Op Ed: Why Some and Not Others?

Happy Merdeka Day!

To celebrate Malaysian pride, I'm going to...keep talking about animals. Yay! 

Talking about my project to a friend, they brought up a question I had never even considered.

Why is it OK to eat some animals and not others?

To a die-hard animal lover, this sort of thought never even crosses their minds. It never did for me. I never asked myself why I was dedicated to conservation; I just knew in my heart that I was. 

Coming from this perspective, I am going to try and answer my friend's question. I'm not trying to create a perfect answer with no loopholes. if this sort of issue was black-and-white, I don't believe I'd even be answering this question.

Humans, in previous years, were the top of the food chain. For the most part, we have now (luckily) been removed from that food chain (most of us are not so worried about being eaten by a lion this afternoon). However, we have taken with us a select few species of domestic animals. 

Lucky for you, this guy doesn't think you'd make a very good meal. He doesn't seem very impressed at all, really. Photo from Lion's Share Digital.

They, too, have been removed from the food chain. We are responsible for them. We now farm things that we eat - chickens, cows, pigs, goats. (I will not address the issue of factory farming here.) So we've effectively taken them with us. They are no longer subject to being eating by roving lions either. When we eat them, we have control over their population and their lifestyle.

However, with wild animals, we have not removed them from the food chain. They are still subject to the forces of nature - different species working in a sort of "checks and balances" system where controlling one effectively controls all. 

In a simple example, if we have too many top predators, too many middle-range herbivores will be eaten, leading to seeds that won't get spread and grass that won't get eaten. This in turn will lead to numerous ecological balancing catastrophes.

Notice that humans often do not feature in these sorts of pyramids - we are no longer native to these ecosystems. Illustration from Tutor Vista.

When we step in here and try to artificially manage a population, we have an issue. We are no longer part of the system - we don't really know what we're doing. When we eat from this environment, we destroy the balance. 

This is just a sort, simple way to think about it. I won't go into issues of morality here - there is too much gray area to make a proper assessment. Hopefully this helps clear the air in terms of "WHY?" for a little bit. 

P.S. A bonus reason is that wild animals are pretty and don't need to be eaten because they look better running majestically through the 2000 sq ft of habitat they have left. ;)

Majestic zebras run in their 2000 sq ft. Image via Wallpaper Wide.

Perhaps I should have included more Malaysian wildlife... oh well. 

Irrational Fears Part 2

Somewhere in here, imagine a couple thousand more sharks. (Actually, between the two images you're only seeing about 600 sharks. Please do a lot of imagining.)

Twelve people is actually a high per year, as scary as that is. The total for all shark attacks in record numbers only a few hundred. You're more likely to die from alcohol than a shark attack. As the internet meme goes, though, "I too would attack anyone wandering into my house wearing only a speedo."

Revealing swimsuits aside, shark finning is a serious issue and a major player in the wildlife trade.

Essentially, finning is the practice where boats troll for sharks, and upon finding them, lift them out of the water and cut off only what is valuable - the fins. This is equivalent to having your arms and legs cut off - you're incapacitated at best. Once this is done, the shark is thrown back into the water (no one wants the rest of it, and why keep the evidence?) to drown. Since, you know, without arms or legs, it can't really swim anymore.

This fins are then thrown into giant freezers in hot spots around the world, such as Hong Kong, where they are then sent out to the world's top restaurants. Or they are dried and cured, to be sold at a market. Regardless, they all go for consumption.

The main culprit is the infamous Chinese dish, shark fin soup. Most restaurants now only serve a prosthetic plastic version, but some restaurants still carry the real deal. A true symbol of luck and prosperity, this is a dish many are unwilling to give up. As more of the world finds itself in a position to consume things it never could afford before, demand for traditional emblems such as shark fin soup rages and roars.

If we want to save the shark species of the world, we need to get over our fear of sharks and our ideas about shark fin soup. Eating shark can't be cool anymore; it can't remain a symbol of good.

Here are some stats to chew on in the meantime.