The 2084 Precept (17 page)

"Coffee, Peter?" Jeremy asked.

"Thank you," I replied with a nod. Coffee
relieves depression. I think.

"You were going to talk about bears," Jeremy
reminded me.

"Yes, well, and I'll try to keep it short.
Frankly, this is also relatively depressing. What happens is, we
capture lots and lots of bears and we put them all into cages.
Cages designed not to allow them to move at all."

"Designed not to allow them to move at
all?"

"Not at all. And when putting them into the
cages, we make sure they are lying on their backs. We do this so
that we can easily drill a hole into their abdomens."

"Drill a hole into their abdomens?"

"Drill a hole into their abdomens, Jeremy.
This enables us to insert a tube into the hole and ram it into
their gallbladders. The purpose of this is to be able to extract
the bears' bile, an extremely painful experience for the bears and
let's not forget that they can't even move, which all animals,
including human ones, would want to do in a desperate attempt to
alleviate the suffering. At the same time, specific organs are
sometimes surgically removed from the bears without, it goes
without saying, the help of anaesthetics, no point in wasting time
and money, is there? After all, the bears can't move."

Jeremy remained perfectly calm and collected
while I was describing this delightful human activity. I guess some
forms of insanity can have a restrictive effect on emotional
reactions. But he was certainly staring at me, possibly in
disbelief. As my father would have said—he was from Lancashire—his
eyes were standing out like chapel hat pegs. Of course, my father
couldn't know that chapels would not have hat pegs nowadays. Or
that most of the chapels would no longer be called chapels.

"And what kind of a purpose does this
serve?" he asked.

"None," I replied. "None at all. The
birdbrains authorizing and performing this torture believe in a
myth, an age-old doctrine which maintains that the bile and the
organs have useful medicinal applications, that they provide
certain medicinal benefits. But this is total crap, scientifically
proven crap, please forgive the choice of phrase, Jeremy. And in
any case there are strong and efficient chemically manufactured
products which provide far more powerful benefits than would be
possible even if the quacks’ false claims for the bile and the
organs were true. Which they are not.. And so the bears are
subjected to this horrifying treatment over and over again for
years on end, and, great though the ongoing physical agony is, it
is nothing compared to the
mental
agony which they have to
suffer. They undoubtedly go mad in the same way as the monkeys do
in our laboratories. Except that with the bears you can't see it.
Because they can't move, you see."

"And so how many bears do you do this to?
And for how long do you do it to them?"

"Oh, the average number being tortured in
this birdbrain-approved horror movie is about 10,000. At any point
in time. And they live like that for periods of up to 20 years. Can
you imagine having to live a life like that, the torment involved,
the pain, the terror, the immobility?"

"No," said Jeremy slowly, "no, I can't."

"Nor can I Jeremy. Nor can the
sit-on-your-ass representatives of the masses. In fact, they call
it bear-farming! These are bear farms! And bear farms pay taxes,
old chap! Yes they do! Everything is fine, perfectly in order, well
justified, thank you very much."

"So you were wrong when you said it serves
no purpose. It in fact provides a payoff, money, for both the
perpetrators and the approvers."

"Jeremy," I said, "you are right. That is
exactly what it does. And the same goes for all kinds of animal
torture, including the silver foxes and the rest."

"The silver foxes?"

"Yes Jeremy, the silver foxes. It's only one
more example, I don't know why I mentioned it particularly. But
here is the news on the foxes. On average we hold about 100,000
silver foxes in captivity at any given point in time, waiting to be
killed and skinned, sometimes even the other way round. And this is
a more cunning kind of torture. The silver fox is a 'running
animal', an animal which requires continuous movement, it's part of
its nature. So what do we do? We put them into cages. But not just
any old cages, oh no. These cages are about 1 m
²
small,
all wire mesh including the floor. No toys, no stimulation of any
kind. In one way the foxes are luckier than the bears, they can
spring up and down and around and around in their prisons while
they become insane. And whether this is a temporary or a permanent
kind of insanity, we will never know, it's not something you can
check up on after you've killed them. And they call this
fur-farming! These are fur farms! And they also pay taxes, whoopee,
better believe it!"

"Fur farms."

