Animal Writings

I was watching the movie "Soylent Green," and my mind drifted during a mob scene...

Imagine being forced to be in a subway car with ninety other people, your whole life, with no way to escape. Each day you were fed gruel. You received no medical care. If you got sick, you suffered and maybe died. There was no enrichment and nothing ever changed. How would you act? Like "an animal?" Would there be fights over who got to sleep on the seats and who got the floor? Would you give up personal grooming? Would you go crazy? After a month, six months, a year, would you eventually give up, resign yourself to a life of nothingness and become nothing? Suppose whoever did this to you bound your hands to make you less dangerous, and proclaimed it a merciful act? You would be like the hens with severed beaks in battery cages. Or the chained veal caves in tiny, isolated pens. It is amazing how the ones who are freed do not seek revenge, and can learn to be trustful and caring toward humans. Who among us is so generous in their heart?

There is a scene in which a man is able to view scenes of nature. Of animals. Not animals to hunt, but as friends. Fellow travelers endowed with the gift of life, the spark of Creation. This calms the man. He is able to gaze at vivid pictures of his natural environment.

Why can't we give pigs some straw on which to lie down and be comfortable? Why can't we let calves grow up with a mother? Why don't we give laboratory rats, suffering in dubious medical experiments, some wood shavings to make a nest, a simple nest? Why do we lock up these animals and treat them as though they were violent, hardened criminals? How can we be so thoughtless and think so highly of ourselves? And so little of them?