Geronimo has been sentenced to death – this in a country that abolished the death penalty as far back as in 1965.
No wonder 90,000 people have signed a petition demanding a stay of execution from the PM. And thousands will march on Whitehall today trying to save the life of Geronimo the Apache… sorry, Geronimo the alpaca. This unless the dastardly authorities kill him first, preemptively.
If our papers are to be believed, the fate of Geronimo has split the nation, thereby achieving the effect that proved beyond the Luftwaffe in 1940. The nation then stood united in the face of the Blitz, when thousands of Britons were dying. Now death threatens only one exotic animal, and yet a deep fissure has rent the country asunder.
I congratulate the country. How free it must be of all the usual problems besetting the world to get so worked up about so trivial an issue.
Covid, creeping inflation, looming energy crisis, national debt spinning out of control, illegal immigrants arriving in droves, racial tensions, social disintegration, illiterate populace, consistently clueless government – none of this causes such a self-righteous public outcry.
This is to be expected. Reverting to pagan cults such as animal worship is a distinguishing feature of our progressive modernity. Regressive is the new progressive.
The reason for the current affront to the pagan sensibilities is bovine TB for which Geronimo twice tested positive. The disease can quickly destroy whole herds of livestock, which is why 500 cows are culled every week for that very reason.
Considering that every year some 77 billion animals are slaughtered for food worldwide, that number doesn’t strike me as cause for much hand-wringing. And yet Environment Minister George Eustice had to agonise over the “soul-destroying” decision to cull Geronimo before approving it.
He could have saved his soul from destruction by delegating the decision to a local vet, which would certainly have happened if we lived in a sane world. Yet in the world we do live in, no one is surprised that the fate of one alpaca should be decided at ministerial level.
It’s also par for the course that the owner of the moribund Geronimo accused Mr Eustice of having “blood on his hands”, thereby casting him in the role of Macbeth. Neither the owner nor the multitudes supporting her seem to discern any moral difference between human and alpaca blood. Anthropomorphism rules.
It’s useful to remember that it’s not only nature in general but also human nature in particular that abhors, and tries to fill, a vacuum. Hence, even though men stopped believing in God, they still have to believe in something, some – any – external good higher than themselves.
What it is doesn’t matter. It can be animal rights, global warming, transsexuality or any other sexuality, anti-nuke, women’s right not to be called ‘sweetie’, universal equality, European federalism — you name it.
As Chesterton put it with his usual epigrammatic brilliance, “When men choose not to believe in God, they do not thereafter believe in nothing, they then become capable of believing in anything.”
Hence the tendency to zoomorphism, worshipping animals as some sort of perverse deities, the way some cults worship cows or cats. Hence also anthropomorphism, assigning human characteristics to animals.
To paraphrase Mark Twain ever so slightly, the less people like men, the more they deify dogs and other species of life’s fauna. And why not? If man is but a marginally cleverer ape, what’s to distinguish him in principle from, say, an alpaca?
“Whom the gods would destroy they first make mad,” wrote Euripides, a cleverer pagan than today’s animal lovers. In today’s world, that aphorism sounds like reportage.
P.S. No rain was in the forecast yesterday, yet it bucketed down most of the day. No point blaming the meteorologists – that’s like blaming marathon runners for not breaking 100m records.
Our meteorologists and climatologists are rubbish predicting tomorrow’s weather, but they come into their own with the weather of 100 years from now. Lengthen the distance, and their doomsday predictions are bound to come true, aren’t they?
Dogs in the USA. A dog will severely maul a small child and the dog owners will receive tens of thousands of dollars in donations for legal expenses to prevent the dog from being euthanized [put to sleep]. The child normally for medical expenses from donors will get several hundred dollars. Priorities all wrong. But triviality is the spice of life?
Not just the spice. These days It’s the whole damn meal.
Some members of my family have been participating in weekly video calls during this covid pandemic. Two childless female relatives sometimes dominate the entire hour with talk of their volunteer work at local animal shelters. Neither would ever consider visiting the local children’s hospital or standing outside a Planned Parenthood office. They learned well from the Bible, Cat-thew chapter 25, verse 40: “Amen I say to you, as long as you did it to one of these my least kitten, you did it to me.”
He still ate meat, pascal lamb for sure.
Animal ‘lovers’ are almost always anti-theists. They see animals as superior to us because unlike us, no animal has ever been beholden to religion of any sort (as far as we know) Whereas some humans still pathetically cling to the idea that we are ‘special’ Know their place in the scheme of things, do animals.
“I prefer dogs to gods”-Ricky Gervais.
Insufferable sanctimony.
I always comliment those who say people are just animals on their honest self-assessment.