And later in the article….
‘Ms. Prosin said her group (Nonhuman Rights Project) was
saying not that animals were people, but that they were “autonomous beings, who
are self-aware and self-directed.”’
--- From the April 21, 2015 NY Times - “Judge Orders Stony Brook University to Defend
Its Custody of 2 Chimps” by Jesse McKinley.
One no longer has an excuse to be ignorant on this topic.
Simply by scanning the many posts and clips on the internet we can directly see the dealings between
humans and animals, and animals and animals, even between different species.
New books have appeared and research has been done exploring the intelligence and the emotional
capabilities of animals.
The sages of India tell us that animals are like our young
children. Bob Kohn should know that our two or three years olds have no legal
responsibilities and yet we have both a legal and moral obligation to care for
them. Animals also are sentient beings
who show affection and experience happiness, fear and pain.
In the pages of
Srimad Bhagavatam (7:14:9), written thousands of years ago, it is explained, “One should treat animals
such as deer, camels, asses, monkeys, mice, snakes, birds and flies exactly
like one's own son. How little difference there actually is between children
and these innocent animals.”
The rights of humans, of the unborn, and of animals, in one
sense, all goes hand in hand. Spiritual awareness is a matter of education and
knowledge, to understand that all life holds a soul and that we are all
connected.
People are conditioned to think, "I don't need to care
about that one because they are not of my race, or my religion, or nationality,
or my species." In this way we create excuses to kill, harm or neglect
others. To acknowledge the rights of all creatures and to see them as part of
our greater universal family is the
beginning of civilized culture.
Later in the Srimad Bhagavatam (11: 7:33-35), it goes beyond
this to explain that the animals, the environment and the elements (i.e. the
earth and mountains, sky, water, fire, spiders, pigeons, deer, elephants) are also
our teachers. The materialists only want to exploit these things to increase
their wealth and derive pleasures. Unfortunately, they wander in the world,
rarely going beyond this narrow mindset. In the meantime the earth is being
torn apart and life forms are being decimated, just to increase the wealth of a
very small fraction of the population.
But the introspective souls see all things as part of a
greater educational process. They seek
to respect all life. They are awed and humbled by the world around them. In
this way, we can gradually learn to see the hand of God working in all beings
and in all situations.
My award-winning book at www.Mahabharata-Project.com
