Humans are becoming technologically advanced every single day but with that, they are losing their emotions, compassion, and failing to empathize with their fellow human beings and animals. It hurts to see that as we are progressing day by day with constantly innovating and evolving, but we are missing out on the love part.
When it comes to cruelty anyone under the right circumstances is capable of committing staggering atrocities. Speaking of this, just two days back as a nation, we all witnessed the tragic death of a pregnant elephant in Kerala, India. A pregnant elephant was fed cracker stuffed pineapple by some unidentified group of men, which exploded in her mouth and damaged her jaw. She walked around the village with enormous pain and finally after two days, she passed away standing in the river. The whole incidence was so terrifying that I am still unable to get over it. Just while reading about it my eyes became moist. People are saying nasty things about them. But I think it is clearly a matter of ignorance where a bunch of people for the sake of fun have done such heinous crime without thinking twice about the consequences.
During my childhood, every Diwali I used to see a group of miscreants tying firecracker to a street dog’s tail. What’s more disturbing is, those youngsters comforting the dog while they tie those firecrackers to its tail. I could see the pain in the dog’s eyes, silently pleading for help and trying to break free! There it was the fun in sadism. Deriving joy by torturing that poor dog who runs for his life, while the crackers continue to burst behind him.
As humans, we have started taking our ecosystem for granted. We literally started underestimating the value of the existence of our co-habitat. That’s what China did back in 1958, with its Smash Sparrow Campaign. A massive social and economic campaign was started and hundreds of millions of sparrows were killed. It took two years to realize that they didn’t only eat grain seeds, they also ate insects. With no birds to control them, insect population boomed. Locusts, in particular, swarmed over the country, eating everything they could find. This ecological imbalance resulted in the death of 15-45 million people of starvation. The Chinese government eventually resorted to importing 2,50,000 sparrows from the Soviet Union to replenish their population.
Changes to an ecosystem rarely go well with human beings. We don’t know or understand why things are the way they are, but everything has a purpose. We live in a world that not only turns a blind eye to animal cruelty but condones it.
As Paul Oxton says, “We should not need to have a “Save an Animal Day”, Save from what?, It is in fact “Save from who?”. It is Human Kindness, Compassion, and Caring that so desperately needs to be saved.”