Newspaper Columns ~ Financial Gazette

Human Beings Are No Better Than Animals.

 


The concept of superiority complex arose from the belief that those with sharp analytical skills or remarkable creative capacity are better than the mediocrity.

The same notion has applied to the cunning humans in relation to other animals. The idea that humans can communicate through talking, body language and writing does not make them superior to other animals.

Let us admit that we have not reached that level where we can unravel the mysteries of indecipherable communion between other animals within the animal kingdom.

Although scientists and philosophers think that animals occupy a lower status in the animal kingdom, the "instinct theory" offers scant illumination on the intricate behaviour we witness within the animal experience.

Human beings through their moral weakness have taken it upon themselves to enslave animals through draught power and worse they have committed their intestines as the burial grounds for the animals they slaughter.

For them they have been given "dominion" over all things on planet earth, so the feeling or opinion of the animal matters not.

Such dictatorship and savagery is often supported by "divine scriptures" that have been schemed, written and turned into holy Writs by man himself to justify his "murderous acts" at the abattoir.

While this may arouse intellectual curiosity in many, the reality is that animals, like humans, have emotions, feelings, expectations and spiritual consciousness.

I have observed the behaviour of female crocodiles after eggs hatch their offspring. You may call it "instinct" but it is "reasoning".

The female crocodile opens her mouth wide and the baby crocodiles line up on the bottom of the mouth and in this case she knows what pressure to apply between her jaws as she transports them to a safer place.

I have also watched dogs in intimate moments. Believe me, many humans are lousy lovers. When a bulldog gets the opportunity, he means business.

Dogs love food just like humans in the same manner. Pavlov's observations suffice. What confirms to me that animals have spiritual consciousness is that when you kill a cow when other cows watch, they normally converge on the scene of the crime and weep. The occasion is often spectacular but sad.

More so, in complex African societies, the traditionalists can transfer an exorcised demon to an animal, which implies that animals have a capacity to accommodate a spirit. But animals have emotions and feelings of resentment too. They know when they are loved and when things are falling apart. Several years ago an alien bulldog found way into my father's yard.

The roaming dog was scavenging for food in the trash can outside my father's house.

I shouted "pfutseki" at the dog in an attempt to scare it away. My bellowing was so loud that the enclosures in the neighbourhood conspired to send back my voice in diminishing copies. But the dog remained undeterred. In fact it tried to pounce on me. And on the instruction of adrenaline, I picked a piece of brick, which at the mercy of reflex action, I accelerated in the dog's direction.

The impact was intolerable and the dog took to vanishing. But I ran into the same dog two months later in another neighbourhood just a few minutes from my father's house.

Believe me, dogs have a sharp memory and remarkable recognition ability. The dog had never given attention to several passers-by, but it dawned on him that I was his erstwhile enemy. The bulldog advanced in my direction with a clear intent. Vengeance!

But for me the situation was a whistle in the dark. I threw glances around me within a split of a second and in no time my hand was equipped with a large stone. Thank God, the bulldog took enough caution to note the potential weapon that I clasped in my right hand.

The dog paused as if in a moment of reflection, I guess it weighed options and the opportunity cost to avert confrontation became the natural choice.

The bulldog took to its paws without creating a scene. Although human beings theorise, philosophise and take a lot of effort to justify the decimation of animals for the delicious dinners and barbecues, they do not appreciate it when they become the targets of someone's barbecue.

When a man confronts a hungry lion in the bush that is when you can tell the whole story. That feeling of resentment to become a lion's "New York strips" or "hamburger" is the same for the cow that screams at the abattoir.

But since the world is operating under human dictatorship, the feeling of the goat or the chicken matter not.

Human beings are the "super animals" and can go on a hunting spree and kill elephants willy-nilly.

Probably until the philosophy that holds one animal superior and another inferior is finally and permanently discredited, there shall always be chaos.

Gwinyai Dziwa 

 


Additional Financial Gazette Articles by Gwinyai:

 

When Fashion Trends Boggle the Mind

Friends, neighbors come in all shapes, sizes

The Interview You Never Heard

Health Care Deliver Can Be Revived

Human Beings are no better than animals

Is Electronic Surveillance Invasion of Privacy?

From Rural Rhodesia to Citadel of Global Capital

Emerging Leaders of a Techno-Century

Tuku Carries Zim's Cultural Torch

 

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