The last couple of days I have been thinking about poaching
a lot. It seems like a very simple thing: poaching is bad. Then I think of my
ancestors during the Ice Age who were starving, and I realize they didn’t have
the luxury of sparing wooly mammoths to make sure there were enough to continue
a population; they just needed to eat. It’s easy to criticize them from my
well-fed vantage point. Sure, I’d love to see a wooly mammoth, but how much
would they have loved to eat a Big Mac? Some poaching really is like that, and
people engage in it just to survive. Can I judge them for that? A lot of poaching,
however, is about greed and not survival. We can probably all agree that this
is a brutal practice, killing rare animals for a single body part, but the
people engaging in this practice are still humans with immortal souls, so we
should pray for them. They often murder other humans too, so their souls are in
real danger of damnation.
I like hypothetical situations, so here is one for you:
imagine you are the spirit of an animal just killed by a poacher. You realize
the poacher did not kill you out of necessity, so he seems very evil to you.
Then you follow him to a poaching operation headquarters, where he gets into an
argument over money with the head of the operation. Imagine he kills the other
man. You, as the animal’s spirit, might sympathize with the killed man and hate
the killer, because he killed you too. However, the killed man is also guilty
because he created the operation that drew in the poacher. Both men would need
prayers for their souls. Now consider that this is probably not a hypothetical
situation but something that happens all the time, and you can see how prayers
are desperately needed. (The animal’s perspective, that’s a long story, but
many of my readers understand.) Greed is a deadly sin that can lead to
destruction of God’s beautiful creation and even the murder of another human
being. We should pray that the hearts of all poachers would be turned back to
God, and that He would have mercy on the souls of the poachers who have already
died. So as you are thinking of prayer intentions, I’d ask you to consider this
one at least once a month. Thanks!
Famous Hat
2 comments:
Like I said, this vision may have come from Episode 1 of the tv-miniseries Roots when Kunta Kinte chased down that leopard, but there were no poachers, just slave catchers who captured him. Similar cruel and terrible profession in a way..
I tend to agree. I really hate all these posts on facebook that I get. Most of them are revenge in regards to animal cruelty or child abuse. I am not saying we should welcome a person like that back with open arms, but in all of us there is compassion. Despite the awful things these people did, there may be a way to rehabilitate or fix them or we do not know what happened in their lives to make them do something so wrong. Returning the hate is not moving anyone forward. It just creates more hate.
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