How to end cruelty to people, animals and nature, and create a world without war and environmental destruction
Saturday, April 02, 2005 by: Mike Adams, NaturalNews Editor
What is cruelty? It is any harmful action taken against another living
entity that disregards its consciousness or awareness. In this essay,
we'll explore some of the levels of cruelty: how it happens, how it's
defined, and what we can do to help end cruelty and enhance compassion
in the world. Cruelty exists in three distinct realms: cruelty against
mankind, cruelty against animals, and finally, cruelty against nature.
Let's start with cruelty against mankind, in which one individual may
be cruel to another for a variety of reasons, usually relating to
gaining personal control over resources ( http://www.naturalnews.com/food.html - food , money, etc.) or other people. This concept of personal gain is an important factor in understanding human http://www.naturalnews.com/cruelty.html - cruelty ,
since individuals are usually only cruel to others because they gain
something from it. In fact, this is designed into our behavior and has
been carried through our ancestry for hundreds of thousands of years.
Picture this: two cavemen are sitting around a fire at the end of the
day. One spent hours gathering http://www.naturalnews.com/berries.html - berries ,
and the other has nothing. The caveman with nothing can attack the
caveman with the berries, take his fruit, and be all the more
successful for it, at least in terms of survival and control of
From an anthropological point of view, there is an incentive for
deceit, theft, and even harming other individuals, as long as it
results in some sort of personal gain. In fact, we see this across
virtually all species, but especially in those that are most closely
related to humans, such as primates.
Today, we see the very same thing happening when one nation attacks
another nation in order to control its resources. Attacking a nation to
take control of its oil supply is essentially the same as beating a
caveman over the head and stealing his berries. It just goes to show
how little we've actually advanced over the years.
This brings us to a salient point: ending cruelty requires moving past
our ancestral roots, and past the behaviors that are programmed into us
because they once helped us succeed in an uncivilized world. Today we
have to recognize that cruelty is not acceptable in the international
community. It is not acceptable to attack and kill other http://www.naturalnews.com/human_beings.html - human beings for any reason, and certainly not to take control of their resources in order to enrich ourselves.
Likewise, it is not acceptable to exploit poverty-wage labor in
third-world countries in order to enrich corporations and their CEOs in
developed nations. But this is no anti-trade rant: http://www.naturalnews.com/free_trade.html - free trade is essential for lifting poor nations out of http://www.naturalnews.com/poverty.html - poverty ,
but only when combined with mechanisms that respect the sanctity of
human life such as safe working conditions, living wages, and a system
of recognizing private property ownership for the poor. Read "The
Mystery of Capital" by Hernando DeSoto, which is among the most
important economic books of the last 100 years, to learn the real
reasons why free trade has failed to provide economic freedoms for
underdeveloped nations (and what we can do to change that).
Beyond war and economics, we also see cruelty in the world of
medicine. Conventional medicine has a long and sordid history of using
human beings for http://www.naturalnews.com/medical_experiments.html - medical experiments , even right here in the http://www.naturalnews.com/United_States.html - United States . In fact, news recently surfaced about a http://www.naturalnews.com/hospital.html - hospital that had been using retarded children in radiation experiments. http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=navclient&ie=UTF-8&rls=GGLD,GGLD:2005-08,GGLD:en&q=retarded+children+radiation+experiments+hospital - Click here for a Google search on this topic.
This and many other medical experiments have been conducted on living, http://www.naturalnews.com/breathing.html - breathing
people right here in the United States. This is one of the most
egregious forms of cruelty, in that it is a harmful action taken
against these people, and that it refuses to recognize the http://www.naturalnews.com/consciousness.html - consciousness ,
spirit or awareness of these individuals. Just because someone cannot
speak in words that we understand, or communicate with us in the manner
in which we are used to communicating, doesn't mean that they don't
feel pain, fear, pleasure or love. Thus, these medical experiments are
a horrifying form of cruelty, and many continue to this day (behind
closed doors, of course).
In the realm of war, we see examples of cruelty as official policy. In the United States http://www.naturalnews.com/military.html - military ,
for example, cruelty against Iraqi prisoners has become a global
scandal. We have seen photographs and heard testimony from individuals
who were engaged in all manner of cruelty against Iraqi prisoners, many
of whom were innocent civilians. These people were subjected to
appalling acts, including sexual torture, humiliation, and execution
(as was actually caught on tape). Notably, it appears that the American
soldiers engaged in this activity rather enjoyed it.
