Violence Against Life

It is only been in the last century that people have begun to believe that violence against animals could be considered morally and legally wrong. To put that in perspective, it has only been a few hundred years since people began to believe the same about violence against women. Violence is a way for humans (to be specific, it is generally humans who identify as "men") to establish control over other people or animals, it's a way to express anger, and it's a way to punish, which may result in death. The Animal Legal Defense Fund has been working hard to establish a legal precedent for the link between animal cruelty and domestic violence. Many of their cases have been successful because the evidence is so damning.

Not quite domestic violence, but definitely connected, was the recent case of Russell Swigart. He became enraged at his female co-worker, broke into her house while she was out of town, killed her cats, and then texted her to describe the ways in which they had died at his hands. He went to jail and was recently up for parole. 15,000 signatures were gathered to help the victim of his crimes keep him in jail (http://www.aldf.org/article.php?id=1627).

I think in our culture, and many others, we are taught that there is something "natural" or inevitable about cruelty to animals. They are separated from humans by some arbitrary differences, so we don't have to follow the same ideas about preserving life. Not only do we eat them for the pleasure of their taste on a regular basis, but we smack them around when they annoy us, we abandon them to starvation, disease or danger, we use them for our benefit and then toss them away, our children are given BB guns to go out and amuse themselves by shooting at anything that moves, our big manly men (and Sarah Palin) go out and prove themselves by blasting away anything that moves with automatic rifles...the list kind of never ends. We aren't taught to value their lives like we're supposed (at least legally) to value human life. Some people even believe it's better for people to get out their frustrations through violence to animals because at least it keeps them from hurting other people. But that's not the way it works. Cruelty to animals is almost always a precursor to violence against people, if not a direct method of terrorizing the intended human victim (as in the case of this West Virginia man in March of 2011: http://www.wtov9.com/news/27148515/detail.html).

Full disclosure, I saw a dead cat in the street on my way home from work, which always spins my mind out to a really sad and frustrated place. Someone let that cat live outside in a busy neighborhood, someone hit that cat with their car and kept driving, someone else ran over its inert body in the street, and everyone else let its remains sit in the middle of the road for the rest of the day. I myself could not bring myself to go out and bury it, mostly because it will require me crying on the side of a busy street for about an hour. These characteristics of empathy for animals that I have are considered ridiculous and impractical by most people. It is maybe too inconvenient and overwhelming to let oneself think about the suffering of other lives - one can barely let oneself think about the experiences of people who have different skin tones or cultural practices, let alone all the billions of non-human creatures out there.