The SNJ columnist Karen Eberhardt-Shelton was born in California but grew up in England.

She now lives in Stroud and is currently working on an education project called Learn, Think, Act and is hoping to develop an eco-community land trust.

Her thought-provoking columns will focus on how we all have to take responsibility for our actions and for our planet.

I’VE never met anyone who has described what it’s like to watch an orca cry while her baby is being taken away.

That wide open underwater mouth and its sobbing aquatic voice. . .

As I write this it gives me shivers.

I endured two films in a row illustrating humans’ ignorance regarding animals and what really goes on inside them.

First there was Tyke the circus elephant who finally said ‘enough’ and went on a rampage.

The poor deranged creature was eventually felled by 87 heartless bullets out on the street.

Why didn’t they shoot her with an anaesthetic and transport her body to a safe place?

You could see in her eyes how much she hated having to act like an idiot wind-up toy in an alien circus ring.

Then on to the orca (killer whale – what a nasty term) ‘prisoners’ of a tourist attraction, forced to live in a way humans would never tolerate if they had one iota of choice.

A bull killed one of the workers, and other workers, in effect, killed that mother by robbing her of her child.

I’ll never forget the grief-stricken sound of her agony and can’t imagine how humans manage to quell their emotions when surrounded by these clever animals being forced to adapt to unnatural lives and the suffering that goes with it.

“The price of compassion is restriction . . .Sustaining an achieved quality of life means respecting limits.”

Limits.

An outmoded words it seems; we transgress ‘limits’ constantly.

I see it happening on farmland too.

It’s haymaking time, so tractors revolve around fields lush with combinations of various plants, wild grasses and flowers – up and down, up and down.

Machines guzzle fuel to enable them to guzzle nature.

The large sloping field next to where I live has several paths through it, so one could walk in the company of bees, butterflies, the occasional bird, and who knows what mixture of non-human relatives and neighbours.

It was humming with tiny melodies and rhythms of creation.

I thought it was a meadow for real and would stay that way.

But no, it’s gone now, and the bale-shaped corpses of the dead have been encased in many layers of black plastic to await the cold, wet times when cows generally remain inside and require packaged meals.

I look beyond, in an attempt to see wildlife endowed with an inherent right to existence, natural food being grown specifically for humans, but no; it’s mostly down to expansion, growth, profit derived from the moos and bleats of the four-leggeds.

Hardly any other species can exist in those chomped down ‘empty’ fields surrounded by roads and fencing, passing vehicles, lurking housing estates. . .

“The right to continued existence is the first and most important right to uphold on behalf of other species, and involves the right to a certain amount of resources and habitat, and the right to continue to evolve without human interference.”

It’s the only realistic way forward if you anticipate a future.