When I'm told animals are "in danger" I picture fellow creatures I want to help. If I know that a human being is responsible — as the hobby farmer who went away without providing enough water for his stock was — I get angry. I picture cows and pigs and chickens gasping for a drink. I see them dying.
When I'm told that a species is in danger and that human beings are responsible my first pictures make me even angrier. I see families of gorillas dying on mountain slopes — as I once saw, in a movie, herds of dinosaurs gasping on a plain. A whole species going down! Who did this?
Then, when I pay closer attention to the meaning of the words I'm hearing, I realize that "animals" and "species" refer to quite different things, and if death is what affects me then I have to distinguish them. There is no relation between the scenes of animal death that arouse my anger and the security of the species. Animals with many of their kind in the world will die in as much pain as animals with few of their kind, and there will be more of them. In a world of constant predation, disease, and deprivation secure species supply me with more pitiable scenes than endangered species do.
By responding to words more thoughtfully I understand the fellow-creature problem better and that makes me a better member of the community of those who love animals and are concerned about the future. I will have seen that there are two issues here, and that I will damage their discussion, and their campaign — or, better, campaigns — if I confuse them. There's animal death with its causes and consequences and there's species extinction with its causes and consequences. Responsibilities may coincide but they are different.
Words both have meaning and generate pictures and sometimes the pictures take us a lot further than the meaning permits us to go. If the word-suggested picture is reinforced by a television picture we may be taken so far we'll never get back to the meaning. I hear "terrorist" and think "threat." I see five bodies around a bus stop and think "awful threat." I see thirty in a market place and think "monstrous threat." I'm feeling just what a "terrorist," according to the dictionary, wants me to feel, threatened. But how big a threat are these terrorists? The fact is that our chances of dying at the hand of a terrorist are lower than the chances of our dying by walking across the street. Do we consider that when we declare "war" on terrorists, in response to their "war" on us? There's no comparison. Think of what a threat of "war" means to a nation (tens, maybe hundreds, of thousands killed, billions spent). It's not close to what a "terrorist campaign" threatens. Yet there we go, picture-driven, into war.
It was pictures (starving children with flies on their faces) that drove us into Somalia and pictures (helicopter down, American bodies dragged through the streets) that drove us out. It was pictures of Belgian babies with their hands cut off, some say, that drove the Allies at the Germans in World War I. It was a word-picture of Kuwaiti babies taken from their incubators and left to die on the floor that first drove us into Iraq. There are always other forces driving us, of course, but the power is in the pictures — as the propaganda experts who provided those Belgian and Kuwaiti pictures well knew.
Attention to pictures, even false ones, can work for good (driving us into Nazi Germany) or for ill (driving us into Iraq) but it's clear, after all we have seen in the last hundred years, that only attention to meanings and facts can work for understanding. The pictures that drive us never tell us whether we should or should not be driven.
Well said. Thank you.
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