In the United States, we increasingly find a culture that supports
cruelty. Much as we saw in 1939 Nazi Germany, this mindset often
accompanies nationalism and pride in one's country. It goes hand in
hand with the fervor surrounding fear-based propaganda typically
orchestrated by a national leader in response to some sort of military
attack. In Germany, it was the Reichstag. In the U.S., it's 9/11.
Regardless of the justification for military action, the apparent
military goal seems to be little more than control of resources, which
once again likens us to cavemen in my earlier example. Except in this
case, we don't have to look at the faces of those we kill because it is
all censored out of the press. The Pentagon even banned the filming of
flag-draped coffins carrying our own (dead) soldiers back from http://www.naturalnews.com/Iraq.html - Iraq .
So what does it take to stop cruelty against fellow human beings? First, it requires teaching http://www.naturalnews.com/compassion.html - compassion .
We must understanding that other human beings have souls and
consciousness, and that is it not right to ignore those souls for
personal gain, be it power, control of resources or some kind of
financial gain. This is a lesson that isn't being taught in American
culture. It's not taught in our public schools, it's not an element of
free-market capitalism, it isn't something propagated by the press, and
it certainly isn't practiced by the current government administration.
As a population, we don't seem to understand that compassion is
The next step toward ending cruelty is to stop meeting http://www.naturalnews.com/violence.html - violence
with more violence. If the problem is violence, then solving it will
require a different approach, such as compassion, negotiation, or even
an apology. The predominant mindset in response to http://www.naturalnews.com/terrorist_attacks.html - terrorist attacks ,
for example, continues to be revenge. This revenge is propped up by the
media and the war-mongering rhetoric of the current administration. But
when we act on revenge, we simply create more hatred and more violence.
We take out one Saddam Hussein, but we create 40 more who believe they
have even more justification to attack the United States and kill even
more Americans in future terrorist attacks. It is a Medusa: kill one
snake, and two more appear in its place. This is nothing but an
escalation of violence, and it can lead only to more war, pain,
suffering and death. Of course, all the U.S. companies that manufacture
military hardware profit handsomely. The war industry in this country
not depends on war for its economic survival.
The way to stop this escalating cycle of violence is to adopt
humility and compassion rather than ego and cruelty. Again, that stance
does not seem acceptable by most of the American population, who
continue to boast bumper stickers that read, "These colors don't run,"
or "American Pride." My favorite is "God bless http://www.naturalnews.com/America.html - America ,"
which implies two rather bizarre ideas: 1) that God blesses war, and 2)
God shouldn't bless anybody else. I don't claim to know the mind of
God, but I doubt the atrocities being committed against the Iraqi
people in the name of the United States today are worthy of any divine
blessing. To name just one such atrocity, the widespread use of http://www.naturalnews.com/depleted_uranium.html - depleted uranium
in ordinance used by the U.S. military in Iraq is, itself, a weapon of
mass destruction that is being used in clear violation of the Geneva
Convention, and that will create lingering radiation throughout the
Iraqi nation for generations to come. Depleted uranium is not at all
selective in who it radiates. By its very http://www.naturalnews.com/nature.html - nature , it is a weapon of mass destruction.
It's all the more ironic, it seems, since Bush's promised WMDs never
showed up in Iraq in the first place -- so the U.S. military decided to
bring its own and use them against the very nation it attacked on the
premise that Iraq might someday develop WMDs and use them on other
To end these cruelties, we must move past the caveman mentality
that tells us to take revenge on the caveman who beat us up and stole
our berries. Unfortunately, that's the mindset we are operating with
today, which brings into question whether we are correct in calling
modern civilization advanced at all. We really haven't advanced that
far. We still act on the same basic emotions and stimuli as our
Cruelty to Animals
Moving on, let's discuss the highly controversial subject of animal
cruelty. Let's start with the premise that animals have souls and
consciousness, and that they can feel pain. We now know that even
simple-minded creatures such as fish can sense and feel real pain. http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=navclient&ie=UTF-8&rls=GGLD,GGLD:2005-08,GGLD:en&q=fish+feel+pain - Click here for a Google search about new research on fish and pain perception.
