LikeLike

I am so fed up with people who say that “it’s only a dog,” so let’s not punish people for animal cruelty. Here’s the reality: torturing a living thing is SADISM, whether the target is a dog, a chicken, a horse, a rat, even a cockroach. There is something profoundly wrong with anyone who takes enjoyment in inflicting physical suffering. Period. Normal people DO NOT think or behave this way.

Animal cruelty needs to be taken seriously, even if you don’t care about animals. The well-attested reality is that people who can torture animals will do the same to humans, if they feel they can get away with it. When a man is torturing a dog, for instance, he’s often fantasizing torturing a woman. We all remember what J. Dahmer did the neighborhood cats in his childhood. Animal cruelty is the “gateway drug” of serial killers, rapists and spousal abusers.

Also, of course it’s absolutely a false dilemma to claim that you can only care about animals OR humans. Many people don’t realize it, but the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to children began as a branch of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to ANIMALS. The first successful criminal prosecution of child-cruelty was conducted under laws which began in an attempt to prevent cruelty to carriage horses. Awareness begets awareness; compassion begets compassion.

Gandhi said that the measure of a society is how we treat our animals. Would Mr. McCartney like to make the argument that he was a cold-hearted animal-lover who didn’t care anything for humans?

One last thing, which is that I just can’t stand when people pull the “when I became a parent…” line. This is so unintentionally revealing: if having a baby makes you have LESS compassion for the helpless living things around you, you only had a very limited amount to spread around in the first place.

In most people, compassion is NOT a limited resource; it actually grows with the increasing number of people, animals, and things you care about. That’s why people can have more than one child without loving the older ones any less. Simple stuff, you’d think.

LikeLiked by 1 person

LikeLike