pet connection

I read a Reuters report this morning from Berlin, “Man’s Homemade Mole Killer Kills Him Instead.” Before I even read the article I thought: Serves him right. I felt sorry for the moles and not the man. I don’t like that quality in myself, but know I’m not alone.

In reading the article I found out that a 63-year-old German construction foreman retiree had wired up a high-voltage cable (380-volts — enough to run a cement mixer or heavy-duty power saw) and connected it to metal spikes driven into the ground to try to wipe out the moles digging up his garden. The man was found dead next to the electrical apparatus. Uwe Werner, the police spokersperson in Stralsund north of Berlin, said, “The moles survived.”

Back to my shrugging indifference to the man’s misery. I think many if not most of us have had such sustained exposure to human pain, misery and death that we’ve somehow become numb and accepting of it. Repeated exposure to violence on television and movies has desensitized us. Plus, at some level we think the human either had it coming or could have taken steps to prevent it.

But with animals, we think of them as innocent victims, without fault, guile, hidden agendas, performances, posturing for personal gain. They are as my minister would say, without sin. So we watch the news on TV, read the newspaper or catch up online and find that natural disasters have struck a blow to humanity, people have been shot, beaten, kidnapped or killed (electrocuted) and it doesn’t raise our emotional temperature a degree. But if an animal has been abused, suffered or killed we’re appalled, sickened, furious, ready to march in the streets. Our emotions are boiling over.

How can we recapture the empathy we once had for all mankind without it being at the expense of our beloved animals?