“Life is as dear to a mute creature as it is to a man. Just as one wants happiness and fears pain, just as one wants to live and not to die, so do other creatures.”  —Dalai Lama

“There is little that separates humans from other sentient beings. We all feel joy, we all crave to be alive and to live freely and we all share this planet together.”  —Mahatma Gandhi

“Man’s inhumanity to man is only surpassed by his cruelty to animals.”  —George Bernard Shaw

“Anyone who says that life matters less to animals than it does to us has not held in his hands an animal fighting for its life. The whole of the being of the animal is thrown into that fight without reserve.”  —J. M. Coetzee

A relentlessly shameful and detestable practice of constant mistreatment, imprisonment, and consumption of innocent animals has physically and psychologically destroyed human beings and their environment. Still, a species dead set on self-destruction refuses to abate or even entertain the notion that what is generally presented as casual, habitual behavior is akin to torture and slaughter of the highest order.

While obesity buckles our knees, air-polluting ammonia deflates our lungs, and the scorching unfiltered sun sizzles our skin, we blindly force line after line of overcrowded, diseased, and terrified innocent, deeply sensitive creatures toward their inevitable demise at the hands of a stony-hearted, uncaring butcher.

There is no greater greed than that of profit over compassion.

We jam needles into delicate infant animal skin and smear burning chemicals over the eyes of lab monkeys so ugly people with ugly faces can walk around playing make(up) believe. Then we shove toxic, hormone-laden poison down our throats and scream about the excessively increasing rates of depression and cancer.

We incarcerate thinking, feeling, and suffering souls behind glass walls, iron bars, and miniature tanks so we can watch them slowly go mad in what we call their “natural environment.” When the lab results return, we can’t seem to understand why the dolphins are being eaten alive by stress ulcers or how debilitating zoochosis could have possibly developed in an elephant that was most likely twice as intelligent as its handler.

It pains my heart to witness this level of agony.

The prattling pro-life propagandists are more than comfortable murdering certain defenseless souls while constantly preaching about saving others. It’s a master course in hypocrisy. A wildly injurious, manipulated book of mistranslated fairy tales governs their lives by shackling them with the false notion that humans are any more valuable or worthy of safeguarding than any other living, feeling creature. It is a fallacy of unparalleled proportions, and this blind piety to the prison of organized religion is far more detrimental to the public psyche than abortion could ever dream to be.

I welcome the impending, inevitable end to this heedless, self-serving species. Finally, the perpetual war waged on wildlife will cease and the rightful inhabitants of this planet will live out their days in a peaceful, balanced equilibrium and well-earned harmony with nature.

We are the raging virus that selfishly squandered and eviscerated the beautiful gift we were given, and it’s high time for Mother Earth to heal the hurt by ridding herself of the unremitting, punishing plague named humanity.

The end of this utter failure called the Homo sapiens experiment can’t come soon enough.

Adolescence Interrupted