#HearMeRoar

This week we truly entered the animal realm as we read our way through a Nat Geo article by Jonathan Franzen, “Why Birds Matter, and Are Worth Protecting” and we began reading the book Beyond Words: What Animals Think and Feel by Carl Safina.

The Jonathan Franzen article focuses on how birds are important to us and our world; Franzen explains that birds perform vital roles like pollinating plants, spreading seeds, etc. in our ecosystem. Birds also serve as natural indicators of ecological health; the health of a marsh can be determined by the bird population around it, and the dangers of workplace by the coal mine canary.

The coal mine canary.

Beyond Words brought us closer to the world of elephants, one of the most important facts I realized was that when someone kills an elephant, a member of a family, they might as well be killing the whole family, as that family, like humans, might be dependent on that single member. This facts points towards a much more sophisticated family structure among animals than humans think.

The animal kingdom is huge and full of surprises, but one thing that is not a surprise is that animals deserve to live and to be cared for, that animals also have feelings, and that they too rejoice when happy and mourn when sad: animals , birds or otherwise, have made our world a better place.

Animals have families too.

Finally, we started researching on the topics of our choice and my choice was my favourite animal, the king of the jungle, the endangered Asiatic lion. The Asiatic is the rarer cousin of the well known African lion. The Asiatic lions live in prides, but unlike their African counterparts, their prides are gender-specific, and males and females remain separate except at mating time.

The Asiatic lion (with family).

These magnificent beasts are however decreasing in population by the day as a result of poaching and hunting for sport. I believe the life of the Asiatic lion shall be the topic for my research during the course of this class.#HearMeRoar