Egyptian Scribbles: animals

Tuesday, 13 November 2007

Dead Kittens

I was walking home from the postoffice this afternoon and enjoying the sunshine and a slightly cooler nip in the air, and then I saw this dead kittne on the pavement. There was a time when I would have sat down on the kerb and cried at the sight of this little thing, but fortunately I've developed a tougher skin over the years. But it's still sad to see the half-starved horses being beaten on the streets, and to find dead little cats on the pavement. It's just one other element of life here that makes the days a bit tougher.

Of course, there is also a great deal of animal pain and suffering in British and American societies, but it is kept hidden from public view in large factory farms and abattoirs. This is why I'm a vegetarian... But public and open animal cruelty is generally regarded as unacceptable and something that would generate disapproval. Are British and US societies hypocritical with regard to their treatment of animals? Of course. But I still appreciate the fact that beating a dog or an emaciated horse is not regarded as acceptable behaviour.

Quotations from Books/ Legal Cases/ Articles I"m Reading

From Richard Rorty, "Human Rights, Rationality and Sentimentality":
"If one follows Baier's advice one will not see it as the moral educator's task to answer the rational egotist's question "Why should I be moral?" but rather to answer the much more frequently posed question "Why should I care about a stranger, a person who is no kin to me, a person whose habits I find disgusting?". The traditional answer to the latter question is "Because kinship and custom are morally irrelevant, irrelevant to the obligations imposed by the recognition of membership in the same species". This has never been very convincing, since it begs the question at issue: whether mere species membership is, in fact, a sufficient surrogate for closer kinship. Furthermore, that answer leaves one wide open to Nietzsche's discomfiting rejoinder: That universalistic notion, Nietzsche will sneer, would only have crossed the mind of a slave – or, perhaps, the mind of an intellectual, a priest whose self-esteem and livelihood both depend on getting the rest of us to accept a sacred, unarguable, unchallengeable paradox.
A better sort of answer is the sort of long, sad, sentimental story which begins "Because this is what it is like to be in her situation – to be far from home, among strangers", or "Because she might become your daughter-in-law", or "Because her mother would grieve for her". Such stories, repeated and varied over the centuries, have induced us, the rich, safe, powerful, people, to tolerate, and even to cherish, powerless people – people whose appearance or habits or beliefs at first seemed an insult to our own moral identity, our sense of the limits of permissible human variation."