This rant has a few twists. The result of a rather convoluted mind at work. Bear with me.
"Animal Lover" is now a term that can be used to describe almost anyone with a conscience. The waves of pressure on communities to care for creatures that cannot help themselves, has over the past few decades, gone from kooky to mainstream. Although, it has to be said, it now seems to be slowly veering off towards the kooky in the other direction. But that is another rant. It is admirable and worthy that people feel and act on a sense of responsibility to care for the creatures that share the planet with us.
Look at our Facebook posts and see the love and devotion that we show towards our pets. Our pets are now "a part of the family" and we carry with us, in this regard, the burdens and joys that go with the commitment that one has for a family member.
Most of us are are aware of the problems that are faced by animals in the wild, their diminishing habitats, poaching and an ever increasing number of animal speices being added to endangered lists. We believe in sustainable eco-tourism and visit elephant sanctuaries and other such wildlife rehabilitation programmes when we go on holiday.
We are, for the most part, well aware of the conditions under which the livestock that will be our dinner is reared. We are able, if we earn enough money, to make choices about what we will eat based on how our dinner is treated for the duration of its life and during the slaughtering process that end its live. We agonise about what we eat. Just how free range is free range? We don't want to eat cruel meat. Some of us go so far as to become vegans in our quest for kindness. We want our food to be raised for the table in humane conditions. We want to live and eat "authentically".
We want to be able to afford a good dinner out without feeling guilty about it so we sit in restaurants and grill the serving staff over the source of our dinner to ensure that we are not being poisoned by or being cruel to the food. And now I am getting to the point of all this......all the while, more often than not, giving very little thought to the people serving up our dinner.
The below link is a timely reminder that we need to focus on our fellow man. It is not enought to care about the animals we eat. We have to show respect and compassion for people. And we need to focus close to home. It is easy to feel empathy for a starving child in the back end of nowhere and be outraged by the misfortune inevitably inherited by the coincidence of a third world birth far away - over there. Most of us, regardless of where we live or come from, can relate to the below clip and the following link Ethical Eating.
“Men feel that cruelty to the poor is a kind of cruelty to animals. They never feel that it is an injustice to equals; nay it is treachery to comrades.” G. K Cherterton.
Now here is the killer, having been guilt tripped by the video what do we do about it?
I am not going to offer up solutions and suggestion on what we can do. I did start to rabbit on about it. Well I would - wouldn't I. I am opinionated and bossy, but as I read over what I had written I realised that all I was doing was sounding like a self righteous prig preaching way more than I really need to. And that won't do at all. What we can do to help our fellow man depends on where we live and our own circumstances. So gentle people, spare a thought, or a dime, or a vote or volunteer to make a difference in your community.
The poverty of our century is unlike that of any other. It is not, as poverty
was before, the result of natural scarcity, but of a set of priorities imposed
upon the rest of the world by the rich. Consequently, the modern poor are not
pitied... but written off as trash. The twentieth-century consumer economy has
produced the first culture for which a beggar is a reminder of nothing. ~John
Berger
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