Animals in the News, Part Two: Human Animals

Animals in the News, Part Two: Human Animals

Part One of this 2-part series recounted three stories of what most people consider animals: rats infesting the D.C. Occupy encampment, pit bulls chewing off a man’s foot in Chicago, and a pet cat almost killing a Buenos Aires woman when it was tossed out of a fourth-floor window.

As unsettling as those stories are, there is another animal far more capable of arousing disgust, inflicting pain, and causing havoc than rats, dogs, or cats. Of the phylum Chordata, class mammalia, order primate, family Hominidae, sub-family Homininae, tribe Hominini, genus Homo, it’s most commonly known as Homo Sapiens.

As Part One concluded, human beings can act more animalistically than technically-lower species.

Of course, since those lower species never wage mass warfare–except maybe in “Rise of the Planet of the Apes”–some would argue that conducting war is irrefutable evidence of the human animal’s capacity to far exceed any other species’ devastation and carnage, an argument that has some merit.

Also worth consideration as evidencing the brutality of Homo Sapiens are the 50 to 60 million “legal” abortions in the United States since the Supreme Court decided on January 22nd, 1973 that human life was no longer sacred. Roe v. Wade has accounted for a far greater loss of life than all our wars combined and vivid testimony to man’s inhumanity to man.

However, let’s focus on a few less-profound yet equally-nauseating instances of man’s, and woman’s, animalistic inhumanity toward its own kind.

“Animalistic” may be a misnomer, though, because animals are programmed to protect their young. True, some eat their offspring when they’re starving and most abandon them when they are beyond survivability but none ever get drunk and leave them shivering in the cold while their mother goes to Mickey D’s.

Thirty-nine year old Farris Martin, allegedly, did just that in Sacramento, California to her nine and four year old children. Her kids were found huddling for warmth in the bushes as Ms. Martin was scarfing down McDonalds’ delectibles.

Martin was arrested on a felony charge of endangering the life or health of a child, is being held on $60,000 bail, and the kids are now hopefully warm and well-fed.

One example, or a thousand examples, of human neglect of common decency does not condemn our species to Hell but it sure helps. So, too, do glaring instances of convicted criminals using America’s benevolent court system to make a farce of justice not make us animals but they come close.

Four years ago, David Belniak pled guilty in Florida to committing DUI manslaughter . . . (Read more at http://www.genelalor.com/blog1/?p=12196.)