Many of you were probably frowning when you read the title of this post. But nevertheless I hold the strong conviction that we are indeed the lowest creatures that are roaming the surface of this planet. And why, you might ask? Because we are the only creatures that are NOT living in perfect harmony with this planet. We perhaps live in nature but we certainly don’t live with nature. And the few of us who did, have quickly be converted either the soft way or the hard to the so-called civilised way of living, like the American Indians or the tribes in Africa. Those were still people who appreciated the beauty of this planet and tried to live in harmony with it, by giving and taking. We, the self-declared civilised people, are only taking from nature what we need without giving anything in return. Instead of living in harmony with this planet we try to re-shape it such that the planet serves our ever-growing needs. And our hunger for more is unstoppable. We consume the Earth’s natural resources at a fearsome rate. We pollute this planet so much that it is dying and we don’t seem to really care because our greed is more important to us. We reproduce and reproduce without there being any real natural threat anymore apart from the odd disease, meaning that we have totally overcrowded our environment and that there is ever less space for the rest of the natural inhabitants of our world. Oh, we all want children so badly that we spare no cost in order to have them without considering the consequences outside of our insignificant personal world. Some say that children are our future, but if we continue to reproduce at this pace there’ll soon not be any future left because every child needs its share of the fading resources. You might even say with a bit of cynism that those who have more than two children are co-responsible for the murder of our planet!
There is only one more kind of beings that has exactly the same kind of behaviour like us, and those are the parasites. Yes, we humans are parasites! We consume our host completely and when it dies, we simply move to the next host or if that is impossible, we prefer to die with our host rather than to do anything about it. Some say, and especially the more religious ones among us, that man is the "lord of creation". Please, don’t make me laugh! We? Lords? Why should we be more important than any other living creature, either plant or animal? Because we happen to be a tad more intelligent? Actually, I also doubt very much whether we are indeed more intelligent than some animals and I can only agree to what Douglas Adams wrote. He argued that dolphins are more intelligent than man because all they ever do is mocking about in the water, having a good time. Whilst we humans spend hours in peak-hour traffic, do jobs that most of us don’t want to do in the first place, pay awful mortgages and in the end only spend a minimal amount of our time on the things that really matter. No, then I’d much rather be a dolphin!
And there is another aspect about man which makes me say that we are the lowest creatures of them all. We consider ourselves to be so incredibly important and so above everything else in this world, that we believe that we can just do anything to any other living creature without the slightest bit of remorse, let alone punishment. And yes, before any extreme veggie reacts to my post, I’m a meat eater, like we humans naturally are for the largest part. It is a law of nature that you have to kill in order to eat. Cats, for example, can ONLY survive on meat, although some idiots are trying to feed them carrots and other plant-like stuff that is very unhealthy for them. On top of that, I hold the firm belief that also plants are a lot more sophisticated creatures than is generally accepted and it’s not because a carrot doesn’t say “auch” when you throw it alive in boiling water that it doesn’t suffer. There are tonnes of evidence that plants not only feel, but that they also communicate with each other, like e.g. Australian eucalyptus trees which start to produce not only poison but also pheromones when they “feel” that something is eating its leaves. These pheromones are picked up by the other trees and also they start producing poison in order to deter the animals from eating any more.
So I repeat: all creatures great and small, we are all EQUAL! We all have EQUAL rights to be on this planet and to live the life for which we were destined. And now I come to the nut of the matter because you’ll probably wonder why I’m writing all of this. A couple of days ago, we received a telephone call from an extremely friendly lady who lives in the village of Sologno, about 5km away from us. She had spotted a strange-looking cat among the usual strays that roam in the streets over there. Her description made us believe in miracles again, although we were still in a lot of doubt, but when we saw it we were absolutely certain: it was our little Thomas!!! But apart from being overjoyed about finding him back, we were deeply grieved because Thomas was no longer the Thomas we always knew: good-humoured, curious and proud. No, Thomas’ appearance has changed a lot. His fur is knotted and dirty and he’s very thin, all things which you could expect after him being away from home for more than two months and after having survived these terribly cold first weeks of February. But what’s a lot worse: his nose is severely swollen and his eyes are dull and sad. He’s incredibly scared of humans now. Which leads us to conclude that Thomas’ adventure started with a very bad experience with humans which probably continued while he was in that other village. There he was probably treated the same way like the other strays and we can only thank heaven and earth that there are still a couple of merciful people around who’ve fed him a few scraps every now and then so he could stay alive. Of all of Earth’s creatures, there is only one who’d do this to another living creature, just for pleasure or because it “feels like it”: man. And therefore, we are the lowest of them all.
It’ll probably take a bit more time before we’ll be able to catch him. But now we’re reassured that he’s still alive and that one day he’ll return to our family. His physical wounds will probably heal. His psychological ones probably not entirely and he’ll most likely not be the same Thomas anymore we’ve always known. It's sad, but we'll have to accept it. At least he’ll be back and we’ll spoil him like a little baby, which he actually is: our little baby. No matter how much other people laugh when we say that...
