Iraq, Eritrea, Ukraine, Afghanistan, Sudan, Palestine, Libya, Syria, Congo all these are occupied territories in miniature compared to the global occupation by humans. The occupation of the nonhuman animals’ homes by humans.

The foundation of many nations is bound with a massacre of another one. But the foundation of every nation is bound with a massacre of nonhuman animals. Unfortunately but not surprisingly, the nonhuman animals massacre is never mentioned.

There is no such thing as "no man’s land". Even that term is outstandingly speciesist. Animals live everywhere. For them the whole world is an occupied territory.

Occupation Begins At Home

The review of the global occupation should symbolically start at home, with humans building their homes on nonhumans’ ones.
Humans occupy any possible area without even realizing that their uncontrolled spreading destroys nonhumans’ habitats. As far as they go, everything is theirs.

According to the National Association of Home Builders, today’s average home size in the United States is more than 2,400 square feet, up from 1,400 square feet in 1970.
Humans are so indifferent and so speciesist, they are not even aware of the fact that four or five of them live in a space that once inhabited hundreds of creatures that were hurt in one way or another in order to provide them their huge and comfortable house. They have their own parking space, warehouse, backyard, front yard and all that without even a second of thought of all the animals that were hurt.

Humans don’t even try to manage in as small as possible area, in order not to cause so much suffering.

Ocean Occupation

The ocean is the world’s waste dump. It is much cheaper for humans to dump their waste into the ocean. Nearly everything eventually ends up there.

Waste such as sewage sludge, mining tailings, fly ash from power stations, dredged spoils from harbors and estuaries, radioactive waste, dangerous man-made organic compounds used for pesticides, weapons and industrial uses, as well as packaged goods - makes its way to the oceans, at the rate of thousands of tons of waste each day.
For example, the search for petroleum through offshore gas and oil drilling, leaks extremely dangerous toxins into the ocean. Fertilizers and pesticides permeate into the ground after it rains and then stream into rivers and ultimately into the ocean. And of course waste from the most horrific exploitation systems on the planet which are factory farms, end up in the ocean as well.

The currents of the ocean create vortexes of garbage and vast "islands" made of debris, and they transport pollutants into the remotest corners of the world. No place in the ocean is immune to the destructiveness of humanity.

When these materials find their way into the ocean, marine organisms suffer toxic effects. Ocean dumping can destroy entire habitats and ecosystems when excess sediment builds up and toxins are released. Toxic chemicals, such as PCBs (polychlorinated biphenyl) and DDT, for instance, have turned up in the fatty tissues and blubber of seals in the Arctic and penguins in the Antarctic, thousands of kilometers from population centers. Such high levels of PCBs found in beluga whales blubber that under Canadian law they qualify as "toxic waste dumps”.

Climate Occupation

Human’s activity, primarily energy use, transportation and of course animal exploitation, release carbon dioxide and other air pollutants that are collected in the atmosphere like a thickening blanket, trapping the sun's heat and causing the planet to warm up. The climatic changes caused by the global warming effect, force animals out of their habitats. It causes droughts, fires and severe weather events. It changes the timing of life patterns such as annual migration dates and it causes glacier retreat due to the increase in the average temperature of the earth's atmosphere and oceans.

Animals and plants that are suited to cooler climates need to move polewards or uphill when the climate becomes even just a little bit warmer. Fish in the North Sea have already been observed moving northwards.
Sea level rise is likely to threaten prime feeding and breeding grounds for millions of birds throughout the world.
Due to glaciers shift and sea ice melting seals suffer from lack of ice which they need for resting, molting and pup rearing.
Florida alligators are sensitive to saltwater encroachment as sea level rises. As the salinity of the water they live in increases, they search farther inland for fresher water.
The golden toad was adapted to an environment that was almost always wet, but with growing periods of drought they became more susceptible to diseases and infections.
In Africa, elephants face changes in their natural habitat caused by global warming, including shrinking living space and more frequent and longer dry periods.
And these are only several anecdotes.

Obviously changing the climate can be a major interest of ours, but not as part of global occupation, rather as a way to end it.

Sky Occupation

Around 15,000 crashes of airplanes into birds occur in the world every year.
Humans violently invade the sky, and their solutions to the damage caused as a result of the crushes is using fireworks, cannons, guns and balloons, to scare away the birds.
Most of the strikes occur during daytime hours, between July and October. Canceling the daytime flights during these months is not an option of course, but leashed dogs in the airport next to the takeoff area in order to run off the birds, is an "excellent" solution. So is falcons that humans set to nest in airports. The ingenuity doesn’t stop there, as humans attach spikes on the airport signs, to make it harder for birds to flock.

Greater but much less known sky conquest, and one of the world's biggest bird killer, is glass.
Up to one billion birds die in glass collisions every year in the US alone, according to a 2014 study by federal scientists. Some birds are distracted by the buildings’ bright lights at night and others are confused by their clear, reflective glass during the day.

