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.