Momentous

1209: 

For me, there’s nothing more momentous than barracking for an animal’s right to a life when it’s been enslaved.  A colder, more heartless thing one can’t imagine, than taking any sort of animal and caging it for life.  It would be kinder to cut its throat.  In the human world we only do that to the very worst criminals.  Nothing can justify doing harm to an animal, let alone torturing it for its whole life by robbing it of its freedom.  And yet we do.  And what’s worse, we think nothing of it.  That puts a rather nasty spin on human nature.  That says a lot about the quality of our relationship with the world we live in.

It all boils down to self-interest.  Humans think first of themselves,  as if nothing is as important as human benefit even when it involves the very worst cruelty.  Most humans don’t give much thought to anything unless it concerns ‘my own life’.  To them, liberating animals doesn’t even enter the equation, since the animal trade is so entrenched in our culture.

At first glance, ‘animal activism’ looks like an absurdity; the habit of caging animals - why would we try to interfere with that?  But some of us, unphased by our appearance, still want to interfere, to bring all the horror of it to light, to show the ugliness of it.  We want to set off a new way of thinking.  The way we see animals, as if they are play things for humans or as machines for producing food and clothing for us, suggests that the human needs to aspire to a much higher plane of consciousness.

         

What is the purpose of human life if not for us to connect with other people and the world around us, to discover and be proud of a much truer manifestation of human nature?

The school teacher, inspired by this need to ‘connect’, takes her students to the zoo, but by taking them she implies approval of that particular institution.  How then does she react when the children kick up a fuss about the caging of animals?  What can she say?  Behind her stands an institution which promotes itself as the ‘good guy’, as a conservation centre for endangered species.  She explains that to her students, the means justifying the end.

So, when they ask questions about the quality of life for the individual animal who is forced to live in this imprisoned state, what can she say?  She may talk of ‘the need for individuals to suffer for the sake of the long term survival of their species’.  But that wouldn’t make sense in the case of almost every exhibited animal in the zoo, which is NOT a member of an ‘endangered species’.  It’s more likely that she hasn’t seen anything more than a need for her students to ‘connect’ with animals. 

A hunter, who professes his love of nature, explains that his way of connecting with the animals is to kill them, not for food but for sport.  His ‘love’ is a smoke-screen behind which he can continue to have his fun.  And of course that’s not much of a justification at all.  It wears thin for many ex-hunters who now do their shooting only with a camera; their need to connect and their love of nature now finds a more positive outlet.

But back to the teacher and her group visiting the zoo - would ‘people wanting to connect’ be the primary reason people go to where animals can be found, either in the wild or in captivity?  Is that why people go to the zoo?  Do we feel ‘bigger’ when we hunt and kill and hang the wild lion’s head on a trophy wall? Maybe we don’t visit the zoo to revel in the animals’ discomfort, but at the same time we don’t go there to empathise with them either.  We don’t see the captive lion and wonder how the lion feels, instead we say “who cares what the lion feels?”

How can we do something which hasn’t been thought through empathetically?  In today’s supposedly consciousness-raised atmosphere, why is an animal’s perspective not relevant or important?  If we can accept that zoo-prisons are okay places to visit, isn’t that rather worrying?  Isn’t that a very one-sided and unconvincing form of connectiveness?