Birds don’t change their migratory paths just because humans build cities directly in migratory corridors, and the result is the greatest sky invasion. The corporate world wants the glass to look shiny and mirrored because that is a symbol of productivity and prosperity. Birds pay the price for this careless and violent aesthetics preference.

Coastline Occupation

Animals who are naturally bound to live near shores, are victims of humans occupation of coastlines. Extreme noises, strong lights and abundance of chemicals pollute the habitats of millions of animals who are compelled to adjust to an environment violently designed by humans.

Sea turtle eggs are laid in niches on the beach. When the sea turtles hatch, they are naturally drawn to the bright seaward horizon that guides them into the water. The sea horizon is brighter than the land horizon because the water reflects all heavenly light sources, such as the stars and moonlight.
However, artificial lights from the coastline, coming from marinas, hotels, restaurants, nearby apartments and from the street lights on walkways, confuse the hatchlings and they wander inland. Lost and disoriented, they soon die from dehydration, heat exhaustion or they are crushed by cars.

Urban Occupation

The occupation doesn’t end with humans clearing nonhumans’ habitats and building cities over them. Humans’ cities are sites of constant violence towards nonhumans. Besides the roads threat, the noise, night lights, and etc, many of the attacks are directly aimed at animals, under what is referred as "wildlife control" or "pest control".

Animals of species whose habitats’ humans have invaded and erected cities upon, are now considered as the intruders themselves.
Same goes for animals of species who have long ago adapted to live of the garbage humans produce (mice, rats, cockroaches, pigeons, gulls etc). Both endemic and nonnative animals are being hunted - poisoned, trapped in brutal devices, or gunned down.

Poisons are exceedingly cruel, causing internal bleeding, convulsions, gradual cardiac collapse, and a variety of other reactions resulting in immense suffering and slow, agonizing death, in many cases over the course of several days. Not only that the real invaders are poisoning those who are "in their way", many other animals are hurt by eating, smelling and drinking the poisons or eating the poisoned animals.

Animals caught in snares or spring traps struggle frantically to escape, often becoming dismembered or strangled in the process. Animals ensnared but non-fatally injured suffer immensely before death.
Glue traps target smaller animals and also cause slow agonizing death of suffocation and dehydration.

Animals struck by arrows or bullets rarely die instantly. Many escape with horrific wounds, only to die slowly and painfully of shock, blood loss, infection, attacks by predators, or exposure to harsh weather.
And in all these cases, often the hunted victims aren’t the only casualties as young and dependent family members are left to starve.

The city is a site of constant threats for nonhumans even when humans don’t set their minds on hunting them and just go about their destructive routine without a care about the "collateral damage".

Tree trimming is another urban example of human’s occupation, as they cut down trees every once in a while with no consideration to the trees inhabitants (birds mostly but also mice, worms, beetles, ants, squirrels and etc.).

For the sake of clean pavements, clean cars and of course clear view from their windows, humans cut down trees and branches, exposing birds nests to predators or in the worst case cut the branches with the nest, leaving the nestlings on the ground or throw them into a near trash can to slowly die. Baby rodents and birds are injured and orphaned by tree trimming and birds of passage lose their winter temporary residence in warm places.

Forest Occupation

Nearly 10 billion acres of forest cover the earth's surface, almost a third of the earth's land surface excluding Antarctica and Greenland. The world's forests have shrunk by some 40% since agriculture began 11,000 years ago. Three quarters of this loss occurred in the last two centuries as land was cleared to make way for animal exploitation, crop farming and to meet demand for wood.

Most forests are no longer in their original condition, having changed in composition and quality. Primary forests with no signs of human activity are destroyed at a rate of 15 million acres a year.

Every year about 32 million acres of forest are deforested, bulldozed, shriveled up in widely spread fires, or washed away in eroded soil. That’s 2.47 acres of forests (2 football fields), every single second.

Obviously the world’s forests are an arena of a lot of violence between animals, but humans are not destroying them to reduce suffering but to increase their personal welfare.

Roads

One of the most definite symbols of humans’ alienation and domination, is the everyday use of their favorite assassin tool - their car.

Animals do not see the highway as off-limit. They are sometimes even attracted to the asphalt because it is warm, or to scavenge the decaying flesh of others who were flattened and splattered by some vehicle. Roads are simply cleared areas of their living space. When driving a car, humans are actually driving through the habitat of other beings.

Driving a car is like entering a crowded forest and shooting a gun. At some point you are bound to hit someone. When humans kill nonhuman animals while driving they call it an accident. If someone fired a gun in the woods, say, while target shooting, and some animal was shot and killed, he would call that an accident too. But knowing that someone could have been shot by the target practice makes that act irresponsible and violent. Humans certainly would not practice shooting in an area where children are playing, and if they do and they killed someone, they would be charged with manslaughter. The fact that it was an accident when a child was shot does not exempt them from the responsibility for killing him. The same thing goes for driving a car through other creatures’ back yards. Some will die because of that, and humans know that. To continue to drive despite this fact is an act of aggression against animals.

Millions upon millions of animals are run over on highways every year. Humans kill more wild animals with their cars than with guns while hunting.

