One does not meet oneself until one catches the reflection from an eye other than human.
Loren Eiseley
“With drastic loss of habitat, a constant threat from hunters, high mortality, and unreliable food sources, life for carnivores has changed dramatically and rapidly from historic norms” writes author G.A Bradshaw in her enlightening book, Carnivore Minds.
These highly stressful emotional and physical experiences that carnivores endure can and do cause their behavior to change. The author writes of post traumatic stress behavior expressed by the constant chaos of their lives.
Imagine a Coyote family about their business being a complex, socially close family of individuals with mother and father and siblings from two or more years. All of a sudden their world is turned into terror because a human has the power and is NOT restrained by any laws ….to kill them. They kill because they hate, they kill because they fear, they kill because they think it gives them power…… and they have NO idea of the persons they are killing.
The mother is shot and killed in front of her mate and her pups of different ages. Another pup…is shot and falls …her blood flowing onto the ground…..The others are in terror, and quickly follow their father as they run for their lives. All five of them blindly flee, running and running until they can run no longer. Out of breath they huddle around their sorrowing father. He just lost his lifelong mate.
Need I go on in this tragic saga? But hidden from almost all of our lives, this brutality goes on…and so does the post traumatic stress.
Does this all sound familiar to you. Yes…..because members of our species experience these kinds of stress as well…..in war, in the abuse of power, in genocide we inflict on those who are different among us.
Our Native Peoples know all too well what our Coyotes are experiencing …because they have experienced it historically when the Europeans invaded their land….bringing disease, slaughtering them, causing forced marches away from the only home, destruction of the ancient teachings and culture.
And so today, our Native Peoples are striving to heal from this genocide… all the terror all the loss. THEY UNDERSTAND WHAT COYOTE ENDURES TODAY.
And so you see…all intelligent Life experiences abuse to Life in the same way. And our science as she writes in her book has discovered how deeply entwined our evolution has been with our fellow beings……Their complex brains have shared the same evolutionary path as ours.
If we know this …Why do we continue to cause such suffering to our wild kin.
Let us take our new found knowledge and create rich and respectful relationships with our wild kin…with COYOTE.
