Course description

Saving our Wildlife and Protecting our Planet

We eat them; we wear their skins; we ride them in races; and we hunt them for sport or food. They work for us in the fields; and they carry us where we want to go. We watch them in circuses and in zoos. Sometimes, we keep them as pets in our homes. Of course, I am talking about animals.

But we also do experiments on them to test new medicines and, sadly, cosmetics.

We cut down the forests where they live so that they cannot find enough food. Then we complain that they come into our towns and gardens and are dangerous to the human population. We are angry that they eat our chickens and goats and we call them ‘pests’ and shoot or poison them.

So, do animals have any rights? Are they here on this planet only for us to eat, wear and work for us?

These days, especially in developed countries, people are asking questions about how we behave to animals. But there are so many differences between us. In India, killing a cow is a crime, but in Bangladesh, beef is a popular meat. In Korea, some people eat dogs and in Belgium and France, horse meat is popular. In Britain, you go to prison for eating these animals. But the British put chickens in tiny cages where they cannot walk or even stand up and where they never see sunlight.

But eating different animals as food is not the only question we need to think about. We also use mice, rabbits, monkeys and dogs for medical experiments. We want to make sure that these medicines are safe for human beings. We even change animals’ genetics. But these experiments help us to discover new drugs that can cure terrible diseases in people. Can we say the same thing about putting perfume in rabbits’ eyes though?

In Scotland, some scientists at the University of Edinburgh even made a sheep, called Dolly, from a cell from one sheep and the DNA of another. The cell and DNA were then put into a third sheep which gave birth to Dolly. Dolly later had six baby sheep herself.

But many people ask if it is right to use animals in this way. Dolly could never go outside and lived all her life in a building.

We need to think about how we must behave with animals. Is it right to hunt them, to wear fur coats, to keep them in small cages in zoos, to put perfume in their eyes? But we also must think about eating them and destroying forests. If we don’t, our grandchildren may only read about tigers and other animals in books.

Now, we are going to look at a few case studies: polar bears, sharks and we’re going to think about eating insects, rather than methane-producing cows and sheep!

First, let’s look at the effects global warming is having on the polar bear.

For about ten years, polar bears have walked into towns in the Arctic Circle in the summer months. They are looking for food. They turn over rubbish bins and attack farm animals and pets. People worry that, soon, they will attack and eat children or even adults because they are so hungry. But polar bears are very shy animals and usually stay away from human beings. Of course, their habitats are not the same as ours and so we do not often meet them.

Adult male polar bears generally weigh about 350 kilograms but this can increase to 700 kg, although females are usually only about 150. They live until they are twenty-five years old but we do not understand why they die young because they live so far away from us. It may be because they are old and cannot hunt to find animals to eat or, perhaps, they are injured. More than 70% of their food is meat.

Polar bears are born on land but spend most of their lives on sea ice. This is where their main food source – seals – lives. Because polar bears cannot swim as fast as seals, they wait near to their air holes in the ice. Seals can spend hours underwater but need to come up to breathe. They do this through air holes in sea ice. When their head comes out of that hole, the polar bear is there waiting. The animal gets the seal out of the water and then bites its head to kill it.

The difficulty for polar bears these days is that polar ice is melting earlier in the year and freezes later. This means that there is nowhere the bears can stay to hunt and, so, they get very hungry. That is when they enter towns.

It is difficult to be exact about the number of polar bears alive today. They often live alone and, so, counting them takes a long time – first, we need to find them, of course. They also live over very, very large areas: in Canada, Russia, Greenland and other Arctic countries. We believe there are between 20,000 and 30,000 animals but this number will fall fast if human beings start to shoot them when they enter towns.

Environmental organisations are giving people in these icy areas where polar bears live sirens, flare guns and other equipment to frighten the animals away. They also have polar bear prisons. When they catch a polar bear, it must stay in a cage for days. It hates this. The bear then does not repeat its journey into the town because it links it with a bad time.

