Mindless Cruelty
My dilemma is this: I know it is morally wrong to kill something needlessly but nature does not make such a distinction. If I follow nature's way and kill something, does that make it alright?
I hate slugs, they are repulsive, and destructive to our plants. The only good that I think they do is to provide a food source for birds and other small creatures. For that reason, and probably that reason alone, I don't like putting down slug pellets to poison them.
I put a log on the fire, and as I fiddled it round into position I felt something slimy in a spot where the bark had peeled away. I turned the log around and found that a slug was stuck to the bare wood.
So, what would you have done? Left it on the log and put it back on the fire, or taken it off and thrown it outside?
I did what I felt was right, much to Little Petal's scornful amusement. But then, I have to live with myself. The distinction I make is that a Thrush eating a slug is nature's way, but my knowingly putting on the fire to burn is mindless cruelty.
I hate slugs, they are repulsive, and destructive to our plants. The only good that I think they do is to provide a food source for birds and other small creatures. For that reason, and probably that reason alone, I don't like putting down slug pellets to poison them.
I put a log on the fire, and as I fiddled it round into position I felt something slimy in a spot where the bark had peeled away. I turned the log around and found that a slug was stuck to the bare wood.
So, what would you have done? Left it on the log and put it back on the fire, or taken it off and thrown it outside?
I did what I felt was right, much to Little Petal's scornful amusement. But then, I have to live with myself. The distinction I make is that a Thrush eating a slug is nature's way, but my knowingly putting on the fire to burn is mindless cruelty.
Labels: Ahimsa, Natures way
posted by Sopwith-Camel | 8:00 pm
10 Comments:
before we were deposited on various European campsites, we had to take part in what the holiday company referred to as "montage". This involved putting up all the tents on all the sites and cleaning them, and any static vans that may also have been on site. We'd offload the equipment from huge artics - including hundreds of metal bed frames all bound together with gaffer tape. Much to colleagues amusement I once spent 45 minutes painstakingly freeing a struggling ant from the sticky underside of one such piece of tape.
I'll undoubtedly get my reward in hell.
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not least since I wouldn't think twice about mindlessly and cruelly ending the life of anything with 8 legs. With the arguable exception of an octopus - though it's probably unreasonable to expect to find one of those lurking under your DVD player.
You never know, but at the judgment desk that ant might tell his story and be your salvation. We've always been told that our sins will be added up and held against us, but it wouldn't be fair without reckoning up the other deeds as well. But I agree about the octopii, they donlt normally inhabit DVD players, unless you have a water-cooled PC like the big Crays. But you're more likely to get into heaven on the word of an ant than have a Cray in your living room.
Dead in seconds or to be slowly digested in the gut of and animal, not a difficult decision! So you would not burn one to death but I'm sure you would throw one in to the path of a bird, what is the most cruel?
Good point, Grant. If I were to feed the slug directly to a pet bird, or put it on a bird table, I suppose it is just as cruel as leaving it on the log to burn. But if I take it off the log and put it outside in the hedge over the road, just as I do with the live mice and rabbits that the cats bring home, I'm just putting them back into the world to take their chances, so I don't see any cruelty there.
You should try using that point to troll some of the Buddhist newsgroups :)
It was right to free the slug from death by fire if you want to avoid being needlessly cruel, but it is not wrong to kill slugs if they are eating your plants. This is because in the latter case they are detrimental to your life. It is nature's way, when one life is detrimental to the other and competition is created, for the less powerful to suffer and perhaps die. Cruelty has nothing to do with it, as it's a human concept that places value judgments on just how that competition goes forward. In nature's way, death by hungry bear, death by starvation, death by sun and kid with magnifying glass, and death by old age are all equal.
Don: I still feel kid with magnifying glass is different from the other forms, in the same way that death in a holocaust camp was different from death in a "normal" prison. I believe there is a question of intent. The predator killing to eat and the gardener destroying pests have one type of intent, kid with magnifying glass has an altogether different motive, as does anybody who enjoys watching suffering.
A lot of books have been written by survivors of the holocaust camps telling what it was like to be interned, but I have never read any books written by the guards and administration officials. I am intrigued to know if they felt guilty about what they did, or if they enjoyed their position of power, or if they didn't see the inmates as living creatures at all. I suspect such a book would be greeted with howls of protest if it should appear.
Sopwith, you might find Hannah Arendt instructive.
Apparently, Eichmann did not feel guilty at all. He was just performing a function.
Think on it a bit though. Ward Churchill wasn't wrong. Functionaries in Merrill Lynch kill just as surely as soldiers. The killing is distant but for mine, that's somehow worse.
Welcome back to the land of the blogging, Doctor.
I've been reading quite a lot about WW2 over the Christmas break, and I notice how many Germans did not find anything wrong with what they knew about the war, possibly just down to clever control by the party apparatus. I suspect that any Western nation without an opposition party could be lead down the same path, as Orwell sketched out in 1984.
I shall have to dig a lot more to try and find out what makes the revisionists tick. It could be as simple as "we were lied to about what out governments knew about the camps, therefore everything they said was wrong, therefore the Nazis could not have been guilty."
See another blog on my sidebar "on the road again" for some good thoughts about the human weakness for binary thought. It is probably what causes the human race to fall down time and again.
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