Today is World Animal Day, but let’s just be clear… one day just isn’t enough.
Also known as Animal Lovers’ Day, today is a “global initiative for animal rights that is aimed at raising awareness about their importance in the ecosystem and improving their welfare standards.”
According to Hope Rescue Egypt, a mother dog and her puppies were buried alive outside of Cairo in Beni Suef City, yesterday. While there is no room in my heart to grasp an act like this, it should be noted that severe levels of animal cruelties like this happen on a daily basis. This needs to stop. But the fact that it needs to stop is obvious, what isn’t, however, is why it hasn’t yet.
Albeit not by everyone, animals are often mistreated in different forms. From despicable levels of violence, negligent behavior, to simply perceiving the animal as unworthy of its most basic rights, this mistreatment continues to repeat itself. For these reasons, we must revaluate the relationship we have with them.
Animals experience feelings as we do, they feel hurt, happiness, sadness and excitement. When we fail to realize that, we often risk overlooking the negative emotions we may cause them to experience. Having a pet at home does not mean having it as a comfortable, neglected asset, it does not mean leaving them unattended at home, and treating them well does not end at providing food and shelter.
They need love, they need attention, they need to feel like they matter at some points, because without these provisions, they feel uncared for. This philosophy extends itself all the way to the perhaps more obvious duties we hold, such as not beating a horse, ethically sacrificing cows, and most importantly, perceiving animals as souls who are entitled to care, just as much as we do.
To reach a level where a group of people can feel okay and comfortable with the process of burying alive a mother dog and her puppies is to know that we have lost complete touch with our senses of humanity. It is either that these people don’t feel that their actions reflect a lack of humanity, or they are aware of their lack of it, and simply don’t have a problem with it. And both possibilities are equally dreadful.
We cannot be in a place where something so cruel can be normalized. What happened reflects a point in a place where the inherent value of an animal got lost along the way, to the point that something so heartbreaking was eventually made possible.
It doesn’t matter whether you’re the kind of person who merely ignores your dog, or someone who has the capacity to bury an animal alive, and watch it suffocate, both behaviors reflect a point along the line where, for some reason, an animal’s rights no longer held an account in the equation. Well, today is world animal’s day, and it is time that we realize that what isn’t human still has the right to be treated by one.