[Buddha-l] Re: on eating meat and pets

[Alex Wilding]

I'm disconcertingly busy at the moment, but picking up a thought (there are
messages from a number of posters I could have started from, but this one is
a good enough example):
----- Original Message -----
From: "Hugo" <eklektik at gmail.com>
> On 10/23/05, Laura Castell <laura.castell at jcu.edu.au> wrote:
> > The issue of pets is a very interesting one.  We can't blame the animals
> > for their actions, they are being their true selves when they go out and
> > hunt.
>
> How is it different from Humans?
> Aren't humans being their true selves when they go out and hunt?
>
> > Even the sometimes apparent cruelty of their behaviour I believe is
> > natural (something about nature I struggle to understand ).
>
> Aren't the cruel acts of humans also natural?
>
I suspect that, looking at history, it is just as "natural" (scare quotes
because I don't want to get bogged down in the admittedly thorny question of
what "natural" means anyway) for humans to be cruel as any other hunting
creature (due to our ingenuety, perhaps distressingly more so). What is
different about humans ("precious human birth" and all that, and I think the
Christians have some similar thinking here) is that it is much easier for
humans to reflect on our natural urges and to *choose* to either obey or
reject them. We are, it seems to me (as what I believe to be a human), in
position where it can be natural for us to choose to ignore our first urges
for the sake of someone else, where the reflectivity of even someone as
intelligent and as intensely empathic as a collie dog seems to be, if not
absent, at least very weak compared to the scope of human choice.
AW