It seems that both on my blog and at work all I've been doing lately is justifying or apologising for my environmental beliefs - often, surprisingly, to people who are adamant that they 'like animals too'. In arguments or debates about being anti-reclamation, or anti-longlining, or wanting people to think that chickens are living creatures or that animals have as much right to exist as we do I'm apparently the one who has to rationalise my emotions away and present arguments that are 'unemotional', whilst the 'other side' only have to drop "emotional" into a sentence to think they've won. I'm supposed to deny my "feelings". It's as if having an emotional response to wildlife, to my environment, to the world around me, somehow negates what I think.

And right now I'm totally failing to understand why that should be...

Time after time, the argument is thrown at conservationists (or any animal-lover) that we are reacting "emotionally" as if this is somehow 'a bad thing'. Representatives of the fur trade tell us we are "emotional". Whalers tell us we are "emotional". Hunters tell us we are "emotional". Yet humans are supposed to have emotions - our emotions are supposedly something that 'elevate' us above 'lower' forms of life. We can talk, we can think, and we can feel. We get angry, we love, we laugh, we get passionate, become involved, we care, we want to protect.

Take the fierce media debates about the seal kills in Canada. The 'anti' lobby are constantly mocked for responding emotionally to pictures of "cuddly" seals. Tell me though, what exactly is wrong with having an emotional response to images of men driving a spike into the skull of a young seal? We have an instinctive reaction to protect babies because of their features - their proportionately large eyes and round faces etc - and those same features are shown by 'baby' seals. We know they're not human babies - but why does that matter? Our in-built response is to want to protect. Surely we should be asking, how did the sealers become so detached from their feelings that they can club a young animal to death without feeling emotional about it? Looking from the outside, I really want to know what excuses they have to make to themselves to justify what they do.

It's the same with the food we eat. How did I become so emotionally uninvolved that I could go out birding all day yet (as I did for years) come home and eat a chicken without ever thinking of the bird it once was? The poultry industry helped by showing happy families eating roast chickens as if it was the most joyous thing in the world to do: no sign of the airless factories, the cages, the de-beaking, the dead bodies piled up on the floor. But of course I disconnected by suppressing any guilt I felt, by not wanting to think about what I was doing. By taking the emotion out of mealtimes. That's how I did it anyway. I knew the arguments for vegetarianism, I knew the facts, but it was easy to ignore them. Everyone else did, so why shouldn't I? Giving up meat was surprisingly long and complex, a multi-step process. I gave up eating meat because finally I could no longer emotionally, rationally, or intellectually justify the cruelty involved, the terrible mis-use of land and water resources, the erosion of my humanity I felt when I looked at the pitiable bits of meat on my plate. I realised that I cared.

That's not good enough for some people though: it's just too "emotional". You know, if I tell some people I don't eat meat they react as if my beliefs are somehow offensive to their sensibilities. To some people saying you're a vegetarian is like waving a red flag in front of a bull. Do you have any idea of the great lengths some non-vegetarians go to in an effort to undermine a vegetarian's beliefs, or to try to trip a vegetarian up? It becomes a contest for some people, to churn out the same stale cliches ('If you're opposed to eating animals, do you think it's wrong for a lion to eat an antelope?'[smirk, smirk]. No, Lions don't keep antelopes in factory farms or fence them in squalid conditions, stick a bolt into their heads to kill them when they're a few months old, and then throw away the bits they don't want) as if NOT thinking that the meat industry is an abhorrence is clever or rational. No human carnivore ever thinks that they should make excuses to a vegetarian for NOT being emotional, so why do they think I need to make excuses about my emotions to them?

As a society, a culture, we desperately need to start caring again, to listen to our "emotional" side. It's overwhelming, but we must. Imagine for a moment what would be left 'out there' if people didn't have an emotional response to our environment. What if John Muir, 'The father of American conservation', hadn't been stirred by the woods and mountains, the wildlife and wild places of America? What if Sir Peter Scott, conservationist and founder of the |Wildfowl and Wetlands Trust had listened to the cries of a dying goose he'd shot and injured and NOT been emotionally affected? How many chimpanzees would there be on the planet if Jane Goodall hadn't responded to them emotionally? If the thousands and thousands of volunteers who give up their time to work on nature reserves or in nature centres worldwide simply stopped caring? The world would be a very different (and I'm certain) less pleasant place to live in than it is now.

Colleagues, friends, scientists may all say that there is no place for emotion in rational discussion, and it's true that no argument will ever be won on purely emotional grounds, but without our emotions to act as a catalyst or as the precursor we build our thoughts with what kind of outcome to the arguments about our world can we look forward to? The continuation of the same sterile, empty, passionless way of life that has created the mess we live in now. Of the same exploitative, anthropocentric lifestyle that says all other forms of life are inferior and are ours to use as we see fit. Of the same break-up of ecosystems every life-form on this planet depends on.

It's as if we've somehow become terribly afraid of our emotions. Perhaps the way we manage the world is so inherently appalling to most of us that we daren't re-connect with our feelings: how would we cope with the misery we inflict so that we can eat, the destruction we have to wreak to make space for us to live and work, the horrendous waste we trail in our wake? Could we cope? More importantly though, shouldn't we be asking how on earth we are going to repair the damage, limit the pain and suffering, and start to put right all that we've done wrong if we DON'T?