Have you heard of the herd of deer that walked into a store in Illinois and checked the inventory out a few days ago? The curious bear in New Jersey that camped out on a family’s front porch, peaking into the house to see what’s going on? The duck mama and her ducklings who these days hang out in a posh Budapest swimming pool? Saw the video of the elephant jogging on the empty North Indian highway? 

Well, my sister who lives in Warsaw, Poland with her family had a moose strolling in their neighborhood. 

A moose, people, a moose! One of the least social animals that there is.

So as it happens, the Lady Moose just stood there on the street, pondering “what the heck has happened here? What is this strange silence?” Then when nobody seemed to bother her, she decided to take a walk and like a caring mother check on the two-legged, noisy creatures that usually cause so much trouble. But apart from my sister’s two unthreatening-looking kids giggling behind their window, she could not spot any other humans. They were all in hiding.

These days, by a reversal of fortune, we are the ones that are locked in like zoo animals, while they are the ones that can roam free. 

Duck mama gives a swimming lesson to her ducklings in a swimming pool in Budapest, Hungary. Deer visit a grocery store in Illinois, USA. (Source: Facebook)

Good for them. They have deserved some break after all the millennia of mistreatment and abuse they had to suffer by our hands. 

While most people can’t wait to break out of their cages and get back to normal after the miserable confinement we all are in nowadays — well, I personally don’t share this sentiment. 

Because our ‘normal’ is completely abnormal. 

It is not normal, and did not do us any good to think we are the “be all and end all” of the creation, and everything exists for us, for our enjoyment only. It is high time to notice that this kind of anthropocentric mentality keeps biting us back on the rear end.

Wild pigs in Haifa, Israel.

The grim reality is that if we eat an undercooked bat, we could wipe half the human population out.

If we keep destroying our rainforests so that we could enjoy our steak we’ll have no oxygen left.

And if we use our fields for our factory farming to massacre millions upon millions of innocent animals we’ll have no agricultural land to grow enough food on left.

If we carry on like this, ultimately, we will have no empathy and humanity left. 

The basis of society should be the dignity of ALL life. Bats, cows, rainforests, lands, rivers and mountains alike. 

Wild goats taking a stroll in an empty Welsh town.

When I think about the immense impact of the coronavirus on our lives, I keep picturing Mother Earth musing to herself: “Well, my children, I have recently warned you through a little Sweedish angel, but you chose not to listen. What choice did I have? I had to give you a major time out, otherwise you would have never given up your little scheme to destroy yourselves, and around you everything else.”

And now there are moose walking around in our neighborhoods, dolphins frolicking in Venice’s pristine Grand Canal, and for the first time in decades the air so clean in Delhi that one can see the Himalayas. 

That’s our new normal.

When our lockdown is over, could we keep some of this please?  

Moose in Warsaw during lockdown.