The land my brother and I share is part of a suburban neighborhood lying smack in the middle of a major metropolitan area of Southeastern Virginia. It has been farmed and worked by European settlers since the first decades of the 17th century, and by various native american Indian tribes for scores of centuries before that. In the middle of Virginia Beach, we have foxes, raccoons, deer, woodchucks, possums, red-tailed hawks, herons, egrets, Canada geese, and temporary populations of many migratory birds.

When I lived in the South Bay area (Silicon Valley, CA) you could see similar critturs in the ditches and marshes ten feet from the 8-lane Nimitz Highway, and coyotes and mountain lions lived on the slopes of the hills running north-south to both the east and west of the San Francisco Bay. When I lived outside of Sacramento, a little west of Folsom, we had a nightly chorus of coyotes hunting around the surrounding hills and ranches, and one day we had a black bear loping through the meadow down by the lake below our house.

All those critters managed to sort things out and survive without any assistance from Peta or the people from EarthFirst!