Some people just shit me

I cannot abide animal cruelty.

I don't understand how people can harm, with purpose, a creature who is harmless, tame and trusting towards them. It just fills me with pain and disbelief, and a need to punish. To hurt their cruel heads till they see sense. Except that it wouldn't work, that much I know. It would be much better if they simply learnt that such behaviour is inhumane. No, inhuman. Except that it isn't, is it? It's human because we're all really animals of course, but "thinking" animals, allegedly, and all that thinking can really mess with the simplicity of primal needs and desires - I mean, how does an animal handle the complications of right and wrong in human society? It's so much harder to know what you should or should not do when it's not life or death - where is the guide within you, and where does it come from anyway? The fully-aware conscience, I suspect, was not included in the basic human package, and so people develop one as best they can, with as much imagination as they can muster, or borrow (or adopt) them from bibles and creeds. Either way, they don't come up the same, and who's to say which is more righteous and superior?

The thing is, though, if we don't think hard, and I mean really hard, about right and wrong, and question ourselves and take responsibility for our thoughts and actions, instead just... living, as it were, blaming nature, we waste so much of the potential we have for protecting and nurturing the preciousness of every fragile little life, starting with those who depend on us.

Sigh.