Animal Madness In The Age Of Killing Them For Food, Fun, Science, And “Progress”

Somewhere along the production line it was not only observed that the animal had blisters in his mouth and was salivating, but it led to the world watching hundreds, and then hundreds of thousands of pigs, cows, and sheep and their new born lambs taken outdoors, shot, thrown into burning pyres, and bulldozed into muddy graves. Reports also described terrified cattle being chased by sharpshooters, clambering over one another to escape. Journalist Andrew Sullivan next discerned in these scenes a “horrifying nothingness,” a reflection of our attitude towards animals, more so as the Foot-and-mouth diseases and mass killings played out in England and spread to the rest of Europe.

Detailing a harrowing story of a pig at a British slaughterhouse, Matthew Scully, in “Dominion: The Power of Man, the Suffering of Animals, and the Call to Mercy,” continues to write how Sullivan reported: Here were innocent, living creatures, and they deserved better than their market value which had been diminished. Slaughtering the animals were simply the quick and convenient thing to do. But does the same go for our scientific laboratories or what we call human progress? After all, hasn’t human progress caused the mass extinction of hundreds of species? Laboratories, meanwhile, are filled with strange new beings, genetically engineered, cloned, and patented just like products.

Darwin’s “Aha!” Moment And The Rage And Rise Of Animal Planet
Humans aren’t the only ones to suffer from emotional and mental illnesses. Charles Darwin came to this realization as he found that non-human animals can suffer from mental illnesses that are quite similar to human disorders. By witnessing many animals undergoing extreme fear, anxiety, and compulsions, he even wondered if identifying insanity in other animals might tell us about ourselves. Since he found that since every animal - including humans - with a mind have the capacity to lose hold of it from time to time, the answer was yes. Triggered by abuse or mistreatment, animals undergo depression and anxiety too, along with compulsive disorders, obsession and dementia.

No wonder two more animal attacks occurred. Facing ill-treatment and mass extinction from scientific research or the loss of their habitats, it’s happening all over the world as alligators and crocodiles, elephants and lions, deer and elk, cougars and bison, and birds are increasingly attacking humans - and for good reason. In these two cases, a polar bear in the Arctic attacked a Norwegian cruise ship guard, and a wild boar charged patrons at a Chevron gas station in Decatur, Georgia. Since Chevron and cruise ships are some of the biggest polluters and destroyers of animal wildernesses, were the attacks some kind of poetic irony - let alone the question of who‘s really attacking who. Either way, both animals were ultimately subdued and shot to death.

(Note: With only 25,000 polar bears left in the entire world, and over 7 billion people, the odds of survival aren’t looking very favorable. As Paul R. Ehrlich said, “In pushing other species to extinction, humanity is busy sawing off the limb on which it perches.” Only in this case, and given the vital importance of how the Arctic interacts with the Gulf Stream and Earth’s Temperate Zones and Climate Change, humanity is busy sawing off it’s right limb (arm) literally.”)

Not Very Human After All And More Commonalities Than Differences
Battered by the destruction of forests, prairies, wetlands, jungles, tropical rainforests, and the Sahel, to make way for mass agriculture, urbanization, or roads and mining, animal extinctions are ramping up. So too is animal abandonment. Given the rise in sport and wildlife trafficking, and scientific research into new medicines, diseases, vaccinations, and genetic bioengineering, the humanization of the world is breaking the back of entire biomes and ecosystems - which isn’t very human. The answer to strange animal behaviors, where many species have attacked humans, could very well be revenge against their mass deaths - 500 just in the past 40 years with another eighty-five percent forever.

Studies actually show that animals have nearly the same suite of genes that underlie the nervous systems of humans, except for worms. Many also have similar connectivity patterns found in the human brain. This not only includes the same cells, body, skeleton, heart, lungs, and blood, but feelings too. The bonding chemistry and other emotions, like fear, shame, self-loathing, and dignity, are in fact similar. Whether or not all of life is one, or there’s a collective consciousness which governs the world, one thing is for certain: Humans are the problem, and they’re imposing a clearly foreign misunderstanding onto animals. As a result, is the other answer to animal madness human madness?

Canaries In Coal Mines And Zoocide’s Mirror Staring Back
Human madness is consequently ignoring the canaries in the coal mines, i.e. …animal behavior prior to catastrophic events. But acknowledging parallels between animals and humans is a blow to the idea that humans are the only species to think or express emotion in complex and surprising ways. So too is the idea that the mental health of humans is dependent on the mental health of animals. A better truth, however, may be nonhuman. Neither would it be human or self-centered, unable to recognize the bits and pieces of humanness in other animals and vice versa. In such a world, empathy and a healthy relationship towards animals will only make humanity better versions of themselves.

It will also avert another major catastrophe like a mass extinction. Known as zoocide, a term created by Mathhieu Richard, zoocide is an equivalent of genocide and systematic extermination of part of the human population in regards to animals - particularly for the consumption of their flesh and scientific research. Along with notable similarities between the logical and technical process to destroy living things, whether they are animals or humans, zoocide is moreover comparable to a “general massacre agreed and guilt free.” This should then serve as another warning: Although abnormal behavior in the animal world is on the rise, there’s much more of it on the rise in the human world.

Humility - The First Test Of Humanity
Whether or not humanity has reached the point of no return, being so abnormal that it leads to guilt free animal extinctions, it’s humbling to know what E.O. Wilson wrote. His research revealed that: “If all mankind were to disappear, the world would regenerate back to the rich state of equilibrium that existed ten thousand years ago. If insects were to vanish, the environment would collapse into chaos.” The same is surely true if animals were to go extinct.

Dallas Darling is the author of Politics 501: An A-Z Reading on Conscientious Political Thought and Action, Some Nations Above God: 52 Weekly Reflections On Modern-Day Imperialism, Militarism, And Consumerism in the Context of John’s Apocalyptic Vision, and The Other Side Of Christianity: Reflections on Faith, Politics, Spirituality, History, and Peace. He is a correspondent for www.WN.com. You can read more of Dallas’ writings at www.beverlydarling.com and www.WN.com/dallasdarling.