DOWN THE TUBE
BOUNCING between programmes on Sunday night, the best viewing night of the week by far, one was stuck once again in that awful TV clash between Carte Blanche and 50/50.
This time 50/50 won, because of a brilliant BBC/ABC programme on the crazy attitudes humans have to animals.
There they all were – the Americans who spend thousands on burying their pets and painting poodle toenails red, and the Chinese who eat anything that moves. Snakes, beetles, cats and dogs were all for sale in the marketplace, killed in the most brutal ways. One poor beast, flayed of its skin and completely unrecognisable, was still breathing as it lay on the table. Snakes’ heads were awkwardly cut off with too-small, too-blunt scissors.
Cats and kittens were brought in crates to a restaurant. They were viciously prodded and pushed around inside the crates, their terror palpable as legs and ribs broke in the process.
But the Chinese are not alone. The Spaniards, too, specialise in animal torture. In around 500 religious ceremonies a year, animals are maimed, abused and eventually die, said the programme. We saw a live goat thrown from a tower and men hanging in space, clutching the neck of a live bird. And as for the bulls … what have they done to deserve such prolonged, painful deaths?
A rabbi commented that at least the Chinese were consistent, whereas Westerners thought it was awful to eat a kitty, but absolutely fine to eat a cow or a lamb.
And what was where it ended last week, with the second half coming up this Sunday on 50/50.
Compulsory viewing, it might point to an ethical pathway between these extremes, in which humans and animals can live together without cruelty and without excessive anthropomorphism. I missed the title, but how about: “What a piece of work is man … ?”
See 50/50 on SABC2 at 5.30 on Sunday night, June 22