Extinct? Taking a walk on the wild side

This isn’t my typical Sunday column but some issues that affect us socially stay on our periphery and do not get the attention they deserve.

But I am going to take a walk on the wild side this week and write about an issue whose consequences we witness every day but its seriousness has been relegated down the scale until only activists speak out.

I never thought I would write a column about animals but a report by the World Wildlife Fund — Living Planet Report 2018 — paints a bleak picture of the world’s dwindling wildlife and their struggle to stay alive even as some species are being erased from Earth.

According to the WWF, since the 1970s, “humanity has wiped out 60 percent of animals” due to “growing consumption of food and resources by the global population...” and the report concluded we are “destroying the web of life, billions of years in the making, upon which human society ultimately depends for clean air, water and everything else.”

That is one scary statement but it should not be a surprise to anyone.

I am no card-waving environmental activist and I don’t believe the extinction of the wildlife population will happen in my lifetime, or with the next generation or the next. But I do believe the signs are clear the shoes of nature are slowly being wiped out and if something doesn’t change, future generations will be without the wildlife that gives our planet so much.

That would be a shame for many reasons — least of all, the wonder of nature.

I am a nature show junkie who has learned a lot about not only animals but human behavior by watching how animals interact with each other and other species.

I am fascinated by how animals hunt to eat, protect their homes and their territory. And to me, there is no better rumble in the jungle then when lions and hyenas go at it.

But even with my fascination, I don’t want wildlife in my backyard because they have been driven out of their natural habitat — but that is exactly where things stand as man continues to encroach on their territory.

Many of us only have to look in our own backyards at the skunks and raccoons setting up homes and having families along side human beings. I don’t think they’re really interested in being my neighbor and I am pretty sure I don’t have that safe, friendly smell to them.

But that means they have been unwillingly driven into our backyards — which means they have no place else to go — which means they’re on the edge of where they can live.

And that has me thinking: What happens when they run out of land and no longer have the resources to populate? Will that leave us with one-of-a-kind species at zoos for us to marvel at?

That would give a whole new meaning to born free.

Since WWF released the report, The Atlantic reports “it has been widely mischaracterized” as the authors stated the size of vertebrate populations has declined by 60 percent “on average” and “it is not a census of all wildlife but reports how wildlife populations have changed in size.”

The general public has not sounded an alarm but even if you are not a wildlife lover, the possibility that our wildlife is dwindling away should raise more voices that it has.

Maybe it is because we have the beef, the bacon and the chicken, and all other animals are on our periphery because we don’t use them to sustain us. Maybe it is because dogs and cats are our animals of choice.

My dream vacation has always been to see the wildebeest migration as it crosses the Serengeti in Africa. Due to the cost, I will never make that trip so I satisfy my craving by watching it on TV.

But due to man’s non-allegiance to the soil that sustains us, I am not sure it will be the same for future generations.

Extinct? Maybe we should take a walk on the wide side.