Page 12 - DoggieRescue E-Magazine November 2015_Neat

12 NOVEMBER 2015 DOGGIERESCUE.COM MAGAZINE

FEATURE ARTICLE: DOGGIERESCUE UNLEASHED AND DANGEROUS

“How wonderful it is that nobody need wait a single moment before
starting to improve the world.” Anne Frank

EYES WIDE SHUT, OR Roland Briefrel with thanks to
IS THAT OPTIMISM? Sam Be Brito for the appropriation.

With 2015 rapidly coming to an end it has dawned on me that issues of animal welfare have once again, seemingly,
taken a back seat. A cursory glance through the year around the world is sufficient to demonstrate this – think of
Cecil the lion, as merely one appalling example. Of course, there are the numerous organisations like Doggie
Rescue.com (now amazingly including cats!!) who successfully toil away tirelessly in support of animal welfare. Just
how many Monika Biernacki’s do we need to clone around the world? Yet it appears to be the case that for most of
humanity we survive existence by shutting our eyes to the cruelty we continue to inflict on animals.

Cartoons by Ryley Miller

The writer Thomas Ligotti once described optimism as that human rights and happiness are “self-evident truths”
the “undeclared policy of human culture-one that grew rather than stuff we have made up so that we can feel
out of our animal instincts to survive and reproduce- better about actually being little more than particles in
rather than any articulated body of thought. It is the flux. Further, the level of human optimism is so far out of
default condition of our blood”. Ligotti, together with control that how else could every generation tell itself
philosopher Peter Zapffe, remind us that humans get on that they live at the best time in history?
with it through an unremitting “zombification” of our
actions that effectively distracts us from “the brother- A glance backward proves that the citizens of recent
hood of suffering between everything alive”. decades, not to mention past centuries and millennia,
were almost always completely unaware of their
Of course all of this will be very negative for us Sydney ignorance, prejudices, cruelty and superstition. One
centric First World types who have convinced ourselves needs to look no further than the fact that at some point