I run a dog sanctuary with my wife. We specialize in small dogs (the name of the sanctuary is Rancho de Chihuahua) and mostly take in outcasts: old dogs, sick dogs, retarded dogs, dogs that really have no place else to go. Occasionally, we end up with younger, more adoptable models, and this requires us to attend adoptions.
Adoptions are everything from a couple of folks sitting outside a pet store looking for homes for shelter puppies, to the massive undertaking where hundreds of dogs are "placed" (this is the technical term for finding a home for a stray).
My wife tends to go to more adoptions than I do and tends to come home with interesting stories. Last weekend she came home from a giant adoption (over 400 animals were placed) with stories about an Afghani boy and his father. The boy was in love with dogs, was desperate to take on home from the fair. His father was less certain. He pulled my wife aside and asked some pretty basic questions.
"Do dogs sleep inside?" was the first one. He explained to my wife that in his country dogs did not sleep inside and he was starting to realize that things were different in America. He was entirely opposed to the idea (he conceded that it might be okay for a small dog to sleep inside), but admitted there was a big cultural divide to be crossed.
This cultural divide is something environmentalists and ecologists and ecopsychologists have been attempting to bridge over these last few decades. With the current species die-off rate at 1000 times higher than ever before in history, changing cultural perceptions about animals many feel may be the only way we can save the animals.
And at a time when there is very little good environmental news to go around—here's a bit of it: it's working. Cultural attitudes are changing. It's not only the Afghani at the dog adoption, it's his home country as well. At the same time my wife was trying to get folks to love a stray, the government of Afghanistan announced their nation's first national park, Band-e-Amir, protecting a very rare landscape-a progression of six high mountain lakes separated by natural dams.
The wildlife in the park certainly need the help. The snow leopard, who lives there, hasn't been spotted for 30 years. The numbers of ibex, urials, foxes, wolves and Afghan snow finch (the only endemic bird in Afghanistan) are greatly diminished as well. But the park should go a long way to reversing these trends.
At the same time Band-e-Amir was opening its doors, the UAE announced the country's first mountain reserve, Wadi Wurayah Fujairah, an 80 square mile patch of incredibly important real estate. 73 species of birds, 17 families of reptiles, 12 species of mammal, 74 invertebrate families-11 of which are brand new to science-all live there.
In both cases, the reports emerging from these countries say that these parks were created with overwhelming local support. That's a huge step forward. In parts of the world where animals usually only thought about for their use-value-that is, their usefulness to humans-setting aside valuable real estate for their protection is the kind of mindshift we've been waiting for.
It's something very rare these days: a bit of hope.
