The question of animal rights

A part of me died the other day as I shuttled through the city. It wasn’t because of the pungent body odours permeating the air of the airport. It wasn’t the sight of paan graffiti adorning walls that did it. The gaping stares of strangers were awful but they weren’t the cause of it either.

I saw a donkey with gashes on its skin pulling a ridiculous amount of load on a cart. The stack also included a barbaric individual that would beat the poor soul each time it slowed down. Now that got to me — animal slavery.

Most of us probably visit zoos with kids because they enjoy watching animals confined. I wasn’t one of those kids. At the age of five when I visited the zoo for the first time, my parents remember clearly to date how upset I got. It’s barbaric to cash in on animals and use them as a source of entertainment. Same goes for Sea World, and the circus. We don’t realise the pain and agony animals go through. Elephants are beaten and starved so they learn those stupid tricks that make an idiot audience laugh. A shameful number of people take pleasure standing on dolphins’ noses for ‘fun’. Innocent orcas and baby dolphins are separated from their families and made captive for the sake of an ugly money-making business. Instead of seeing the revolting truth behind these animal prisons, we cheer this barbarism with gurgles of laughter.

We say that animals are not like us therefore, we think they are less than us. We say they lack self-awareness but what we really mean is they lack ‘human-like’ self-awareness. They have thoughts, feelings, preferences, interests. They have amazing memories, can anticipate the future, and recognise sometimes hundreds of other individuals even of other species.

Teaching your children that laughing at animals is fun, that your own entertainment overrides someone else’s autonomy, is a terrible kind of upbringing. That the agony and the terror and the misery and the blatantly disrespectful act of taking a life are nothing compared to the glory. Suffering is suffering. It is always ugly. It is always unwelcome. It always needs to be stopped. There are no exceptions. A person with the capacity but not the inclination to cease suffering is morally incomplete. Animals are not our playthings. We are on this earth to protect them. It’s our duty. When it comes to animal rights, it’s better to be outspoken than unspoken. To the beautiful animals that lost their lives today in the name of human entertainment: I’m so sorry. You deserve so much better.

Published in The Express Tribune, December 9^th, 2014.