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Can Harambe's Death Create Lasting Change?

Can Harambe's Death Create Lasting Change?

 

It’s not every day that a major US news outlet publishes a story that fill you with hope and gratitude. June 4th, as it happens, was one of those rare, wonderful exceptions.

In a piece published simultaneously in both text and podcast form, Scott Simon, the host of weekly NPR show Weekend Edition Saturday, waxes philosophical on the larger implications of the recent shooting death of Harambe, a seventeen year old gorilla and (former) resident of the Cincinnati Zoo, after a three year old boy fell into his cage.

The specific circumstances of the shooting are, of course, tragic. We will only note that the situation would never have arisen in the first place were it not for our custom of imprisoning animals in cages for our amusement, and our collective indifference to the desires of our fellow inhabitants to live in their natural habitats, roam freely, to go about their lives as they see fit.

What makes Simon’s commentary so extraordinary, however, is the direction in which he pursues his argument.

“Many people on social media platforms,” he notes, “have attacked the mother as neglectful.” Simon refrains from taking sides in this specific tragedy, and telescopes the reader’s attention to a different tragedy, related though orders of magnitude more vast in scale. “If some of the people who snarl at the boy’s parents on social media want to do something more for animals,” he writes, “they may need to look no further than their own dinner.”

Simon then briefly outlines some of the main contours of the terrible plight of animals kept as livestock:

“We have heard a lot in recent years about the 8.5 billion chickens that are slaughtered for food in the United States every year. The ones that live on factory farms are kept in cages about as large as a sheet of copy paper. Their feet never touch the ground. They never see the sun or sky. They never play or mate. Their beaks are often snipped or burned off to keep them from pecking each other to death in those cramped, congested cages.”

He goes on to say, “Harambe’s death might also remind us how more than 100 million pigs are raised for food in the United States.

Most pigs are kept in windowless sheds on factory farms, in cages so small they cannot turn around; so they will grow fat. They live in their own manure, and the air is so heavy with ammonia that many pigs develop lesions on their lungs.”

“What happened to Harambe was a catastrophe,” he concludes, “but one so rare as to be almost unprecedented. The treatment of so many millions of animals raised for food can be just business as usual.”

It is an astonishing piece, a case study of ethical and responsible journalism, and a testament to Simon’s courage and empathy, and to NPR’s editorial excellence. Would that it be a model future journalism the world over.

http://www.npr.org/2016/06/04/480671964/if-gorillas-death-moves-you-consider-other-animals-plights?sc=17&f=7

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