As the truck disappeared into the distance the little calf was never to be seen again. The mother elephant felt nothing. She just stood there watching. This is what people are saying, people say that animals don’t have feelings and cannot cry emotionally, they say they can’t feel sad. Doesn’t sound more natural to say: as the truck disappeared into the distance the little calf was never to be seen again, the mother elephant felt destroyed, she felt as though she could never be happy again, tears of sadness dripped down her face. For she had just lost her baby.
Some scientists state that animals are not bothered by the fact that they are being shoved into cages for shows, forced to perform for circus and more. They are getting tazed, burned, whipped and hit for no good reason but human greed and people still think that they can’t get sad or can’t cry. “We are just like animals, we are animals” A grade 8 student at UWCSEA states. “Most people think we are better than animals but in reality we’re not”
“What you see when you actually get to know wild animals is very different from a casual sighting. If you saw human beings doing nothing but drinking water or running around a field, would you think that is all there is to human beings? If you know the people drinking the water or running around, you have a different experience watching them” Carl Safina, author of ‘Beyond Words’ states. This suggests that there is much more to animals than we see. What could be going on inside these animals minds that we are not seeing? If you saw someone walking down the street you wouldn't assume anything. That person might of been going through a divorce or just found out that he had a long lost brother. Since these are just things we will never know, we might as well consider them.
“Charles Darwin is a bit of an embarrassment for modern psychologists in that he was more willing to ascribe human emotions to animals than scientists tend to be today” Says Dr Thomas Dixon. Millions of animals are dying are year, having their family taken away, being abused and so much more and yet people still believe that animals can’t cry emotionally like us. “They can, I’ve seen it” Says some students in grade 8. Fear, all animals that live like this live in fear. People and animals are the same, except animals can be faster, smarter, hear better, see better but they don’t go around killing humans for fun. So why are we at the top of the food chain? Do we deserve to be?
Why do we make such a big deal over human slavery when we are the ones creating animal slavery, they have to work longer and harder than humans. “Humans have this very sad habit of denying the existence of any emotion or reasoning within other species but why” Because recognizing other animals as similar to us is harder. It is much harder to hurt someone you can relate to, so in order to justify the abuse of other species humans must sustain an image of us and other creatures as more dissimilar than we are. I really don’t think animals like being whipped and forced to act in circuses, I really don’t think animals like being put in a small cage all by themselves and I really don’t think animals liked having their families and friends killed.
‘Just as people began filling in the seats the elephant trainer came to untie the elephants ankle, as the chain dropped to the ground the elephant shook with fear. Forced to stand on a ball for 1 hour and if he fell he would be punished afterwards. A single tear slid down his face as he thought about his family, he was taken away when he was only 4 months old. The trainer grabbed his whip and whipped the elephant hard around the stomach just as a warning. A few years ago this elephant would have of taken this chance to run, to crush the trainer but no. This elephant was so traumatised, so broken that he just stood there, tears continuing to fall. When the elephant first taken to the circus his ankle was tied to a metal pole. He pulled and yanked for hours and hours which lead to months and months. After a year of trying the elephant gave up, believing that he would never be able to get free. As years passed the elephant grew older and stronger the elephant still never bothered to pull or yank. Although the elephant was strong enough to break free and run away, he had already given up and never bothered to try.’
No comments:
Post a Comment