Why I Stop for Squirrels in the Street
Today I committed genocide. In one fell swoop, I eradicated an entire cohort of ants enjoying a rather fat droplet of a fruit smoothie I had spilled on the floor. Their presence would disgust my mom, I reasoned, and I was admittedly too lazy to find the piece of paper and cup required for releasing them back into the wild.
“Too lazy.” I am ashamed to admit it. As soon as I discarded of their limp bodies, shriveled to the size of a semi colon, I at least had the decency to mourn their demise. The lost ants’ brief enjoyment of their snack was smothered by an excruciating ending, made worse by the fact that my plush paper towel was unable to apply the necessary pressure to squish their bodies in one go.
Many will find this lingering, consuming guilt foolish. That is ok; I find these people foolish too.
Consciousness is precious. That anything exists at all considering the uber-delicate requirements for life, eradicated with one tip of the quantum balance, or as author Camille Paglia shrewdly observes, one “shrug” from mother nature, is remarkable!
The pit of my soul knows that everything feels and perceives. There is no feasible way for something to be alive and for it to not have complex functionality. Humans, in our narcissistic anthropomorphic projection onto our external surroundings, assume that if something does not exhibit the same traits as us, and is not “human,” it is utterly incapable of the same things we are. The shock we exhibit when an elephant paints itself, or when we learn dolphins have sex for fun and communicate in complex language, demonstrates a comically insulting idiocy very unbecoming of the world’s “most intelligent” creatures.
We are hypocritical in our selective valuation of life. There is a reason I would never kick a puppy, but I was able to stomach stomping on a family of ants. Even vegans’ avid advocacy for extending empathy to other life forms has its limits. Vegans sympathize with animals (which more obviously convey human-centric definitions of emotion) but not for for plants, who as inanimate as they seem, nonetheless emit toxins to protect themselves from predators and communicate warnings to one another through vast, complex underground networks of roots when a perceived threat is near.
My ants incident is a reminder that, instinctually, I know that life is to be respected and not senselessly taken. It is why my foot inadvertently slams on my breaks and shreds my brake pads down an inch every time a squirrel runs out into the street.
