I, personally, disapprove of animal cruelty for entertainment, but my personal opinion really means little in the great scheme of things. I mean, as a person, imagine yourself being struck and killed by a car. Accidents happen. Flat tire, car goes out of control, a person is killed. Nothing malicious, just an act of fate. OR it might be someone playing a live version of GTA, getting his kicks out of running over people for the enjoyment of killing living people.
Now, as a person, in your last moments on this earth, does it really matter the REASON why you’re dying? Does it make any difference to you that someone has killed you for pleasure as opposed to killing you by accident?
As I said, I’m against animal cruelty as a personal belief, and I live my life to that extent. Which is all well and good for MY life. But expecting others to live THEIR lives according to MY principles is total arrogance (not to mention utterly futile). And bragging about my “principles” is just an attempt to appear somehow superior to others. A position obviously not yet attained by the sheer need to brag about it and insist that others adopt my viewpoint.
Then again, maybe I really don’t have a position against animal cruelty since I do hunt, and enjoy placing a good shot to bring an animal down. To each his own.
“Wrong. Your antennae you keep and I’ll tell you why. So that every shriek of every ladybug at seeing your hideousness will be yours to cherish. Every grasshopper that weeps at your approach, every mosquito who cries out, “Dear God! What is that thing,” will echo in your perfect antennae. That is what to the pain means. It means I leave you in anguish, wallowing in freakish misery forever.”
“You do realize that antennae don’t sense sound? They’re olfactory organs.”
“Really? No shit?”
“Yup.”
“Okay, how about…You killed my father. Prepare to die!”
“Your father? We’re ants. We’re a matriarchal society with a single mother.”
“Alright…give me a minute…maybe a Monty Python line…”
It doesn’t make any difference to ‘you’, because ‘you’ are dead. For the rest of society though, it’s more reassuring to be able to put death down to an accident, or a necessity, rather than somebody else’s boredom. The former is bad luck or fate - the latter is, at best, sociopathic.
Okay, so I’m still alive, but it’s my wife or kids that died. As someone who is still alive, who’s still part of society, does it really matter to me that she or they died as a result of an accident or by someone’s boredom? Dead is still dead. I’m not going to go skipping merrily through the rest of my life, thinking gee, it’s a really good thing they only died by accident.
The last guy who uttered that worthless phrase at my mother’s funeral, “At least she’s in a better place, now,” needed surgery to repair what was left of his teeth.
