While driving around downtown yesterday, I almost ran over a street rat. The little guy hopped off the curb, and ran across a busy four lane road.
I stopped to let it pass.
Yes, I’m serious. I stopped so that a street rat may live downtown. I was surprised, though, that when I stopped to let him go across, other people were trying their hardest to run him over. He had to dart under the wheels of a couple of cars that had swerved in an effort to catch him under their wheels.
He made it to the other side, and waddled down an alley out of sight. I couldn’t help but smile and keep on driving.
But that got me to thinking: Why did everyone try and kill him? Doesn’t that say a lot for how we value life?
If it had been a cat, people would have been stopping and/or swerving all over the road in an effort to avoid killing it. But why not stop for a rat? As far as intelligence goes, rats are comparable to a cat. Take it a step further, and we can see that they’re both furry, can be kept as pets, and have the same relative amount of cleanliness.
So why not brake for the little rat? Or a skunk? Possum?
Surely we try to avoid killing things because we don’t want blood or animal bits on our cars, but the value of the lives of some of these animals seems a bit skewed, and I honestly am not sure why.
To a point, it seems like it has to do with size. We’re not talking intelligence or “character” or anything else, but size. A rat is smaller, so it’s okay if it gets killed. A mouse is smaller, so it’s not a big deal if it gets run over.
But if a cat or a dog gets run over, it suddenly becomes a big issue, even though the amount of intelligence between each of these creatures is fairly level.
The rest has to do with societal norms: rats are unclean, or they carry disease, so it’s okay if they die. Cats are cute and cuddly and they don’t hurt anyone (which is a lie, and all you cat owners know it).
In our culture, we don’t eat our cats. In many other cultures, it’s perfectly fine and considered fairly normal to do so. We eat cows and pigs, and in other areas of the world and because of religious beliefs (don’t get me started), some people don’t.
As humans, we have a very confusing set of ideas about the value of life. We have personal and societal norms that we tend to adhere to, and then the things that are cute and considered “pet worthy”, are spared. But anything else is considered expendible, and just not a very big deal. Let it die, no worries.
I’m honestly a little perplexed by this behavior. There are people today, still, that consider black people little else than animals. We have countless societies that practice ethnic cleansing, and many thousands of millions of people have been killed in the name of God and religion.
The problem with life is, it’s only as valuable as the price that we put on it. As humans, we’re apparently very able to shift that price, and we’re able to shift the attitudes about the importance of that life. Depending largely on how we view the living and breathing creature that stands before us, it may be not be a big deal if we kill it.
Don’t get me wrong; I’m not about to stop eating meat. I’m not going to advocate that we try eating cats and dogs in this country. I’m not going to push that horses not be slaughtered, or that people shouldn’t eat things that we consider to be out of our own societal norm.
Hell, there are still cannibalistic cultures that exist in the world today. That is their norm, and it’s perfectly fine for them to eat the remains of the dead. They see no problem with it, even though we see it as extremely taboo.
Based on our attitudes about life and the value of each person and each animal in this world, I think the conclusion is pretty obvious.
Either all life in the world is sacred, or none of it is. And I’m leaning much more toward the latter.