Dirge for a Lonely Planet: The Sixth Mass Extinction

by Julie at ProgressiveKid

A sweet-looking older woman with a cloud of hair and an oxygen machine at her side told me a story recently about a friendly squirrel that lives in her yard. “It seems to want us to adopt it.” I love hearing about interspecies connections, so I listened eagerly. She went on to describe how it comes on her back deck, eats nuts from the tree there, and walks right up to her and her husband as if to say hello every morning. Getting to the point, she then explained that they were going to kill it, either by poisoning or trapping, because it just didn’t respect their property. “I’ve had enough of them [animals]. We [people] are so generous, and they don’t respect it. We are the ones who know how to share, and they just abuse it.”