Love and Cruelty Concerning Animals
Conscience and
Indifference
Man is capable of the worst and of the best. We are
easily capable of loving and of hating, of being
clear-sighted and blind. And our relationship with the
remaining animal world is a big illustration of that
very fact.
We are able to love animals profoundly. The attachment
of children and the elderly to their dogs, cats and
birds are a known illustration.
How would our world be without animals? How would our
country-sides and woods be without birds? What would be
of our world without forests and their inhabitants? The
silence and the emptiness would smash us.
And yet we have always been hunters, we have always
killed animals and destroyed woods and forests – to eat,
to survive, but sometimes also cruelly, also
unnecessarily or excessively.
And today, worsening past violence, we imprison animals
in narrow poultry-yards and cowsheds, stealing their
freedom, treating them as machines, slaughtering them in
the millions on the automated lines of slaughter-houses,
or subjecting them to the worst sufferings in our
laboratories and our scientific experiments.
We are very far from some Asiatic traditions concerning
the rights of animals:
All breathing, existing, living, sentient creatures should
not be slain, nor treated with violence, nor abused, nor
tormented, nor driven away. This is a pure, unchangeable,
eternal law.
Jaina Sutras, Acaranba Sutra, traditional religious Indian
texts
And at another level, blindly, turning nature against us, we
are poisoning the earth and the sea with the chemicals of
our industries, destroying forests and their milliards and
milliards of species (maybe millions, if we count the
insects and micro-organisms). Blindly, often in the name of
progress, we kill and destroy.
Love and cruelty, conscience and indifference, are part of
us. They are both in us, contradictorily. And that justifies
a little mediation on the arguments of the animal rights
defenders. You can find relevant texts at:
Books, Films,
Cultural Stuff on animal
rights, war, dark side of men, genocides and so on? See
Love Essays Store
(in association with Amazon)
See more at:
http://www.animal-rights-library.com
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