Bird Lovegod: We have brought this ‘weapon of mass destruction’ upon ourselves

What we’re now all learning is that wildlife markets have the potential to create impacts on a scale that literally destroys human society.

This is curiously ironic, because it’s an absolute reflection of the impact humans have on wildlife. We destroy it, change the landscape, and in many instances, kill or cage the animals that were living there. And hey presto, suddenly, it’s all come back to us. Now we have our precious economies destroyed, our commercial landscape obliterated, our way of life totally disrupted, and now we live cooped up. Karma. Cause and effect.

The reaping of what we have sown. Totally predictable and actually completely inevitable. We did this to ourselves.

It will pass and the landscape will change. But if we continue to treat wildlife in the way we have done, it will happen again, and again, and again. So what are we going to do? What’s the take away from all this, as they say?

Which would make more sense, a global fund, to pay people to preserve wildlife and look after and protect and manage those habitats, or the complete destruction of our way of life across the world?

Shall we choose? Which makes more sense, to preserve nature, and protect it from us, and us from it, or to live indoors, unable to go out, and even when we can, a requirement to ‘distance’ from each other, a requirement to be less personal, less connected, less social. Are we so blind as to accept the consequences of our actions and still continue to do them?

Make no mistake, humanity as a collective brought this catastrophe down upon ourselves.

The deaths, the sickness, the suffering, the financial and social and personal and cultural calamity is entirely of our own making.

Collectively. We sowed it. Now we reap it. We need to own it, as they say.

Will we learn? Will we change? If we don’t, if we collectively continue to treat the natural world as a commodity to be exploited, if we continue to degrade nature, and our own humanity and selves with it, if we continue to exploit other living beings as we have done, then not only have we created this disaster, we retrospectively deserve it.

We need to humbly realise we did this to ourselves. We made this happen. And having understood that, we absolutely need to change the attitudes and root behaviours that have caused it.

Wildlife markets need to be absolutely and totally outlawed globally. It’s not an option. They are unnecessary, have embedded negative impacts on every level, and when they go bad, they go so bad they destroy the way of life for every human on earth.

Think of it this way. The effect of that Wuhan market is thousands of times greater than Chernobyl.

That wildlife market has killed more people and sickened more people than Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined.

That wildlife market is killing thousands of people every day, all over the world, and will continue to do so for years, perhaps for decades, perhaps for centuries.

It has paralysed half the world, and continues to spread. If it were a weapon, it would totally qualify as a weapon of mass destruction.

And there are thousands such markets across the world. Any one of them could detonate at any time.

The magnitude of such a catastrophe we have never seen. And for what? Wildlife markets are a weapon of mass destruction, against wildlife, and now against all of us. They absolutely and totally need to be banned.

If you agree, search Ban Wildlife Markets Globally on Change.org.