"The Thirteenth Amendment, which abolished slavery, took decades of movement activity to push the nation to a crisis point. The Nineteenth Amendment, which extended the vote to American women, was also first a sixty-year state-by-state battle. Both of these amendments passed when society had shifted to the point at which it was psychologically untenable for a plurality or majority of Americans to resist the concepts that drove the law."
Naomi Wolf Give Me Liberty: A Handbook for American Revolutionaries

We must make it psychologically untenable for people to continue to view animals as resources for our entertainment, consumption (literally), and management. Yesterday I was interviewed by a journalist with The Christian Science Monitor regarding alligator hunts in South Carolina (1,000 new permits have been issued), and what I hope I got across more than anything, wasn't how cruel or unsportsmanlike hunting is, but the premise that the alligators aren't ours to manage.

In addition, the fact that most alligator "attacks" occur due to the ignorance of people, not the viciousness of alligators, and then we punish the gators for our ignorance, is injustice at its peak. But it's also laziness (and greed for the permit money). If our children were required to have humane education (not to mention financial literacy--another area I'm passionate about), human-alligator interactions would decrease, and there would be less of the hysteria which fuels the calls to "destroy" them. And if children were taught that alligators are as sentient as their Golden Retrievers, and were taught that creatures who look very different and not cuddly aren't bad, we could dramatically change the dynamic between alligators and humans.