What a Sea Lion Has to Say

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Plastic, What Has it Done?

I was born here, raised by mother who taught me to hunt and survive. My main source of food is fish, I spend a good portion of time off the coasts of California and Oregon. I do travel occasionally to other parts of the ocean. I am a sea lion, and since I was a pup, I have run into more and more of these pale colored floaty things. They don't taste good, I can't really chew them up, but I also see other marine life consuming them. I have also seen other marine life get trapped in these pale floaties, sometimes it makes it easier to catch them and eat but I eat the fish with the pale floaty. It makes my body feel sick, but then again, nowadays my body always fills ill and I am not sure why. Other times, I see it is one of my kind (another sea lion), entangled and dragging around a pale floaty, it never leaving the body. Nobody helps my entangled family member, nobody. I see humans watching us on the docks, pointing fingers sometimes, not sure why they do that. I do notice, their attention often gathers and direct towards a sea lion who's entangled or hurt, but again, nobody helps that sea lion. We are all on our own here, we either survive trying to avoid these pale floaties or we die from them. It gets harder every year, even when we manage to avoid them we are still consuming them through our food chain. I really just want a life that the elders use to tell back from the old days, days where plastic was not to be worried about, where we could hunt fish and penguins with no worries they had pale floaties in them or stuck to them, where we could travel without have to dodge these pale floaties, where humans did not see us as entertainment but more as something majestic and symbolic of the ocean. I want those days back... but will I ever see it or my children? Perhaps my children's children? I hope so.

End of Sea Lions Tale...


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