Let's go back to the animals part.
A happy horse is gentled, not broken. And when it comes right down to it, I've always preferred a horse I couldn't really control, except by her own good grace.
I once went to the Florida Keys to swim with dolphins. They were actually wild, and could come into and go from the "facilities" as they pleased. They seemed to enjoy people. At one of two facilities I visited, dolphins "worked with" autistic children. At the other, among my group of dolphin swimmers was a deaf gentlemen, whom the dolphins treated with kid gloves, as if they knew he was deaf, and could not, like the rest of us, hear their whirrs, clicks and chirps as they playfully "charged" us, pretending they intended to sideswipe us.
They would also swim along the edge of the lagoon as we walked on the boardwalk, stick their heads out of the water to be stroked (they felt like hardboiled eggs) and open their mouths because they wanted us, their "handlers" told us, to put our hands in their mouths to show we trusted them. We did.
My favorite part was just swimming with them, though the rest of the group "rode" them, holding on to their dorsal fins. I gave up my "ride time" in exchange for others' swim time. Though the dolphins allowed and seemed to enjoy the riding, I have never liked it when animals "jumped through hoops" for me. They LOVED to swim in the wake of our swim fins, to swim just below us in tandem with us, along side us, or to rush in front of us, suddenly stop and "stand" on their tails peering straight into our faces as if to ask "Where do you think you're going, Legged One?" and then swim off laughing their little radar clicks.
I was so awed by these benevolent "wild things", so intoxicated by their freely-distributed charm, even convinced that they could tell what I was thinking and feeling about them as they swam beside me while I walked along the boardwalk, their left or right eye-side up, following me, "reading" my thoughts.
In addition, I have always preferred cats to dogs. You can beat a dog bloody with a chain and he will come crawling back to you on his belly. Not so a cat. He's out of there. Someone once said, "There's no use calling a cat. They screen their calls." And I have always admired dogs who turn on those who beat them. It seems to me that those who prefer dogs to cats prefer dominion, to be dominators, and those who prefer cats prefer democracy and negotiation.
Natty Seidenberg says "...our most basic relationship of survival - our relationship to the natural world - is based on exploitation and alienation." To paraphrase Seidenberg, greed, control and ownership are values to be cherished, virtues which are rewarded, and which bring with them not only privilege, but are necessary for survival under capitalism, where the "free" market passes for freedom. Social order and cooperation, e.g. control, governing the behavior/relationships of groups of individuals to something else, are institutionalized, such as the institution of monogamy by church, state and society, and the behavior is reinforced and enforced at every level of society as the only, the natural, the moral way to live.
I might add that your best lover will be one you "convince", perhaps seduce with their freely-willed participation, but certainly not one you have raped.
When you lose the love and awe of "wild things", when you lose respect for "the other", it is yourself who is lost in the arrogance of being you. It takes a VERY small man who can only feel big by standing on someone else's neck--bell hooks refers to our society as a "white supremacist capitalist patriarchy." That's a triple whammy of striving for domination, not freedom. Obedience for obeisance via objectification.
I have foregone a discussion of our genocide of Native Americans, the abomination of enslaving Africans, the subjugation of women, the exploitation of labor, the demonization of gays, as well as the slaughter of fellow humans by the millions as "collateral damage" in our continual wars of US imperialism. And I do realize that my willingness to ride a horse and not a dolphin is my own hypocrisy, perhaps rationalized by the fact that horses are no longer "wild things."
Please refer to my postings "The ABC's of Atrocity", "IMPEDIMENTA (or Buried Alive)", "Anathema" and "The Frog and the Scorpion" posted here at Op Ed News (which I have "attached" to this article) for further thoughts on society's role in individual behavior. Also, please read any of Alice Miller's books on child psychology or Arthur Silber's posts on obedience at his "Once Upon a Time" blog. Thank you.
The ABCs of Atrocity
sow the seeds of future perversity.
Animals are the means we use to teach
our children not only the basics of speech,
but to give them the tools they're going to need
to begin elementary reading.
We ask "What does the cow say?"
"P is for pig" we tell them
while their animal friends scream in agony
as we mechanically and mercilessly slaughter them,
renaming their dismembered body parts
beef, pork, mutton and poultry
in order to distance the abattoir
from the innocence, the purity, of the nursery.
And as children learn that they are complicit
with their nuggets, wings, ribs and cheeseburgers,
they lock it down deep in denial,
repressing interfamilial murder.
Further, children learn god has given them
"dominion" over all other animals
and some of them practice what's termed
"animal husbandry." The 4-H is an example
of the indoctrination of impressionable children
into support of this hypocritical debacle.
It teaches children to care for an animal,
to feed her and groom her and name her,
grow up with her, win a blue ribbon,
and sell her to a restaurant in a stone cold betrayal.
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