Pets

Man buys coffin, writes his
obituary, jumps in with gun,
fails to kill himself.

When I was a boy it was not at all uncommon for people, wanting to dispose of an unwanted litter of dogs or cats, to put them in a gunny sack and throw them in the river. I also witnessed people disposing of pets without even bothering to put them in a bag. One of my most vivid memories is coming across some newborn kittens casually tossed into about an inch of water on a driveway. A boy with me burst into tears and was upset for several days thereafter (he later returned from Vietnam boasting of how many “gooks” he had killed). As unpleasant as this was it was accepted by most people as a necessity of life. Nowadays, of course, we have pet shelters and such trying to save unwanted pets by finding new homes for them, encourage spaying and neutering, and so on, but even now there are still hundreds of thousands of pets that are “put down” every year. I find this deplorable, but I have no realistic solution for it.

Having to dispose of unwanted pets is one thing, but abusing and torturing pets for no apparent reason is quite another. Just today I saw and item where a young man put a four week old kitten in a microwave. A friend rescued it but too late to save its life. A young woman threw a kitten to its death off a high rise apartment . In the past couple of years I have seen several times where kittens have been set on fire. Just the other day a young man was arrested for throwing puppies out the window of his moving automobile. George W. Bush, as a boy, apparently enjoyed placing firecrackers in the mouths of frogs and blowing them up. I have personally witnessed this done to fish. I don’t know what the motive is for this kind of sadistic behavior, but it clearly isn’t just having to dispose of unwanted pets. There is a genuine element of sadism involved. There is said to be a correlation between this kind of behavior and subsequent crimes, violent and otherwise. If these people are punished it is usually just probation, community service, or some such relatively minor matter. I become outraged at reports like this and I believe these kinds of individuals should be subject to much more serious penalties. I think it outrages me mostly because these animals are so helpless and cannot defend themselves.

But then I think, why should I be so upset about this when the same thing is happening to human infants. I know of one account of a baby being put into a microwave, another of a baby being fried in a large frying pan, still other infants being beaten to death by their parents or babysitters, and so on. In fact, such reports are fairly frequent these days. The penalties for such behavior in the case of humans is much more severe than for similar behavior towards animals. I’m not sure this is entirely fair to animals. In any case, it seems to me there are forces at play in these kinds of abuse cases, for both animals and humans, that go far beyond what we should consider “normal.” There is some sadistic pathology involved that we do not seem to understand very well. I’m not sure we have even tried very hard to fathom this.

Still another thing about pets and their treatment that bothers me is how pets are treated here while millions of people around the world are starving. Our pets eat better than many people do. Ads for cat and dog food, in the context of world poverty, are virtually obscene. “Fancy Feast” and others of that ilk must be horrible for many people to have to endure. Dog and cat shows, and clothing for dogs and cats, along with marriage ceremonies for them, and other such frivolities, must strike many third world citizens as absolutely insane (me too, for that matter). I think much of the problem here stems from the fact that nowadays people keep pets more for amusement than for serious purposes, like controlling mice and rats, hunting animals, and such. As toys I guess they can simply be disposed of when the novelty runs out or one’s circumstances change. This can be seen, I think, in the reports coming in at the moment of thousands, perhaps as many as a million pets being abandoned because of the economic downturn. As this looks like it will get worse, and on a world-wide basis, we should give more attention to it, although I don’t think we need to go to the extremes of PETA.

LKBIQ:
Women and cats do as they damned well please, and men and dogs had best learn to live with it.
Alan Holbrook

TILT:
Genetically, the Bushmen of the Kalahari represent the oldest known human population.