If the Buddhists are right then meat eaters are screwed. Perhaps that's why Buddhism never really took off in the West. The mountain of accumulating dharma dung was just too much sinful mush to overcome. Moreover, Rinpoche explained, the weight of your Karma increases geometrically over time.
So let's forget Buddhism and taking responsibility for our actions. Let's choose instead the forgiving religion of Christ the outcast, and slit his throat quickly to get the dangerous big sky God off our backs.
Our view of animals is almost Victorian. We judge them by their deportment. An animal is someone who might defecate, urinate or copulate in our sight. An animal will gambol about in a silly way while we read the latest slow fruity roast recipe for Christmas dinner.
A science fiction story by Larry Niven, bordered in black, tells the story of how humans were originally livestock, which, after a catastrophe, were left to range freely on Earth, over time developed a modicum of sentience.
In the story, the narrator comes across the original unevolved species of human cattle who border all the continents of a forgotten desert planet fighting each other to get to the high protein feed in the form of nutritious ocean kelp.
The question the story ended on was: Would these farmers, these herdsmen come back one day to check on their livestock? What did they do with livestock that inadvertently developed intelligence and started to unbalance the ecology of the planets they were seeded on?
Failed Victorian distinctions of what constituted an animal and a human often got them into deep water. The Hottentots and Bushmen and Aborigines were hunted by our ancestors like game. They indulged in slavery in West Africa and a little ethnic cleansing in North America. In the Victorian and even Edwardian pecking order of humanity: White, blond, blue eyed, males, educated in the caked fiction of the Anglo-Hellenic ideal came out on top followed by all the other gradations of humanity right down to Chimpanzees.
And if you open the Pandora's box of biology and genetics and let Dawkins and others out to have their say about "selfish phenotypes", they will probably do a Glen Hoddle foot-in-mouth and link demonstrable evolutionary success and failure to race. So much for the paths their materialism will lead us along - eventually. Dawkins the Victorian.
I love the old Whole Earth idea and I read an article in one of these self help manuals for rural communities yesterday on how to kill a pig.
-Hit the pig on the head with a hammer.
-Slit its throat
-Burn the hair of its skin
-Scrape its skin
-Shave its body
-Soap and wash its body
-Hang it up from holes you bore in its feet
-Cut it in half with a hacksaw
-Take care not to break open the intestines.
This sounds so repulsive. But what is worrying is how little difference between killing a pig and a human. All these butchers and Hugh quite wittinglys. How do they cope with doing this stuff? Do they have to develop split personalities or what?
And yet when we watch Planet Earth there is this unbreakable bond of empathy we can have with all life, even a gnat larvae in the depths of lake Victoria.
I just think of the first meeting of the Masai with Speake. A tall people. The boys have to kill a lion single handed with their spear before they become men. Just Imagine the Masai in their kekois, six foot five and then some cork headed colonialist in his unwashed sweated woolens, watching the Masai mix and drink blood and milk, classifying them. You'd think they would recognise their own dear Achilles and Hector when they saw them wouldn't you?
I got a sense of elephants near Bongani last year. One of them came quite near the compound fence and we made eye contact. I felt the full enveloping power of her personality, the tonnage of her presence and I understood that our relationship with animals and understanding of life is completely misconfigured. Hive consciousness is far more of a big deal to humans than elephants, they are more like fully fledged individuals than we will be.
Or as Jung would say. Individuation, they (the elephants) have got it!
By Phil Hall
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