Wayne Pacelle, CEO and President of the Humane Society of the United States, toured the country in April to promote his instant bestseller, The Bond: Our Kinship with Animals, Our Call to Defend Them, published by William Morrow/Harper Collins.
Hopefully you caught one of his Bay Area appearances and were infected with his compassion and strong sense of purpose. If you missed seeing Pacelle in person, you can count on being moved and inspired by those same qualities in his writing. The Bond is available at many local independent bookstores, as well as at the large chains and online. The following excerpt from the book’s preface is reprinted with the permission of the Humane Society of the United States (www.hsus.org).
We all have our own ideas about how to make the world a better place – and that’s a good thing. Some are called to serve the poor, bringing food, shelter, medicine, and opportunity where the need is greatest. There are men and women devoted especially to the welfare of children, protecting them from violence and exploitation and finding homes for the orphans. Many dedicate themselves to preventing or curing disease, while others labor to protect the environment from pollution or careless development. And by the millions, men and women in America and beyond have set their hearts and minds to the work of preventing cruelty and alleviating the suffering of animals…
I’ve always felt a bond with animals, and I have come to realize that so do people everywhere. At the same time, in more than twenty years of immersion in animal welfare, I’ve also seen incredible cruelty done to animals and heard ever more elaborate arguments offered to justify those abuses. This book is my attempt to confront these contradictions, to disentangle our sometimes conflicted attitudes toward animals, and to suggest a path forward in our own lives and in the life of our country. We all know that cruelty is wrong, but applying this principle in a consistent way can be awfully difficult when so many people and industries misuse animals so routinely and so blithely and often cannot even imagine doing things a different way. In each case, there is a different and better course, and our best guide is the bond with animals – that first impulse to do the decent thing for a fellow creature.
I’ve learned that in the animal-welfare movement no creature is quite forgotten, and there is no animal whose troubles do not matter to someone. Name any species and it has its defenders. It’s not just the “charismatic” species, defended by such groups as the Mountain Lion Foundation, the Snow Leopard Trust, the Whale and Dolphin Conservation Society, the Gorilla Foundation, or Save the Elephants. Countless other groups have been formed to help farm animals, animals in laboratories, overworked animals like donkeys and camels, stray animals and feral cats, and other injured and needy creatures both domesticated and wild…
Of course, the flip side of all this benevolence is that such groups and their labors are needed in the first place. There is so much animal cruelty, homelessness, and suffering, and so much of it is a consequence of human action. In a rational world, the kinder people wouldn’t be so busy dealing with the wreckage left by the cruel and careless.
As harsh as nature is for animals, cruelty comes only from human hands. We are the creature of conscience, aware of the wrongs we do and fully capable of making thigns right. Our best instincts will always tend in that direction, because a bond with animals is build into every one of us. That bond of kinship and fellow-feeling has been with us through the entire arc of human experience – from our first barefoot steps on the planet through the era of the domestication of animals and into the modern age. For all that sets humanity apart, animals remain “our companions in Creation,” to borrow a phrase from Pope Benedict XVI, bound up with us in the story of life on earth. Every act of callousness toward an animal is a betrayal of that bond. In every act of kindness, we keep faith with the bond. And broadly speaking the whole mission of the animal-welfare cause is to repair the bond – for their sake and for our own.
Today, more than ever, we hold all the cards in our relationship with animals. They have no say in their own fate, and it’s up to us to speak and act on their behalf. International assemblies convene to decide which species will be protected and which will not – quarreling over terms and clauses that can either spare animals by the tens of thousands or destroy them on a similar scale. Humans control the births and deaths of billions of domesticated animals, and often the number of days or hours they are permitted to live. We even shape their very natures and temperaments through selective breeding, genetic engineering, and now cloning – taking godlike powers upon ourselves, often with complete disregard for the original designs of God and nature.
When it comes to people and animals, power is asymmetrical, and all the advantages belong to us. Whether it’s a subarctic nursery of newborn seals before the hunters come, or a herd of elephants about to be “culled,” or dogs and cats at the end of their allotted time at a shelter and deemed to costly to keep alive, always their fate depends on our forbearance and our compassion. And one of the themes of human experience, since we first entered the picture ages ago, has been the expansion of that power and the moral test of how we use it – whether cruelly or kindly, selfishly or justly, pridefully or humbly. There have always been people and groups, in every time and place, who seek to dismiss and belittle the cause of protecting animals, as if the other creatures of the earth were just an obstacle to human progress that needs to be cleared away, subdued, or even wiped out as we decide. And there have always been those others who raised a clear voice in defense of animals, unafraid to question old assumptions, unworthy traditions, and practices and industries that can no longer hold up to reason or conscience.
Millions are carrying on in that same spirit of challenging, questioning, and calling cruelty by its name. The battle is unfolding on many fronts, as described in the pages to follow. In the end, whenever we humans find it in ourselves to help powerless and vulnerable creatures, we are both affirming their goodness and showing our own. In that way, their cause is also the cause of humanity, and this book is your invitation to join it.
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