Amid so much depressing news, some stories lift the heart. The other day I read about a rare friendship between a man and a fox in Gazipur. A fox named Lalu comes running out of the jungle when called by name. Lalu is more than a year old and eats everything: cooked rice, curry, meat, bread and biscuits. He spends most of the day in Gias Uddin's yard or house, and though he sometimes goes into the forest, he runs back as soon as he hears "Lalu".

What a strange love has grown between a wild fox and people. About a year ago a farmer found a helpless fox cub in the forest, its eyes just opened. "I have raised Lalu since he was small. Now he's part of my family. He sits beside me when I eat and follows me when I go to work." Foxes are wild animals, so keeping one at home is risky, but with enough food and care such coexistence is possible.

Meanwhile in Bauphal, the white egret that shopkeeper Hemayet Uddin raised has returned to him. Two days earlier forest officials had released it on a tree known as "the egret's house" near Nurainpur Bazar. But after its release the egret was silent and listless, eating nothing and spending its time alone. Two days later it came back to Hemayet, the person it loves.

About four months earlier, during a storm, the chick had fallen from a tree at the Khan house near Nurainpur Bazar. When a monitor lizard attacked it, local trader Hemayet Uddin rescued it and raised it as carefully as his own child.

Animals, birds and plants are bound up with human life, yet many of us have never learned to love the living world, and for the same reason we have not learned to love people properly either. Our society does not teach love for people, plants and animals from childhood. Because kindness to living beings is not taught, countless cruel killings take place in human society and in nature.

While wild animals can be tamed and kept with love, people kill, hurt and harm one another and burn property and homes. People not only kill people; out of envy and greed they destroy animals, birds, plants and crops for no reason. We have seen many proofs of how cruel, violent and heartless humans can be.

How cruel and ignorant must a content creator be to catch an endangered Ganges river dolphin (shushuk) and post a video of it? The video cannot be watched in full, and seeing the dead dolphin was upsetting. In it a man runs up with a dead dolphin on his shoulder and says: "Got it, got it! This time it came to the Padma and ate all the hilsa, people aren't getting any hilsa, so I caught it."

He thought he had done something very funny. He showed no concern that by filming the dead dolphin he had committed a crime and was spreading false information. He had earlier posted several videos of catching various river fish and aquatic animals.

The river dolphin is a beautiful, playful aquatic mammal that looks like a dolphin and lives mainly in fresh water. In Bangladesh it is a protected species under the Wildlife (Conservation and Security) Act, 2012, and killing, capturing or selling it is punishable by law.

About a year ago I was stunned by a photograph from Nijhum Dwip taken by a wildlife and bird researcher. It showed a dolphin tied between two bamboo poles and hung up. I could not believe my eyes and thought it was an imaginary picture. Later I learned it was not imaginary at all but entirely real. The researcher said local people had caught the dolphin and hung it between two bamboo poles so that oil from its body would collect in a pot placed below. I have never seen a more painful picture in my life.

Yet I know Nijhum Dwip as a free-roaming ground or marine protected area for dolphins and river dolphins. Even so, a dolphin was hung and killed there to collect oil. People believe dolphin oil can be used to make medicine to cure women's ailments. Relying on this baseless belief, a class of barbaric people keeps committing this brutal act.

The other day I read in a newspaper that a government official had been hunting birds freely for several years. No one was watching and no action was taken against him. Wherever birds, especially migratory birds, gather, hunters crowd in. Many use hunted birds as gifts or bribes.

Many years ago, when a picture of the severed body of a blue kingfisher and its eggs went viral on Facebook, I felt guilty myself, because I had looked at the picture as a viewer. Because of one inhuman person, the mother bird could not save her unborn young despite trying hard. The killer attacked the kingfisher's nest, tore off the mother's head, placed it beside the eggs, photographed it and uploaded it to Facebook. It proved that only humans can show their cruel face for no reason.

