Patrick McDonnell's wonderful Mutts
An op-ed in today’s NYT
by Jonathan Safran Foer describes the challenges that pets, and their
companions, face in a city like New York. In the greater Toronto area,
the loathing for our animal companions has recently spiked sharply,
largely due to the huge new immigrant population here, some of whom
have grown up with an irrational fear of animals (they are used in some
struggling nations to intimidate and extort money from the poor, and in
others, because of superstitious religions, they are considered a cause
of disease). The fear comes from exposure to the darkest side of our
animal friends (a side brought out deliberately by despicable humans).
The loathing comes from ignorance. As Foer puts it:
In
the course of our lives, we move from a warm and benevolent
relationship with animals (learning responsibility through caring for
our pets, stroking and confiding in them), to a cruel one (virtually
all animals raised for meat in this country are factory farmed — they
spend their lives in confinement, dosed with antibiotics and other
drugs).
How do you explain this? Is our kindness replaced with
cruelty? I don’t think so. I think in part it’s because the older we
get, the less exposure we have to animals. And nothing facilitates
indifference or forgetfulness so much as distance. In this sense, dogs
and cats have been very lucky: they are the only animals we are
intimately exposed to daily.
This is, of course, true of
more than just the fear, hatred, cruelty and neglect we show animals.
It is true of almost every creature, human and other, we fear, despise,
and mistreat. We hate and fear ‘terrorists’ because we are not exposed
to the plight that so many people in struggling nations live with every
day, which seeds the desperation their actions manifests. The suicide
bombers hate and fear us in return because they don’t know us, don’t
know that we’re not just shallow, amoral, mindless consumers prepared
to destroy the planet, and their home, to meet our arrogant and
insatiable materialistic appetites.
English-speaking and the
French-speaking Canadians have never got along well, largely because
most of us won’t or can’t talk with each other, and don’t see just how
much they have in common.
The old fear the young, and the
young fear the old, because they have so little contact with each
other. Except for those who have regular contact with them, we fear
those who are physically and mentally disadvantaged, because we don't
know how to relate to them, don't know what they'll do.
The poor hate and/or envy the rich, and the rich fear that the poor will steal from them, or worse.
And
we all fear nature -- from the farmer paranoid about coyotes and
poultry flu to the city-dweller paranoid about mosquito bites, bacteria
and viruses. So we poison coyotes with agonizing strychnine, trap
'vermin' with torturous leg-hold traps, kill millions of factory-caged
birds rather than adopt responsible, sustainable farming practices, and
spray our homes and lawns with toxic chemicals that destroy ecosystems
and poison every creature that comes near them, including ourselves.
It
is in our nature to fear and shun what we do not know. Discretion is
the better part of valor, after all, and creatures who are cautious
tend to outlive those who are rash in confronting the unknown. Our
dislike of people who are different and unfamiliar has a second
Darwinian advantage: It increases the genetic heterogeneity and
physical separation of tribes and hence reduces the spread of
communicable diseases.
In the crowded modern global village,
however, this Darwinian advantage becomes a disadvantage: Although we
are in physical proximity with different cultures, we don't mix with
them and hence don't know, distrust and often end up in conflict with
them. Our economic and military reach vastly exceeds our cultural
grasp, so we pass and exercise judgement on other cultures (often with
the best of intentions, though sometimes not) without understanding
what we are doing or the effect of our reckless presumption that
everyone shares our goals, ideals and values. Our intolerance of those
who are not like us makes us angry, hateful, violent, distrustful,
paranoid, and ultimately numb and indifferent to the suffering of
'others'.
And as we lose touch with nature, and become
disconnected from all life on Earth, we forget who we really are, and
we destroy the natural world and all its creatures without knowing or
caring what we are doing.
This destruction of 'otherness', of
heterogeneity, of difference, is a vicious cycle: Lack of diversity
means we have less opportunity to meet and see and appreciate cultures,
creatures and environments different from our own, so we become even
more distrustful of them, and indifferent to them. The conservative
dream of one single global culture, all of us indistinguishable from
each other, and of one single species squeezing out all others' right
to exist, is the world of the Borg -- with zero diversity comes zero tolerance.
The death of nature, and of culture. |
MADE IN CANADA
trust your
instincts 
