… the reason people once could talk to animals was not because people understood a language that we have since forgotten, but because we and the animals were and are aspects of the same being(s). This is what we have forgotten or forsaken.
The repression of our knowledge of this original kinship with animals constituted the primal moment of splitting that has enabled humans to erroneously imagine ourselves as separate from what we have corralled off and designated as “nature.” This splitting has led some of us to think that we can destroy “nature” without destroying ourselves. This initial moment of fission made possible all subsequent ones, including rape, atomic fission, gene splicing, vivisection, and so on.
The word animal is derived from a Latin word meaning “breath” or “soul.” Many human cultures, particularly my own, participate (along with our machines) in the torture and annihilation of animals. Yet as we do, it is our very souls that we are sacrificing. One of the great dangers of deforestation is the attendant depletion of the oxygen content of the atmosphere. According to Alice Walker, humans are “connected” to animals as closely as we are to trees. She warns us that by destroying animals we lose “the spiritual equivalent of oxygen.” Without wild animal life, “‘Magic’ intuition, sheer astonishment at the forms the Universe devises in which to express life—will no longer be able to breathe in us.”
… it is only when we are living in harmony with “familiar values”—when there is a communion between animals and people—that we can work magic.
(Jane Caputi, Gossips, Gorgons & Crones: The Fates of the Earth, Bear & Company, Santa Fe, 1993, pp. 152–153)
Wonderful words! I was thirteen, a long time ago, when I first learned about how animals were used in experiments, and was horrified to my core. Someone in my family was a medical professional and said it was essential for human care, but I could never believe that. A few years later I was a banquet hostess for a conference on saving animals from such experiments, and I had to lay tables surrounded by the most ghastly and heartbreaking photos. It's now decades later and the situation has improved a little, but nowhere near enough. As much as possible I use products that are free of animal cruelty, but sometimes can't afford them, and it's hard to trace products back to the original company and know whether that company, despite having one cruelty free product, also owns others that abuse animals. I fear humanity is in general so cruel, so selfish, that I don't know what hope there is for us or those forced to share the world with us.
ReplyDeleteI feel the same. Sometimes there seems to be so little hope. It certainly seems like most humans are cruel and selfish, yet I know that not all are, and that it's just an (unfortunately large) segment of humanity that is causing most of the problems. And yet even then, it's the people in power, and the corporations, who are driving the whole thing, not the individual person who is just trying to get by in whatever way they can.
Deletei love this... to separate ourselves from animals, to look down upon them or treat them without respect, is to destroy our own selves and souls. we are animals too! "the one life eats itself", true, but it does so without the routine cruelty or horrific scale of some human behaviours... reverence, gratitude, kinship are what we should be showing our non-human kindred.
ReplyDeleteAgreed. :)
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