Statistics vs Interactions

After Rachel and Mazzy's visit, I went home and was so upset about the gassing of animals in the south and the heart sticking that I tried to tell my friends about it. They really didn't want to hear about it, didn't want to listen to any statistics or descriptions. This was not because they don't like or care about animals, but rather because they love animals so much they couldn't stand to hear that 4 or 5 million are killed every year in the United States. This is a difficult issue to tackle when dealing with animal rights (and human rights as well): how people can be outraged hearing about a single murder or case of cruelty, but massive killings overwhelm them and the numbers are almost too hard to wrap your head around. The amount of people that died during the genocide in Rwanada and the Holocaust and other events are really hard for people to come to terms with. Statistics and numbers are useful, but they also distance us in a way.

It's different when the animals are right in front you, like when I was working at the PSPCA and walking a dog named Block who had had one leg amputated, or seeing the emaciated dog that could barely move. Seeing that kind of thing really leaves an imprint on you, so that even when you want to forget or not think about the dogs and cats suffering, you can't help it. Maybe if everyone was forced to see that kind of thing and experience it for themself-- if everyone was forced to go inside slaughterhouses, maybe people would have more compassion and would certainly think twice before buying a pet from a puppy mill once they had seen the ones in shelters.

I think a major obstacle to getting rid of euthanasia in shelters is first getting people to listen to how bad it is. If people can't even listen to how things are, they can't be moved to change the way things are. It's tempting to turn off moral obligations because once you start thinking about how much suffering and death goes on in the world and how you can do very little to stop it, you can start to feel helpless. But thinking about and empathizing with other beings is necessary for social change to occur, and we need to understand that turning ourselves off to the suffering won't make it go away.