Outside, a pig is being killed. I’ve been hearing his screams for some time now and not even the sound of the tv covers them.
Pain was invented in the early stages of evolution. The amount of pain that there was, there is and has yet to come in the world, only allows us to care for our own, or at most, with the pain closest to us in time and space.
It depends on the distance we are watching things. A battle between two armies, if seen from far, from the top of a hill, can easily be an aesthetically pleasing experience, such as the effect of napalm, seen from a plane.
The boats enter the water, the men row towards the place where the whales were seen, later they will simply turn on the engines, launch the first harpoons, later they will shoot a canon.
The feeling that prevails here is also ancient: the excitement of hunting and danger.
A more recent feeling may be the feeling of being part of a group.
Even more recent may have been the sympathy for the suffering of the animal that was bleeding while it was harpooned till it died. But I don’t think this was true… or may be it was, in the middle of this turmoil of emotions. I’ll try to find out.
Size matters and the sympathy we feel for the suffering of another being depends on its size. We don’t feel the same watching a 5cms fish die, a 50cms, a 120cms dolphin or a 20 meters whale. But it doesn’t end here, of course.
This has a lot to do with empathy, with similarity. And behind all this, there’s culture and education.
It’s hard for me not to label all this concern about protection of whales has hypocrite or at least, inconscienct. Whales live all their live in their habitat. 99% of the animals bred as human (and other animals) food, have the most miserable life one can conceive, and just because their death does not include a few hours of suffering, all their lives are constant suffering.
The pig is now silent and I’ll shut my mouth for now too.
No comments:
Post a Comment