Human greed, animal suffering

The header says it all. For at least 5000 years (but massively increasing with the Industrial Revolution, and massively increasing again with the 20th century degradation of the environment) human greed has caused animal as well as human suffering. The latest? The New Jersey Fish and Game Council has voted unanimously to support a bear hunt to reduce a population "increasingly in evidence" in human-populated areas.

But there's a reason for this increased black bear presence, and it's once again human greed. In the Pine Barrens, and other parts of the far west of the state (and as in other places throughout the Northeast and Northwest) increased destruction of animal habitats to make way for human development is pressing animals into smaller and smaller wildspaces. So of course bears, and coyotes, and deer, and many other wild animals are more and more evident in human-populated areas: they have nowhere else to go.

If the native Americans were right, that when humans died they entered the real world in which they encountered not only the spirits of all their ancestors but also the spirits of all humans, trees, and other natural phenomena, then we're going to have a lot to answer for.

The Fish and Game Council ought to be protecting animals and their habitats, not conniving with the NRA to allow fat-assed Conan-the-Barbarian wannabees to kill bears.

Same thing happening for similar reasons with lions in Africa.