Author Peter Christie urges pet owners to extend their love to increasingly vulnerable non-domestic creatures
Peter Christie recalls how the “contradictions” in, E.B. White’s classic children’s story of a kind-hearted spider trying to save a young pig from becoming bacon and ham, were apparent to his daughter, then four or five, when he read it to her years ago. Christie, a veteran Kingston, Ont.-based science writer, believes that what biologist Edward O. Wilson termed “,” humanity’s fascination with other life and living systems, is sunk deep in our DNA.
This is biophilia on a strange, inward journey, Christie argues, a desire to bring the wild inside the human sphere and tame it, abandoning the true wild to its tragic fate. In a world where humans, between 1993 and 2009, turned wilderness areas that were collectively larger than India into farms, towns and mines, the sixth great extinction—the ongoing annihilation of wild animals in both population and species numbers—rolls on, with pets, pet owners and the pet industry major contributors.
The world’s 750 million cats are also the deadliest invasive mammal species known, linked to 60 species extinctions since Europeans first brought them to the New World . Dogs, a billion strong, are linked to another 16 extinctions. With numbers like that, neither species is in danger of extinction itself while those they threaten are, making the issue of a feral cat cull ruthlessly logical for many conservation biologists. But not for cat advocates.
Then there are the protein demands of the pet food industry. In the Western world, where dogs and cats are increasingly considered family members, pet food trends have tracked human trends—more health-focused, more “biologically appropriate,” and thus more meat-based. If they were a nation of their own, U.S. cats and dogs would be the world’s fifth largest market for meat. They consume a third of the animal-derived calories of American humans, including fish.
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