Animal Writings

From time to time I think about this and discuss it... Many animal advocates and vegans take in homeless companion animals. Most adopt through a shelter or rescue group. Some rescue strays or manage feral cat colonies, others foster animals whose time has run out at the shelter, or give up a room for a few days so a spayed feral cat can recover before going back outside.

All are aware that in addition to our dogs happily going on walks each day, our cats playing with wand toys and scratching on their posts, our rabbits munching on timothy hay and investigating tunnels and cardboard boxes, millions of companion animals are stuck in poorly-funded pounds, or are slaves to the puppy mill industry, where they live in confined filth. Or they are killed by the most crude and barbaric methods for their meat or fur. The suffering is constant and horrific and intolerable, the death toll every year is in the hundreds of millions. Far beyond the walls of our peaceful abodes and well cared-for animals, is a nightmare. The nightmare is real and continuous.

Add to that the fate of billions of animals in factory farms, fur operations, roadside zoos, rodeos, and other venues of animal abuse, and the numbers, and the misery—all human-caused—becomes incomprehensible.

So there are countless animals that we confine to horrid situations and short lives, and it is pervasive, and un-ending, and yet right in front of us is this one animal—loved, precious, beautiful. Unique. An ambassador, perhaps, for all animals. One lucky individual, free from all the various institutions that treat animals as expendable commodities, as disposable inventory, as things. The animal in front of us may never suffer. She has veterinary care. She has toys and soft places to lay her head. We talk to her and play with her and clip her nails and make sure her ears are clean. We empty her litter box and brush her and sing funny songs to her and pet her. She knows human kindness, not human meanness. She has someone who loves her, who will take care of her, who is committed to her.

It is easy, when we're face-to-face with our animal companions, snuggling or simply relaxing and doing mundane things, to forget about all the horrors that lie in the dark distance. It's easy to imagine all life is this peaceful and harmonious. Yet the back of our minds can't forget, the pit of our stomachs cannot become completely un-traumatized, the hole in our hearts can never be repaired. The suffering is too great. Even if it stopped tomorrow, the trillion or more who lived joyless, pain-filled lives and were brutally killed, without anyone ever caring one bit about them, cannot be brought back. The atrocities cannot be un-done.

We do what we can. We tell friends, relatives, and co-workers about the treatment of farm animals—babies stolen from mothers, newborn chicks suffocated, hens burned to death, veal calves too weak to stand sleeping in their own urine, animals whose horns, beaks, toes, and tails are severed, and who are castrated with no pain relief, animals dying at all stages of their lives from their human-imposed giganticness, animals panting and collapsing and dying in transport, hanging animals screaming as they bleed and thrashing as they drown in boiling water. We tell them about vegan meat substitutes and soy and almond milk; we point them to vegan recipe sites, we cook delicious vegan meals for them and they say, "Wow, this is good, but I could never do it." We hand out vegetarian guides to passers-by on the street. We write to food section editors and restaurant managers and members of congress, hoping they'll take some small step—at least—to make our present world somewhat more humane. We sometimes wear ourselves out. Revolutions take time. As we know from history, societies cling to ingrained, accepted exploitations. They justify them, they engage in pervasive and extensive denial, they practically think of them as entitlements. They invent religious reasons for the most heinous cruelties while violating the most basic tenets of the religion.

So it gets tiring. But more than that it's sad. At the end of each day, despite our best—and sometimes valiant—efforts on behalf of the animals, they're still locked up. They're still in tiny crates. They're still grabbed in the middle of the night and thrown into cages and taken on a long truck ride. The slaughterhouse line is still running. It is always running somewhere. Millions of animals will have been killed while you're reading this post. The killing machine doesn't stop. Six- and seven-week old birds—some still peeping—are shackled; they have had impoverished lives of deprivation and denial, they have endured days of starvation and confinement and traveled in freezing cold and burning hot weather; and with their last energy they flap their wings—for most of the laying hens, this is the only time in their lives they'll get to flap their wings; then they're tortured. Torture is a big industry in America. We condemn torture on TV, but if the ones being tortured are non-humans, the torturers make billions of dollars and are afforded special legal protections. The person publicly denouncing torture may come home and support a different form of torture that night.

Ten more paragraphs. A hundred more paragraphs. A book. We could write from now until the day we die and it wouldn't even be one word per victim, and it wouldn't ever describe the horribleness of being treated like a commodity—worse than most property—and having your life taken away, being forced to exist in misery until your captors—your breeders who brought you into this earth solely to be destroyed and to serve them—could kill you and dig into your flesh.

Maybe we can grasp the indescribable sweetness of life and the unspeakable horror of mass killing by looking into the eyes of the animal in front of us. As I write this—in between typing sentences—I'm petting my bunny's nose. She closes her eyes and almost goes into a trance. How good that must feel, just a simple, caring stroke on the fur. Her sisters are suffering and their suffering is mass-ignored, and I wish I could reach out to them. I wish I had superpowers. Alas, all I can do right now is make this one bunny, rescued in the nick of time, feel great. So—like so many rescuers—I indulge her. I'm sure I overdo it. To make up for all the ones who weren't saved, who won't be saved, who will basically live in animal concentration camps and be killed in an assembly line. On and on it goes. When will it stop?

My funny little five-pound girl, with the ring of orange fur around her nose, hops on my lap, grooms me a while, then "presents" herself for more petting. Her turn. All right—how can I resist? So I pet her nose. And as she gets more relaxed, so do I. There is some peace and some good in the world. Isn't it better that we treat rabbits like this? I mean, doesn't it make so much more sense to pet their noses than to shoot them? Strangle them? Scrape their skin off before they're even dead? Doesn't it make more sense to be nice instead of mean? Isn't it more fulfilling? More right?

Her nose is resting on my knee now. She's in heaven, and watching her, so, almost, am I. If only all bunnies could know this. So I close my eyes as I stroke her nose and her forehead...and think of all the ones in their cages, all the ones who will be killed tomorrow, and who will never know this... and hope maybe they can feel it...when I pet my bunny's nose, I pet the noses of all the bunnies in the world, and every animal in every cage and confinement facility and laboratory, and every animal who was abused and abandoned, or the victim of human brutality...and we all close our eyes, and we all go to sleep, and we all know peace, and we all feel love.

Labels: cats, commodification, companion animals, dogs, fur, rabbits, vegan outreach