Hunting wild birds is illegal in Bangladesh, but catching and selling birds shows no sign of stopping. Bird researchers say many people hunt birds in search of a different taste of meat. In recent years, cases of killing birds with poison have increased, making it possible to kill large numbers at once. According to the Forest Department's wildlife crime control data, migratory birds make up the largest share of birds hunted in Bangladesh.

Bird researcher Sarowar Alam Deep says ducks and shorebirds are the most notable migratory birds. Shorebirds include curlew (gulinda), godwit (batam) and plover (jiriya) species, while ducks include the northern pintail, gadwall, ferruginous duck, mallard, common teal and ruddy shelduck. Besides migratory birds, local wild birds such as egrets, waterhens, doves and green pigeons are also hunted, according to BBC Bangla.

News reports show that many birds come in winter to the Hakaluki and Tanguar haor areas, Baikka Beel and Chalan Beel, and that most hunting also happens there, using poison. In villages, mynas, parrots and doves are poisoned because they eat paddy, among them many rare species.

Why do people kill birds? Amateurs go hunting in groups. Birds are killed for their distinctive meat; hotels buy them and sell them at a price, and many see hunting and eating bird meat as a status symbol. Sadly, although birds are released and offenders are sometimes punished, bird experts say the crimes that appear in official records are less than a tenth of those actually committed.

We constantly see stories of cruelty to stray dogs and cats: beating them to death, pouring hot water on them, poisoning them, tying their legs and hanging them, gouging out their eyes. Over the past few days, four cats have been rescued from Dhanmondi Lake and nearby areas in the capital, and not one of them has eyes.

Those who rescued and are caring for the animals do not believe this was an accident. Some animal lovers are looking after them, but the cats that roamed the streets have been blinded for ever. We do not know what harm they did to anyone. Whoever is committing this terrible crime must be found.

According to Professor Ahmed Helal, a mental health expert at Faridpur Medical College, people may do such things because of personality disorder or conduct disorder. "Psychopath is a common term. In mental health we don't use that word; we use these two terms. If adolescents have conduct disorder, they are cruel to animals and hurt them. Hurting them may give them a kind of gratification." When pictures of the eyeless cats spread on social media, many people expressed anger and disgust and demanded punishment.

In a village in Bogura, a woman slit the throat of a cat for the "crime" of eating fish. She admitted the killing in her own words, saying she killed the cat because it ate cooked fish, and her confession went viral. The Bangladesh Animal Welfare Association has filed a written complaint against her at the police station.

The practice of beating or slaughtering to death in a society is very bad. Those who today beat a dog to death for doing harm may tomorrow beat or strangle a person who does them harm. "Beating to death" is a terrible tendency, and it is growing in our society by the day.

I have written before that human violence towards people begins with violence towards animals. The FBI in the United States once said in a report that most serial killers in that country had a background of animal abuse. If someone has a tendency to torture animals from childhood and no one warns the child about it, they grow up to treat people inhumanely too. Research into the psychology of criminals in Bangladesh would produce similar findings.

I am not talking about poachers, because they kill animals for business and are known criminals. But the young people who killed the animals sheltering on a hilltop, those who ate the deer that took shelter in a house during a flood, those who killed a mother civet, those who break dogs' legs, hang cats by rope, gouge out cats' eyes, or poison fish, monkeys and birds: all of them are killers. Today they kill animals; tomorrow they will kill people, and they do.

Even in this utterly loveless environment we see the friendship between mechanic Sattar and a mongoose. For three years Abdul Sattar has raised the mongoose with love, like his own child. Despite hardship in his own household, he feeds it fish, meat, bread and bananas. The mongoose roams freely, keeps all the shops in the market free of rats and keeps people safe from the fear of snakes. The hostility nature shows us today is the result of human misdeeds. I try to believe that whoever loves living beings serves God.

The writer is a communication specialist and columnist. The column is dated 19 November 2025.

Source: Jagonews24. First published in Bengali on The Agro News.