"Yes, Jeremy, just as with domestic
cats."

"Domestic cats."

"Yes. China, the world's largest exporter of
fur products, skins about 2 million cats per year, not to mention
hundreds of thousands of dogs. The pelts are sold overseas or to
their own domestic textile industry and end up as decoration on
inexpensive fur hats and jackets and winter shoes, and as tassels
on berets and so on. This created a huge scandal in Europe last
year and caused more than one well-known clothing chain to withdraw
certain products from its stores. These products' fur had
officially been described as 'manufactured fur'."

"Two million every year," said Jeremy, "that
sounds a lot to me, Peter. Where do they all come from?"

"The majority are bred in so-called fur
factories. Their short lives are spent squashed together in
terribly cramped cages and they are killed as demand requires by a
knife cut to the groin. This allows them to bleed to death without
damage to their pelts."

There was a knock on the door and the dream
appeared carrying a tray with a pot of coffee, sugar, milk, two
cups. She was an impossible creature, damaging to the eyes, grave
risk of excessive optical dilation, dangerous strain on the iris,
cornea, retina, whatever. Where and how did Jeremy find her?

"Mr. Parker, sir, I was making some coffee
and it just occurred to me to ask if you and your visitor would
perhaps care for some?"

"Why yes, thank you Miss Goodall, very
thoughtful of you, much appreciated, kindly just leave everything
on the table here. Thank you so much."

"My pleasure," said the dream, didn't even
look at me, well why should she, her laptop at home was running out
of gigabytes, clogged up with details of male acquaintances. Or
maybe female ones, who knows…now there's a nice erotic thought to
help carry me through the remainder of today's session. And then
she did her trick again of retiring fast, noiselessly; a smooth
personal assistant indeed, elegant, sophisticated for sure,
cultured, doesn't intrude, but I got a quick look at her legs this
time, man oh man.

Jeremy poured the coffee and handed me a
cup. I checked the window again, great, sun still there. I won’t
tell him that the humans also
eat
cats, I’ll just leave him
with the monkey brain example. But wait a minute, wait a minute, I
do
have a question here.

"Jeremy, you never called for coffee. Don't
tell me you were up to your mind-influencing games again,
computer-hacking Ms. Goodall's mind? Tell me you simply forgot and
that it was just a coincidence her coming in, correct?"

A bright look lit up his face, his eyebrows
lifted in an enquiring manner, his mouth spread itself into one of
its polite smiles, but he made no comment, just took a sip of his
coffee.

"Peter," he said, "I think I get the
message. You kill billions of animals and you torture millions more
of them before killing them as well. And you do it all the time and
in vastly increasing numbers. Now as far as I am aware, there are
few, if any, dominant life forms in the universe committing these
kinds of atrocities on their fellow inhabitants, none that have
appeared in my studies anyway, and none that I have ever heard of.
I really don't think I need any more examples thank you. It doesn't
make for pleasant listening and presumably you are not exactly
enjoying the telling of it yourself. I'll be researching some of
this of course and if I need another example or two, it sounds as
if there will be plenty for me to choose from."

"Yes," I replied, "there will be plenty for
you to choose from, don't have any doubts about that. And if I may
make a suggestion, why not add a little color and interest to the
text of your thesis? Why not try animal pornography?"

"Animal pornography? Did you say animal
pornography?"

"Sure," I said, "certainly I said it. You'll
find it via the Internet, no problem. And if your computer were not
properly secured, you would be receiving non-stop emails with some
fairly disgusting attachments illustrating the subject. Animal
pornography is alive and well in most parts of our world and some
of it involves torturing the animals to death as part of the sexual
act. And if your professor is not averse to a modicum of black
humor,
factual
black humor I hasten to point out, then you
should take a look at the country I live in. As in several other
parts of the planet, Germany has a law forbidding the distribution
of animal pornography, but—wait for it, Jeremy—there is no law
forbidding the act itself! Flap, flap. Another of the birdbrains'
masterstrokes. True! And as a consequence there are animal
bordellos in Germany! Believe me. Check it out."

I'll be out of here soon, he can't say I'm
not giving him his money's worth, can he? Or maybe he can. What
money anyway?

