The giraffe Marius is killed – and the world is in uproar. But what is the world truly raging about? In the aftermath of all the outrage over the killing of giraffe Marius, one could ask: Was it a sick act to kill the giraffe – or is it the world that is sick? Is the killing truly a reflection of human cynicism and evil – or is it actually animal-loving vegetarians/vegans paving the way for a natural catastrophe with their utopian dreams of a world where the laws of nature are attempted to be overturned?
It is thought-provoking how the fear of death, of pain, and of getting hurt is a common denominator for all humans and animals. No living being desires to die if it can avoid it. All life possesses a strong will to live, and all living beings will do everything to survive. Strangely enough, it is this same will that incites animals to kill and eat each other.
It is quite interesting how everything operates in this manner. It seems that everything alive lives off other living things – plants or animals. Everything dies and is reborn in this cycle of life and death. The universe consumes itself. But why does nature function in this way? Why do we need to kill other living beings to survive? Why can’t we just eat dirt and/or carcasses, so no one needs to suffer or be killed?
The Cycle of Life and Death
Nature does not concern itself with morals or ethics. It is about transformation – the transformation of energy – so that the cycle of life and death can be sustained. This has been the way for billions of years – long before humans walked the Earth. It is a fact.
Native Americans are said to have understood and accepted this natural cycle. They knew that the balance of nature depended on it. No more should be taken from the system than could be added. They hunted animals sustainably, thanking the Great Spirit and the animals for giving their lives so that humans could survive.
However, in recent years, these ancient ways have become a distant memory. Our world has become increasingly artificial and technology-based. Technology has made many people’s lives so efficient, comfortable, and protected that we no longer feel the same responsibility for our own survival – not in the sense of personally cultivating our own vegetables or hunting for our own meat. The system takes care of it for us.
So, “animals” are no longer something most people think of as something you hunt and kill to eat. Killing is something we humans only do to each other in wars – or for fun on our computer and TV screens, and animals are something you either keep as pets for companionship – or something you watch for entertainment in a zoo or on TV, where animals are assessed based on their ‘likability factor’. Animals in general – especially mammals – have become more and more human-like in our perception. They have been anthropomorphized, as Bengt Holst, the scientific director of Copenhagen Zoo, expressed it.
Wrong to Kill Animals?
Humans have become so alienated from the old ways of life and so ‘Disneyfied’ in their thinking that they have almost forgotten the fact that animals are still just as much a source of food for us humans as they have always been. But how can you blame people for thinking this way, when they are almost only presented with animals as pets in their daily lives and never see how the meat on the table actually ends up there? It is understandable that it must be difficult to see the connection between one’s cute pets and the packaged meat in the supermarket refrigerators.
Many see this development in our thinking as “progress of humanity”. But the fact is, we are only deceiving ourselves. Even though many of us may not be able to accept it, we cannot deny the fact that most people still eat meat, which means that we are basically predators. This alienated fantasy world we have created around us has not changed human desire for meat, only made people so sensitized in a way that most of us are not able to kill anymore – and not to see animals being killed either.
How can we bring ourselves to harm animals when we project ourselves into them, identify with them, and invest our emotions in them? We know that we do not like pain ourselves, and we do not want to die, so why should animals? Therefore, it feels “wrong” to kill these innocent beings. We no longer like the fact that any living beings have to lose their lives for us to eat them. The problem is that we still love the taste of animals, don’t we? So what do we do about it? How do we handle the fact that to satisfy humanity’s insatiable desire for meat, we actually have to breed billions of animals, only to kill and eat them?
The Cruel Reality
We have this romantic idea of cosy farm life with cows peacefully grazing in the sun on green fields, where they live a happy life, but in reality, nothing could be further from the truth. The truth is, almost everywhere agriculture has become a cold-hearted mass industry, where billions of animals are considered nothing but ‘products’, kept in slavery in enormous agricultural factories, out of sight, often under holocaust-like conditions, where they live a miserable existence, never seeing the light of day, force-fed with food – entirely unnatural to their species – and forced to reproduce in large numbers. As soon as there is enough meat on their bodies, they are transported and placed on conveyor belts in endless rows only to be ruthlessly slaughtered in slaughterhouses far away, where any access is strictly prohibited to outsiders. And why is that? Why do we keep meat production out of the public eye? It seems that we feel we need to protect ourselves from really having to realize how terrible we are to animals. We dare not look ourselves in the eyes. Our self-deception is phenomenal. We do not want to be confronted with the “dark” sides of humanity. The system we have created helps us to act like ostriches: stick our heads in the sand and live in blissful ignorance and indifference.
The scope of the cruel mass slaughter of animals worldwide is almost inconceivable. It seems that most people are unable to realize how much pain we truly inflict on every single one of the animals among the billions we kill with our modern way of life. What would happen if we really had to face to what extent the human race exploits animals, and how much animals suffer for our sake? Would we truly change our behaviour – or just learn to live with the guilty conscience? Many people become vegetarians or vegans to ease their guilty conscience, but most do not. As there is not much we feel we can do about the way the world is organized, we believe that we have no choice but to go with the flow. It’s easy because we are not the ones killing the animals. Others do the dirty work for us – so we forget our own responsibility in the grand scheme of things.
Primitive and Heartless?
