‘My girlfriend is unhappy with me’, ’My boyfriend doesn’t pay me enough attention’, ‘My children don’t listen to me’, ‘my boss is a monster’, ‘I’m my husband’s second wife, his first is the newspaper’, ‘My wife’s best friend is the TV’, ‘My job sucks’, ‘My enemy is unfairly lucky’, ‘You have nothing in ur lifr if you don’t hv a boyfriend/girlfriend or you don’t drink or you don’t smoke’, ‘ICC would be better if it listened to my analysis of cricket’, ‘I cannot seem to reduce my waist to 26 (from 28)’, ‘Oh hell! I have a pimple on my face’, ’Damned! Today is a dry day again??’, ‘!@#$%, he scratched my car!!!’……….. on and on the list goes… Too many personal grievances, too much pressure to overcome, too much of bad enough stuffs going on with me myself …..Why should I care about the person next door, let alone an animal about to go extinct.
Lately an ad has showed up on the TV. It depicts a cub, scared to move out of its shelter, Curious and unsure of what to do next, where to go. And suddenly there’s a deafening bang. And then there’s a count… 1411 … I hope that by now you know which ad I am referring to.It’s the ‘Save the Tiger’ ad promoted by aircell.
Sandwiched between an advertisement promising girls to be successful by turning fair complexioned and another describing some eternal bliss of some now-latest-tomorrow-obsolete technology, there’s this small plea to save the tigers. The most common reaction to this is ‘Yeah right! As if we don’t know that even the promoters don’t care’. I’ll be honest, I do care but even then I reacted the same way, more out of disgust and disappointment than anything else.
However my mother surprised me by calling up sometime after 10 in the night and requesting me to blog about the topic. My parents were touched, so was I.
Tiger is the national animal of India. Well shouldn’t we be proud of them? They are big, beautiful, agile, symbols of strength, intelligence and power. But wait a minute! Did HUMANS say tigers are intelligent? Ha Ha… Right! That’s so very humble of them. Even God knows that by gifting them with BRAINS, now humans are capable of outsmarting even Martians (it is a general assumption in movies that the latter are far more intelligent and sophisticated and technically sound than Earthlings). So most definitely humans are far more intelligent and powerful than tigers. So much more, that, the purpose of their existence is solely to serve the needs of the homo sapien species. So we just play upon our lives and braving and daring the odds and difficulties, take an aim and shoot them. We just so desperately need their nails, teeth, skin. After all God unfairly gifted us just some complex limbs and human body and brain but not their fur. So now it’s a burning desire amongst us to earn enough to comfortably purchase a tiger skin, real tiger skin, to make up for the loss. So now we are beautiful, agile, symbols of strength, intelligent, powerful and the supreme of all species even within the human beings themselves simply by wearing their skin or adoring them on the wall or carpet. We are healthier because we can eat medicines made out of their nails and teeth. Probably it makes us feel like we are tigers from outside and within. The buyer is a happier man, the seller is richer. And just because the tiger won’t lend us its skin on its own to adorn our bodies, let’s just prove we are more powerful. Shoot them dead. Tell the other tigers we can and will kill them if they do not offer us their physical possessions. And thereafter, lets place our Goddess of power, Maa Sherawali on a tiger and pray them both showing off our gratefulness an respect to their supreme power and possessioins. How much more ridiculous can WE get?
Why save the tiger? Here’s a scientific cause:
Tigers occupy the pinnacle of the food chain and a healthy tiger population is an indicator of the well-being of the whole forest. Throughout evolution predators have had a regulatory influence on the population sizes of other species; it is thanks to carnivores such as tigers that the number of herbivores is kept in check. In turn the number of predators is constrained by the quantity of prey. The populations can therefore only fluctuate between certain limits because of this feedback mechanism.
With the number of herbivores under control but not depleted the forest vegetation is likely to thrive-provided humans do not over -exploit it. Seeds will be dispersed but new growth will not be prevented by excessive grazing pressure. Healthy vegetation protects and nourishes the soil, preventing erosion. The soil filters and purifies the rainwater and safe-guards the water table. Many forests are important catchments areas for rivers, upon which many species including human beings depend.
Species at the top of the food chain are generally larger and require more space than other animals particularly if they are territorial. Conserving such species in the wild protects the habitat of many other animals as well as safeguarding the essential ecological processes such as water and nutrient cycling. Thus the tiger acts as the guardian of many other creatures.
Courtesy: http://www.tigersofindia.com/why-save-the-tiger.php
Boring? Doesn’t ring any bell in you? Too much science? Not romantic enough? Not your type of topic? Not a spicy piece of news? Or is it that you are too illiterate or too educated to care?
Humans in their pride of their superiority of some sort tend to treat others as inferior. Why save a tiger? Well may be because the way we treat them now is the way British treated us Indians in the pre-independence period? May be because we never signed any treaty saying we are authorized to kill at our will? May be because the humans have been offered plenty of alternate and better medicinal herbs in nature rather than animal extracts? May be because walls can be adorned with many other pieces of art rather than a processed animal skin? May be because there exist plenty of clothes on this planet not made from animal skin and yet they are beautiful, expensive and solve the purpose of clothes themselves? May be because we are the supreme species and therefore we can Also make a POSITIVE difference?
It’s high time we realized that courage and strength and bravery are not shown by displaying a shot lifeless skin of a dead animal. A person struggling to survive against a killing disease, a person fighting against all odds to support the truth, a person daring his/her fears, a person recovering from a drug addiction exhibits an example of true courage. A person hunting unarmed animals for pleasure exhibits an example of vanity and illiteracy. A person hunting a tiger to earn and feed his family represents a nation with desperately hungry and poor and uneducated people.
Can you imagine daytime without the sun? Can you imagine the ocean without its water? Can you imagine a world without cars? Can you imagine a life without music? Can you imagine flowers without any colour in reality, can you imagine a world without computers or newspapers? I believe you can’t.
Now tell me can you imagine a river choked with sewage? Can you imagine a human inhabited colony without any trees? Can you imagine a sky without birds? Can you imagine going to a tiger reserve and spotting no tiger? Can you imagine a world where there are no forests or tigers or any wild animal? Unfortunately this is not an imagination at all. This is a reality. But it does not bother us or spoil our sleep because at the moment we have other and apparently more important vices to deal with first.
It’s not fair on our end to let go off the topic of preserving tigers. They have as much right and need to exist as we do. They are far too innocent to ask us to stop. If the poaching continues at this alarming rate we’d be definitely finding ourselves talking of tigers as an extinct species in another couple of years. Would it sound good to say that India is a country who slept while its national animal ceased to exist in its forests? PLEASE PLEASE, let’s not overlook the situation any more. Please join hands to stop tiger poaching. If the buyers stop, the sellers stop. DO NOT buy products made by brutally killing innocent animals, both adult and children. DO NOT let those with you, buy these products either. Educate people in any way possible to help them realize the value and beauty of tigers and to realize the mistake of killing tigers to earna living. Teach them instead to learn other skills for existence. If you believe in God, then why displease her by wiping off her vahan??
We need tigers. The tigers need us. Disturbing the ecology to this extent would primarily make it impossible for us humans to survive in the coming decades. Let’s not wait for a disastrous famine or flood to come and convince us to wake up and work to prevent this planet,this country from collapsing.
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