However, the damage that highways inflict on animals is not limited to direct hits. It starts with the destruction and fragmentation of habitats, chemical and physical alteration of the surrounding environment and continues with the construction of the road itself, which causes loud noise, strong lights at night, pollution and stress.

The transportation system is enough of an inherent feature of our society to condemn our system as irrevocably abusive to nonhumans.

Once roads are constructed, it usually leads to building projects, whether they are new condominiums built on what had been an "undeveloped" hillside, or a huge shopping center constructed on what had been a "vacant lot" consisting of trees.

The habitat fragmentation confines wild populations to areas too small for their needs or forces animals to attempt road crossings to locate food, nesting sites, and mates. Due to the habitat fragmentation, species are forced to invade other species habitats, competing with them on the same resources.

Energy

Oil is considered to be the real reason behind many occupations of "human" territories, but it’s never considered that it’s always a reason for nonhuman territories occupation.

Most people are now aware of the environmental impact of oil drilling mentioned earlier. Their highest concern, however, is usually directed at the economic impact of oil spills - will it damage commercial fish hatcheries, or wash up on beaches located in resort areas? Even when wild charismatic animals are covered in oil, their suffering hardly affects policy making. Seldom is it considered that the homes of animals are being polluted, regardless of the economic significance of those homes to humans.

Each year there are dozens of oil spills. Millions of animals get covered with the sticky, smelly substance clumping their scales, feathers and fur, stinging their eyes, and clogging their nostrils and mouth.

Oil is not the only energy source humans use. Nuclear reactors, which release low levels of radiation into the environment, damage local wildlife. The water used to cool nuclear generators is heated and then returned to its source, usually a river, raising the temperature of the surrounding ecosystem. When the ecosystem changes, animals who were dependent on the old conditions are hurt. Studies point out that populations living near nuclear reactors, are coming down with higher levels of leukemia and other cancer types. We can only imagine what happens to the millions of animals who don’t have the choice of living elsewhere?

Nuclear reactors are not alone in being hazardous to nonhumans. Hydroelectric plants employ dams which alter the entire ecosystem of huge expanses of land. Deserts become lakes and rivers downstream dry up to a trickle, without a care for all the beings that rely on their water.

No discussion of the damage to nonhuman animals by the energy production system would be complete without mentioning acid rain as a result of burning of coal. Ecosystems from forests to lakes, rivers and oceans are severely affected by the acidity, an untold number of individuals who inhabit those areas pay the price.

Even the seemingly harmless wind turbines include stages such as construction, transportation, routine operation and general maintenance.

All over the world bats and birds collide with the turbines’ long, spinning blades, which in many times were built in their migration route.
According to a 2012 study published in the Wildlife Society Bulletin, each year in the US alone 573,000 birds and 888,000 bats are killed by wind turbines. In comparison, between 2010 and 2015, the US wind turbines killed more than 3 times the number of birds that the 2010 BP oil spill did.

Solar energy (projected to grow from 2014’s 1% of electricity supply to 27% in 2050 according to the IEA) requires vast land and thus causes habitat loss. Photovoltaic panels manufacture, like any other electronic industry, requires hazardous materials, among them hydrochloric acid, sulfuric acid, nitric acid, hydrogen fluoride and acetone, gallium arsenide, copper-indium-gallium-diselenide, and cadmium-telluride. This industry creates millions of solar panels each year and in the process millions of pounds of polluted sludge and contaminated water, which are transported by truck or rail for hundreds or thousands of miles to "waste facilities".
Another type of solar energy is Concentrated Solar Power, which works by using mirrors to focus sunlight onto receivers, boiling a liquid that turns turbines to create electricity. Ivanpah, the largest project so far, has 350,000 mirrors spanning across an area 4 times the size of Central Park. According to a study supervised by the California Division of Wildlife, each year 3,500 birds are burned alive while flying through the area.

The world’s communities are not self-sufficient. Transportation is the life blood of the world economy. So even strict vegans, as long as they are part of this "driving society", as long as they live in houses, use electricity and any other civilization element, they’ll be responsible for occupation and suffering. It is inevitable. The vegan diet itself is part of human global occupation.

And it is not just about food. It’s not even just about consumption. Vegans are unwillingly paying for animal researchn, financing the military, the predator control programs, the logging industry, agriculture subsidies, the maintenance of public lands used by hunters, the building and maintenance of highways, financing oil drillings, financing electricity based on coal burning and many more animal abuses that are funded by taxes. Causing suffering is inevitable, even for animal liberation activists.

Becoming a vegan is by no doubt the primal step for suffering reducing, but even a vegan world won’t be enough. And unfortunately there will never be a vegan world.

Don’t get us wrong we are not saying you should isolate yourselves from society. It is not the most efficient thing to do. It will hurt your activism. We are into suffering elimination, not purism. Our point is that you can’t avoid your personal suffering causing and it shouldn’t be your goal anyway. You should do what ever you can to find a way to stop the suffering everyone is causing.