Today I went to lunch with a a coworker and a sales rep at the hospital I work with, and as usually happens with me - we started talking about animals, and the sales rep said - "screw cats and dogs - humans are way more important - we should only think about humans and animals can just die - they're "just cats and dogs"".
And you can guess what kind of response that got from me!
He said that we shouldn't even be thinking about cats and dogs and their welfare while people are dying in Afganistan and Iraq and on the streets and being murdered - we should be focusing our energy on humans.
What I said to him was the "life IS cheap - life REALLY IS cheap - for humans and for animals. It MUST be, because people are so willing to kill each other - humans are, for such silly things - all around the world, and even next door to us.
Last week I was out at Bayer's Lake Industrial Park and I saw a woman hit her about 2 year old child - she just hauled off and give him a good smack - they were outside the Burger King and he was sitting on the pavement and she bent down and just smacked him because he was crying and he recoiled back like he was so afraid of her and he started crying louder and she hollered "STOP!" and she grabbed him by his coat and he was just this innocent little thing and I just stood there watching it - and I was like - how could she do that to her little child? I think it was the first time I've ever seen a human do that to a child and it stunned me - that someone could do that to a baby, and it affected me. But people do that to other humans all the time - I mean a man over in Switzerland or Finland or one of those countries kept his children as sex slaves in a dungeon for a couple DECADES.
So it makes sense that people can be awful to animals - and it's my belief that dogs and cats and pigs and cows and chickens and humans are all the same - we're all equal and deserve the same treatment - even though life is so cheap - we should still all be treated the same - and we've got to start somewhere, so we might as well start with animals" and my sales rep friend said - in the countries where all the wars are going on that they eat dogs - and it pretty much tastes like chicken - so the animals are at least all the same to him!
So I don't know if I was getting through to him too much!
It just boggles my mind that people don't have the empathy to see living things other than human as requiring consideration of concern. It makes me wonder if they have enough empathy to even have concern for other humans - maybe that they've never met or only heard about - if they have the depth of perception to be able to understand that people exist in 3 dimensions and actually exist outside of their own personal space.
If you can't treat a dog humanely - how can you treat a human humanely? It confuses me.
Send them this
ReplyDeleteBest quote of the day
http://badrap-blog.blogspot.com/2008/09/best-quote-o-day.html
Next time someone like that asks, tell them you're working at the root of the problem. There is a reason that so many humane groups have begun campaigns to show the relationship between violence to animals and its progression to women and children.
ReplyDeleteThere are just too many things wrong in the world for any one person to address everything .... ya have to pick your battles and go with your own heart. Otherwise, one is just like the untied balloon that careens madly around the room for a second before becoming a useless bit of rubbish.
When our daughter Yana was a preteen, she is 24 now, I told her that when she dates someone, to pay attention how her chosen person treats all others.
ReplyDeleteSomeone who is only nice to his/her "in-group", but has no compassion and empathy for others, or doesn't treat them with respect and decency, is NOT a nice person. It's that simple for me. One is either nice, or one is not - regardless of race, religion, color or species.
sigh
ReplyDeletejm
Funny that you posted on this topic. I was just going to do the same. Must be something in the air.
ReplyDeleteI'm tired of people bringing up the hypocritical argument of helping animals vs helping people. How self righteous is a person to ask someone else to justify what they do in their spare time? Does the sales rep ever watch TV? How can he justify wasting his time watching TV when there are so many people living in misery he should be helping instead? Does he ever go out for a meal? How can he justify going out for a more expensive meal when there are hungry people out there he should be cooking for instead?
People who ask such questions aren't looking for an answer. They're just showing how morally lazy and ignorant they are. They're just trying to assuage their own guilt at doing little to nothing at all for other living creatures.
This sales rep sounds like a very cold, ignorant individual (typical of sales reps, really), exactly the kind of human that we don't need.
ReplyDeleteWHAT A DORK - maybe you should direct him to the Purina Hall of Fame site - or to all the assistance dogs/ service dogs sites or search and rescue teams!
ReplyDeleteJanet and the Casbah Crew