Animals and Suffering

I recently read a post which described some of the harsher aspects of raising sheep commercially. I thought a bit more about my own relationship with animals and how I feel about their experiencing of life...

I grew up with cows, pets and wild animals. There were probably more non-human mammals inside the boundaries of my home town than humans. Maybe even without counting the cows! In this environment and given my mother's strong habit of anthropomorphizing pets, I learned as a child that animals were part of the family.

We went through many dogs when I was younger. We had one that got hit by a car, one that ran away, one that bit me and my father had to put it down - in my town, this last was done gangland execution style with a pistol. It seems I must have also learned that certain family members could be removed under the right circumstances - an observation that only came to me for the first time while reading a recent post.

The upshot of all this is that, to me, animals are people too. I don't attribute them with sentience, but who says people can't come in different flavors? I do observe emotional behavior and the obvious effects of sensation. I eat meat and wear leather, but I deplore efficient animal factories where life is perverted to produce resources for human consumption. Life is interdependent and it is not so ugly to consider different species living off each other in various ways. What seems sad to me is when a life form is intentionally robbed of the chance to follow its instincts and luxuriate in the glory of being alive. To live only to die seems somehow a diminishing of that magic time between coming and going.

I do learn from even the most tragic scenarios I run across, a kind of symbiotic act, but I also feel empathy as I learn and this is natural and confirms my humanity. On the road recently I saw a dead squirrel, flattened by traffic. Further on, a pigeon lay broken. It was a beautiful summer day, sort of the start of Spring for me as the temperature had risen enough that I had donned shorts for the first time. I thought of how the day might have gone for those two animals up until death, flitting about in the pleasure of warm weather and pursuing their little seasonal animal urges. Then all the promise of Spring ended abruptly.

Did I learn anything from their deaths? Almost my first thought after the above one was that I should enjoy this moment of my ride home because I might not see the end of the trip, which was only five more minutes in length. When life ends for one being, it may being value to another that still lives. This is not a bad thing. What corrupts the process is when we do not celebrate life while it is here.

As for suffering, if we think of pain or death as harsh, then life is harsh. If we think of life as beautiful, then are pain and death not beautiful as well?