• Question: What is the worst thing you have seen? (Animals getting trapped in rubbish and things like that)

    Asked by millie137 to Nicolas, Christine on 15 Jun 2011.
    • Photo: Nicolas Biber

      Nicolas Biber answered on 15 Jun 2011:

      Hi Millie

      That’s a hard one to answer, because I always try to forget about the worst things. In animals trapped in rubbish I am lucky to say I haven’t seen any for real, only on pictures. But the worst picture I have seen was of a fully grown turtle that had a plastic loop wrapped around it’s waist. That plastic loop had been there all its life, since it was little, and the turtle just had to grow ‘around it’. Now it has a very narrow waist (only look at this if you can take it! http://conservationreport.com/2009/04/24/animal-welfare-turtle-deformed-by-being-trapped-in-a-six-pack-plastic-ring/). On films and pictures I have also seen things like dolphin slaughter and shark finning. Deliberate animal cruelty is the worst.
      When I was little I was in the South of France with my dad. He was doing research there. The cold weather came back during the spring and all the flamingos that had already migrated back from further south froze to death. Nobody could have done anything about it, and it was nobody’s fault, but it was still horrible. I helped my dad and my godfather to carry them away in literally truck loads.
      I don’t like thinking about these things very much.

    • Photo: Christine Switzer

      Christine Switzer answered on 15 Jun 2011:

      Hello again Millie! And Nicolas!

      I have been very fortunate as the worst I’ve seen in terms of animals has been photos or stories.

      The worst thing I have seen personally and recently is poverty. We talk about people living on $1/day but not in a way that we can really see. My students and I went to Malawi in January where we got to see what that really meant. They were working on independent projects that could be beneficial either to Malawi as a country or the Univ of Malawi Polytechnic. We visited several rural villages and saw successes and failures in terms of the aid money that comes into the country. The problems are overpopulation, disease, deforestation, overfishing and a number of other problems that follow from the main ones. The successes are innovation, resourcefulness and recent improvements in maternal health. Destitution is balanced by opportunity, so the overall message is sad but hopeful.

      Cheers,
      Christine

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