When I was a Mormon missionary in England, I remember being invited into a home where I was about to sit in a large, soft overstuffed chair, the nicest one in the room, right next to the fireplace, when the man of the house said in alarm, "Not there. That's the dog's chair."
This experience was in great contrast to the day a few years earlier when I was a kid living at home in Sandy and attempted to bring my dog, Pokey, into the house through the front door and my dad, who spent the best part of his life as a farmer, blocked the way. "Why can't he come in?" I asked. My dad said, "'Cause he's a dog."
I bring these two episodes up in light of the legislative debate that took place last week and is scheduled to be continued this winter over what constitutes human abuse to animals and when that abuse qualifies as a felony.
What exactly is animal cruelty? That is the question. And how far does it dip below Not Letting a Dog in the House and Have His Own Chair?
I have conflicting views on the subject of human treatment of the non-human animal world that keep changing the longer I think about it. Take zoos, for instance. As anyone who knows me well will tell you, for years I have had a personal boycott on zoos, on the grounds that their cages take away an animal's freedom. (I made an exception when I was in Australia last winter and visited the Steve Irwin Zoo primarily because many of the animals there are free to roam in a kind of non-zoo existence.)
But just when I was feeling all smug and comfortable about being sensitive to the treatment of animals with my stand on zoos, I read "Life of Pi," a best-selling novel that came out a few years ago about a zoo owner's son who makes the case that in many instances zoos are actually better for animals than the wilds and anyone who transfers human feelings onto animals is naive and confused.
Now I don't know exactly what to think about zoos ... or about transferring my human feelings onto animals.
All sorts of things we do with animals seem to be contradictions. We gaze admiringly at deer in the summer and leave food out for them in the snow during winter; then fall comes and we shoot them like house invaders. We roundly criticize Michael Vick for the 56 pit bulls on his property and are appalled at the ones he put to death because they didn't have a killer's instinct and in the next breath announce that any of those 56 not claimed within a week by someone willing to give them a decent home will be "humanely killed."
Humanely killed? What does that mean?
The people at the Humane Society may not be disposing of them for the same reasons as Vick, but they're still dead.
We breed pigs and turkeys and chickens with enough steroids to make Barry Bonds drool with envy, shortening their drug-stupored life spans to something only slightly longer than what it takes to cook them in a microwave oven. We flock to rodeos to see if cowboys can last eight seconds on the backs of bulls that have been poked with electric prods so they come out of the gate as mad as, well, Barry Bonds. We hook three-pound browns in fishing rivers with poetic names and then yank the hooks out of their mouths so somebody else can come along and do it again.
I'm not passing judgment on whether any of this is right or wrong, I'm just observing it's what we do to, and with, animals and wondering where or when or how to draw any lines about cruelty.
We kill mosquitoes and house flies with impunity, but we protect sharks and lions. We mutter and shake our heads about men who watch dogfights and cockfights as we sit in dens lined by heads of trophy deer and watch the Ultimate Fighting championships on the big screen. We protect entire forests for the spotted owl but don't do the same for the spotted beetle. We wear ostrich boots and mink coats and carry alligator handbags as we call animal control about the way a neighbor is ignoring her cat. We treat thoroughbred horses like rock stars and don't bring plow horses into the barn when it rains.
I have the questions, I just don't know the answers.
But all in all, I think my dad had it sized up a lot better than that guy in England.
Lee Benson's column runs Sunday, Monday, Wednesday and Friday. Please send e-mail to benson@desnews.com and faxes to 801-237-2527.