In a nutshell, the story was about a Pekingese dog that was abandoned by its owners in a suburb of Boston and died of pneumonia a couple of days after being brought to a local animal hospital. But that's not even half the story. According to the article, this poor animal was “ensnared in its own fur” and couldn't even see or move due to its severely matted fur. He was covered in his own feces and, according to the vet who treated him, probably got pneumonia from “breathing in feces and bacteria for years”. His owners could not even be bothered to drop him off at an animal shelter, so they just left him to die.
Stories like this make me sick.
Gandhi said that “[t]he greatness of a nation and its moral progress can be judged by the way its animals are treated”. Given the frequency of stories like this, certain citizens of this planet are neither terribly great nor terribly moral. What they are instead is terribly cruel, and that cruelty diminishes us all as human beings, especially when we tolerate such behavior either directly or indirectly through ineffectual legal remedies.
It's easy to treat the strong in society with dignity and respect, as we really have no other choice if we want to succeed and survive. But it takes pure empathy and caring beyond one's own selfish needs to do the same for an animal.
To be sure, we as a society like to toot our own horns as being the “superior” species, above and beyond all the creatures beneath us on the evolutionary ladder. We like to believe that our abilities to think and reason at a higher level, our advanced language skills, and for all I know our ability to text each other through our cell phones all somehow entitle us to the self-serving belief that all non-human creatures exist solely for the purpose of serving us and our whims. We arrogantly assume that animals exist merely for our own entertainment, sustenance or usefulness. But while we may have superior reasoning skills to those of, say, dogs and cats, we also have a far greater capacity for cruelty.
If the sheer inhumanity of inflicting this kind of suffering is not sufficient reason for cracking down on this type of cruelty, then perhaps the more selfish reasons are sufficient: Do you or your children really want to be around people that have such disregard for the pain and suffering of others? Do you honestly believe that such people's antisocial attitudes begin and end with cats and dogs? Personally, I think there's something truly frightening about any so-called human being that demonstrates such a lack of empathy toward another living creature.
The fact is, we all get outraged and condemn the people who do these things and who otherwise neglect and abuse animals (and I use the term “people” very loosely), but it keeps happening anyway, doesn't it? I'm sure part of the reason for that is that the legal penalties for such cruelty are completely insufficient, amounting to a mere slap on the wrist. You're likely to do longer jail time for stealing a car than for torturing an animal. It's about time that society and its laws took these cases more seriously. Maybe then such stories would be blessedly few and far between.
When I was a child, I would hear that animals don't go to heaven when they die because they have no souls. Sometimes I think it's their owners who have no souls. At any rate, it's clear that people like the owners of that poor, neglected Pekingese have no heart.
Stories like this make me sick.
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