The Impact of Agriculture on Wildlife Zoologist Jordi Casamitjana discusses the different ways agriculture has been impacting the lives of wild animals all over the world.
I have been campaigning for the protection of wildlife longer than I have been vegan. I started last century dealing with the issue of wild animals in captivity. First, trying to rehabilitate back into the Brazilian Amazon a colony of woolly monkeys kept in a primate sanctuary in Cornwall. Then, campaigning to phase out zoos and public aquaria in the UK. It continued by working on the enforcement of the Hunting Act 2004 investigating and prosecuting those who hunted foxes, hare, and deer against the law. I even helped train anti elephant and rhino poaching officials in the East African country of Mozambique. Therefore, I have a pretty good idea about the main threats wildlife are exposed to, and what kind of measures we can take to help. But most of the wild animals involved in my campaigning were either big mammals or “exotic animals”. In other words,
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animals most people like. In reality, though, the majority of the wild animals that suffer because of human activity are not of these types. They are the small birds, the rodents, the insects, the arachnids, and the aquatic animals we interfere with when we go into Nature to build structures or to farm for goods. The wildlife we harm, displace, or kill to accommodate our population growth, our relentless expansion, and our growing economy. When we cut down forests and build concrete towns and cities in their place, countless wild animals perish. But once we have done it, the resulting land is no longer part of “the wild”. Some species do manage to adapt to our urban environments, but the biodiversity of these spaces is small and fragile. When we build major structures, roads and buildings, we attack nature as huge meteorites attack our planet when falling from the sky. Fast, devastating, and
indiscriminate, causing the extinction of many local populations all at once. However, when we go into Nature and make it the countryside, the damage is no longer acute, but chronic. When we transform a forest into a farm, we keep attacking wildlife every year—and we have been doing it for the last 12,000 years. We are in a constant never-ending battle with all the animals who try to get their land back. A battle that arguably causes more suffering than the concrete, plastic, and metal tsunamis we unleash when we urbanised the world. Agriculture is a chronic disease for wildlife. Like an oozing wound that never heals. The Worst Type: Animal Agriculture There are different kinds of agriculture and not all of them are equally damaging to wildlife, though. Some are depleting while others are regenerative. Some are destructive while others are sustainable. Some
