A dog starved at his master’s gate, wrote Blake, predicts the ruin of the state. He was right, of course, but today culturally sanctioned brutality against dogs is usually just weekend overflow, the lads having a Saturday morning out together after five days of culturally sanctioned brutality against women.
Indeed, the portents that bony mongrels bring have been somewhat overshadowed by more modern and less subtle harbingers, aviator sunglasses for instance, peering down the barrels of heavy ordnance mounted on Datsun pickups. And yet the feral curs continue to flit at the edge of our consciousness and conscience, holding in their sunken gums Blake’s societal barometer.
Of course, there’s more than one way to skin a cat, or stuff a Maltese as the case may be. Mange and misery may predict decline, but a dog fed paté off its own gilded plate reflects more than the material comfort of the state. And a dog reclining on a therapist’s couch heralds a culture in abject crouch.
Which is why this past week’s low-key celebrations of all creatures great and small passed without the faintest echo of a yap or mew or a gurgling squeal diminishing into a bubbly, breathy silence.
World Animal Day is a noble idea, even if it makes for a ghastly acronym. Its existence seems to imply a single admirable hope: by remembering, for a few hours, our own respect for — and responsibility towards — the wondrous beasties, we may be moved to appeal in some organised way to the mercy of those who continue to torture, exploit, violate and massacre them in our name. Blake warned of a decaying future, and sounded an implied clarion call to individual action. World Animal Day longs for a less bloody one, and calls for a unified front.
And it is precisely here where it, and all the other splendid charities and websites and organisations stumble, for they look forward to some sunlit upland on which critters frolic unmolested. And in looking towards this bright utopia, they fail to point a bloody finger back at the cause of their cause: people.
Perhaps it’s understandable. The World Wildlife Fund and suchlike rely heavily on donations, and it wouldn’t do to replace the fuzzies and squishies on their website with the legend ‘It’s you lot, you bastard plonkers. You’re doing this, now stop or we’re all stuffed”.
But nonetheless one is struck by the infuriating impotence in the slogan of the South African branch of the WWF. ‘Let’s leave our children a living planet,” it urges, diplomatic and benign. Alright, but are these the same children whose breakfast bacon represents the final splattering convulsion in a chain of unthinkable industrial horror? The same children who consider food security — and the mechanised martyring that implies — to be a birthright? Or the children who are so bored that nothing pricks the ennui but the shrieks of hamsters burnt with cigarette butts? Those children? Surely as long as they have an iPod to listen to and a mirror to look at, they’re content? Can’t we keep the planet for ourselves, we who have at least made peace with the hypocrisy of our meat addiction by a careful process of denial, rationalisation and fantasy?
But apparently it’s all signed and sealed. Our children are getting the old ancestral biosphere, and we’re getting a pine box and a toasty furnace. Not that such harsh truths are ever spoken in the non-confrontational world of Animal Day. Click on the photo gallery at AnimalsMatter.org, and one is confronted not with propaganda showing the brains of baby seals on Wellington boots, but rather with a gigantic library of me-and-ma-dawg snaps. Animals matter, but apparently some matter more than others, and those that matter most are the ones that can say ‘I wuv oo” and sleep on one’s slippers.
Indeed, follow not more than three or four links from this orgy of suburban pet-fetishism, and one comes across people’s shrines to their ‘dog-angels” who were sent to heaven by old age or articulated trucks. One assumes that there are no cat-angels, as it would be fairly disturbing for the inmates of Paradise to see them being plucked like so many shrieking cling-peaches from the top branches of heavenly trees by squadrons of flying Jack Russells.
This is not helping. The 60-million pigs slaughtered at the nadir of their misery every year are not having their lot improved by being associated with cuddles. The sharp end cannot be viewed alongside the soft rear. And neither can be addressed without returning each time with a long, slow, bloody indictment of the master behind his gate.