The next morning, I got an uncharacteristically early start. I know it was early (for me) because the McDonalds outside Billings, Montana, was still serving breakfast.
At the time I was a lacto-ovo vegetarian, eating eggs and other dairy products. So for breakfast I had an egg biscuit and a SUPERSIZE coke. I’m an ethical vegetarian, not a healthy one.
Fog was rising off the surface of Lake of the Isles, so it must have been evening. There was no snow, so it must have been August. I was still in Minnesota, so I must have been married.
Hundreds of Canadian geese roamed the Minneapolis park around Lake of the Isles from early spring until they departed for more temperate climes in the late fall. I always enjoyed their company. But they did make something of a mess (literally) and I guess people complained.
A metal pen had been erected down by the shore, and several dozen geese were being held prisoner. One by one, workers were taking geese out of the pen and carrying them to a white panel truck with an unrecognizable but official-looking logo.
Most likely, they were being relocated to other areas around the state. Minnesota has many lakes, probably more than the proverbial ten thousand. The city of Minneapolis itself supposedly has 18 lakes, though I knew of only four. But as far as the geese knew, they were being kidnapped.
The workers were not gentle, but I imagine it’s hard to be gentle when you have a full-grown goose struggling in your arms. As each bird was snatched away from the enclosure and hauled to the truck, it began to cry. Not squawk or honk or some other non-human word. Cry.
Our path to the world shapes us more than we know. The human world is a playground of objects, ready to hand for need or entertainment. To keep it that way, we shelter ourselves from the consequences and consciousness of our actions, insulated by institutions and traditions and worldviews that condone our marauding methodologies. Our indulgence is self-confirmed by need and greed.
My father was an artist with a carving knife. He grew up on a farm in Iowa and later worked as a cutter in meat-packing plants. I know he respected my compassion for animals, but I suspect it puzzled him too. Land and animals for him were something to live off, not something to live with. Except for dogs, of course, who were always accorded family membership.
Many people defend carnivorous behavior as part of their heritage. This argument has the rigor of a child’s tantrum: Tommy did it, why can’t I? The heritage argument is also selective. Our history also includes cannibalism and the Spanish Inquisition, but I don’t hear much pining for them (unless you watch Monty Python or listen to Talk Radio). Killing animals for sport is cruel. Killing animals for food is (or should be) unnecessary. But it’s more honest than a trip to the grocery store, or a McDonalds.
If morality is not convincing, you would think self-interest might be. We endanger ourselves each time we endanger animals. Throughout human history, when one group wants to control or destroy another, the first step is to name them: Animals, they say. Not really Human. Undeserving of rights, money, peace, freedom, life, or whatever else has become the object of acquisition.
The way we treat animals is the way we may one day be treated, even disallowing the possibility of reincarnation. In an enlightening episode of The Twilight Zone TV show, aliens invite humans to go to their home planet. An alien book falls into human hands and the title is translated as How to Serve Man. Too late, we discover it’s a cookbook.
An alien invasion may be necessary to get us to change. It’s a question of values, which is to say, a question without a rational answer. Ants have their values inbred in their antennae, which detect the morality of the nest by aroma. We humans conjure our values in survival mode out of our DNA, then decorate the consequences with nature’s tools: logic, emotion, and five mere senses.
Moral argument is an oxymoron, a fallacy more pathetic than the Pathetic Fallacy. To be convinced, just watch the Sunday morning political talk shows. The technique is to start from a moral axiom and then erect a logical fortress around it. Since the starting points are not coherent, argument never ends in agreement, no matter what rational bridges we build.
In such an atmosphere, politics becomes the art of the possible and not the art of possibility. Already, this century (and the previous century and the one before that and the one before that) provides ample proof that humans can be convinced to commit any act, no matter how inconceivably horrible to others.
Nature teaches the tyranny of the gene, the tautology of the fittest. Nature cherishes process, the coming to be and the passing away. The Ten Commandments were written on stone, not in stone.
To live is to choose. But we are a fortunate generation in this sense: new choices are available. We don’t have to kill to survive. We don’t have to despoil the land to acquire as much as we can against the winter’s deprivations. This is the dawning of the Age of Aquarius.
The Anthropomorphic life is not easy. If I am ever arrested for drunk driving, it will be motoring down a country lane after sunset, swerving desperately to avoid the fireflies.
Each day, we choose: to kill or not to kill. Each day, I choose not to kill. The hopeful aspect is, this is something I have learned. I’ve never gone back and never regretted it. There are aspects of life we can’t change. We need to pay attention to those we can. People can choose compassion, changing their lives, or at least the living.
It can be done.
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