Thank you so much for this amazing email from the kind people at March for Elephants!
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I think we always need to think about what's going on in the world- and not just politics. We need to remember these animals. In Africa, every 15 minutes, an elephant is slaughtered due to poaching. In Asia, elephants are being abused every day for tourist's entertainment. Taking animals out of the wild for profit, to be used for amusement, strikes me as inhumane.
As you start off this new year, remind yourself of the unfairness that these animals are constantly facing, and don't take life for granted.
Dear Elephant,
I write to you at the end of the year 2013. A year during which 35,000 of your kind were slaughtered, 96 a day and 1 killed every 15 minutes... all for trinkets. All for ivory trinkets.
I wonder...
As one year merges with the next and as humans celebrate the end of the year 2013 and herald new beginnings in 2014, as we cross that irreversible rubicon in time I cannot help but wonder... a 100 years from now... a million.... ten years from now..5 years from now.... will you be a ghost, a figment of human imagination... a creature lost amongst the hundreds and thousands and millions of creatures my kind have caused to disappear, to disappear forever?
Will you be a creature I visit in my dreams or will you still be our wandering and constant gardener, keeper of the great green cathedrals of Earth, our Earth, yours and mine, this "pale blue dot", the blue planet, a little speck spinning on its axis, bringing us night and day in the vast and lonely sea of space .. will you still be scenting the air... trunk raised...40 thousand muscle working in unison, a work of art, evolved over millions of years of time ..trumpeting your presence... singing your song.. interpreting a contoured topography of sound and smell.... and feeling.
Will you still be wandering in some distant land feeling the earth with your feet in ways we never could.... scenting water in ways we never could... planting and growing forests in ways we never could... building rivers and wells and streams in ways we never could.... remembering ancient pathways from a thousand years ago in ways we never could.. caring for your young in ways we have only barely began to understand and noble in ways unfathomable... truly, I believe you are a better creature than I ever could be... as surely as I believe that if humans erase your presence from the Earth... we surely don't deserve the Earth... surely not.
Forgive us dear Elephant .. for the many ways in which we have abused you... exploited you, discussed you, analyzed you, commodified you, pontificated about you in ways utilitarian as though you were yet another "thing" to be "managed" by man (as you know we love to "manage" things) .... a "thing" to be discussed at "trade conventions" and measured against (always against) what is "better' for humankind...our arrogance has grown to be astounding and abhorrent ...this arrogance is an aberration of nobility.. it is everything you are not... and that arrogance must end... we who "see" you, we who see equivalence in all life.. and the suffering of all life.. whether human or animal.. we will stand for you.... in the best ways we know how.
Dear Elephant, I sign off In solidarity with you and our mother, the Earth. May 2014 be a better year for you and all creatures non-human who are abused at the hand of man. It's really my only wish for 2014.
Elephant, May you Live!
Go make a difference!
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