By my profession as a veterinarian, let me be quick in introducing myself, the relief of animal suffering including how we raise them and live with them and even how we eat them concerns me.
Humans have always intimidated the ecosystem aggressively and bother less about the environment and the realities of animal conservation, with the consequences of woes and all sorts of problems and diseases.
It is a fact that almost sixty-five percent of diseases in humans originate from animal sources. Beyond just numbers what have we done to confront this proportion other than to wait for the next virus to unleash its mayhem on the world. We are yet to jump out from the tight clutches of the global Covid-19 pandemic that has truncated the old peaceful world that we were born into, since March 12, 2020 when WHO made the declaration.
Talking more about the ecosystems of humans, animals and the environment is nostalgic and never tiring for me, with all its complex mix of thrills and frills. Of all the earthly inhabitants, man with his exploratory nature is the most guilty and disruptive of the delicate balance that exists naturally.
We crisscross or ‘cross-carpet’ the thin imaginary borders without any caution whatsoever. The ecosystem of the earth must deliberately be preserved, despite the harm already inflicted by man.
Let it not be imagined that because we are in the underdeveloped economies, we are not partakers or culprits in the shifting of the delicate equation sustaining the world, since little or no industrialization goes on here unlike the sky-blind emissions from giant machines and turbines in the more industrialized economies competing amongst themselves.
In a variety of ways, everybody has contributed and we must consciously imbibe the call of change.
What about the traditional practices still in vogue as we carelessly prepare the bushes for farming through burnings and dislocation from natural habitats of the games in them? Animals that hitherto existed in the fringes of forests around us are being driven so far into the unreachable wild, and could go extinct from us without the future generations ever seeing or knowing about them, while the more malleable of them that are small in size and smoked out of their holes go closer to human dwellings and sneak into our kitchens and food stores, carrying their viruses and other germs with them.
Our general likeness for and the delicacy of eating bush meat in and outside our homes, and the food safety advocacy around the leanness of such meat, free from drugs and inorganic contaminations does not even help matters, as it has become a crazy boundary cross for man, who has thereafter thrown caution to the winds.
The best public health advice today is for us to retrain our taste buds against eating bush meats of all sorts. Medical researches have gone deep enough lately and knowing what we now know of many deadly viral haemorrhagic fevers, like ebola and Lassa fever, we need no warning us to be more restrained from bush meat eating. Lassa has been worse for us in its seasonal recurrence.
It has refused to leave our shores for reasons best known to our health managers who seemingly enjoy the largesse they get from foreign donors, who come in with aids of all sorts whenever an outbreak is declared rather than genuinely seeking the production of vaccines to confront the scourge killing our people on a yearly basis.
That will be a subject for another day. Lassa fever was first diagnosed in January 1969 at Lassa, a remote village in Borno State, where the first known victim was a Christian missionary nurse named Laura Wine.
She infected many other health workers that had close contact in managing her, and they also died of the disease, and that was the trigger for the extensive research that led to the confirmed diagnosis of the strange disease.
Today the rest is history as they say and the disease still lives on. It shouldn’t be like that, were it to have been in saner climes.
As for environmental degradation, climate change has become the huge challenge, necessitating elementary pupils to be recruited to serve as ambassadors and world advocates to prick our consciences, after all, a super world leader who recently lost reelection, once championed a conspiracy theory denying any damage to the climate and worked so negatively hard throughout his 4-year tenure as President to weaken global efforts in that regard.
Man has continued to display more panic reactions out of fear for the imminent self-inflicted catastrophe than a pertinent sustainable response to saving nature from destruction.
The threat of climate change is real for us and also for the animals we domesticate and those that roam in the wild.
The intensity of ambience heat in recent years with 2017 posting the second highest ever in recorded history according to United States National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) calls for worry, as it indicates that a layer or two above could be giving-way or at least no longer act as protective as it used to be due to our unguarded activities.
Although cars are now being redesigned to use less or no hydrocarbons at all, that is good news elsewhere, and not in Nigeria that is diametrically still spending billions rejuvenating old refineries, even as Industry standards are being reset to deal more appropriately with gas flaring and hydrocarbon pollution.
Now, apart from the bush burning scare and killings of animals earlier mentioned, let us look at the less than abstract world of animals that have been with man ever since the beginning.
There is no sufficient global plans against their devastation save for the pockets of animal conservationists dotting our landscape randomly, and that is where the limits of wild animals end. Sadly for the domesticated, large ruminants have taken to the center stage in our country, albeit in the negative sense as it relates to herdsmen and farmers clashes across the country.
The bandits have taken them as shields as they dwell in bushes to kill or kidnap their victims.
The sight of a mobile herd of cattle that was in the past considered a blessing through the organic manure from their dungs and the opportunities of easy and cheap access to milk, cheese and other byproducts sold by the wives and children of the migrants, have suddenly turned to a curse and hatred, the type never seen before.
When ruminants graze irresponsibly, there is a silly man at the background that had promoted it and who should be directly held responsible, blamed and punished. But what we see today is a conspiracy of silence by those who should have acted swiftly in condemnation and offer immediate compensation to assuage the ill feelings of the offended, instead they assemble a fully armed rogue army and await the bitter reactions from those whose farms or properties have been damaged, and find any reason to unleash mayhem.
The proverb of the past that recognized that a child could cry when smacked by the parents is no longer given vent to. Unfortunately, those who are angry with the cows for straying on their crop farms destructively do not summon enough courage to switch allegiance and become vegetarians in their objection.
Despite their pains, they still go for meat and meat byproducts openly, which clearly shows that with justice in place, the opposing tribes still need each other.
As veterinarians, we know sadly that some of the animals get entangled and don’t ever survive the poisoning from errors created by men who should have best designed and directed their activities.
In any case ranching is the best model and the new acceptable way to return the sacred name and numerous blessings that are associated with the cattle.
Whenever, we treat our animals shabbily, it mirrors our collective attitude directly. The society that cares for their animals will care more for their physically challenged and the most vulnerable amongst its and the most vulnerable amongst its population that have no voices of their own