My first blog post on something else than cooking. And it's a very sad post.
I am totally worked up about this link: Live animals being sold as keyrings in China . Yes, you have read correctly: Live animals are sold as keyrings! Animals that are permanently sealed in small plastic bags. In these small plastic bags they can only survive for a short while before they suffocate. And no, those keyrings are not designed to be opened, so that they can be taken out and survive. They are designed with an expiry date. Their life is compared to a can of tuna or a glass of cherries that expires after a while and you throw it away. They are selling living Brazil turtles or two small kingfish, sealed in an airtight package with some colored water. It really made me sick and sad to read that.
And people are buying those keyrings. Yes, rub your eyes and read again: PEOPLE ARE ACTUALLY BUYING THESE CRUELTIES! Sometimes you wonder if mankind has some morals left. Probably not.
Now, how would you react? If you buy some to free those poor creatures, you support the trade and they are continuing to produce, just to sell more. So is the solution not to buy?
But what happens to the already sealed up animals that are slowly suffocating in the plastic bags? Their lives are dumped into trash cans. If the trade dies out, luckily no others will follow the same fate, but that's not going to help those already sealed up.
Stepehn Messenger from Treehugger already found the right words:
"Sadly, it is likely that so too will the animals which have already been sealed in their colorful, transparent tombs - gasping for the final breath of air they've been packaged with, as they peer out to a world in which their lives are considered essentially worthless. And in such a dark hour, it's hard not to believe our very humanity awaits a similar fate. "
Sick. Sad. Sickening. I wish those people, who produce these keyrings, had the same fate as the poor creatures they are torturing to death. Then they'd probably understand what they are doing to other living creatures. Just imagine living in a plastic bag not much bigger than yourself and slowly suffocating while watching other creatures outside your see-through prison. Imagine.
And sadly that's an example of how mankind considers the lives of animals worthless.Worthless to whom? Of course worthless to mankind. Only if we can use their lives to produce goods for us, or to entertain us, they are worth something. Otherwise, without any use for humans, animals are considered completely worthless. And since no one punishes the pride of creation - man - for what he does to animals, he can do whatever he wants with them. Are animals ever striking back? Do they declare war on humans for exploiting them? No. There is no higher authority than mankind to stop us from exploiting animals.
I admit I was getting a little bit too polemic in the last paragraph. I am just adressing a common way of thinking. I will probably write an article about common views concerning animals later in this blog. Sometimes I wonder, how some humans are even capable of performing gruesome acts on animals, and then I get all angry and sad and apparently a little bit too polemic. A polemic argumentation often gets highly illogical and I do not intend to have a onesided tunnel vision.
Back on topic: It makes me even more desperate that it's actually not against the Chinese law, which only protects wild animals, and apparently these turtles and fish are not wild animals.
I hope they are going to stop this soon.
Yours sincerely,
