A Sick Hostility to Animals...

… by cowards is, alas, one revelation in the comments to my previous posts on the pet food scandal. I say cowards because the ones who mock the feeling of pet owners whose companion animals were threatened by the criminally inept pet food industry, was their almost universal scaredy-cat (to use an animal metaphor) unwillingness to attach their name to their posts. I wonder why, I wonder what they’re afraid of. Especially since they’re so profoundly courageous in their attacks on the feelings of other human beings, what scares them about putting their names on their attacks on pets?

Some of them may have missed my previous month’s discussion of commenter anonymity in which I stated the default position of this blog which was that, in general I would not post anonymous comments, and particulalry anonymous comments that were egregiously stupid, hateful or bigoted. So I’ll spare you their subhuman bile since most of these pet haters fit all three categories, the bigotry being against people who dare to feel more than apparently they are allowed to feel about their pets by people who have “actual children” as one smugly creepy (and of course cowardly anonymous) commenter put it.

Frankly to call these people despicable is give to them more dignity than they deserve, they’re merely pathetic. I’m tempted to say such cowardly responders make me rethink my skepticism about the standard profile of serial killers: that they begin their careers by injuring small animals (in addition to setting fires). That’s unfair (to serial killers). No, seriously, I’m not making an analogy between serial killers and pet haters, but I do think the pet hater commenters may reveal something unexamined and ugly in the culture, something that may have a causal connection to the pet food scandal.

The open sore of pet hatred they reveal may have been, in a way the source of the predisposition that licensed the callous irrespsonsibility of the pet food makers: who cares, they’re just animals. Why bother taking any special care with their lives when compared with the importance of exalted human beings.

In fact the comments of the pet haters suggest just the opposite: they seem to think they’re superior by virtue of the accident of their (nominally human) birth. But their cowardly viciousness suggests that, in fact, these people are lower than animals.