Love And Birds

Human Ethics and the Insensibility of Other Animal 


When the guns stop their shouting, birds hasten to sing. In the midst of desolation and the horrors left by human wars, birds sing perched on the boots of the dead soldiers, inattentive to death. It’s a well known scene for those who have experienced war.

This indifference of birds sounds strange. It shocks us, hurts us. And may lead us to think: «How far and above other species we are. Only we are able to truly feel and have conscience. Only we are capable of thinking and loving in superior terms».

Well, maybe. But we can’t help being as the birds, insensible to the sight of a thousand and one massacres – at the human level, and outside it. Absorbed and used to the cruelty of life as we are, we don’t see how indifferently we behave towards the poor and the unfortunate of our species, and how cruel we behave towards other species.

Positively, we don’t think of the millions of animals we daily slaughter in our shambles, or of the many billions we keep confined in cruel conditions, before killing them.

In this view, it’s entirely out of place to become astonished with the insensibility of the birds that sing in the branches of trees next to the human corpses left by our own wars.