And yet animal cruelty continues. Many think of animal cruelty as
limited to people treating their dogs unfairly, or beating their pets
out of anger. But as serious as that is, it is the least of the animal
cruelty concerns. I believe that the greatest animal cruelty happening
right now is in the food industry, where we are growing living beings
and harvesting their flesh in order to feed a nation http://www.naturalnews.com/beef.html - beef and other meats.
The conditions under which these animals are raised and harvested are
atrocious. I believe it is cruelty at its worst to put a chicken in a
cage so small it can barely turn around, and cut off its beak so that
it can't kill another chicken or pluck out its own feathers. Cattle
feeding practices in the United States right now are also a form of
cruelty, since matter such as dead animals and chicken excrement are
ground up and fed to cows. This is a standard, USDA-approved feeding
practice in the http://www.naturalnews.com/cattle.html - cattle industry, by the way. http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=navclient&ie=UTF-8&rls=GGLD,GGLD:2005-08,GGLD:en&q=chicken+litter+cattle+feed - Click here to search Google and see for yourself.
I also believe that the very practice of raising animals in confined
environments, subjecting them to atrocious feeding habits and killing
them in inhumane ways in order to harvest their flesh and turn a profit
is an outrageous form of cruelty to animals. I believe that in any
advanced society such practices would be outlawed entirely. I find no
justification in this society to harvest the organs of animals for the
consumption of human beings. People ask, "What about the protein
needs?" and "How will we feed the world if we don't harvest cattle?"
Actually, they have it backwards: if we don't switch to plant sources
of protein, we'll never have enough land to feed the world. Harvesting
and growing spirulina, for example, takes 1/100th of the acreage
required by cattle for the same amount of digestible protein. And
raising soybeans only takes 1/10th the acreage of raising cattle.
Spirulina, by the way, has twelve times the digestible protein of beef, ounce for ounce. Raising cattle is one of the least efficient ways to feed the world.
As long as people demand beef, though, an improvement over current cattle industry practices would be to mandate organic http://www.naturalnews.com/free-range.html - free-range
practices, in which animals are still raised for food, but they live
healthy, sane lives, and are given free access to the outdoors. They
should have sunlight and clean water and the ability to live out a
relatively normal, healthy life. And when they are slaughtered, it
should be conducted in the most humane manner possible -- one that
respects the life of each creature and how that creature is giving up
its flesh for the purpose of sustaining the life of a human being. That
is slightly better approach to creating meat for consumption by human
beings, and it is practiced by a few small organic and Kosher beef
producers. Organic, free-range meats are available in the United
States, but they don't make up the majority of meats available at
grocery stores today.
Another form of cruelty to animals is using them in experiments, which
is often done by the cosmetic industry, the food industry, and to some
extent by the U.S. military. Animals are routinely used in painful
experiments, which I find to be an unacceptable practice. These are
living, breathing, conscious creatures, and just like human beings,
they should not be subjected to cruel treatments if we are to call
ourselves an advanced civilization of any kind.
These animals feel the pain of these experiments. If a research worker
is giving a pig third-degree burns so it can test burn-recovery drugs,
that is cruel and unnecessary, and should be outlawed.
Cruelty to NatureLastly, we must discuss cruelty to
nature. This is a phrase that's not often used in popular culture. To
explain this concept, we must first recognize that plants are also
living, breathing beings. They have a nervous system, a structural
system and a circulatory system. They are very much alive, although not
in the same way that mammals or human beings are alive. Plants are
indeed living creatures, and we need to recognize that and start
looking at trees, for example, as tree-shaped beings. By and large, we
fail to do that today, and through this failure, we as a species allow
ourselves to commit outrageous acts of cruelty towards nature.
Some of the ways we express that cruelty is by polluting the rivers, streams and air with industrial wastes. We are killing http://www.naturalnews.com/the_oceans.html - the oceans through sound pollution and military sonar buoys (which is one reason why so many dolphins and http://www.naturalnews.com/whales.html - whales
are turning up on beaches these days). We are killing the coral by
dumping toxic metals onto our crops, which creates toxic runoff that
empties into the rivers, streams, and http://www.naturalnews.com/oceans.html - oceans . We are cutting down rainforests and systematically destroying the natural http://www.naturalnews.com/ecosystem.html - ecosystem of the planet.
