| Puppies and Orangutans
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| Date and Time |
- | Mar. 6th, 2008, 06:25 pm | |
| Current Mood |
- |  blank | |
| Current Music |
- | budgies and tiels in conference | |
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By now, most have heard about the video of U.S. marine throwing puppy off a cliff in Iraq. This sort of behaviour isn't new to war. There was a Vietnam veteran in Cahill 3 with me. He told me a story that seems now eerily similar to this. The guys in his unit called the orangutans "rock apes", because they would catch rocks you threw at them and then throw the rocks back. They had fun playing catch with the orangutans until one day one of the guys in the unit decided to pull a pin out of a grenade and throw it at an orangutan . Of course the orangutan caught the grenade and was blown to pieces. That ended the fun they had with the orangutans. The difference is that they didn't have camera phones then. Should we be surprised by this sort of behaviour? These soldiers have been sent to kill people. Most humans view other animals as less than human. If they're killing people left and right, what's the odd puppy or orangutan ? Who is more evil then: the marine that killed the puppy or the politicians sent him over there to kill? |
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| Comments: |
Each person is responsible for his/her own actions. There is a difference between killing for pleasure and killing for need or because you were forced to. I do think war is terrible and I also think that the government doesn't do enough to support troops, but at the same time each soldier can make their own choices. The soldier made a choice to harm the animal and he should be punished. The fact that he has been subjected to violence does not give him the right to harm innocent people/creatures. I might be more inclined to feel sorry for the soldier and to warrant his behavior as tolerable if what he did was not premeditated, but his actions were premeditated and he enjoyed it.
I agree. People are responsible for their own actions. That does not mean that we cannot hold the government officials responsible for the events that occur as a result of policies. Holding those in power responsible should not exonerate those who commit reprehensible actions on the ground.
I think the soldier in question is responsible for his own actions, of course. Yes, he's in the military fighting a war for the government, but he also decided to join such an establishment. I think the orangutan situation is a little bit different in regards that most veterans from the Vietnam war era were drafted and more/less forced to fight for their government. Of course, this doesn't excuse the grenade thrower at all from what he did wrong because he made that particular horrible decision on his own free will.
I feel chagrin and sadness that people become so outraged over the treatment of a puppy, but that they feel no outrage over the routine torture of the animals who are born and killed in factories. I do not mean only the routine torture associated with slaughter (which some people justify as "necessary"), I mean the abject abuses committed by animal factory workers, purely for sport. I shudder at the amount of dissociation it requires of supposedly "normal, healthy" people to reserve their outrage for only those animals they deem worthy.
However there are many military people who won't kill animals but will kill humans. | |
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