Animal Nitrate

I'm afraid I'm still guilty of a ridiculous level of love for all things cute and fluffy.



Two things happened that had an effect on me this past weekend. Firstly a friendship that has lasted since childhood ended. Secondly my cat, Ali, died. Who wants to guess which of the two was more upsetting? I’ll give you a clue; I conform to the stereotype of England being a nation of animal lovers.

Many moons ago I wrote about how we seem to be far more horrified at the mistreatment of animals than we are at the mistreatment of people. I’ve seen and heard little or nothing to alter my views regarding this. For example, after the main body of the Afghanistan conflict (it wasn’t a war apparently; to echo a better man, a war is when two armies are fighting...) had ended there was a huge relief effort aimed at improving the lot of the Afghanistani people. And yet donations to charitable causes for the populace were dwarfed by contributions to a charity that concerned itself with the welfare of Marjan. Marjan was the one eyed lion that had eked out a miserable and tortured existence in Kabul zoo for the last 23 years. So in the midst of a sea of human suffering, our heartstrings were plucked and played by the plight of a solitary beast.

I should make it very clear that I am in no way looking down on the huge number of people who find animals more agreeable than people. Whilst scanning through the news yesterday a story broke involving a young boy being battered and burnt to death. Let us be in no doubt at all that this was a truly horrific crime. Just beneath it on the Ananova website was a story of a Czech man who was sentenced to 6 months in prison for kicking a hedgehog to death. Suffice to say that I would have been happy for the former crime to be inflicted on the perpetrator of the latter.

What is it about the human condition that allows us to hear reports of appalling human suffering with something horribly close to tolerance whilst we cannot condemn those who cause pain to animals fast enough? This is even reflected in our charities; the main charity for the protection has a royal charter, which although it counts for little in this day and age does give the RSPCA a certain air of esteem. Contrast this with the leading UK charity concerned with the welfare of children, the NSPCC. They are merely a national society. So our monarchs (Prince Phillip notwithstanding of course; the irony of his being patron of the World Wildlife Fund has been oft commented on) are apparently more concerned with animals than with children (which explains quite a lot, not least of which is the fact that our future king has become an old hippy with spiritualist leanings and one or two pointed views on architecture; if only Phillip had shown as much attention to his son as he has to the various species that he’s been helping become extinct).

It would seem that our attitude toward animals stems from a somewhat unholy alliance of duty to protect those that are weaker than ourselves, compassion for those who have suffered, guilt for the fact that the suffering has invariably been at the hands of man, and selective sentimentality. I name the latter with a certain amount of trepidation and self-disgust, as I am guilty of it myself. This sentimentality comes from our anthropomorphication of cute animals. We are less eager to put our hands in our pockets to save endangered insects (unless they are pretty or fluttery, preferably both), fish (the stocks of cod in the North Sea and Atlantic have plummeted, but as long as we get out fish and chips then everything is ok, right?), or birds and mammals that occupy the less attractive end of the looks spectrum (if every hyena on the face of the planet was to disappear tomorrow I don’t think anyone would mourn too much, do you?).

Of course, all of the above could quite easily be applied to people as well with the exception of sentimentality (except perhaps toward children, but as I am not a parent I find it difficult to relate to that mindset; in my world children are there to cry noisily, make awful smells, and ask banal questions. In all respects they are little different to French tourists...) and it is that final element that makes the crucial difference. I think we find it easier to sympathise with the plight of an animal because we can impriny our own idea’s of it’s characteristic onto it regardless of how close this may be to reality. For instance, let’s return briefly to Marjan. A lion is regarded as a noble beast, the king of the jungle. It simply isn’t right for this regal feline to have suffered so much. Therefore it seemed proper to try and restore it’s sense of dignity in it’s last days.

That all sounds about right, does it not? Yet I have seen footage of these ‘noble beasts’ behaving in a decidedly ignoble way; would we use the same metaphors of royalty if we were more familiar with them as bloody great big pussycats that produce echoing squitty noises when emptying their bowels? Or if we had seen one drag it’s backside along the ground in much the same way that a dog might do (and incidentally, the next time you do see a dog do that, pay close attention to the owner; you will never again see such a look of acute embarrassment in your life...)? Okay, with our Royals it’s not the best comparison but you get the gist.

It’s not so easy to make these simplistic projections of emotion onto people, and if it is tried then it doesn’t sit easy with us. Again, the conflict in Afghanistan provides a recent example of this. I talked to many of my friends about Afghanistan (and doubtless bored them all senseless in doing so) and there was a certain amount of ambivalence about the future of the Afghanistani people. In general, we wondered why they had not done more to rid themselves of the oppressive Taliban government, and why they had tolerated the insidious presence of the terrorists who had brought American retribution upon them all. As to the starvation that they were enduring, many people wondered why they didn’t just leave (because as a man named Sam Kinison once said “You live in the middle of a desert! There wouldn’t be any famine...IF YOU PEOPLE LIVED WHERE THE FOOD IS!!”). We are happy to think such things, yet the people of Afghanistan were just as caged as Marjan. Pakistan, Iran, and the various former Soviet republics are not exactly teeming with opportunities for fleeing Afghanstani’s. The refugee internment camps in Australia and the UK are a fairly clear indication of what the West thinks about anyone who had the courage to flee. And make no mistake about how courageous or desperate they had to be to attempt to leave. They ran the risk of execution at the hands of the Taliban or the Northern Alliance, or being robbed by the various tribesmen on the Pakistani and Iranian borders, not to mention the incredible risks involved in sailing for days to get to Indonesia or Australia. No one expected an animal to have done this, but we believe a person to have been in some way negligent if they didn’t.

In truth, I’m not even sure that valuing animal welfare above that of people is such a bad thing. Obviously if taken to extremes it is (Hitler’s love of his dogs is an established historical fact; his regard for Jews, Gypsies, Slavs and, by the end of the war, people in general is something of an oxymoron) but in general I’m inclined to think that anything that encourages us to feel compassion toward something that is not ourselves can’t really be faulted. I certainly don’t feel guilty about feeling relieved that my former friend is out of my life whilst sobbing at the prospect of never seeing Ali again. Maybe we should stop trying to compare sympathy for animals with sympathy for our fellow man and recognise them as different things. Hopefully we will then stop trying to establish a hierarchy of consideration and get on with the important business of treating every living thing with respect and empathy. And following that we can go on a flying pig hunt because, let’s face it, that is just as realistic a prospect.