I found Ana Maria Spagna’s essay, “The story of Gimpy” touching and thought-provoking (HCN, 9/2/13). Beyond evoking the compelling image of the black bear left incapable of foraging by a gunshot wound, Spagna addresses human compassion toward animals, concluding, “We’re all connected and we owe our fellow creatures something.”
It is essential that HCN continue to publish well-researched articles on the destructive impacts of human activities such as our incursion on wildlife habitat and the consequent explosion in species extinction, pollution of the atmosphere and oceans, impacts of oil-gas extraction and transport, overgrazing, and conversion of grasslands and forests to agriculture and residential development. We are all to varying degrees complicit. An appropriate concluding question might be: What can be done to overcome the human hubris that places individual comfort and opportunism above all else?
Doyle McClure
Longmont, Colorado
This article appeared in the print edition of the magazine with the headline Gimpy’s lessons.
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