Critter Corral Comments

While envisioning my upcoming Critter Corral themed room, I remembered a 4″ x 6″ box filled with animal quotes, stats and data from my API (Animal Protection Institute) days and retrieved it…

 

Taped to the top lid underneath was, hands down, my favorite animal quote of all time (and I have literally hundreds of animal quotes that I love).

 

I typed it out again in large font and put it into a frame for the room.

 

Here is what it says:

 

 

That pretty much nails it for me. My earliest memories are of the animals who populated my life. (English teachers and editors will silently “correct” the foregoing sentence to read “that populated my life,” but to me, every animal is a “who”, not a “that.”)

 

Humans have tried hard for centuries, millennia,  to isolate ourselves from the notion that we’re animals, too, so we’ve put up artificial ways of separating humankind from animalkind.  (Even my spell and grammar check software screams foul when I try to legitimize my stance on this. It allows “humankind” as one word without question but kicks up a fuss with the word “animalkind.”)

 

It was just a couple centuries or so ago that humans decided we should be allowed to  explore anatomy and that it was okay to vivisect animals for experimental or investigation purposes but not humans. Before this time, several popes in the Catholic church proclaimed that animals had souls, just like people, and that they were destined for the same heaven humans were.

 

But then religion (does this sound familiar?) got into bed with scientists and other powerful men and decided that animals were without souls and therefore okay to vivisect while still alive and dissect when dead. If you’ve ever read the poem “Rags”  by Edmund Vance Cooke, you know where I stand on the vivisection of animals: horrors! If I linger on the thought for very long, I’ll have nightmares. (Hell, if I linger on intensive animal farming or the slaughter of a single creature in inhumane, painful, alarming ways to the animal, I’ll have nightmares!)

 

Humans have a diseased way of rationalizing what we do to animals and their habitats. My Critter Corral is my way of showing where I stand.

 

I’m not a vegetarian, and I should be. As much as I value animals, I ought to view eating them the way I’d view the necessary eating of a human corpse because of dire deprivation and isolation a la the Donner Party or the athletes who survived in the Andes by eating the flesh of their dead, already frozen teammates.

 

I view environmental destruction as a form of murder. Whenever we take away the livelihood and/or shelter of fellow creatures, we’re exhibiting species-ism–the belief that human wants and desires matter more than other creatures’ existence.

 

The Bible (which is not the inerrant word of God, since the biblical God is a construct of superstitious, unscientific Middle Easterners) states that man has dominion over the animals. Dominion is not the same as domination.

 

Dominion implies stewardship. Domination implies forced control over.

 

The Bible never uses the term domination over animals. “God” (according to Middle Eastern “diviners,” the Franklin Grahams and Jerry Falwells of their days)  instructs armies to massacre complete human populations (that’s domination), but the Israelites and other nations came up with the idea of animal sacrifices on their own.

 

The only time “God” appears to have sacrificed animals is when he clothed Adam and Eve after they ate of the apple and found themselves naked and ashamed. (Again, the Genesis story is a parable created by a Middle Eastern patriarchal culture; it was not an actual event.)

 

We’ve been sacrificing animals, people and the environment based on a bogus claim: that we’re so freaking unique and special that God has granted us total control over our eventual salvation and  that all salvation requires is believing in Jesus Christ.

 

We can already see how that’s turning out: today’s most visible Christians are white supremacist terrorists (news flash: they always have been–this is nothing new!)

 

We have created God in our own image (not the other way around): a white (bogus!) savage (bogus!), rapacious, capricious god (bogus!) who thinks only of Himself and His selfish pleasures and desires.  A god (bogus!) who delights in wars, genocide, and environmental destruction.

 

The white supremacists’ Golden Calf now sits in the White House literally killing poor people and people of color (whose low-paying service jobs are deemed essential) with his above-it-all delusions of godhood and the righteousness of his bigotries, hatreds and fears.

 

The left calls Trump the anti-Christ; the far right calls him God’s Chosen One.

 

(Did God run out of locusts?)

 

This post has gotten off track some, but the bottom line is that until we consider all nations–human and animal, plant and mineral–equally deserving of our care as we consider our own, we don’t have a fucking prayer of pulling this rabbit out of a hat.

 

And our downfall will be our own fault … and nature’s luckiest strike.

 

How I would love to be proven wrong, but at the rate we’re going, I’m not sure that’s even possible…

 

But sitting alone or with company in my Critter Corral, I’ll remind myself: it really is a beautiful world. I hope we will elect to find a way to save it. Doing so will even safe us. Learning compassion for all life can spill over into creating compassion for the humans who don’t look or believe the way we do.

 

And that way lies peace and comfort.  We’re just one decision away from having that… each of us.

 

Who, or what, are you considering “the other”? The less worthy? The scourge?

 

There’s your test. Try to see them as worthy of not just your toleration but of your compassion… maybe even your love.

 

All humans want to be celebrated, not just tolerated. All sentient creatures want to remain safe, free and unmolested. Why are these two things such hard things for human beings to understand and to honor?

 

P.S. Happy 41st Birthday, Deaken!