Animals

1999-9-20 10:38:00

Welcome Paula as a new poster girl (female who posts to this list). You are concerned about people who are cruel to animals as well as human beings.

It is certainly true that cruel people are hard to stomach. One of the worst punishments we can give them is to not associate with them. If cruel people only have other cruel people for friends then they may be pressured into reform to move into better company.

You took a step in the right direction by confronting people cruel to animals. If everyone did that, cruelty would soon diminish in the human race.

Do you forgive these people? Forgiveness is really for our benefit and here's how I deal with cruel people. I just see them as people of limited consciousness that do not know any better. Do we forgive a cat for tantalizing a mouse before he eats it? No, there is nothing to forgive because that is just the way it is with a cat and if you want to keep your pet rat or bird safe you must keep them away from the cat. Having negative feelings toward the cruel person, the cat or any other living thing is a waste of energy. Instead do everything in your power to be harmless and spread harmlessness.

Even though one should forgive all people that does not mean you have to associate with them or accept them into your life. Jesus forgave the Jews who crucified him yet he also chased them out of the temple in anger partially for their cruelty to animals.

You might want to read my account of my chicken that I loved as a kid at http://www.thenewagesite.com/JJArchives. Go to Archive # 241.

Along this line a lurker wrote me the following question:

"If you wouldn't mind, I do have a problem/question that I would like to ask you and hopefully you will have an answer to it. I look to the universe and I do see the order, the design, and the plan that manifest throughout nature and believe that this indeed is testimony of a Loving Creator. However, I will never understand how this "Loving Creator" could of ever ever come up with the food chain! It seems to be blasphemy to design with love other to implant the need to devour life. Often this is carried out in the cruelest of manner as one species feeds of another and on and on and on. WHY??? I have great difficulty with this entire concept and someday God has a lot of explaining to do."

Interesting question. Man is indeed cruel to man, but the animals eating and hunting each other on the food chain is indeed a fierce thing. Something I think is even worse is the hunger they have to go through during winter months in the wilderness.

Animals have an advantage over humans for living in this hunting environment. If a human learns he is facing a threat then he worries about it all the time, but because of a difference in consciousness an animal only has fear when confronted with immediate danger (in normal circumstances anyway). Thus a deer that is in danger only one day a month will live 29 days in relative peace. A human in the same circumstance would be on edge all 30 days. This does not answer your question, but perhaps it will give you the understanding that in many ways the hunted animals live in greater peace than we do.

Why does God allow such apparent cruelty in the food chain?

Many people think that God can just snap His/Her/It's fingers and make everything right if He wants to but such is not the case. The evolution through the food chain in this sphere is the only way God can figure out to evolve the higher lives in this dense sphere. Without this process you and I would not be here. There is no other way at present.

I know we have heard in all the religions that God is all-powerful, but God has reflected Itself into unlimited lives of which you and I are one and each life must work out its best methods of survival and evolution. If there was another way, the reflections of God who create evolution would have explored it, but apparently the way things are in the animal kingdom is the best we have been able to engineer so far.

One thing that is helping the animals live more peaceably is that many humans have adopted them as pets and raised others for food and in doing so the domestic animals have become much more gentle than the wild animals, but also very dependent on us.