#10 - A Social Debt
We owe a great debt in our society, and we are doing a very bad job of paying up. The debt, incurred over a period of centuries, is owed the many creatures with whom we share this world. They are the animals who, because we dominate them all, have found themselves living in our midst and in our service for most or all of their lives. They are household pets and they are beasts of burden; they are horses and guard dogs; they are carrier pigeons and cattle, poultry, mink ranched for their furs, laboratory mice and the cats on our laps. Not only must these creatures exist solely on our terms, they commonly die on our terms too. Coexisting with man is not always a happy situation. We have been calling all the shots since time immemorial. And it's not a fair deal.
Why must a hog, bred and raised to feed our smiling faces at a holiday feast, wade her lifetime through mud and garbage and sleep in a swirl of flies? Why must a pony, bred and raised for the amusement of children, languish alone for years in a damp, dark stall in a dilapidated barn? Why must an 800 lb cow, destined for slaughter, be hoisted over the side of a cargo ship by her horns? Why do any of these things have to happen? They don't! I challenge anyone to spend just one winter's night chained to a 55 gallon steel drum, like so many dogs I have seen, and come out smiling the next morning.
This is not to say that there are no healthy and content of domestic animals around. There are, but there are as well terrible lives being lived all over our countryside by countless poor creatures whose only shortcoming is having been born in the wrong company at the wrong time. Their plight of suffering and disease is undeniably the result of people's ignorance or cruelty and, in some ways the most shocking, total lack of concern for what these animals of ours are going through right before our very eyes, or possibly just down the street.
This lack of conscious is what I mean to address. We do, as a society, owe a great debt to our fellow creatures who, willing or not, must live out their lives all to our benefit. Their wants and needs on this earth are simple: food, water, comfortable shelter and a pat on the head every day. We are their stewards and most crave our caring companionship. Very simple, yet many get little or none of these things, and the final insult is to deprive them of a compassionate, quick and painless death. It is easily within our means to do the right thing.
Altogether too many people read or watch (on TV) such a message is this, pause for a moment of shocked sympathy, and then they carry on as before, conveniently forgetting their debt and leaving all this unpleasantness to the "animal nuts." That is wrong, irresponsible, weak behavior. We are directly responsible for all the animal lives we have control over. Their need is dire, very real, and it is now.
It is an easy thing to sit down and write a check payable to your local Humane Society in any amount (preferably a minimum of five or ten dollars ). They know best how to spend it.