Mercy

“I wonder what would the animals and trees around us tell us if they could speak. What would our rivers say about human history and what would our cattle say on the topic of human rights. We have trampled on their rights for long, and now the results are before us.”

Draupadi Murmu, President of India

It feels good to hear that the President of India thinks of what nonhuman animals would think of what humans have done to them. 

(It would of course be even better if the President could do something about it – although India already eats proportionately fewer animals than any other nation on Earth.)

Sentient animals need not think of what we have done to them: They feel it (those that are still alive). 

Rivers neither live nor feel nor think, but they are among the inanimate necessities of which we are depriving all sentient life, including our own. 

[Whether plants feel or think will be the subject of a forthcoming target article and multiple commentary in Animal Sentience. —- I think not (but they are alive, and I love them).]

So many humans think that animals don’t feel, or don’t care that they feel. 

Animals’ lives are unspeakably, unimaginably, unforgivably wretched, because of us. What they need, desperately, is not animism, but action, not metaphors, but mercy.