Thanks for what you do — I looked up CUPA and am very impressed. Here it is, folks: http://www.cupabangalore.org/. A great response to the random, cruel mindlessness of our species… wishing you best of luck and strength…

Vandana

I have grown up, like you, in the beautiful, lazy, laidback town of Lucknow of the 1970s and the nature in everyday life that we as children had the priveledge to access. The concept of zoopolis is neither surprising nor dramatic, but a feeling of great loss and regret of how much has got lost in the process of growing up and development in the western mode of cities and societies. Loving animals and nature prompted me to co-found CUPA in Bangalore , and your article helps me to re-affirm the faith we had then and sometimes threatens to get lost now, with the mindlessness around. I hope we can restore the concept you have written about so well….suparna

Your pigeon story is delightful, Vandana. And your point of other creatures being “so peripheral to our existence that we don’t really see them” is important. It strikes me often that people have pets and don’t even think of them as anything more than animated decorations. The last edition of New Scientist had an essay that is many years overdue: Flaws on Paws: Welfare Problems in Breeding Pedigree Dogs.
http://www.usyd.edu.au/news/84.html?newsstoryid=2695
We live in the middle of bush here, and occasionally, a raptor-injured racing pigeon stops by and recuperates on our balcony–it looks to humans as protectors.
In New York, the hawk-nest controversy gained international attention.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/4082491.stm

But what I really should say is that this post by you and the comments it has sparked are what I think that the web should be. Thank you for writing it.

Celsius1414, narrow escape! Glad you are here to tell the tale.

Anna, I finally got a chance to read the story Excreta Etc. Thanks so much for the link. the story was stunning. Brought back memories, too, of the pigeons who nested on the window ledges of my various homes in India. Some of them chose the weirdest places. A couple of years ago my aunt’s fourth floor balcony was the site of one such unusual place. There was a square-shaped depression in the balcony’s cement floor, presumably for drainage of rainwater, and the bird chose to build a nest there. My aunt made sure nobody disturbed her and I even managed to take a photo from the window, of the motehr bird sitting serenely on her eggs. the balcony was a little too high for cats so it turned out to be a good spot for a nest after all.

Vandana

http://www.celsius1414.com/vitality_and_morbidity

Dune trilogy had a lot of animals in them, I guess it depends on the story as well.

Road-kill, I believe, is a different problem, the causes might overlap but I think are essentially different. (For instance tho I neither identify with the male of my species nor with the plants or animals, I have always been very aware of the people and the birds on the road and have never killed any.)

Vandana: I echo the need for different mindsets. I’m quite optimistic about the planet’s prospects actually. Life has been around for a long, long time, and perhaps we beat ourselves up too much over the last 4000 or 5000 years. Here we are, idiot-geniuses, six years old, thrown into a dark and shadowed room, with just enough grub for a few weeks and told that all of life depends on our unraveling this
humongous ball of chewing gum and twine. What’s amazing, really, is that the kid is even bothering to try.