This morning I saw the most horrible story in the newspapers on my way to work – just happened to glance across the aisle of the train, where another passenger was reading a paper, and this item caught my eye.
It was an appalling story about how some vicious thugs had tortured a pet dog to death. The photo in the paper of the animal's pathetic corpse was ghastly. I wish I hadn’t seen it. I desperately wished I could get that image out of my head.
Now it is evening and I am at home and I can hear a robin singing in the birch tree outside and some of the horror is fading.
I’m not sentimental about animals (says she - you should hear me talking to cats.) OK, let me qualify that. I don’t like other people’s sentimentality towards animals *wry grin*. But I can’t stand to think of a helpless, dumb, innocent creature being treated with such revolting, savage cruelty. I can't stand it.
![Sad :(](./images/smilies/icon_sad.gif)
I hate humans.
I hate them when they do this.
I want to flog people who do things like this.
OK, so there are worse things in the world. There are little children suffering. People dying and being tortured.
But how can that be comforting, to set the death of that small dog against larger, more significant suffering? It’s as if that poor, pathetic little dog’s corpse somehow symbolises for me all the pain and ugliness that humans can inflict on creation, themselves and each other.
It's the specific images that linger in the mind and are so hard to erase. Somehow, too, you don't want to erase them ... you need to remember that such horrors do happen.
Suffering is awful and so hard to understand.
I feel the pain of it more and more. I feel for the world more and more.
I just need to cry here. That's all.
![Crying or Very sad :cry:](./images/smilies/icon_cry.gif)
![Crying or Very sad :cry:](./images/smilies/icon_cry.gif)
![Crying or Very sad :cry:](./images/smilies/icon_cry.gif)
![Crying or Very sad :cry:](./images/smilies/icon_cry.gif)
![Crying or Very sad :cry:](./images/smilies/icon_cry.gif)