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Time of India
3 days ago
- General
- Time of India
My family is other animals
Mahabharat swarg Critics of animal lovers dub them frivolous and 'sentimental'. Don't some carry Chihuahuas around in designer handbags, leave fortunes to cats, clone pets and pamper pariahs? In reality, not wearing human-centric blinkers, most animal lovers are pretty clear-headed. They see the big know research says Homo sapiens appeared on this 4.5bn-year-old planet just around 300,000 years ago. They accept kinship with Earth's myriad inhabitants, most plants and animals predating humans. They also respect ancient wisdom about life's inherent harmony and creaturely interdependence — incontrovertible scientific philosophy fetes 'vasudhaiva kutumbakam': the earth/world as one family — peoples, cultures, creatures. Scientific theory echoes this Upanishadic concept: if all life grew from a single-celled ancestor, all life-forms are related. While competitive struggle marks nature and society, Darwin felt sympathy for 'all sentient beings' was man's noblest impulse. Sympathy, in practice, means sharing. Yet every living space — from forests to cities — has been monopolised by humans, a singularly self-absorbed apex predator whose insatiability has no one example suffices to show how much humans depend on organisms deemed 'inferior'. Insect biodiversity dwindling worryingly courtesy anthropogenic natural habitat loss, entomologists warn human society would flounder if all bugs disappeared in an 'insect apocalypse'. No techno-fixes can replace the ecological role insects freely play as food sources, plant pollinators, seed transporters, pest controllers, nutrient recyclers and soil preservers. Deflating humans, biologist EO Wilson said these 'little things…run the world'.India's Constitution validates the shared ethics of ancient wisdom and modern ecology by directing citizens 'to protect and improve the natural environment including forests, lakes, rivers and wildlife, and to have compassion for living creatures'. To be loved may not be an animal right according to many, but to nurture all life is every Indian's fundamental duty. And nowhere is it written that India's stray dogs don't deserve compassion simply because the streets are their home, where cruelty awaits them more than those in court to 'forget the rules', an SC two-judge bench recently said 'no sentiments' should impede removal of Delhi-NCR's strays to 'shelters', seemingly referring to animal lovers' sensitivities. In India, everything from film releases to women's entry into temples can be stymied by the wounded 'sentiments' of some group or other. If animal lovers' voices are less audible, thank the misleading notion that animal welfare/rights is somehow inimical to public lovers have been labouring to remind people that strays are highly intelligent, useful community dogs providing natural pest control, neighborhood security and no-strings-attached companionship. They however know that calculating 'utility'-based 'worth', while ignoring an animal's capacity for joy and suffering, is self-serving anthropocentrism. Like you or I, a dog, donkey or dolphin didn't choose to be born. Yet each enhances the web of life. Dogs, frogs, owls or elephants, non-humans have intrinsic value as links in an evolutionary chain, which speciesists mistake for a prefabricated ladder with Man perched on animals lacked intrinsic value, conservation of whales, tigers or orangutans wouldn't be worth it. Animal lovers' detractors will doubtless say stray dogs aren't comparable to wildlife. Wild animals are majestic, mysterious and multifarious, kept separate from safari-going humans in whom they inspire awe, aesthetic fascination or scientific curiosity. Whereas strays are everywhere, their familiarity breeding more contempt than argument merely proves the humble dog lover's point. If strays aren't comparable to wildlife, they shouldn't be segregated like wildlife is. As many eminent people emphasise, human-dog conflict and risk of disease have humane solutions that don't require driving healthy, non-aggressive dogs off the streets. Crammed into so-called 'shelters', they'd be worse-off than any wild animal in poaching-hit, encroached-upon reserves, national parks and many govt-run orphanages, schools and hospitals provide subpar services, when prisons are overcrowded and understaffed, can anyone seriously believe low-priority dogs won't be hungry, ailing and neglected in underfunded municipal pounds? Is abandonment in an institutional black hole to be the fate of lakhs of affectionate, attachment-forming dogs — India's street-smart 'Indies' world-famous for being clever, vigilant, resilient, loyal and good-natured?An unforgettable episode inis worth recalling. Urged by Indra, Yudhishthir at Mount Sumeru is just a chariot-ride away from heaven. But he wants a dog that faithfully followed him in his difficult journey to go along too. No, says Indra, lowly canines cannot enter heaven. Unwavering, Yudhishthir refuses to attainif it means abandoning a living being. The dog, as we know, turns out to be Dharma in disguise: a test of virtue. But before this startling revelation, the dog in Yudhishthir's eyes is simply a 'devoted' pariah. A stray for whom he rejects heaven — and, ultimately, regains paradise.
Washington Post
03-06-2025
- Health
- Washington Post
We finally may be able to rid the world of mosquitoes. But should we?
