Journalism blog dedicated to stories that either receive little attention in the media or don't get the attention they deserve. With the exception of outrageous conduct that screams for condemnation, all Bullwork of Democracy reporting strives to be unbiased. Tweeting @cccheney
More than a dozen skinned cats hang on hooks at the Yulin Meat Festival in China. The People's Republic also has a massive dog meat trade, with as many as 20 million canines slaughtered annually for human consumption. /Reuters image
On the timeline of human evolution, civilization has existed for the blink of an eye.
There may be no better illustration of humanity's relatively brief development of civilization than the Yulin Meat Festival. Humane Society International has documented this horrific celebration of the dog-and-cat meat trade in China. But if anyone wants to confirm the existence of this extreme barbarism in the 21st century, all they have to do is Google search images of the festival. Warning: These photographs are unbearable if you have a semblance of a conscience.
Depending on which distant ancestral species you pick for homo sapiens, the human brain is rooted in an evolutionary timeline about 3 million years deep. Humans have been developing the trappings of civilization such as written language for about 40,000 years, which is a figure that generously considers cave paintings as a form of written communication. In other words, humanity and its bipedal forebearers have spent 99 percent of their time on Earth as savages.
The mass slaughter of humans' primary animal companions in China--and the rest of humanity turning a blind eye to the practice--reflects who we are as a species. It is not a pretty picture.
Chop Chop was a great companion but an awful editorial assistant. /Family photo
I lost one of my best friends yesterday.
Anyone who thinks house cats lack personality, intelligence and complex emotions never met Chop Chop.
When I was working nights at the Portsmouth Herald, she would hear my car pull into the driveway at 1 a.m. and greet me at the door. She knew how to push my buttons when she was hungry and wanted more food in her bowl. She fought cancer for the past two years, but she was filled with love until the moment she took her last breath at the vet's office.
Humans are not the only sentient beings on this planet.
Dolphins have been observed swimming in groups of more than 60 individuals. /Image via tecnewsgator.com
Communication and complex social groups are two of humanity's defining characteristics. Dolphins can communicate over great distances and form social groups in sizes from mother-child pairs to congregations of pods. Dolphins also exhibit several other social behaviors:
Dolphin interspecies sex in the Bahamas: "It is possible for conflicts to arise when the two species encounter each other in overlapping areas of their range. Interspecific sexual interactions might serve to diffuse tensions in mixed-species groups."
There is a mountain of evidence that humans are far from alone in the animal kingdom in possessing complex emotions such as compassion and the ability to form intricate social bonds such as friendships. The video above that was released by PBS' Nature program in November provides several compelling examples of this evidence in species including canines, goats, monkeys, horses and felines.
I first became interested in this topic many years ago, when I saw a video on elephants. Early studies of these massive animals demonstrated highly complex social structures built around a dominant female elephant and the ability to communicate vocally over long distances. The evidence of emotions in elephants that I have found most convincing is their behavior when encountering elephant remains. There are several examples of these encounters available on YouTube. In these encounters, elephants exhibit a set of behaviors that demonstrates what can only be described as deeply felt emotion, from members of an elephant group falling unusually silent as they gather around elephant bones to ritualistic interactions with the remains.
This mountain of evidence begs the question: How should this knowledge of emotion and even consciousness in other animals affect humanity's interactions with other members of the animal kingdom?
Many countries, including the United States, have already granted protected status to several species that have demonstrated human-like intellectual capacities such as chimpanzees and marine mammals. But whether humans like it or not, we must eat to survive, and even a corn muffin was at one point a living thing. After an exhaustive and global examination of this dilemma is conducted, I suggest the creation of an Animal Kingdom Bill of Rights.
The first article of this international treaty could be a prohibition against animal species genocide. The decimation of the elephant population, which once stretched in contiguous territory from the Horn of Africa to Southeast Asia, is clearly genocidal. Recent studies of marauding elephant males indicate a breakdown in elephant society similar to the strains in human societies that have been subject to genocide.
The second article of an Animal Kingdom Bill of Rights could abolish cruel treatment of non-human animal species. Most of my ancestors were New England farmers. It broke my grandfather's heart when he saw the man who bought his farm beating an ox with a chain. Ethical farmers treat their animals humanely. Most of the cattle raised to produce beef and dairy products in the United States live in feedlots, enclosures prone to knee-deep mud that are so prone to disease that anti-biotics have become a staple of the food given to U.S. cattle. Feedlots are clearly an example of cruelty and should be reformed or banned.
A dairy cow stands knee-deep in a muddy feedlot. /USDA image
