Sad Post About Cute Animals

This first picture is a super cute kitten that I saw sitting there as I was going to see the puppies pictured below. It just looked sort of sick and was too tired to flee in fear as I stuck my phone camera in its face.

This post is mostly about dogs. My wife used to tell me stories before we were married, not infrequently, of dogs who went missing after going out on the town for the day. She also told a story about traditional dog slaughtering methods that would keep clear the consciences of the hungry, hitherto meatless soul. First a large pot is set to boil, while it is heating up, a plank is set up like a see-saw. when the water reaches a full boil, the dog is then enticed to run up the plank. when it crosses the fulcrum point, the dog tips the see-saw the other way, and it falls into the boiling water. This, of course relieves the consumer of the meat of any responsibility or feelings of remorse, because the dog fell in on its own accord, and now that the dog is dead anyway, it would be a shame not to eat the meat.

The above paragraph gives a little background on these pictures of little pups I am holding. Their mother went out one day and just never came back. Now they are filthy and shivering, but they are big enough to eat on their own.

The next anecdote about doggy suffering is one caused by my own foolishness.

One day after I went rambling in the mountains, I saw a dog on the walk home along the highway. I noticed a metallic sound when it was walking around. The nice doggy had a wire around its neck, so i decided to try to beckon it over to see if i could free it so the wire wouldn't get caught in something causing it to get stuck and starve to death. when i knelt down and made the sort of noise likely to attract a dog, it got scared and ran into the road where it was immediately smacked into by a car. I didn't dare look because of all the screaming it was doing, and I wasn't about to go chasing it around in the middle of the highway. I could only think of the dog dragging itself away from me even when still crippled and not only causing the death of a cute animal, but also several car crashes as well. At least I stopped my well intentioned efforts before taking multiple lives. I would like to talk to a Buddhist about the karmic repercussions of this action, because according to my understanding, as long as intentions are good, it still produces good karma even if the end result is just more suffering. The "fang sheng" or releasing of live animals is a Buddhist tradition here, and it is the cause of a huge traffic in animals who are raised or caught just to be released by people who buy them specifically to release them in order to gain karma. This practice often causes havoc in the local ecosystem, and most of the released animals die anyway.

I chased the dog into the road right after I watched a video on a popular China blog called shanghaiist. You shouldn't watch that video, though Its a Wenzhou university security guard beating a dog to death. What does this say about people and their attitudes towards animals? I don't know. Is this a representative picture of attitudes towards animals in this part of the world? No, not really. I like to think these are the outliers. I'm not really sure I believe the weird story about chasing dogs on a see-saw either. But it makes for interesting reading.