But then… from time to time, people come across the slaughter of animals where there is a clear view of what is happening, where they witness someone still slaughtering animals in the old ways – out in the open, where everyone can see – like when the giraffe Marius was slaughtered – or when animals are slaughtered in small pockets of preserved cultures that have not fully transitioned to industrialized mass exploitation of animals yet, and therefore do not hide their meat production away from public view. Experiencing this firsthand is so shocking to unaccustomed, unprepared onlookers that they become enraged: – You evil murderers! they shout. – This atrocity does not belong in the 21st century! Why can’t you evolve like the rest of the world!
These “primitive” people or cultures carrying out these slaughters do what is deemed the most natural thing to do, seemingly without guilt – and it is very provocative, especially for those who could never bring themselves to harm animals (i.e. most of us). So, we consider ourselves “more evolved” and “morally superior” compared to these heartless individuals.
But are we really? Do we truly believe that just because we personally do not have blood on our hands, we are better than them? Is our own culture’s mass exploitation of animals truly more ethically acceptable? Is the highly industrialized mass breeding and killing of animals not even more sinister and perverted? Referring to seeing “the speck in your brother’s eye” but not “the beam in your own eye”…
Our Inner Wounded Predator
To justify ourselves, we begin to make a more or less absurd distinction between animals – as if some animals have more value than others and deserve our care more than others. Mammals, to which we ourselves belong, are absolutely the most preferred on the value list because they are the “cutest”. But we still eat mammals, including intelligent mammals.
Why do we think it is okay to eat one kind of mammal but not another kind of mammal? A life is a life, isn’t it? Why should, for example, the life of domestic animals be less valuable than the life of wild animals? Isn’t the only difference just that domestic animals are unlucky to have been born into a century where exploitation and slavery of these types of animals have evolved into the most extensive yet in human history? But does that mean it is more “natural” or ethically acceptable to kill and eat these animals?
What is really happening here? one could ask. Is it that we – in our quest to eradicate all evil in this world – are so repulsed by the reminders of the predator in us – our own nature – that when we see others play out what we no longer accept in ourselves, we become angry? Are we just projecting our fear and frustrations over our own hopeless alienation from our natural selves onto others who represent what we hate to admit is a part of our own human nature? Very convenient for us, these events open a valve through which we can release the pent-up steam.
Escape from the Guilty Conscience
Bottom line: Many people feel so uncomfortable with the fact that blood must be shed in order for us to have meat on the table, that we now defy and challenge the laws of nature, trying to find a way out of this ‘evil’ cycle of life and death, which was completely natural for billions of years. The first idea that comes to mind is this: Why don’t we all just eat plants? It would solve the problem, wouldn’t it?
And then again… it’s a problematic path to take, because it goes against millions of years of evolution. And would it really solve our ethical dilemma? Could it not just lead to more questions? On the other hand: What makes us think it’s okay to kill and eat one kind of living beings – such as plants – and not another kind of living beings – such as animals? Don’t plants also have the will to live – just like animals? They have no chance to defend themselves. Is it okay for us to take advantage of that?
I wonder what would happen if people found evidence that plants also have something akin to sensitivity, emotions, or even a form of intelligence. Maybe we should only eat ripe fruit that has fallen to the ground and is already dying anyway…
What if we all became vegetarians, or if we – as the intelligent beings we are – found ways to just eat food that was 100% synthetically produced? Would it really change anything? Isn’t it just another side of the same coin? Isn’t it all about trying to find a clever way to escape from our own self-created guilty conscience that our bread is someone else’s death?
Opposing the Eco-system
Lastly, it is challenging to live up to the moral standards some people have developed today. It almost seems impossible to eat something without feeling guilty in some way or having a pang of conscience. But if we truly, seriously, made an effort to find alternative food sources that could be accepted as ethically “correct” today, wouldn’t it be the same as opposing the framework of how the entire ecosystem operates – and always has?
What about the fact that animals eat each other, just as they always have? Is it also “immoral” when animals do it? Why should animals have this “right” to cause the death of other animals, if humans are denied the same “rights”? It’s mind-boggling to the absurd. If we are to be consistent, shouldn’t we also prevent animals from inflicting pain on others and stop them from eating each other?
But what would happen to the ecosystem if we implemented this and truly tried to implement such an idea? Is it possible to eradicate all “evil” – all fear, all pain, all death – in this world? Wouldn’t we just tip the balance of nature and cause a catastrophe, instead of the utopia we dream of, if we went too far in that direction?
What makes us humans today – in the relatively short period we have walked on this planet since the beginning of time – so special and so different that we must change something as fundamentally natural as the cycle of life and death? Is that okay? I’m just asking.
What are We Protecting Children From?
Giraffe Marius was killed to maintain balance in the giraffe population, quite simply. There isn’t much more to it in reality. It’s the most advantageous for the population as a whole. Marius had to be killed – and so the opportunity was taken to teach the children about how nature works. The lions could enjoy some good meat, which is natural for them to eat. In reality, a win-win situation for everyone except Marius himself, who is now dead – and therefore unaware of being the loser.
But this rational way of dealing with such matters is seen as evil cynicism that must be hidden at all costs from our children, so they can still be lulled into candy floss and Disney duvets with sweet little Bambi figures. But what are we protecting children from? What kind of coddled generation are we creating? Are we not doing the children a disservice by hiding the realities of life and death from them and pathologizing the natural?
If we suppress what is natural and hide it away, are we not just creating an artificial, false, and distorted world instead, which in the long run will make us all sick? Because the natural does not disappear by sweeping it under the rug. Sooner or later, it seeps through the cracks, probably in sick and perverted ways, because we have been raised to fear and hate the natural. That doesn’t sound like a pleasant world to live in.