They buzz, they bite and they cause some of the deadliest diseases known to humanity. Mosquitos are perhaps the planet's most universally reviled animals. If we could zap them off the face of the Earth, should we? The question is no longer hypothetical. In recent years, scientists have devised powerful genetic tools that may be able to eradicate mosquitoes and other pests once and for all. Now, some doctors and scientists say it is time to take the extraordinary step of unleashing gene editing to suppress mosquitoes and avoid human suffering from malaria, dengue, West Nile virus and other serious diseases. 'There are so many lives at stake with malaria that we want to make sure that this technology could be used in the near future,' said Alekos Simoni, a molecular biologist with Target Malaria, a project aiming to target vector mosquitos in sub-Saharan Africa. Yet the development of this technology also raises a profound ethical question: When, if ever, is it okay to intentionally drive a species out of existence. Even the famed naturalist E.O. Wilson once said: 'I would gladly throw the switch and be the executioner myself' for malaria-carrying mosquitos. But some researchers and ethicists warn it may be too dangerous to tinker with the underpinnings of life itself. Even irritating, itty-bitty mosquitoes, they say, may have enough inherent value to keep around. Target Malaria is one of the most ambitious mosquito suppression efforts in the works. Simoni and his colleagues are seeking to diminish populations of mosquitoes in the Anopheles gambiae complex that are responsible for spreading that deadly disease. In their labs, the scientists have introduced a gene mutation that causes female mosquito offspring to be born without functional ovaries, rendering them infertile. Male mosquito offspring can carry the gene but remain physically unaffected. The concept is that when female mosquitoes inherit the gene from both their mother and father, they will go on to die without producing offspring. Meanwhile, when males and females carrying just one copy of the gene mate with wild mosquitoes, they will spread the gene further until no fertile females are left — and the population crashes. Simoni said he hopes the project can move beyond the lab and deploy some of the genetically modified mosquitoes in their natural habitats within the next five years. 'We believe that this technology can really be transformative,' he said. At the heart of Target Malaria's work is a powerful genetic tool called a gene drive. Under the normal rules of inheritance, a parent has a 50-50 chance of passing a particular gene on to an offspring. But by adding special genetic machinery — dubbed a gene drive — to segments of DNA, scientists can rig the coin flip and ensure a gene is included in an animal's eggs and sperm, nearly guaranteeing it will be passed along. Over successive generations, gene drives can cause a trait to spread across an entire species' population, even if that gene doesn't benefit the organism. In that way, gene drives do something remarkable: They allow humans to overwrite Charles Darwin's rules for natural selection, which normally prods populations of plants and animals to adapt to their environment over time. 'Technology is presenting new options to us,' said Christopher Preston, a University of Montana environmental philosopher. 'We might've been able to make a species go extinct 150 years ago by harpooning it too much or shooting it out of the sky. But today, we have different options, and extinction could be completed or could be started in a lab.' When so many wildlife conservationists are trying to save plants and animals from disappearing, the mosquito is one of the few creatures that people argue is actually worthy of extinction. Forget about tigers or bears — it's the tiny mosquito that is the deadliest animal on Earth. The human misery caused by malaria is undeniable. Nearly 600,000 people died of the disease in 2023, according to the World Health Organization, with the majority of cases in Africa. On the continent, the death toll is akin to 'crashing two Boeing 747s into Kilimanjaro' every day, said Paul Ndebele, a bioethicist at George Washington University. For gene-drive advocates, making the case for releasing genetically modified mosquitoes in nations such as Burkina Faso or Uganda is straightforward. 'This is not a difficult audience because these are people that are living in an area where children are dying,' said Krystal Birungi, an entomologist for Target Malaria in Uganda, though she added that she sometimes has to fight misinformation, such as the false idea that bites from genetically modified mosquitoes can make people sterile. But recently, the Hastings Center for Bioethics, a research institute in New York, and Arizona State University brought together a group of bioethicists to discuss the potential pitfalls of intentionally trying to drive a species to extinction. In a policy paper published in the journal Science last month, the group concluded 'deliberate full extinction might occasionally be acceptable, but only extremely rarely.' A compelling candidate for total eradication, according to the bioethicists, is the New World screwworm. This parasitic fly, which lays eggs in wounds and eats the flesh of both humans and livestock, appears to play little role in ecosystems. Infections are difficult to treat and can lead to slow and painful deaths. Yet it may be too risky, they argue, to use gene drives on invasive rodents on remote Pacific islands where they decimate native birds, given the nonzero chance of a gene-edited rat or mouse jumping ship to the mainland and spreading across a continent. 'Even at a microbial level, it became plain in our conversations, we are not in favor of remaking the world to suit human desires,' said Gregory Kaebnick, a senior research scholar at the institute. It's unclear how important malaria-carrying mosquitos are to broader ecosystems. Little research has been done to figure out whether frogs or other animals that eat the insects would be able to find their meals elsewhere. 'The eradication of the mosquito through a genetic technology would have the potential to create global eradication in a way that just felt a little risky,' said Preston, who contributed with Ndebele to the discussion published in Science. Instead, the authors said, geneticists should be able to use gene-editing, vaccines and other tools to target not the mosquito itself, but the single-celled Plasmodium parasite that is responsible for malaria. That invisible microorganism — which a mosquito transfers from its saliva to a person's blood when it bites — is the real culprit. 'You can get rid of malaria without actually getting rid of the mosquito,' Kaebnick said. He added that at a time when the Trump administration talks cavalierly about animals going extinct, intentional extinction should be an option for only 'particularly horrific species.' But Ndebele, who is from Zimbabwe, noted that most of the people opposed to the elimination of the mosquitoes 'are not based in Africa.' Ndebele has intimate experience with malaria; he once had to rush his sick son to a hospital after the disease manifested as a hallucinatory episode. 'We're just in panic mode,' he recalled. 'You can just imagine — we're not sure what's happening with this young guy.' Still, Ndebele and his colleagues expressed caution about using gene-drive technology. Even if people were to agree to rid the globe of every mosquito — not just Anopheles gambiae, but ones that transmit other diseases or merely bite and irritate — it would be a 'herculean undertaking,' according to Kaebnick. There are more than 3,500 known species, each potentially requiring its own specially designed gene drive. And there is no guarantee a gene drive would wipe out a population as intended. Simoni, the gene-drive researcher, agreed there are limits to what the technology can do. His team's modeling suggests it would suppress malaria-carrying mosquitoes only locally without outright eliminating them. Mosquitoes have been 'around for hundreds of millions of years,' he said. 'It's a very difficult species to eliminate.'
