With Coco, she was sometimes like a mother with her only child. But the puppy was soon a dog and then, too soon, too old, requiring frequent veterinary attention. Of late, he had been losing weight and was having difficulty keeping food in. An infection of his anal sacs, the scent-secreting glands dogs use to mark territory, kept him in continuous pain.

Priya must have known the end could be not far away but I believe a part of her would have been in denial, hoping, like all loving parents do, that this was just a passing cloud. 

Poll

Who will win the Punjab Elections?

BJP 32.76%

AAP 43.10%

INC 24.14%

Submit

View All In Poll

Also read: Ek footpath ki keemat tum kya jaano babu...

But what if it wasn’t?

You know how perversely my mind works. I ask myself why we don’t feel similar emotions when a cockroach dies, squelched under our gleeful shoes. Why do we feel smug satisfaction instead? Why do Japanese fishermen take annual pleasure in corralling and massacring one of the world’s most intelligent mammals, the dolphin?

Why do human harpoons kill majestic whales just to harvest their meat and use their oil, blubber, ambergris and cartilage to make medicines and perfumes?

How come we swat flies without a second thought while swearing that dogs and cats have feelings just like we do? Do they?

My mind jumps, perversely, to nine plump, good-natured dogs, rather like huskies, frolicking with children in a compound in a Vietnamese village. I remarked that this family must love dogs very much, and was told, in a whispered aside, that when winter came around, these pets would be skinned, chopped, grilled and eaten. Their meat apparently helped humans stay warm when it was cold out.

Many Vietnamese families raise dogs expressly to eat them on some winter day.

What’s so surprising about that? Haven’t humans always farmed animals to eat them? Unless you’re vegan or Jain, you’ll likely be eating chicken, pork, cows, lamb or fish—all widely farmed today—not to mention exotic meats such as ostriches, crocodiles, snails, deer, antelope, giant rats and camels.

What’s so wrong about that? Chap’s got to eat. We’re all hunters at heart, even if we wear suits. It’s a wild world, feelings don’t come into it. If a lion had to consider a gazelle’s feelings, he’d never pounce.

Which, at last, brings me to lions. In recent years, tourists have begun paying as much as $25,000 apiece for the pleasure of killing a lion, specially bred to be killed. America is an especially big source of hunters with money, time and bloodlust fed by a brutal gun industry. At the moment, Africa has about 260 lion farms, with 8,000 to 12,000 lions bred, raised and kept in captivity. Their claws, teeth and testicles are sold to China, where they are used to make aphrodisiacs and other medicines.

Unlike cows and pigs, these lions are not being bred for their protein content. They are being brought to life, fed well and groomed into handsome majesty so that one day a cowardly hunter with a high tech gun may kill it from the safety of his jeep. For his money, he can specify the exact kind of lion he wants to kill, down to colour, body span and size of mane. Lion farming is now a $2.4-billion industry.

Killing another living being requires first a declaration that it is less than human. Hitler was able to exterminate 6 million Jews only after he had declared them to be a sub-human threat to German purity and growth. Whites enslaved blacks only after convincing themselves that they were less than human.

Humans are unique in that they take pleasure in destroying life, their own and others’. But justifying butchery, whether of a chicken, a lion or a Jew, whether to eat, to savage or for ethnic cleansing, requires believing that the victim is somehow below you.

Here is the tragic paradox: when you attack any life believing it to be less than yours, it is you who end up being sub-human.

Being human looks a little different. Priya didn’t go to work at all during Coco’s last week alive. She stayed home, barely sleeping, staying as close as she could to her darling child, not wanting to miss his slightest whimpered need. But then, despite herself, her eyes closed and she briefly dropped into asleep, utterly exhausted. Coco was just inches away from her, lying on his side. 

When she awoke, with a start, three hours or so later, Coco was still as she’d left him, on his side, inert, gone from his body and her life. 
He was loved till the moment he died.

You can reach C Y Gopinath at cygopi@gmail.com 

Send your feedback to mailbag@mid-day.com

The views expressed in this column are the individual’s and don’t represent those of the paper