02.24.08
Mirror, Mirror on the Wall
Mirror, Mirror on the Wall, Who’s the Cruelest Species of Them All?
By Anneli Rufus, AlterNet. Posted February 23, 2008.
We are, of course, but a new book on animal cruelty will make your jaw drop about how vicious humans can be to other animals. Tools
Shamu’s mother was harpooned.
She was killed in the wild by the crew that captured the first in a series of young orcas that have since been trained to do tricks at San Diego’s Sea World marine park, known sequentially as America’s most famous performing sea mammals.
And maybe that’s all you need to know to realize just how far humans will go. Maybe that’s all you need to know — were you beside me on those bleachers, years ago, cheering Shamu? — to see blood, even faded and vestigial, on your hands.
Erin E. Williams and Margo DeMello’s Why Animals Matter: The Case for Animal Protection (Prometheus, 2007) is a book so jam-packed with literal crimes against nature that it’s hard to read more than a few pages in one go. Williams works for the Humane Society of the United States. DeMello is an administrative director of the House Rabbit Society.