Teach your children to respect animals and the world around them. Teach them that nature isn’t their toy and that their actions have consequences. Teach them compassion for other beings and creatures.
A lot of people on this post are focusing on pets, which is fair but not what I intended. Any decent pet owner would teach their children how to respect their pets, their dogs and cats and the like, but pretty much everyone neglects lessons about other animals and nature in general.
Teach your kids that:
nests are important and that they need to be left untouched and undisturbed
they should NEVER take an animal that they find outside and that if they find an injured animal, they should give it space and find an adult to help
wild animals in general need a wide berth and that ANY animal can be dangerous if it feels threatened
wild animals are not pets under any circumstances
it’s kinder and very easy to catch and release bugs outside instead of killing them
all bugs are important, even spiders and wasps and other scary ones
everything in nature has a job in general, and everything has a role to fill
something being scary or creepy does not mean it deserves to die
Whatâs really wild is that the native people literally told the Europeans âthey walkedâ when asked how the statues were moved. The Europeans were like âlol these backwards heathens and their fairy tales guess itâs gonna always be a mystery!â
Maori told Europeans that kiore were native rats and no one believed them until DNA tests proved it
Roopkund Lake AKA âSkeleton Lakeâ in the Himalayas in India is eerie because it was discovered with hundreds of skeletal remains and for the life of them researchers couldnât figure out what it was that killed them. For decades the âmysteryâ went unsolved.
Until they finally payed closer attention to local songs and legend that all essentially said âYah the Goddess Nanda Devi got mad and sent huge heave stones down to kill themâ. That was consistent with huge contusions found all on their neck and shoulders and the weather patterns of the area, which are prone to huge & inevitably deadly goddamn hailstones. https://www.facebook.com/atlasobscura/videos/10154065247212728/
Literally these legends were past down for over a thousand years and it still took researched 50 to âfigure outâ the âmysteryâ. đ
Adding to this, the Inuit communities in Nunavut KNEW where both the wrecks of the HMS Erebus and HMS Terror were literally the entire time but Europeans/white people didnât even bother consulting them about either ship until likeâŠlast year.Â
âInuit traditional knowledge was critical to the discovery of both ships, she pointed out, offering the Canadian government a powerful demonstration of what can be achieved when Inuit voices are included in the process.
In contrast, the tragic fate of the 129 men on the Franklin expedition hints at the high cost of marginalising those who best know the area and its history.
âIf Inuit had been consulted 200 years ago and asked for their traditional knowledge â this is our backyard â those two wrecks would have been found, lives would have been saved. Iâm confident of that,â she said. âBut they believed their civilization was superior and that was their undoing.â
âOh yeah, I heard a lot of stories about Terror, the ships, but I guess Parks Canada donât listen to people,â Kogvik said. âThey just ignore Inuit stories about the Terror ship.â
Schimnowski said the crew had also heard stories about people on the land seeing the silhouette of a masted ship at sunset.
âThe community knew about this for many, many years. Itâs hard for people to stop and actually listen ⊠especially people from the South.â
Indigenous Australians have had stories about giant kangaroos and wombats for thousands of years, and European settlers just kinda assumed they were myths. Cut to more recently when evidence of megafauna was discovered, giant versions of Australian animals that died out 41 000 years ago.
Similarly, scientists have been stumped about how native Palm trees got to a valley in the middle of Australia, and it wasnât until a few years ago that someone did DNA testing and concluded that seeds had been carried there from the north around 30 000 years ago⊠aaand someone pointed out that Indigenous people have had stories about gods from the north carrying the seeds to a valley in the central desert.
itâs literally the oldest accurate oral history of the world. Â
Now consider this: most people consider the start of recorded history to be with  the Sumerians and the Early Dynastic period of the Egyptians.  So around 3500 BCE, or five and a half thousand years ago
These highly accurate Aboriginal oral histories originate from twenty thousand years ago at least
Ainât it amazing what white people consider history and what they donât?
I always said disservice is done to oral traditions and myth when you take them literally. Ancient people were not stupid.
I used to be a happy person.
Now I’m so angry. All the time. Everything makes me upset.
People who are insensitive and mean, people who make decisions I wouldn’t, people who are ignorant, people who don’t care, and even people who are better than me. It all makes me so angry.
I can’t watch tv or movies anymore because the plot conflict makes me upset.
I need a break from myself and I don’t know what to do.
Anonymous
