Watching the nocturnal slaughter of feral pigs by men in military camouflage, sporting night vision goggles, who have loaded up their 50 caliber machine guns equipped with laser sites I could only imagine how those men were imagining themselves. The pigs, for some reason, in a wild panic often ran right into the Humvee and bounced off in a cartwheel of the dead.
The military paraphernalia suggested they were not playing great white hunter, but they were engaged in flesh and blood war games, where they were the heroes of some video war game brought to life.
The really creepy thing is how every one of them was grinning, as if they really enjoyed the killing. It was like looking at those old photos of white townspeople grinning into a camera while black bodies hung limply by the neck at some Mississippi lynching.
Not that shooting feral pigs is in any way the moral equivalent of hanging human beings but it was that incongruity of the pleasure these guys were taking in the taking of life.
Schadenfreude does not even begin to describe it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eOt1HLXNRFE
That video was "Lord of the Flies" on steroids. The idea that is what human beings are and what they do, as if to say: we all came from a violent past, where all life on Earth was merciless, brutal and short.
But human beings have industrialized all this.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uXs3vJt129M
This is just another in a long line of slaughter, encompassing the American buffalo apocalypse of the 19th century, the whaling of the 19th and 20th centuries, where the slaughter of entire species was done not just for fun, but for profit, and, in the case of the buffalo, as part of a concerted effort to eliminate the plains Indians as a distinct group. Kill the buffalo and you kill the Indian, Philip Sheridan said. William Tecumseh Sherman--how ironic is that name?-- agreed, and the army cooperated with the buffalo butchers to sweep the prairies clean of the vast herds of buffalo that sometimes stretched to the horizon.
During the famous whaling years of Moby Dick about 5,000 whales were killed a year; in the 1960's with the industrialization of seaborne whaling factories, 30,000 whales a year were "harvested."
In her New Yorker article, "Talk To Me," Elizabeth Kolbert describes the efforts to use artificial intelligence to breakthrough and speak to whales in their own click language.
AI has been used to write a version of Moby Dick, written from the whale's point of view and it ends with this:
"I, the White Leviathan, could only wonder if there would ever come a day when man and whale would understand each other, finding harmony in the vastness of the ocean's embrace."
That, creepily, was written by a machine.
A man from Sri Lanka, a Buddhist, visited my home and a mosquito landed on his arm, but rather than smash it with a lethal slap, he simply and gently brushed it off, so it flew off, (with me in hot pursuit to kill that insect vector) but as he explained, the mosquito was a living thing, part of the planet's family.
I have no compunction about killing insects or ticks which harbor encephalitis virus or Lyme Disease or anaplasmosis, but I did work in a laboratory at the National Institutes of Health one summer where we splayed out living white lab rats on surgical platforms and operated on them without anesthesia, to catheterize their livers so we could learn a little more about the hepatic biochemistry, and I had nightmares about those poor rats. They squirmed and struggled to escape; they wanted to live. They were clearly terrified, as terrified as those feral pigs being blown apart in those Texas fields.
And we were killing them.
Occasionally, that summer, I'd walk past a line of PETA protesters with their signs, "Why Cage Life?" and I would think, "Oh, you have no idea."
I suppose I would have been a failure as a farmer.
Farmers, of course, kill things all the time, without shedding a tear, unless of course they have to shoot their favorite horse or dog: Then they get all emotional.
But if those animals could talk or communicate with us, things might get a lot more complicated.
About 15 years ago, I read Michael Pollan's book, Omnivore's Dilemma, and although he is no vegetarian, and ends his book with a wild boar hunt, and the dinner he made of his prey, I came away from that saying, "I can live without meat. Why bother eating animals?"
Eventually, I started back eating lobsters, who have no real face, and salmon, who are suicidal anyway, and then most fish. Once a year, I eat pork spare ribs. But mostly, I live on cereal, vegetables and stuff you grow in the soil, and haven't missed meat. It's a problem for my family, who is populated with superb cooks, but they have adjusted. I've had to formulate a rule so they know what they can cook if they want to include me: No barnyard animals.
I'm not opposed to eating deer, which are a classic example of populations without predators run amuck. But I haven't done it beyond tasting a venison horderve.
But certain stories have driven home the point about animals. Beryl Markham's stunning 1942 book, West With the Night, tells of how she acted as a bush pilot, taking off in a small airplane in Kenya to find bull elephants with big tusks so rich Americans, like Teddy Roosevelt on safari could shoot them. She did that until she realized whenever she flew overhead, the elephants would quickly form a circle, all facing inward so the tusks were not visible from above.
"They are protecting their bulls, concealing those big tusks!" Markham said, "They know why I'm up here. They connect the airplane to the hunters who follow it!" she realized to her horror. She landed her plane and quit, refusing to take part in the murder of any animal that smart.
But does an animal have to be that smart for us to want to not kill it, gut it and turn its brain fluid into transmission oil, glue or lamplighter fluid?
Are we unsympathetic to the dumb animals but willing to spare the smart ones?
They are all "sentient," aren't they?
Like those dumb lab rats, they want to live.
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