Daily Pondering

“Animals do speak, but very few people know how to listen.”

A calf raised for veal (Image from https://www.flickr.com/photos/sandi1214/2131871828)

I write here about this statement because it is perhaps the very essence of the conflict between humans and animals. It seems even revelatory when initially read due to our longstanding acceptance that a lack of speech can be equated with a lack of ability to express one’s nuanced thoughts, feelings, and experiences. The statement however, upon further consideration, is not particularly surprising or groundbreaking insofar as it only acknowledges what we must admit to be true, namely that animal exploiters are largely anthropocentric, and thus prone to such misconceptions as the common one contending that animals cannot communicate with us. But how faulty this is. In eyes, in whimpers, in growls, in stares, in touch, in silence, animals tell us all that we need to know. Will we listen? The answer to that question, it can be guaranteed, will partially determine whether we are benevolent, or whether we have chosen the side of ill dispositions.

The haunting reality that is veal farms (Image from https://rantingsfromavirtualsoapbox.wordpress.com/2014/07/30/veal-crates-and-plastic-hutches/)

On Explanations

We must continue to hope that one day our animal friends may know what it means to be free.

As I packed my final boxes one Monday afternoon, preparing for my move from a summer in Brooklyn back to college in the Berkshires, a friend and I conversed over the matter of the determination of advocates and activists. How is it that one person feels the urgency of a cause so deeply, and is thus compelled to live their life in pursuit of the rectification of that one single wrong, while another person turns away and cares little to naught about the very same evil?

Stephen King once wrote that, “the battle between good and evil is endlessly fascinating because we are participants every day.” This, I believe, does also beg the question at hand: What ultimately destines us to one or the other side in this epic battle? Is it a cosmic force, chance, a deliberate choice, a compulsion, or something altogether distinct from any of these?

Who truly knows the answer to this question? I have searched in vain for quite awhile now. Tired of the absence of any substantive, satisfying, or at all convincing answer, we began musing on the array of possibilities that nevertheless must exist. That’s when it came to me.

Perhaps those who speak for animals, when so many others remain silent among the animals’ harrowing reality, perhaps these individuals speak because they know. Maybe it could be that there is a memory in their soul from a life they used to know, a life of their past. Maybe those who speak were once the siblings and friends of the myriad animals who are subjugated on farms, in laboratories, in rings, in tanks and cages, on stages, in concrete and grass, in planes and cars and boxes and bags, in any and all conceivable places. Because they once knew and experienced, they understand and speak out for all of the wrongs to be amended, to be remedied how they can.

Let this proposed idea be called unlikely, naïve, idealistic, fallacious. Let it be mocked. Let it be disproven. But when you are conscious of a world of suffering made to be irrelevant, we begin to "tell ourselves stories in order to live" as Joan Didion once phrased it.

For the world to cease to commit animal cruelty in its many fashions and learn the happiness and peace that is unconditional compassion… that is my greatest wish.