Cruelty

I hate any form of cruelty and abuse. People say if you want to get a reaction from me, serve me with injustice and watch me unfold from a quiet introvert into an avenging angel full of wrath and purpose. I cannot tolerate injustice. If there is something that keeps me awake at night, that’s it.

I detest cruelty to animals, even though I was born and brought up in a place where pouring a boiling water over a stray cat for stealing your dinner over and over again or eating the entire inhabitants of your aviary is justified and nobody will crucify no one for doing it. We find it normal, like spanking our children to discipline them. Part of our tradition and culture (not the pouring of boiling water) part of life.

Probably some of you will disagree if I say I don’t find punishing the cats or eating dogs (I never done it yet though) a cruelty. It is a form of violence but not cruelty. In my book there is a vast difference between the two and I can say that I prefer the first than the latter. Violence can be merciful. Let me tell you why.

Cruelty always involved some kind of torture for a long period of time and over and over again. It is a recurrent act of violence without mercy and most of the time psychological.

Take for example those caged/captured animals in the zoo, circus or children’s fair where they tied the ponies behind each other and let them walk in tight circle over and over again carrying kids on their backs. I find it cruel. Forcing elephants (or lions) to learn tricks using whips or bears to dance, that is cruel. My ex gassing the kittens of my son because he didn’t want to have them in the house, or digging out the eyes of my son’s pet rabbits hanging them on the wash line feet up so the blood drips out of the cavity better he said- that’s cruelty. I rather he slits the throats of the rabbits swift and clean so the poor animals won’t suffer. But this is the guy whom during one of his episodes let my parakeets out in the middle of the winter and flushed my goldfish in the toilet. What can I expect?

Cruelty is pruning big trees every year to a certain desired shapes or height till they become unrecognizable. Just a stump with twigs sprouting on top. Or subjecting them to the process of espaliering for what? For experiment? For produce? For aesthetic?

Cruelty is what they did to James Bulger  and what Marc Dutroux  did to those poor innocent children. Violence is what IS is busy right now and cruelty is what they practice in Guantanamo Bay and Gulag.

Don’t get me wrong, I loath both practice but if I can choose, I will opt for swift violent death than long time of torture and abuse. I open pray that if my children are going to die, let it be in an accident or natural cause rather than being abducted and subjected to all kinds of horror.

I find passive-aggressive behavior a form of cruelty. It is mean, damaging and deliberate. Deliberate cruelty is unforgivable. I rather meet a hostile person heads on than deal with passive – aggressive individuals. In my eyes they are more dangerous. You never know where you are with them because they are a master in manipulation and deceit. 

Man is the cruelest animal. Friedrich Nietzsche said. And Fyodor Dostoyevsky agreed by stating: People speak sometimes about the “bestial” cruelty of man, but that is terribly unjust and offensive to beasts, no animal could ever be so cruel as a man, so artfully, so artistically cruel.

I agree. Cruelty in humans starts early in life. Look at those bullies in schools and playgrounds and now online. People are masters of devising perverts thoughts and acts out of boredom. I don’t see animals doing it.

No wonder there are numbers of studies dedicated solely to human’s behavior and evil. Anthropology, social psychology, history, philosophy, and political science are just a few. How about  psychology and neuroscience?

A wise man said:  cruelty is always topical. I’d love to live in a world where it wasn’t — perhaps the kind of world imagined by the political scientist Glenn Paige. But if that world exists anywhere in the space-time continuum, it isn’t here and now on planet Earth…