les impressions et les expressions

cohabitation and petting

la cohabitation et la caresse
originel, 27 juin 2023

Animals coexist with us the human beings under one ecosystem on the planet. The word of cohabitation is often employed with unrealistic idealism, but the coexistence is my most natural way of seeing. The relationship between us and animals is not friendly; just as other children are called “your friends” in a kindergarten, we are not always on a good term with animals, but at least it is impossible to perfectly exclude the influence which they and we have on each other, and it is not allowed to behave totally selfishly also as in a kindergarten.

I see a news show in the morning always introduce a video of a pet with funny behavior, being watched with smiling by the commentators at the studio, and I have already got tired of it. Pet is quite grotesque in that humans projects their idle on actually living animals instead of treating them as others with which they share the room for living. It means that they are insensible of interaction between the human race and other races. Some might refute that loving their pets is quite normal in that they form a friendship in living with their pets. This argument is reasonable enough, actually. Nevertheless, I personally will never be willing to form the relationship in which animals are regarded as to be protected like a baby and the growth of animals in their own way is ignored.

Some moral vegetarians claim that having a pet while eating animal meat is paradoxical and I totally agree with it. To pet animals is out of social relationships in nature, which consist of food-chain and ecosystem, and this prioritization of humans’ perspectives is as if they were trying to become a god, who can objectify the entire world.

In the long history of humanity, it was already normal to take an animal as their companion of hunting. The difference from the pets in modernity is that ancient humans and animals were in mutualistic symbiosis while modern humans deprive pets of animal lifework, which forms the dignity of life. Today, when mistress system in the harm is condemned, how can we still justify our deal of animals just as a pet?

In fact, in the modernity where humans have overwhelming competence, the idea of interaction between human beings and animals in the same ecosystem is not easy to apply the real world, especially the visible one. Taking it into consideration, the appearance of a new way of relationship, that is petting, is convincing enough. I believe that the religious views of our ethnicity have survived in a particular form, while weakened through modernization and spread of national Shintoism. Society is hardly sensitive to those remained perspectives regrettably, but they stay here and there in a various form and therefore I was able to find them. In conclusion, they are resistant to pets, which is particular to modern society.

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