[Buddha-l] Chinese young people start org. to save endangered species, reptiles, etc

[jkirk]

This is a revealing video about how these young folks work and
why. There is no overt Buddhist moral going on here.........but
there is compassion. They want to stop the prolific exploitation
of wild animals for food in Guangdong. (The same issues obtain in
food markets in Thailand. I don't know about Cambodia or Laos.)
This is really an amazing social development. See the video here:

 
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/video/2009/apr/09/animal-ri
ghts-china
 
Raising animals for food is one thing, but eliminating all the
wild animals  of the world is another. As a Korean student once
told my class, tigers were extinguished from Korea because they
were hunted for their body parts for traditional medicine. (I'm
not impugning traditional medicine only--pharmaceutical medicine
is also a danger to world environments due to the ways it is used
and discarded. In the tigers' case, it wasn't big pharma, it was
big traditional markets.) 
 
And, yes--those animals we eat in the USA, reared as food
resources, their predecessors eons ago were wild animals.
However, among the species that are reared for food, the total is
miniscule compared to the number of wild species that are
imperiled or on the brink of extinction, due to human activity.
Just to offer an example, even though it's out of date (1991--it
has gone worse since then):

http://tinyurl.com/np5gws

"Since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, a large number
of biologically classified species have gone extinct due to the
actions of humans. This includes 83 species of mammals, 113
species of birds, 23 species of amphibians and reptiles, 23
species of fish, about 100 species of invertebrates, and over 350
species of plants. Scientists can only estimate the number of
unclassified species that have gone extinct. Using various
methods of extrapolation, biologists estimate that in 1991
between 4000 to 50,000 unclassified species became extinct,
mainly in the tropics, due to our activities. This rate of
extinction is some 1,000 to 10,000 times greater than the natural
rate of species extinction (2 - 10 species per year) prior to the
appearance of human beings. The continued extinction of species
on this planet by human activities is one of the greatest
environmental problems facing humankind."
 
Animals evolved as part of the habitat-interdependence of all
living beings----extinguishing thousands of species can only be
detrimental to world ecology. So, for me, it works to draw a
Buddhist moral--even though philosophers limit pratityasamutpada
to human phenomena, I prefer to apply it to the world, and beyond
(if I knew what beyond was). (If I got this wrong, someone will
correct it.)

Joanna K.