Buzz of indifference .
I’ve come indoors to write now, I was out in the garden but there was a pigeon with mental health issues annoying me, every time I ‘shooed’ it away it just stared at me as if it was on some high end hallucinant. So I thought let him/her/it win, I need to write. Now I’m sat at the kitchen table… there is a big fat fly somewhere, you know the type , you can hear them buzzing around but hardly ever see them, until they get tired or kill themselves by banging their heads on a closed window, but the buzz… so annoying. So already today I’ve been terrorised by a pigeon and now a fly, the usual human response would be to kill ‘em, but I’m not one of those humans, I’ll wait till the fly tires look for it, put a glass over it, slide a piece of paper onder the glass and put the fly outside (hopefully the pigeon doesn’t eat it, do they eat insects? Or are they just left over feeders?) Anyway let’s write…
First let me reassure you, the fly was found, arrested and put across the border between kitchen and garden, it flew away, I wonder if it appreciates what I done for it?
It all got me thinking, why do we humans think we have the right to decide what lives and what dies on this planet? What species we make extinct, what animals we kill for fun, what animals we mutate to become just living breathing meat factory products? Why do we give ourselves that right?
Why do we sign petitions to stop bull fighting (rightly so) but not care how the meat on our BBQ became the meat on our BBQ? Is a bull fight more gruesome than the slaughterhouse cow? Sometimes not even dead when the belly gets sliced open. Where and how do we draw those lines of hypocrisy?
Cats and dogs are pretty safe, they make great instagram hits and will sometimes let themselves be made to look like idiots by the human influencer who makes it wear sunglasses/funny hat/clothes or whatever will get the photo higher instagram rankings. They are also good companions so if you harm ‘animal’ lovers or should I say ‘certain animal but not all animal lovers’ will Lynch you. Horses are pretty safe in most countries as are Mules, Donkeys and certain exotic animal types. We love animals… except the ones we love to hunt, eat or put in a cage. The ones we like to hunt vary from country to country, by the way if you like to hunt, not for survival but just for the fun of it, you should seek help. The ones we like to eat are in the survival game (very ironically) lowest on the ‘food chain’. Chickens, pigs, goats, sheep, fish, cows, etc etc etc nobody ‘loves’ them unless they are on the BBQ in the bun or on a plate with fries and sauce. They can force bred, force fed and slaughtered in ways that would make Hannibal Lector throw up, nobody cares. Now I’m not saying we shouldn’t eat meat, all I’m saying is why can’t we treat all life on this planet with some respect?
What would happen if we gave every last animal a ‘cute’ name? Put the name on the package when it gets slaughtered and put on the supermarket shelf. “Today children we’ll be eating Betty the cow, Betty was enjoying her life in the field before they took her to a slaughterhouse to be cut open while half awake, you should have seen the terror in her eyes (what a Diva!) So anyway now she’s here (well parts of her anyway) on your plates waiting to be eaten, enjoy”. “Tomorrow Toby the pig will be here they are slicing him open as we speak, isn’t it great?” Teach your children where meat comes from, and how it gets to be on your plate, by all means eat your meat but remember where it came from, after all some animal gave its life for your dinner.
