Creatures of compassion

Yesterday was my birthday.

And it was the day that two essays about expanding our circle of compassion to all beings appeared in major papers. One, by Jonathan Safran Foer, appeared in The New York Times (My Life as a Dog) and the other, by Roy Hammersley, in the UK paper, The Guardian. He starts Creatures of Compassion this way:

I was very worried about the dogs. Not dog, dogs. Buster was "quartered safe out here" like the enviable soldiers in Rudyard Kipling's Gunga Din. I, on the other hand, was off to "India's sunny clime". It was the dogs of Delhi that worried me. To be more precise, I took it for granted that they would be scrofulous, malnourished and abused, and I worried about how I would react to the sight of so much misery. I come from a long line of canine masochists who tortured themselves about imagined cruelty. My mother had no doubt that any dog not under her care was starved and badly treated. As a result, she constantly found dogs that were not lost and fed dogs that were not hungry. I do not make the same perverse assumptions. But it seemed unlikely that feral Indian dogs would be in peak condition.

This echoes my exact feelings the first time I went to India. Could I bear to see street dogs in pathetic conditions? Turns out the street dogs Hammersley saw were pretty well off. Most of the ones I have seen in cities were, too. (The dogs in rural areas appeared worse off.)

The column goes on to make the connection between compassion towards non-human beings and compassion towards humans.

Although animals cannot have rights, humans have responsibilities. And we cannot ignore them with the excuse that we are concentrating on something more important.

The two columns were very nice birthday presents.