Rhodes, ROAR and Rights

By Philippa Bradbury

Earlier this month, Rhodes University was host to a full five days of events that rejected animal cruelty. The events were orchestrated by Rhodes’ very own animal cruelty awareness organisation, ROAR.

Animal cruelty comes in a variety of different forms. You hear of stories where people try to drown puppies or abandon their cats on the sides of roads. This is probably the least violent act of cruelty you might say, but the fact that someone can abandon another creature, whether it is covered in fur or not, makes my blood boil. One may argue that animals just do not think the same way that humans do and thus do not realise when they are being abandoned or intentionally hurt. I know this to be complete rubbish. My golden labrador would sink into a wave of depression whenever he saw a suitcase because he knew that we were leaving to go on holiday. He knew the difference between a school bag, and a sports bag, to a holiday suitcase. Animals may not think exactly like humans, but they are closer than you think.

One particular event that stood out during the Animal Awareness Week, was a run of some completely naked, and some very nearly bare arsed, students who ran from the African Media Matrix to Eden Grove, shouting their mantra, “Wear your own skin!”. It was an extremely effective staged protest in some ways as people still talk about it today, but it is generally over their cereal filled with milk, that came from cows who are kept pregnant their whole lives so as to produce the best milk, or over their pork chops, not knowing that the pigs they are now eating, are kept in stalls in which they cannot even move their heads from side to side and are now, as a result, insane.

To stop animal cruelty, one needs to change the mindset that exists. Someone who eats meat in this day and age and shouts angrily, “I am not cruel to animals!” is, in fact, a liar. For, although one realises that people have always eaten beef, it is the circumstances in which these animals are sheltered that are cruel. It is the fact that the chicken we eat came from an animal that was so pumped full of steroids, that the breasts were too heavy for the chicken to hold up and thus her legs were broken. This particular chicken was then not killed for another six weeks. We, the consumers, are providing a market for this cruelty to animals to continue. Until we change this, anyone who eats milk, chicken, fish or beef, is providing the worst form of cruelty to animals that exist. Can you live with that?