Opinion: Iraq’s Four-Legged Victims

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The daily human death toll in Iraq is numbing in its sheer numbers, but something happened to remind me that there are other victims of man’s self-slaughter: a bomb blew up in the Baghdad pet market.

I heard the human dead and wounded figures, but no one reported the toll, the terrors of the creatures’ sufferings -- trapped in cages, mangled, dying.

And then someone sent me these videos, of more animal suffering and carnage. Accidental death is one thing, but what these videos show is the deliberate infliction of cruelty -- and the enjoyment of it. How low can we go? Why create pain and terror where there is so much, so gratuitously, already? And, even worse, against beings who, like children, cannot fight back?

These are ugly images: one link appears to show American forces throwing stones at an injured dog for fun, and two others are apparently of U.S. forces and perhaps others whooping and hollering as the lions in the Baghdad zoo are fed a live donkey -- all videotaped like an animal snuff film.

Three quotes, all from different times and different places, come to mind:

First, Gandhi’s, that ‘The greatness of a nation can be judged by the way its animals are treated.’’

Then, Plutarch’s: ‘Though boys throw stones at frogs in sport, the frogs do not die in sport, but in earnest.’’

And last, Frederick Nietzsche’s: ‘Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster.’’

No nation, no people can claim to be civilized that does not take all three to heart.

Here is a long clip and a short one of ‘Lions Fed Donkeys In Iraqi Zoo,’ and here’s a video of the wounded dog being tormented.