A Life Lesson Triggered by Dismemberment (Part 2)
This article continues from the previous one
The meat in your mouth did not come out of thin air
In contrast to Copenhagen Zoo putting euthanasia starkly in front of the public and using the dissection and the subsequent feeding of the carcass to the lions as life education, let us pull the timeline and the map closer: last December at Kaohsiung Shoushan Zoo, a black bear bit another black bear to death By comparison, Copenhagen's approach of openly revealing the euthanasia process is extremely controversial, and an overwhelming wave of protest is bound to follow. Yet why did the zoo choose to handle it this way? It is nothing other than an attempt at a "very practical" kind of life education - in Denmark today, with the concept of animal rights running high, they want to remind everyone that although the act of killing is frightening, not seeing it does not mean it does not exist! In the wild, giraffes face the threat of being hunted by lions anyway, just as the beef in your mouth did not come out of thin air either. Bengt Holst, the scientific director of Copenhagen Zoo, said: "The reason this has caused such a huge controversy today is that the giraffe is a cute animal. What if today it had been a gazelle, or even a pig?" The matter of killing animals is truly a truth people are even less willing to face than climate change. A friend once said, "if we cannot care about life that exists, then how can we possibly care about climate change that cannot be seen?" As for Taiwan's attitude toward caring about life, the trendiest thing is to go into a movie theater and watch "12 Nights", and then, amid bitter weeping, problems that had already existed for more than 20 years seem to be recognized all over again. And that is still the dogs and cats we are most familiar with. But the animals eaten in our mouths, wiped on our bodies - the pigs and cattle raised as Matsusaka pork, the mice and rabbits used to test cosmetics - their "12 Nights" has not yet been filmed, and so their lives still leave most people unmoved.
