Food for thought
I want you to take a brief look around yourself. Firstly, you may be sitting at home or even in someone else’s home looking out at the world around you wondering whether it is socially acceptable to have another tea before either the partner or kids come home from school. Otherwise, you are probably like highest percentage of the population at work, wondering how come you are putting in so many hours at work and regardless of these hours you are still looking at the same four walls, or the same routine or the surrounding buildings, airports and landscapes. Unless you are an extremely lucky person who happens to have none of these, however regardless you are still stuck in some kind of routine of surviving or looking out on the others who are packed like sardines and crammed on buses/trains or airplanes to get from one place to the next. As much as we would all like to be the free birds who live to travel or bring up a family or a simple life with peace and harmony or a life of luxury. Wherever you are right now, I want to to take a look at where you and others are or have been.
Do you or others have pets as well? When you are walking down the road how many people do you see walking their dogs and sometimes even their cats or guinea pigs. (Trust me I know I’ve seen it all!) There are a whole lot of people who have some form of animal, and all my life I agree to be one of them. My family home have had cats, guinea pigs, fancy rats, hamsters and looked after parrots and dogs. It has been quite the family farm here thats’s for sure.
Now going back to looking out at the world and the people (like me) who own these animals, who provide homes, food and love for their animals. My question is at what point did animals actually need any of these things? If we are to go back a few 100,000 years BC we were all pretty much fending for ourselves and I am pretty sure as we were hunting the grand scapes for food in our man cave days that we did not turn around to our fellow furry pre-human pack and said ‘did you walk the dog this morning?’
So at what point did we not only dominate the world in our ‘civilised’ society but decided that animals from species other than our own belonged to us? I don’t believe there is a right or wrong answer in this, as I know if I dropped off my cat randomly in the woods, not only would she absolutely hate me and throw a kitty tantrum, yet, after her kitty crying for a few hours she would find her way back to us as she always does because this is her home and she has conditioned the idea that we provide food, water, attention and of course love.
According to Christopher Beam the first domesticated animal was the dog as he claims ‘No one can pinpoint exactly when humans first started keeping dogs as pets, but estimates range from roughly 13,000 to 30,000 years ago’ in the State (https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2009/03/which-animal-did-we-domesticate-first.html).
Most of us including myself has accepted this as how things are, however, it is always great to question the conventions that we believe ourselves to be true. At what point did we started taking ownership in the natural world over other species?
Secondly, drawing back to our little vision at the beginning, drawing ourselves in, to looking at our surroundings, before I interrupted you, in order to look at people walking animals down the street and questioning why we have come to captivating other species. The biggest question of all is when we look at these animals, they merely live to survive in a natural state. You always find them building a little nest, or hunting the natural resources (unless the humans have brought manufactured food), breeding and an awful lot of sleeping. Yet, humans were a species amongst these others at one point and we seem to not only have captivated other species, however, we have found a way of captivating our own. Our survival depends on the need to work and the needs to work are controlled by those who are systematically programming us to believe that this is the case in order to pay for food, water and shelter rather allowing more land for it to grow, creating tall buildings for us to work in, (deprived of natural sunlight may I add) in a world that is now manufactured to become industrial to provide more things or what we don’t really need and less of the things of what we do. As a consequence of doing what society dictates we do in order to survive, we are moving away from the very foundations of what humans should be doing to survive, such as eating healthy foods, getting enough sunlight, sleeping well, healthy social interaction and sometimes having a family. Leaving a generation baffled by illnesses, poor economic health and a high fear of survival, due to our basis that we should be working a minimum of 50 hours a week to put down a overly overpriced mortgage for homes, which we are then tied into paying off for the rest of our lives. We are pretty much promoting that the survival of the fittest in today’s world are the ones who work the longest hours, rather the people who are also here to bring peace and harmony to the world.
We are the only species to captivate our own species, as well as others. #foodforthought
Jane R blog-ess 