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| Photo by engin akyurt on Unsplash |
What stimulated me to write this post is something along the lines of people vociferously complaining about the existence of a video on social media showing the gory depiction of an animal killing and/or eating another animal of a different type. Think about lions hunting a zebra, for instance. (If you'd like to go back much further in time, imagine a Tyrannosaurus assailing a Triceratops in Late Cretaceous North America.) Such things are natural phenomena, and vehemently resenting and detesting them would naturally prompt me to raise my eyebrows.
I understand that such macabre events can make some (or many) flinch, but that's the harsh reality of nature. That's the nature of nature. Lions are predators and carnivores (their dental apparatus is not "designed" for ingesting vegetation) and without consuming flesh, they would simply vanish into thin air. They have evolved this way, and it is not their fault that they have to kill other animals in order to survive. Taking sides is a mind-bending thing to do and can lead to cognitive dissonance. Nevertheless, it seems that nowadays many people are drawn to this sort of behavior and continue engaging in mental masturbation – X is an extremely cute animal! Nobody and nothing should ever hurt it! The more videos of X thriving on social media I see, the more ecstatic I am!
An implication of the nature of nature pertains to morality. I have changed my mind on more than one thing in my life and this is one example of those. I used to firmly believe in absolute morality, but the nature of nature has simply crushed this way of thinking. Let's take birds and worms, for example. Is it morally right to catch worms and feed them to birds? Well, from birds' point of view, definitely yes, as it will give them the nutrients they need, but it's certainly a huge no from worms' standpoint, as it will contribute to their demise. Talking of this matter, Dr. Henry Wu's quote in Jurassic World has had a deep impact on me: "Monster is a relative term. To a canary, a cat is a monster. We're just used to being the cat."
Then, a question naturally arises: How should we live our lives? I think the best approach to answering this question is shown by the following quote from Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, a.k.a. Osho: "You should care only about one thing, that you are happy, that you are blissful, that you are silent, that you are at ease with existence."
Related article: Animal Abuse
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