Scientists all agree that global warming is a huge danger for animal populations and, so, for humankind. It’s politicians who do nothing about it. But we must act now to protect polar bears and the planet before it is too late. Estimates are that in thirty years, the polar bear population will only be 30% of today’s.

A different case might be sharks, which are often seen as frightening, and maybe better dead than alive.

There is no animal more frightening than a shark. If a person dies because of a shark attack, the news travels around the world very fast and we can read it in newspapers, watch it on TV or surf it on the Net. In fact, there are about four deaths each year because of sharks, but between thirty and fifty people die from dog attacks in the USA annually. Hippopotamuses killed fourteen people in just one accident in Niger in 2014 and attacked a tourist boat the next year in Malawi.

So, where does the idea that sharks are really dangerous come from?

First, the novel ‘Jaws’ by Peter Benchley and the Stephen Spielberg films of the same name made people very frightened of sharks. The story is about an enormous Great White Shark that attacked and killed swimmers on an American beach during the holiday season. It was so large and strong that it could break bars on cages and make holes in boats. It could also swim very fast and was almost impossible to kill.

But, in fact, there are more than 470 different kinds of sharks and only five have ever attacked human beings. There is a dwarf lantern shark that is only about 15 centimetres long and the largest shark, the whale shark, may be twelve metres but has never attacked a human being.

There were sharks about four hundred million years ago but the modern shark has been on the planet for about a hundred million years. They live in nearly every sea in the world. They lose about eight to ten teeth a day and grow thousands of new ones during their lifetimes.

Sharks do not produce many babies and these take a long time to grow. A shark is not usually sexually active until it is thirteen to fifteen years old. Because they often die between the ages of twenty and thirty, this does not leave many years for them to reproduce.

Sharks are endangered. Every year, 100 million are caught by fishermen and millions more for their fins. In China, people believe that shark fins are delicious to eat and they also work as a medicine against cancer – which is not true at all. These days, some countries do not allow the sale of shark fins because cutting off a fin and throwing the live shark back into the water is very cruel.

It is true that sharks occasionally attack human beings in the water, especially if they have a cut on their bodies, are wearing jewellery or splashing a lot, but this is very unusual. Sharks are amazing animals and we need to protect them if our grandchildren want to see them swimming in our seas.

And, finally, let’s look at changing our eating habits!

Most people in Europe, the USA and India do not eat insects. They think it is a disgusting idea. But, actually, about two billion people all over the world eat them – in Asia, New Zealand, Africa and Latin America. I am British but I really enjoy eating grasshoppers when I am in Thailand – they are better than chips!

These days, there are very good reasons why we should eat insects. First, many insects give us all the important nutrients we need every day: oil, carbohydrates, proteins, vitamins and minerals. Grasshoppers are especially healthy!

Next, it costs a lot of money to eat beef. We must feed the cow, make sure it has somewhere to live, call the vet when it gets sick and then take it to the market to sell. But insects need almost no money from the farmer to grow. This means that people in poorer countries will get the same protein intake as others in richer nations.

Another reason is that cows, sheep, goats and pigs make methane gas. This hurts our environment. But insects do not. So, if we eat them, we leave very little carbon footprint.

And, finally, insects can be delicious. Ant egg curry – again from the east of Thailand – is great.

But don’t trust me! Try some insect recipes.

If you want to watch some videos on this topic, you can click on the links to YouTube videos below.

If you want to answer questions on this article to test how much you understand, you can click on the green box: Finished Reading?

Videos :

1. Protecting Wildlife (01:58)

2. We must Save Wildlife to Save Ourselves (02:19)

3. Protecting Endangered Species (2:45)

4. Dolly: The first Mammal to be Successfully Cloned (1:06)

5. Experiments on Animals (1:38)

6. Medical Experiments with Animals (7:34)

7. Why Animals are Needed in Research (4:27)