Planet Debate 2011 September/October l-d release Animal Rights
Cruelty Towards and the Infliction of Suffering Upon Animals Must be Rejected
Download 1.43 Mb.
|
Cruelty Towards and the Infliction of Suffering Upon Animals Must be RejectedMUST ADDRESS AND REDUCE HUMAN CRUELTY TO OTHER SPECIES (we do not endorse the gendered language in this card) Jon Wynne-Tyson, 1975, Food for a Future: the ecological priority of a humane diet, p. 138-41 Cruelty is the worst sin of all. It might almost be called the only one. A form of obsession with self and excluding consideration of others, cruelty has to go before any other reform of ourselves or our environment begins to be possible. The cruelty inherent in our exploitation of the animal world is so undoubted that anyone who has read this far and now finds himself in disagreement with such a statement will have wasted his time, for he will be so far from knowing that I am talking about that he will never have suffered a moment’s pang about anything at all that is going on in the world outside his own immediate circle. I believe and hope that there are few intelligent people who have declined to such a low of ignorance and self-obsession, though we have to face that very many of us have allowed the scum of daily pollution so to cloud our consciences that the truth and importance of what really matters – of what it is really all about – have been lost to sight. There are, as we all know, no reasons for indulging in cruelty. The arguments for a humane treatment of other creatures cannot be refuted except by a nihilist. Such arguments are answered not by reasons, but by excuses. When such excuses are accompanied by deference to the theory rather than the practice of idealism, the result is that most human of human failings, hypocrisy. Excuses provide the easy way out, the path of least effort and continued self-indulgence. The educated and intelligent person who pays lip service to morality, and has at least intelligently faced the inexcusable nature of flesh-eating, is more difficult to excuse than the unthinking, who have thought about little, and see no alternative. Most of us prefer to fall back on the childish defense of “But I want to” rather than accept the necessity for self-reform. Dispensing our compassion with absurd selectivity – shedding crocodile tears over the bull-fight or the mauled bird brought in by the cat, while in the next breath crooning over the tenderized flesh of the castrated steer or the caponized fowl – few of us have progressed further than the picture-book clichés of our childhood. We want the grass to be green, the sky to be blue, and no splashes of red except on the poppies and the instantly recognized “baddies.” It may be possible to understand and to feel some pity for the weakness and gullibility of our species, but when we look at what our failings have made of the world, and the hell that we have created for its more defenseless inhabitants, it is surely incumbent on everyone who can see the total picture to put that understanding at the disposal of those weaker creatures who need it most. Before it is too late we must become aware that this earth we live on is not anthropocentric. Only man is man-centered. Ecologically speaking, we are totally dispensable. The biosphere is in no way dependent on man and would in fact be much better off without him. The environmentalists who have suggested that man is like a fatal disease that the earth has been unfortunate enough to contract are not indulging in absurd exaggeration. We have the power of choice. We can help what we do. Animals cannot. It is up to us to realize the necessity to ourselves and to our environment to become an influence for good rather than for evil – to learn to live symbiotically instead of like parasites and rogue predators who kill without need or even hatred. The fox, some may protest, kills in excess of need, and therefore animals are no better than man. But if man chooses to upset the local ecology by his own predatoriness, and then creates an artificial situation in which a quantity of poultry are held captive in a small area, he cannot complain when a fox starts to behave like a man. We cannot justify our own actions by citing those of a fox or any other animal when man behaves far worse by breeding and slaughtering thousands of pheasants, grouse, cattle sheep, pigs and other victims of his “sport” and stomach. In a way this all boils down to the only viable kind of morality being little more than a sense of balance. In my last book I suggested that only by a change of values, not by a change of political administrators from the same stable as their predecessors, can people learn to behave more like humane beings. Unregenerate people can only create an unregenerate organization and an unregenerate society. Only better people can create a better society. They do not even have to create it – it is already there by the very act of self improvement. By “better people” I was meaning, above all, more compassionate people: people who have seen the paramount necessity to eradicate their cruelties. For cruelty is humanity’s worse form of unbalance. There is no parallel in nature to mankind’s cruelty. It is a unique vice, peculiar to man, and the cause of the major ills of our society. Oddly enough, despite the state of the world by which so many of us are now downright scared, there are still plenty of people who breathe brimstone at the very suggestion that people should become better. They get, it seems, an instant vision of mere goody-goodiness, or interfering busy-bodying and probably a reduction of their sex life. Let them be assured that although all sorts of baddy-baddiness may well get tidied up in the course of educating ourselves into a more balanced concept of life and our responsibilities, it is above all cruelty in its many forms that is the evil we must concentrate on eradicating. There is no more constant and widespread example of this evil than in our daily treatment of other species. The eradication of cruelty is an educational problem, little more. But two great hurdles stand in the way. The first of these is man’s fierce resistance to change – personal change, that it, or habits and heart. We all know that one of the major irritants within a consumer society is change for the sake of change, but this relates only to such idiocies as planned obsolescence and other short cuts to high profits and low standards. The kind of change that can come about through increasing knowledge leading to a revision of habits established in times of greater ignorance is a rarer but much more important phenomenon. Directory: file -> view view -> Western Europe after wwii view -> Author study: paul fleischman view -> Qpa1 7ela study Guide view -> Arctic Oil/Gas Neg view -> November 1970 Approximately 150,000-500,000 deaths Bhola Cyclone Bangladesh view -> Grade Level: 6 Unit of Study: Caribbean glce view -> Citation: Duffield, Katy view -> Table of Contents Lesson # view -> Chinese Wind Energy Disad Download 1.43 Mb. Share with your friends:
|