More Compassion for Animals
Our relationships with animals other than ourselves are complicated, frustrating, ambiguous, paradoxical, and range all over the place.
When people tell me that they love animals and then harm or kill them, I tell them I’m glad they don’t love me.
We observe animals, gawk at them in wonder, experiment on them, eat them, wear them, write about them, draw and paint them, move them from here to there as we “redecorate nature,” make decisions for them without their consent, yet we often dispassionately ignore who they are and what they want and need.
Compassion is the key for bettering animal and human lives. People all over the globe are talking about ways to lighten our carbon footprint and accrue carbon credits. But what about our compassion footprint and compassion credits?
A good way to make the world a more compassionate and peaceful place for all animals, to increase our compassion footprint, is to “mind” them. “Minding” animals means that we must recognize that they have active minds and feelings. We must also “mind” them as their caretakers in a human-dominated world in which their interests are continually trumped in deference to ours.
The rest of the story here.
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