The Cruelest Animals

I know it's unfair to pick on some poor woman by analyzing an out-of-context snippet of something she said after having a microphone pushed in front of her, I know I would say all kinds of stupid stuff, but I just couldn't help it this time.  I was listening to a BBC podcast in which a woman said that she thought that "humans are just the cruelest animals" in response to a zoo exhibit that described the gory facts of the shark fin trade and decided I just couldn't help looking at it in the form of a blog post.  After all, there are so many ways to look at it.  NOTE: this post got just a tad gory.  If you have a romantic idea about nature formed by watching Bambi and wish to maintain it you might just want to go find some other blog to read.  Try Viewpoint, that may still be a little too realistic for your liking, but at least it's less gory.

First of all, there's the part about calling humans animals.  After all, the idea that she believes that there is such a thing as cruelty and presumably also believes that it is wrong suggests that she believes in a god.  After all, we've already established that atheists have no basis for right and wrong (at least you didn't post a dissenting comment) and if she does believe in a God it would strike me as pretty odd to think that humans are just animals.  After all, must religions elevate humans above the status of animals.  

Secondly, one could look at her statement from the pragmatic side and not that there are many examples of animals being cruel to other animals.  Cases in point, cats playing with mice, killer wales bleeding and harrying female wales and their calves to death, wolves killing sheep, eating out their tongues, and leaving the rest of the carcass, deer eating off the heads of baby seabirds, etc. . .  Although the shark-fin trade is rather gruesome (including cutting off shark fins and throwing away the rest of the shark to bleed to death) I don't think it's very accurate to say that humans are any crueler than "other animals" that do everything from practicing slavery to killing for the mere fun of it.

On the other hand, you can look at it and say that she's right!  After all, from a christian perspective, humans are the only ones with the souls and the capability of feeling malice and hate and doing evil.  Because of these things, humans are the cruelest or all creation because they can be cruel on a higher level.  If a female animal eats it's own young to survive it is not being as cruel as a mother eating her own child to survive.  Because all that the animal was made to do was to survive, a female animal eating it's own young would not be evil.  Humans, on the other hand, are created to love God and their fellow humans.  Therefore, if a human mother eats her own child it goes against the divine purpose she was intended for and is being evil.  (Please note that I have nothing against my mother or any other mother for that matter and am simply using the first example that came to mind, from my memory of animal behavior that we would call cruel.)   Of course, although it's possible that she did mean it that way, I think the chances are extremely slim since she was in China, where the likelihood of being a christian is extremely small and because I doubt that someone who wanted to convey that message would phrase their statement in that way, especially in the context of an exhibit about the gore behind shark fin soup (a status symbol in China that has been in growing demand due to the growth of the middle class there). 

Finally, I shall conclude by revealing to point behind these wandering thoughts.  Um. . . Well. . . You see. . . AHA!  Yes, as I have been getting to all along (cough) the humanization of animals and the dehumanization of humans has led to some perplexing paradoxes, like the one embodied by the affore-mentioned statement.  After all, it seems strange to me that in china there would be concern over sharks when they seem to care little about they're infamous human rights abuses.  In my opinion, either there is no god and humans and "other animals" are equally unprotected by any moral law or there is a God and only humans are protected.  Instead it seems that in our postmodern world people believe that there is no god and that animals and the animals known as humans are both protected by a moral law, albeit few care to think about what exactly this moral law might be or why it is applicable to any living organism at all, whether human, animal, plant, fungus or bacteria.  Ask PETA.  Maybe they'll explain why their moral law only applies to animals and not to any of the other groups listed.  More likely they'll just rail at you and call you a veal calf slayer or a speciesist or something along those lines.