<$BlogRSDUrl$> The Cyberactivist

Behind the scenes of the fight for the protection of animals and workers and the preservation of the environment - my experiences as a Tyson slaughterhouse hanger/killer turned activist. Exposing the evils of factory farming, by Virgil Butler. If you have arrived here looking for the Tyson stories, view the early archives. Some of them are now featured on the sidebar for easy searching.

Wednesday, October 22, 2003

Man's Inhumanity 

I read an article in the New York Times
called "Wild Thing" by Charles Siebert

He made some good points in this article.
He discussed the recent instances in the
news of captive wild animal attacks and/or
escapes. I agreed with much of what he said
regarding the cases of Montecore, Little Joe,
and the tiger and alligator found in a in
apartment in New York. He said:

...Coincidences, surely, and yet not all that
surprising when you consider the current state
of our so-called compact with the wild...

...wildlife experts estimate, for example, that
there may now be twice the number of tigers,
as many as 10,000, in various modes of captivity...

We are, in fact, so far along in loading the world's
last wide-ranging predators into the figurative and
wildly aimless ark of human progress that we can
almost view the events of recent weeks as part of
some collective creaturely revolt, a la Alfred
Hitchcock's "The Birds." It's as if the animals
themselves are subliminally sensing and trying to
flee -- in the way they do the earliest tremblings of
earthquakes -- both their complete displacement
from their realm and their distorted replacement
within ours. They seem naturally discomfited by the
vast disconnect in our thinking about them, which
can readily dismiss such things as the centuries of
begrudging but mutually propitious interludes that
were required to render a wolf a dog; or that can
transform 400-pound tigers into apartment dwellers
or apparently cute cuddle toys twirling atop glass balls.

...Montecore's and Little Joe's and Ming's fates, their
current incarceration and probation, exiled from their
respective stages, utterly guiltless, bewildered and
afraid...

And he uses a very appropriate quote that speaks
volumes about society:

"'We can judge the heart of man,"' wrote Immanuel
Kant, "'by his treatment of animals."'

I was talking yesterday with a fellow activist
that really put it well. He said that the biggest
fight, and the thing that bothered him the most,
was the arrogance of the attitude that
people have that everything on this Earth,
especially animals, was put here expressly for
our exploitation and use.

I've got another quote that I like enough to use
for a signature because I think it really sums it up.

The worst sin toward our fellow creatures is not
to hate them, but to be indifferent to them:
that's the essence of inhumanity.
----George Bernard Shaw
Posted by: # Virgil / 9:55 AM
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