"Peter, are you trying to tell me that
your whole species
is like this? I mean that your entire
species is either involved in, or at least in agreement with, what
is going on?"

"Well, we allow it and that is a fact for
sure," I said. "It depends on how you wish to interpret the
situation,” I went on. “All of us eat meat, the entire species as
you put it, except for a few vegetarians of course, and we are all
fully aware of where the meat comes from and how. But none of us
particularly want to know much about it. Certainly we would have no
desire to spend a few days watching fellow human beings
conscientiously working away in a slaughterhouse, we wouldn't want
to stomach the smells or listen to the screams. We wouldn't want to
spend a single day there, not even an hour. If we had to perform
that work ourselves, most of us would become vegetarians. But the
filet steaks are good, so is the veal escalope, so is the chicken
pie, so are the pork chops and, oh yes, the hamburgers. Ignore and
enjoy is our motto."

I drank some more coffee. Good stuff. If
he's as good in business as he is with his selection of coffee and
secretaries, Jeremy here has to be running an extremely profitable
group of companies, bonkers or not.

"At the same time, most of us know about the
baby seals and the torturing of animals in general, but we don't
let that worry us too much either. There is nothing we can do about
it, say the voting masses. If the morons we've voted into power
allow it to continue, that's just the way it is. And they're right
on that one, Jeremy, they can go on voting until they're blue in
the face, but they'll never change anything for the simple reason
that they can't change the human race. Plenty of them have tried
and plenty of them have even been killed for their troubles, your
Jeanne d'Arcs, your Rommels, your von Stauffenbergs and untold
thousands back through history. Laudable people, all of them, but
all they succeeded in doing was to die before their time. They
didn't change the human race. On the other hand…"

"But you are a member of the human race
yourself, Peter. Yet you almost talk as if you consider yourself to
be separate from them."

"Correct, Jeremy, I am a member of the human
race and just as much a part of everything that's going on as
anyone else. But I am a cynic too, an unashamed one. I have read
history, up to and including the most recent century, and I have
seen that we don't change; I have seen that in fact we
cannot
change, and so I have stepped aside, taken a seat in
the theater so to speak. I watch some of my fellow creatures doing
their best, if you want to call it that. And that's why I don't
vote, I never have and I never will, I leave it up to the voting
masses. One half argues one way, the other half argues the other
way, and both halves try to force their views onto everyone else.
And who is to say whose views are best? Sometimes the first half
wins, sometimes the second half wins, and so it goes on and on. A
naïve and ridiculous procedure. All we do is argue and argue and
argue; as I have said, sometimes with the use of weapons and
sometimes without. You cannot realistically expect anything
sensible to come out of such a process, can you? We read about what
happens in our newspapers, day after day for decades, and then we
die. Nothing changes."

He asks a question, he gets an answer. It's
a fair deal. And in any case I am only an interviewee in this
fantasy world of his. He gets the facts as I see them. And they may
be right and they may be wrong, but who cares? Not me. They are
facts. They don’t upset me, it's the way things are. And today's
good mood, although suffering from a sprinkling of depression, was
still going strong, assisted, don't doubt it, by occasional
thoughts concerning the dream and her possible lifestyle. Yes, and
also by the fact that the rain had stopped.

"On the other hand," I continued, "as I was
saying, there are indeed some humans who are extremely conscious of
the state of affairs regarding the murder and torture of other
species, and these people have achieved the creation of several
'nature reserves' in order to protect a few of the animals from the
human monster. To help them avoid extinction. Or at least to give
them the
chance
of avoiding extinction. Of course, this
doesn't work properly either. The laws are broken, there is
poaching, humans break in, they commit animal kidnapping and other
atrocities, they kill elephants either for their tusks or even just
for the sport of it. Over half of Africa's elephants have been
killed for the ivory trade since 1987. And in addition to the legal
slaughter of the elephants, there are another 30,000 of them killed
illegally
each year. Western Africa's black rhinoceros was
officially declared extinct not long ago. And, sadly, the list is a
long one and it's ongoing. Nature reserves are now basically places
where you can go to experience the past, but without the past’s
plenitude of wildlife. The British environmentalist Max Nicholson
once referred to them as living museums."