Animal Rights.

Animal Rights

 

The UN has drawn up an incredible set of Rights for Human Beings. It is about time that they did the same for animals. It might put a stop to the mindless slaughter of our wildlife and the cruel treatment of our farm and laboratory animals.

 

Animals are sentient. They feel pain, fear and terror the same as human beings. They also have emotional needs. They need to explore, communicate and socialize. These were crucial for their survival in the wild and evolved in much the same way as with human beings. We are animals after all.

 

A good example of this is with pigs. Pigs are highly intelligent animals that enjoy investigating, solving problems, meeting other pigs, exploring, rooting out delicacies and playing. Unfortunately on many pig farms they are kept for the whole of their lives in pens so small that they cannot move and have nothing to do. The farmers do not appreciate how cruel this is for an intelligent animal. They think that if they give them food and water and inoculate them against disease they have done their job well. They haven’t.

 

Those pigs need rights. They need woodland to snuffle around in, mud to nuzzle and things to do.

 

I used to work in an Animal House. The Animal House had four animal rooms, plus a wash room, for cleaning cages, an office and a pen for cats.

 

 Those rooms were all ultra-sterile.

 

Room one was typical. It was the rabbit room. It had high strips of windows just under the ceiling, which were of reinforced frosted glass and could not open, and would only allow a diffuse light into the place. The main lighting came from a bank of strip lights which blasted every crevice with incandescence. The walls were plain white tiles and the floors were composition. Every day I had to wipe down the tiles and swab the floor with disinfectant until they were spotless and germ-free.

 

Inside the room were two rows of plain white plastic cages in their white tubular steel frames on wheels so that they could be moved in order to mop the floor.

 

There were no posters, no decorations. The whiteness was unremitting.

 

Sitting in each of those cages was a huge, obese white rabbit. They were kept for possible experimental purposes but never used. They lived in plastic cages too small for them to turn around. They had a water bottle stuck on the grill at the front and a food dispenser that fed them sterilized pellets. They sat on a grill which allowed their faeces and urine to pass through on to a tray of sawdust. They sipped water from their bottles and chewed pellets that tasted like sawdust.

 

My job was to change and top up the water and food pellets, and regularly change the sawdust in the tray underneath. When these tasks were performed I did not even have to touch the animals.

 

The rabbits sat on their grills and stared out straight ahead all day in a state of catatonia.

 

The highlight of their day was when I came in to the room and talked to them. I also put the radio on. I don’t know if they liked loud Rock Music or not? But I figured it couldn’t make their life any worse.

 

I was used to keeping pet rabbits and guinea pigs so I went out front where there was a patch of wasteland, tidied it up and built a rough fence around it. I then carefully took the big bloated rabbits out one at a time and placed them in the enclosure I had created.

 

At first they sat there, their noses twitching, eyes adjusting to the sunlight, looking like the proverbial rabbits caught in the headlights. You could see the bewilderment and fear. It was palpable.

 

After a period of adjustment, tentatively they started to edge forward, paws feeling soil, noses sniffing the tufts of grass and dirt. Gaining in confidence they began exploring further, sniffing each other, nibbling the grass and weeds, and lolloping hesitantly around the enclosure.

 

I can never forget the moment. It was as if a lightbulb went on in all their heads at once. They suddenly realized that they were free, they were out of the room; they were out of their cages and out in the big world – a world that was so stupendous that they could never have imagined its existence. That patch of wasteland might have looked like a measly dump to us but it was like paradise to them.

 

Within minutes they were running, leaping in the air, bucking their hind legs and testing muscles that had never been used before.

 

It was the start.

 

Their days were now spent tasting weeds, running, madly bonking each other – regardless of gender, digging holes, prancing wildly and delighting in their infinite freedom.

 

I would watch them gleefully carrying on and their delight was contagious.

 

In the morning I would come into the whiteness of the room and see sixteen pink noses twitching in anticipation, pressed up against their grills.

 

The weight dropped off them. They lost their lethargy. Those rabbits were alive for the first time.

 

Then came the visit. The powers that be had heard about my rabbit run and decided to pay it an inspection.

 

A serious posse of men in suits with clipboards walked around. They ignored me. They looked at the sterile room with its white tiles, composition floors and strip lighting. They inspected the rows of pristine white cages and sniffed the disinfected air. They conferred. Then they inspected the ramshackle run with its delinquent denizens exuberantly engaged in nefarious acts, without so much as acknowledging my presence.

 

They walked off without a word.

 

The letter was delivered the next day. The rabbit run was unhygienic and did not meet with Home Office standards. It was to be taken down forthwith and the rabbits returned to the safety of their room.

 

Looking at that room through the grill of that cage – just tell me that animals don’t need rights. The room was eloquent in oh so many ways.