Mercy, Mercy, Mercy

Making your way in the world today takes everything you've got.

Taking a break from all your worries sure would help a lot.

Wouldn't you like to get away?

Sometimes you want to go

Where everybody knows your name,

And they're always glad you came.

You wanna be where you can see,

Our troubles are all the same

You wanna be where everybody knows your name.

“Cheers” Theme Song

Sometimes I wish I could live in a place containing only people who think like I do, especially about the things that I hold important.  ‘People who try to kind’ would be number one on that list.  I am not asking for much, because I know that there are not many people in this world who are as weird as I am, so we would only need a very small area. 

Yes, I know that diversity brings interest to your life and stretches and expands your horizons.  But most of the diversity I meet on a daily basis just makes me sad.  I am tired of rubbing shoulders with people who are unkind – to children, to older people, to poorer people, to people with handicaps, and most especially to animals.  I don’t want to be with them.  As the Desiderata says, they are injurious to my spirit.  They fill the air I breathe with toxicity. I just want to be with people who reflect who I am.  People who I don’t have to explain myself to, to justify my thoughts to, to argue with or force myself to ignore. I want a meeting of minds.  I want to be around soul mates.

Imagine somebody cheerfully announcing that he killed two puppies from his female’s litter because they did not meet the breed’s standard.  Not because they had an incurable disease.  Not because they were so badly deformed that living would have been agony for them.  Simply because they were not perfect, according to what some book told him perfection should be.  He felt he was being heroic and self sacrificing in not selling or giving away those puppies because his ethical code would not allow him to risk these sub-perfect specimens reproducing with another owner. 

"Anyone who has accustomed himself to regard the life of any living creature as worthless is in danger of arriving also at the idea of worthless human lives."

- Albert Schweitzer, (Alsatian Theologian, Musician, and Medical Missionary)

How can I begin to express how deeply depressing I found this to be?  I wanted to scream at him “You’re not ethical, you’re maniacal!” but I knew that would end badly and nothing would change. I thought about calmly stating my dissent in a civilized and measured manner because I felt disgusted that my silence would seem to be condoning what he was doing. But ultimately I just wanted to slowly, carefully, back away from him, like you would back away from a cobra with venom dripping from his fangs. I felt sick.

“Dogs are not humans.  We are not obligated to treat them the same way we treat humans. In fact, it is bad if we do.”  Over and over again, I’ve heard so many variations of this theme that I’ve lost track.  No, dogs are not humans – but they are thinking, feeling beings with emotions that include trust, loyalty and unconditional forgiveness towards their human masters.  And I stress the word “masters” because it is the part of dog ownership that a lot of people like the best – to be in total control of something with a pumping heart, and millions of cells and nerves and chromosomes and synapses that we could never in a million years hope to recreate. We can’t make it, but we can destroy it – the power of destruction with impunity, with no repercussions, is in the hands of any idiot who can walk into the TTSPCA or visit a breeder and plunk down some money, or beg, borrow or steal a dog.

And I would argue that we do treat dogs the same way we treat humans.  Historically, mankind has raped, murdered, enslaved, tortured and oppressed his fellow humans, and still continues to do so. Hopefully putting aside the rape, we do the same to dogs. Many years ago I read a book called The Chrysalids by John Wyndham – I still have it, battered and falling apart.  It was about a world after the final holocaust, where because of the radiation from the nuclear warheads used in the war, the chances of breeding true to the standards (which its inhabitants found in a book called The Bible) were less than 50%.  Deviations to the breed standard were considered abominations and rooted out and destroyed – animals, crops and humans.  Fiction based in fact. People who would kill a child for having an extra thumb, as was done in the book, are based on the same people who would burn a young woman at the stake for having a mole under her arm, or put a dog in a bag and throw it in the sea to drown because it dug up a flower bed – or did not have a correctly curved tail.

As Shakespeare said, “the quality of mercy is not strained.”  Mercy is mercy is mercy.  You can’t say you are a merciful person, or a kind person, or a loving person and then decide who you are going to be merciful and kind and loving towards. You can’t filter your mercy. Hitler was kind to children and dogs – German children and German Sheppard Dogs.  Did that make him eligible for the Noble Peace Prize? 

There was a woman once who wrote a critically acclaimed book on dog training.  It was a masterpiece of prose and beautiful poetical allusions.  And it related how she dug holes, day after day, and filled them with water and held her dog’s head under the water, day after day, in punishment for the dog digging up her garden.  Did authoring a beautifully written book make her a merciful person? Because she was a well respected dog trainer, were her actions kind? No, on both counts. But thousands of people read what she had written and calmly accepted her cruelty to that dog - and even applied it to their own dogs.

When I first went to live in Canada, I never saw anybody living on the street. It would have caused an uproar if Torontonians discovered that people were eating out of their garbage cans.  I went back to visit years after returning to Trinidad and was shocked to see Yonge Street filled with homeless people.  And nobody saw them.  I still remember the first time I saw a woman driving a taxi in Trinidad – I was so surprised, (and delighted) that I couldn’t stop talking about it for hours afterwards.  Now, I don’t even notice the hundreds of female drivers we have on the roads. What has this got to do with cruelty?  I am making the point that if we are immersed in a certain way of doing things for long enough we don’t see what we are doing.  We can act cruelly without even thinking about it being cruel. We just accept it as the way things are and it becomes okay for things to be that way.  We stop questioning the status quo, especially if no one else around us is doing it.  We become cruel because we stop seeing. We stop seeing the dog.  We see only the breed.  The species.

Compassion for animals is intimately connected with goodness of character and it may be confidently asserted that he who is cruel to animals cannot be a good man."

- Arthur Schopenhauer, (German Philosopher)

Yes, we are the masters.  But it is the dogs who are merciful and forgiving.  Perhaps, instead of humans training dogs, dogs should teach humans how to be humane.