Poor pets

The novel coronavirus pandemic has forced the world into a lockdown and put a spotlight on political leaders as well as their ability to respond to such an extreme and unpredictable scenario. While authorities across the world struggle to grapple with this bio-menace, it seems we are threatened to give up a bit of our humanity in this frantic quest of self-preservation. There are stories of individual heroes — the medics who are working tirelessly to save lives even at the risk of their own; the security services that have been enforcing social distances; and of course those engaged with ensuring essential supplies. And there are others who sought to help those that are unable to help themselves, like scores of pets left locked in pet stores across the country as lockdowns were announced overnight.

Left out of the list of essential services because they do not offer any survival element for homo sapiens, hundreds of pets — trapped in dark, unventilated stores for days — starved. Those that survived were left caged with the carcasses of their companions. The dead rotted and the living sank in their own multiplying, putrid excrement. No more able to bear their screams and scratching from behind closed shutters, pet store owners, animal lovers and animal rights activists risked arrest and even infection by the invisible virus to attend to the surviving animals and extend to them the branch of life in major cities of the country viz, Karachi, Lahore and Rawalpindi.

The sad fact, however, is that the district administration in each of these cities had to be explained that it was our moral and ethical responsibility as humans and as believers to also care for these animals in such desperate times, and that the abandonment of these creatures is akin to losing our humanity. Fortunately, we proved that we still have a shred of soul left within us. 

Published in The Express Tribune, April 10^th, 2020.

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