DEER FIRST, DOGS NEXT

Barbara "BJ" Andrews, Science Editor, SAAB

If you hate learning about a deadly problem you can’t fix, don’t read about the oil industry’s impact on the environment of animals we cherish…

Deforestation and loss of habitat is just the beginning. Northern border states are major producers of beef cattle, corn, crude oil and canola (that oil you fry with and which produces ethanol for your car.)  We tire of dire predictions about the environment, pollution, food and fuel shortages but here’s what it means to YOU now, today. And what it means to that bear on the deforested "natural habitat."

Oil wells are running dry and moving further north to new drilling sources is a deceptively dangerous solution.

Transporting crude oil through leaking pipelines has already had tangible, devastating effects on the animals and our environment. The first owners of the land, the Arapaho, Comanche, Sioux, and other northern tribes have protested to no avail, even as pipeline excavation destroys sacred lands and burial grounds.

At the rate (population) and industry is growing, our quest for oil to run everything that makes us “modern man” will inevitably make us gone. Victims of our own ingenuity. Casualties of a polluted planet.

Writing for Time, Ian Willms documented the impact of oil production on the First Nations of northern Alberta. Ian states “The oil industry consumes the ecology. It poisons the water, it eats up the land, it displaces the natural migrations of caribou and moose and other animals that the nearby First Nation communities rely on.”

I heard you think “so what?” Since dog owners tend to be rational people who appreciate nature, I’ll answer you. Depending on where you live, you may already see it coming - the encroaching world of more people, fewer animals, trees, and less space! My genes ache for the people and animals of the Great Plains.

My grandmother was Comanche and I feel the overwhelming sadness emanating from all of the Great Plains nations. The first "horse people" in America, and the wild horse herds that sustain them, have already lost the land to tar pits of pollution.

Your grandparents may be European but we are all Americans. How can we forgive such "progress" and the people who are so blinded by today’s technology that they see only profit? Will the solution be electric cars?  Will that stop drilling and destruction of our environment?  Think about this; no animal soils it own bed or over-hunts its territory.  Only mankind does that.

If you’ve ever seen wild antelope spronging across the great distances of Wyoming or the Dakotas, you feel overwhelming sadness when viewing them in a zoo. Yesterday it was the animals that lost their habitat. Today it is us, the superior (?) race, that is losing our natural environment as more of us are trapped in the “concrete jungle”.

I suppose there’s something to be said about “being above it all” but I prefer to be “grounded” in reality. The antelope are disappearing.

So are the Sight and Scent hunting breeds. Their services are no longer needed. They are giving way to dogs whose only service is to soothe the heart of mankind and ease the pain of seeing nature disappear.

Share your love for all animals with your children and grandchildren who will never see a bear, a buffalo or antelope in the wild. Then hold your dog close.

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