A few days ago I was worshipping at the Cathedral of St. Arbucks when I noticed the following quotation on the side of my Cinnamon Dolce Latte:
Wild animals often do a much better job of caring for their offspring than we civilized and educated humans do. If we cannot keep children safe in their homes, how can we hope to make ourselves safe in the world?
-- Lee Grogg, Executive director of Ryther Child Center, an agency providing safe places and opportunities for children.
I never bothered reading Starbucks' version of Successories on my coffee cup because it's usually hidden under the cardboard sleeve, but a for the last few weeks I've been having worse-than-normal insomnia and on this particular day I had been up for nearly 38 hours so things were… a little weird. I mean, colors were a little brighter and I was hearing things before they actually made a sound. I was one with the infinite void, man, and on this day my coffee cup was talking to me and telling me to read the wit and wisdom of Lee Grogg. And so I did, and when I read it I knew that it was something that must be laughed and mocked mercilessly, but alas I was not in the state of mind to do so at the time, but before I stepped back into the swirling purple cosmos that unites us all- seriously, dude- I saved the cup.
Now, I am sure that this Ryther Child Center does a lot of good work and helps a lot of children out, but are they crazy? For most animal species, 'caring for their offspring' consists of them laying eggs in a warm hole in the ground and taking off. Most birds and mammals do raise their young but very often they will eat their young, or they shun the runts and let them starve, or they will purposely kill off a twin because they can't produce enough food to feed more than one baby.
So please, people, for the sake of the children, let's start a campaign to buy a TV and cable TV for The Ryther Center so that they can watch Animal Planet and stop saying such goofy-ass things to the coffee-drinking world.
2 comments:
I used to train and ride horses before I went in the army, have had some since, and it never ceases to amaze me how much trouble people have because they humanize and even idealize animals, and often because they minimise the intellectual and emotional potentials of the animals.
For most people ownership is a rude awakening. They are not little dolls that give love and can be set aside until wanted, then put away again.
Where I assist with horseback therapy we were tube worming some horses and had to 'twitch' a couple, and some of the families of the clients thought it was cruel. Most of them think a horse is sort of like a big couch that moves, are quite unaware that a domestic horse (especially stabled ones) is really pretty far out of it's environment.
When I first read the cup I thought of my dad, who would say (loudly) when me and my brother were misbehaving, "Now I know why tigers eat their young."
A lot of people humanize their dogs, too. If you've ever seen 'It's Me Or The Dog' or 'The Dog Whisperer' you'd see people who have dogs that treat them like children and wonder why the dog pees all over the place. One particular episode had a girl who got a nasty little dog 'because she wanted to dress it up and take it around in her purse'. Someone should have smacked her in the head and taken the dog from her until she grew up and realized that a pet wasn't a toy.
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