Rhino's last rites

Over human rights any day

Everybody has something that involuntarily gets to them. A ‘trigger’ if you will. Mine has always been around animals. I see someone abusing an animal, I lose my shit.

I’ve been known to become extremely violent towards the offending human/s around such things, and I have to always be mindful in the midst of my red rage not to end up in a cage paid for by the taxpayer.

A no less sad but slower, subtler abuse is the extinction of Earth’s critters. There’s a photo out there of the last northern white rhino on the planet who, moments from death, is being lovingly stroked by his keeper. (I’m not going to put it up on here because it haunts me too much, and always will, so here’s a living rhino).

These are the things I think about in the dead of night, and the bright, harsh light of day. The loss, the ache, the utter destruction of all that is so beautiful - and never to be replaced - by our poor excuse for breathing called humanity.

I’m not gonna’ lie. I don’t identify all that much with my fellow mankind. Never have. For whatever reason, human suffering just doesn’t affect me in the same way animal suffering does. I don’t analyse it much, but I know that others judge me for it. Well, fuck ‘em. It is what it is.

Given this it’s really no wonder that Social Justice Warriors leave me cold. All their endless empty hand-wringing over inequity and unfairness and gay pride and racism is lovely-jubbly an’ all but they never seem to engage with the world outside of their urban smarm. They simply don’t appear to understand it, and how dire things really are.

Try and talk to them about what humans are doing to wildlife and biodiversity and the climate and, poof, they’re gone. It’s like recognition that the luxury of human rights only exist when things are ‘good’ is completely lost on them.

Very soon human rights will be non-existent. Whether or not a ‘trans women is a women’ (clue: he isn’t) will be as meaningless as every other stupid ideology humans have ever brought to the ‘disconnected from nature’ table.

Because when humanity loses touch with science and nature the result is never good.

Here in 2021, on the cusp of endless extinction and death - including our own, you’d think we’d start getting real. But no, we’re too busy eliminating gendered language, making robots, planning life on Mars, and generally self-pleasuring our days away. So in love with ourselves are we.

I’ll leave you with a quote from American writer and naturalist Henry Beston.

“We need another and a wiser and perhaps a more mystical concept of animals. Remote from universal nature and living by complicated artifice, man in civilization surveys the creature through the glass of his knowledge and sees thereby a feather magnified and the whole image in distortion. We patronize them for their incompleteness, for their tragic fate for having taken form so far below ourselves. And therein do we err. For the animal shall not be measured by man. In a world older and more complete than ours, they move finished and complete, gifted with the extension of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear. They are not brethren, they are not underlings: they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendour and travail of the earth.”