We, the animal creatures and critters of the Earth, resolve to make our voices heard by
all human beings everywhere. There are two million members of the animal kingdom, more
than four thousands of which are mammals, just like you. But since your first appearance at the start of the Pleistocene Epoch, we have been greatly abused and grossly mistreated by your species. Today, you threaten us all with your carelessness and greed.
May our squeaks, squawks, squeals, and screeches, our baas, barks, and bellows, our neighs and brays, our moans and groans, grunts, growls, and howls, yelps, roars, moos, and warbles reach your unhearing ears. Some of you refuse to believe the dire warnings of Mother Nature. Some of you think that Father Time will give you time to change your habits and your lifestyles. You are all wrong!
We, the surviving members of the animal kingdom, bear witness to the decimation of our land, the
pollution of our air, and the contamination of our seas. Your mindless destruction of our planet Earth is so indiscriminate that thousands of species—members of our animal family, like the dodo and the passenger pigeon—are extinct. And today, millions of us are threatened with the same cataclysmic fate.
Then, what will you do?
There is urgency in our message! Not since the last ice age have, we been forced, like beggars, to scavenge for food. Today we are driven to encroach on your villages, towns, and cities when our
habitats are destroyed. We have even been pushed to cannibalize our own in order to survive.
Have you forgotten the order of creation? We, the animals, have inhabited our planet for at least 560 million years, while your modern species, Homo sapiens, grew to maturity only 300,000 years ago.
Have you forgotten the lessons imparted in your religious texts? In all of them—the Christian Bible, the Hebrew Tanakh, and the Muslim Quran? Your species, mankind, was given charge of all the Earth’s wealthy ecosystems in order to ensure our collective survival.
Dominion was granted to you over our animal kingdom in order to befriend us and to serve as our guardians, not to overwhelm us as predators and hunt us down as enemies. Alas, it seems that you have discarded the wisdom of your ancient poets, pundits, and prophets. The words
of your sages throughout the ages have fallen into the dust of your collective memory.
Even in more recent times, many of your seers—like Aesop,
Mother Goose, and Hans Christian Andersen—have tried to remind you of our importance as we entertained your young. And, indeed, when you were children we charmed you with our stories, and you learned many of our ways. But are we not more than entertainment?
As food, we have nourished you. Our hides and skins have clothed you and our labor has built your
homes, towns, bridges, and roads. Have you forgotten that we were not designed for your vanity or sport? Because we—the nonverbal animals of the Earth—do not speak your human languages, you assume that your human nature is superior to our animal instinct. Let us remind you that your human nature has visited homicide, suicide, arson, war, hate, and greed onto the peoples of our Earth. By contrast, we have only one nature, and that is our animal instinct to survive.
We introduce Our Animalpedia Manifesto to the literary world in the hope and with the aspiration of
being acknowledged and respected by our mammalian brothers and sisters, members of your human species. It is our mission, in these apocalyptic times, with our planet in a terminal state, to remind your humankind that our animal kingdom wisdom is timeless and needed now more than ever!
Our Animalpedia has, indeed, taken liberties with your figures of speech, but only to entice you to stretch your imagination to embrace all of our animalogic. We beseech you, as the most vital link in our food chain, to remember that a durable linkage requires many, many links. You are only one of those links. We, the animals, are the rest!