There are always rainbows...

Sometimes life is tough. Some mornings you wake up in the dark with high winds pummeling rain against your kitchen windows while you try to cook breakfast. Some days you wake, get yourself ready, and move your body outside only to be pelted in the face with horizontal ice-rain. Raindrops cover your glasses and you must remove them to be able to see. You finally get to your lectures which are spent arguing about the meaning of life and death or learning to quantify vast quantities of suffering. You learn the ways in which the problems that you are trying to solve are connected to larger global issues that are totally overwhelming. January has been a difficult and dark month, but it is now over.

Today is a beautiful, sunny day! I am getting work done on my assignments, including that manatee enclosure design one that I mentioned in a previous blog.
Manatees are vulnerable. Despite the fact that they have no natural predators, they are very threatened by habitat loss by people building developments in Florida which drain water from this beautiful river. They are also frequently injured by boats (cut by propellers) and ingest fishing hooks, lines and rubbish. Some people are working hard to save the manatees and conserve this species, and manatees are making a come-back. It is so nice to see so many wild manatees in this live webcam stream from Blue Spring State Park, but it is important to remember that there are very few total manatees alive in the wild. We need to continue to work to protect them.

It is all too easy to see these manatees and think, "Look how many there are! Everything is good! We don't need to worry about them anymore." It is also all to easy to read about the mass extinction of animal and plant species that is happening right now and feel completely depressed and unable to appreciate any good news. In order to work on challenging issues and help make the world a better place, it is important to have a balanced view and try to avoid black and white (all good or all bad) thinking.

Icy rain might pelt you in the face, but there are always rainbows. There are beautiful rainbows, but there is also rain. I think it's important to remember that suffering and happiness are both natural parts of life.

This is my opinion, and I'm not sure how it fits into Animal Welfare Ethics frameworks, but I will be discussing that during our final week of classes.