I can't share this in the usual way...

I can't share this in the usual way (maybe due to length), but it comes from the North Alabama Wildlife Rehabilitators page and it is so true.  ❤

"I don't much care if you believe in this or not.. I do. I was trained as a wildlife biologist by some of the best minds of the times in the mid-1970's ...George Petrides, among others, author of the Peterson guide. Wildlife were simple animals, dumb and hard-wired, programmed for their existence, creatures lacking passion and intelligence and curiosity and thought. Manage 'em, shoot 'em, and they'd replace themselves if you were doing your job well. The non-game species, well, maybe they could fend for themselves while you were managing all the others that were delicious, or dangerous, or scarce or rare or otherwise desirable for some other reason... then I went to Vermont, and learned Boreal science and the mysteries of wildlife behavior under Pete Marchand, gained the trust of a family of wild beavers. and my life was changed. I hand-raised a beaver and a porcupine, and learned wildlife behavior at hands-length. My old rocking chair still shows beaver-bites, and I learned that the pile of toilet paper, towels, shoes and dirty laundry jammed up in the kitchen were a response to the sound of running water. When I came to Ohio, and found Kim, I relearned first-hand the behaviors of fox and flying squirrels, gray and black and chipmunks too. I watched them change and grow, and saw the intelligence in their eyes as they discovered their new situations and adapted to them. No holding cage was secure, no offered food was accepted as "good enough", no published academic behavior was completely accurate. And so it has been for more than a decade. Wildlife, and even domestic animals, are far, far brighter, more observant, more adaptable, more amazing than we could ever have thought. I have seen the bright eyes and calculating minds of small furry creatures. I have watched their response to challenges in their environment. In our blindness, we have created convenient tough skins that shield us from their brilliance. We do not want to know that other thinking creatures are capable of seeing us unclothed, unknowing, unfeeling and dumb.

I fear for our world. I fear that the carelessness of "who cares" misunderstanding will lead us to a place where only we matter, bold and proud and stupid, not realizing that our lives are tied to all other lives on the face of the Earth, in ways so soft and subtle that we cannot even begin to understand them. We are not the summit of evolution, not the be-all and end-all of biology. We are a potentially magnificent species, capable of self-recognition, but woefully short in introspection, with an abysmal grasp on the past and the ramifications of it for our future. We share our lives with other living things, not as masters but as other equal living things, brought here by hundreds of thousands of years of adaptation and change, and are just way stations on our way to the future."

Written by Robert D. Hinkle