Attitudes of Human Beings Toward Turtles

The attitudes of human beings toward turtles have been widely varied and inconsistent. People have studied turtles; kept them as pets; venerated them.

Eaten their flesh and made use of their eggs, oil, and skin; ignored them; labored in their behalf; and thoughtlessly abused and exploited them.

We have treated turtles, alternately, as respected fellow creatures of the Earth and, to borrow an expression from Shakespeare, as "blocks, stones, and worse than senseless things."

For their part, turtles have left us alone, asking nothing except to be allowed to live their lives undisturbed. It has taken some 150 million years of paleontological disasters to reduce the immense diversity of reptilian life to a meager four orders.

But it has taken man only a few hundred years of indiscriminate slaughtering to bring many survivors to the brink of complete extinction.

For us, it is natural to see the situation entirely from our perspective, describing how we view turtles and how we act toward them.

On a deeper level, however, turtles have a certain power over us: the power to reveal us as we really are, to make crystal-clear the way we see ourselves and the planet we live on, the quality of life we will bequeath to future generations, and perhaps even our very prospects for survival.