Life: Evolution's Precious Gift

Life: This brief dance is all we have.

Surely if an all-powerful and benign being - a god - had created this universe, he or she would have devised a better method of feeding than the predator/prey method of finding sustenance. So much suffering is the result of one creatures having to die, usually in agony, in order that another may live.

The falcon drops from the sky on the wood pigeon, its steely claws and beak sinking into the victim's flesh, one that perhaps has its own chicks waiting forlornly for a mother that will never return. The lion breaks the neck of the wildebeest or gazelle, the unborn progeny dying as the mother's heat leaves her carcass and the invasive fangs tear into the small body in her womb.

Mankind hardly hunts any more for his meals, but we breed untold millions of sheep, beef-cattle, pigs and chickens, which never see maturity before the slaughterhouse becomes their last address. These poor, peaceful and harmless animals smell their own deaths well before the killer bolt enters their brain, or their throats are cut in rural farms.

I would ask this supreme force why couldn't we have been made with digestive systems that only needed plant life? OK, you say, but plants have life too, is there any difference in grazing on grass or depriving a tree, or its produce?

Then why has not our god designed animals that live on fresh air, rocks, minerals, water...anything that obviates the need to end the days of a fellow creature...he‘s the almighty, no? He can do anything!

Life. If a deity is not responsible, but it was only the chance meeting of two particles in the primeval soup which began the evolution and the end result of millions of complex creatures, all living - in one way or another - on their neighbours flesh; if this be true and taking other life is unavoidable, then surely it should be seen as the most heinous crime to take a creature’s life gratuitously.?

Life. If it is true that there is one life only; no after-life, no heaven, no paradise stocked with milk and honey and willing virgins; this magic experience under the panoply of the limitless universe, in green lands, mountains, river and seas; this mere moment of love, birth, art, music, dance and desire. This waking dream that we all too often throw away in its entirety like despots, yet guard - moment to moment - as if every second was prized more than all the precious jewels in the firmament. If this is all, then surely the creatures of the planet, too, from the tiniest insect to the most majestic elephant, has the right to live out its life unthreatened by man.

This is why I can no longer take a life except in defence of my own of that of my family. I catch the spider in a glass and let it back into the world; I just watch as the wasp flies around my head and soon returns to the open window. I will do anything short of harming another motorist to avoid the squirrels, pheasants and deer which dash across the road in breeding season, their own humble lives full of plans for nests and how to catch food for their young.

I watch in horror as whales are harpooned - still, despite all the work done by conservation groups - as great African mammals are shot and ripped apart to satisfy the sale of their horns and organs to a market frequented by brain-dead Orientals.

Here in the UK I watch cynically as red-faced and brandy soaked twats of privilege put pressure on their buddies now in power to get fox-hunting legalized again.

This week I listen with despair as the “animal loving” Britain plans a “badger-cull” to murder millions of these inoffensive and charming country dwellers in their “sets,” using doubtful statistics about bovine TB to back the assassination.

We all die: the creatures, and man, supposed to be the highest in terms of intelligence. But we are practically the only animal to gratuitously take life: for unneeded food, for sport, to satisfy our own blood lust.

I don’t believe in all powerful beings responsible for life on Earth, or anything metaphysical It’s a shame in one way, though, that a god, a heavenly gate and a judgement day is not the end we all face. We would have a whole lot to answer for.

..All been said before, a million times, a million ways and the mindless murder rages on...Hey Ho...