Little by little we are destroying nature here on Planet Earth, but
this is not just an environmental issue: it's an issue of cruelty. It
is cruel to destroy an ecosystem, because doing so simultaneously
destroys the life that depends on that ecosystem.
Too often, those of us in western society think of plants as inanimate
objects. However, if we could see them on time-lapse photography, we
would recognize that they are living, breathing, moving creatures. On a
slow scale of time, populations of trees actually migrate. A sunflower
will track the sun as it moves across the sky, minute by minute, so
that it's always getting the maximum sunlight possible. Flowers open
and close in response to the cycles of daylight. These are not just
automatic, machine-like reactions, as some might argue. These are the
conscious actions of living, breathing creatures that deserve to be
treated humanely. If we fail to recognize this in nature and continue
to behave cruelly toward it, we will find that there are terrible,
devastating, natural results of our actions.
Nature will eventually return to a state of balance, but finding that
balance may involve some dramatic and unpleasant changes in the world
around us. Nature can do just fine without human beings, and if we
continue on our current path of cruelty towards nature, I have no doubt
that we will be setting in motion a chain of events that will result in
the sharp reduction of human population on this planet. I believe this
will occur through so-called "natural disasters," such as http://www.naturalnews.com/climate_change.html - climate change
or pandemics of infectious disease (the bird flu virus is a strong
candidate). This is not nature's revenge. This is simply cause and
effect of our cruelty to nature. It's a reflection of our own cruelty
to nature, coming back to haunt us.
When we are cruel to animals, they can't fight back. But nature is
resilient when we are cruel to it. Nature doesn't fight back; it
overcomes. If we were to wipe out every single tree, uproot every blade
of grass and kill every plant on the planet tomorrow, we might think we
had conquered nature. But within a few short years, humanity would be
wiped out due to climate changes and the devastation of the food
supply. And a few short years after that, nature would return in full
force, with far greater health and biodiversity without mankind. The
wildlife, rivers and streams would, in time, return to their pristine,
original state, and life in the oceans would again become abundant. All
I only hope that our civilization can find ways to put an end to this
cruelty without having to be wiped out by nature. I hope that we can
find a way to live in balance with nature. But to do that, we must put
a stop to our cruelty. This means changing the way we live in harmony
with our surrounding environment and taking an honest look at how we
pollute the rivers and streams, oceans, airways, and the entire planet.
There is no "them," only us
Whether discussing cruelty towards people, animals or plants, all
cruelty stems from a prevailing distortion carried by nearly everyone
on this planet: the belief that we are separate.
If person A attacks person B, it is only because he believes he is
separate from person B. If a society attacks and destroys nature, it is
only because it believes it is not part of nature. But this is a
distortion: we are all connected through an intricate web of
intentions, energy and chemistry. One act of cruelty towards a human
being gives rise to many such cruel acts in return. One act of cruelty
towards an animal is returned to us in a darkening of our own hearts.
One act of cruelty towards nature sets in motion a chain of events that
ultimately returns to threaten our health, our food supply, and the
very life of our planet.
Cruelty can only be acted out by those who suffer from the illusion
that we are separate, individual people who exist in isolation from our
world, our conscious animals, and the abundant plant and microbial life
that sustains us. And thus, the solution to cruelty seems clear: teach connectness.
Call it Karma, or call it quantum physics. You can calculate it with
mathematics and the laws of life sciences, or intuit it from feelings
and emotions. Either way, it is the same truth: we are all connected.
We are part of the same system, and we depend on each other. All of us:
the people, the animals, the plants, even the planet... we all
experience the reverberations of cruelty created by people, industries,
or nations. Simultaneously, we all benefit from the waves of peace,
love and connectedness being broadcast by those who meditate with
positive intention in churches, mosques, shrines and temples all around
Without them, frankly, we would already be lost.
Perhaps you should consider joining them. Any moment in which
you find peace, silence, clarity of thought, and love for others is a
moment of creation and connectedness that ripples out through the lives
and souls of every living thing on this planet. You can make a change
through intention alone. Ending cruelty starts with having sufficient
numbers of people meditating on connectedness.