How to Tell Their Story

People tend to connect more easily with wild animals than with farmed animals. When stories of wild animals are told, people naturally side with the animals, perhaps also due to not realizing our society is based on the genocide of wild animals; they feel they have no foot in this crime. The story of Ruti the hyena is an example of one that touched many hearts in Israel.

No names, no faces, no stories. When I give lectures about the wild animal genocide, I put a question: "there are trillions of victims, each year, that die due to human activity. Please tell me a story of a single victim". No one ever raises their hand, and this is also the case when the audience is comprised of many environmentalists. There was only one exception, when a woman knew a story of a bird that was shot by a hunter and saved, lives happily in a sanctuary, and obviously was given a name. The exception shows the rule: no names, no faces, no story. What is a story?

But what about polar bear pictures? they are symbols, a frozen moment in time, not a sequence of changes in a particular individual's life. We can find some individual stories on National Geographic, but those usually hide the human influence (though that may have changed somewhat in recent years). By the way, I also think relatable stories about individual farmed animals to are very seldom told. This is why we need Animal storytelling, which can strengthen animal personhood (at Sentient, we try to tackle some of these issues with the Camera on Animal tech).

We need names, but we need numbers as well! I was born and raised in Israel, a country living in the shadow of the Holocaust. Every Israeli knows the number 6 million (Jews killed in the holocaust), and the story of Anne Frank. In my opinion, these two represent the fundamental elements that structure memory and recognition of atrocities: the story of the one, and the extrapolation to millions. Without a story, there is no emotional connection; without big numbers, it is a personal tragedy, not an atrocity. The main difference between a massacre, slaughter, pogrom (which are also not used in environmental terminology) to the term genocide is the sheer volume of suffering and death. It's about the numbers, It's about the individual story. It's both.