I came across a blog today I'd like to share. I can't tell who the author was, but their views are very much in common with many of ours. I think we all need to think about the content.
"What was once cute and fluffy but became a bloody, rotten mess?
Yes...a rotten mess. The Chinese are smasing alive Racoon bears on the ground for fur...How inhumane. The cubs are helplessly caged and they bleed...My heart went out...don't they feel who are doing it?
However, do you think of life, a beating heart, and receptiveness to stimulants, feelings, and a struggle for survival amidst tremendous odds? Take a minute to stop and think of this; after all, animals aren’t the cuddly stuffed toys that you see in department stores. They are living, breathing creatures, given a life just as we humans have. They too have to live, eat, survive, and live their lives. But there is a huge difference between the way animals live and the way humans live.
Animals have to struggle for survival; they have to fight for their lives. They do not people to help take care of their babies for them, to cook for them, no family members for guidance and help – the things that humans tend to take for granted. No. Animals are solely on their own from the minute they take their first breath to the minute they take their last. They have to eat for survival, defend themselves with nothing except themselves, build their own homes, take care of and protect their young. To them life is an extremely tough existence, and they have to make do with whatever they have and cannot demand for anything more.
Sounds kind of harsh, doesn’t it? Yes, that’s an animal’s life! The world today is becoming less aware of the pain and suffering being inflicted on animals. As a result, animals are becoming even more and more downtrodden in society.
Humans have, and continue to, treat animals as if they are property, as if we can own and therefore control their lives and what happens to them. This is immoral, animals are here for themselves, animals have their own lives, and they think, have feelings, feel pain, require love (from their own species), feel emotional hurt, have families, and everything else that humans do. To just simply say that non-human animals should have no rights because they’re “defective” is a mindless statement!
People come to this “conclusion” because they come up with some mindless babble like, non-human animals can’t talk, drive cars or vote, and therefore they have no non-tradable properties. Well answer me this; do non-human animals have the right to exist in their natural environment and express behavior that matter to them? We withhold non-human animals the very basic rights, simply because they don’t resemble humans. Since they have it so harsh, why do we humans take pleasure from inflicting pain on them, from killing them? They have no defense; they do not have guns and rifles, they do not make traps and snares, nor can they retaliate.
Hunting, poaching and shooting for pleasure, or “sport”, is both sadistic and extremely cruel. Sadistic because, you kill something that cannot defend itself in any way, something who can run only so far away from you before you catch it. Poaching an animal because of its beautiful ivory tusks or its strong horn is very unfair and signifies greed. Humans can get anything they want, they can buy anything they want in a store, but these beautiful assets of tusks and horns are God-given, and they are the elephants’ and the rhinos’ to keep, they are a part of their body. The same goes for snake and crocodile hides; they are the reptiles’ skins! If only poachers could stop to think and imagine themselves being shot down by a huge crocodile or an elephant, and then be stripped of parts of their bodies, they could be a little more compassionate.
It dosn't end here....A group of people go into the countryside on horseback with a large pack of dogs and chase the first unfortunate little fox, rabbit or bear they see. The dogs do the chasing; the hunters merely follow along. Needless to say, the dogs tear up the animal upon catching it, and the hunters stand there on their horses and cheer. Yes, this is a popular “sport”!
Another extremely disturbing aspect of animal cruelty is animal testing. Animals are literally being tortured to death by substances such as drugs, cosmetics, diseases, tobacco, alcohol, detergents and other poisons. After all these acts of cruelty such as locking animals in complete darkness, literally driving them insane – the goal, believe it or not, is actually mental insanity – and then turning them in to drug addicts, inflicting diseases such as Aids and cancer, disabling them by turning them blind or deaf, and… there has even been cases of dogs being sewn together, and many cases of mice, rabbits, guinea pigs and even monkeys having cosmetics, detergents and other household products rubbed into their shaven skin and having it drip into their eyes, while being under no anesthetic at all…
All for what reason, what does this achieve? We are only finding out things we already know such as we know smoking causes cancer, drinking ruins the liver and we know the side effects of drugs on humans and the results from these experiments are not totally 100% accurate anyway because animals are different to humans. After years of developing science and technology why do we still use these unreliable and inhumanely cruel methods to find out little or no information about cures for diseases? Shouldn’t all the money and effort spent be spent on preventing these diseases in the first place by changing the environment around them instead of using all these inhumane tests on all these animals to prove nothing?
Animals are abused everyday of our lives, and right now, 100's are being tortured and killed around the world. You'd be lying if you said you'd never witnessed an act of cruelty towards an animal. But what I want to know is what did you do about it? Stop it or forget about it? There are so many problems in our world; why does animal cruelty have to be one of them?
Man is capable of the worst and of the best. We are easily capable of loving and of hating, of being clear-sighted and blind. And our relationship with the remaining animal world is a big illustration of that very fact.Animal cruelty can run the gamut from the unintentional neglect to the intentional torture of an animal.
WAKE UP...AND PLEASE SO SOMETHING...JUST THINK WHAT IF WE WERE SMASHED, BESKINNED, BEHEADED AND TESTED."
Blog at: http://unleashyourinnerself.blogspot.com/2008/12/what-was-once-cute-and-fluffy-but.html
