In the ecological catastrophe in the Brazilian region of Rio Grande do Sul, with hundreds dead and nearly a million displaced from their homes, a unique case has emerged in the rescue operation of victims swept away by the waters. For the first time, the same attention that has been given, both by authorities and volunteers, to saving people’s lives has been demonstrated in the rescue of domestic and wild animals.
To date, more than 12,000 animals have been saved from death. Furthermore, the injured have been cared for by veterinarians with the same interest as people in hospitals, while trucks and planes loaded with food have arrived for them from all over the country. This has led to columnist Eduardo AffonsoFrom the newspaper Or Globe to affirm: “Little by little we are realizing that everything that is alive matters to us. The next revolution, that of animals, has begun.”
A change in Brazil in the appreciation and dignity that animals deserve began in some way with the controversial inauguration of the new president Lula da Silva, to whom his predecessor, Jair Bolsonaro, had refused to give the traditional sash of command. Janja, the president’s wife, organized a commission for the handover of power made up of anonymous people, representatives of categories that are usually ignored by those in power, from a garbage collector, an indigenous woman and even her family dog, called Endurance.
This time, in the new ecological tragedy, the presidential family played an important part in rescuing the animals, giving them the same attention and importance as people. This has made it evident that it is becoming more and more real in research on the intelligence of what we call animals that perhaps we are not the Homo Sapiens so different from them and in some aspects they can even be much superior to us.
As I write this piece, I am reminded many years ago of one of the columns of the brilliant Manuel Vicent. It was an Olympic Games year. With the fine irony that characterizes him, he laughed at the “subhuman” efforts that for an entire year the candidates to compete in the Olympics made to achieve a few tenths of a second in a hundred-meter race or to win a few strokes in an Olympic pool. Vicent, slyly, wrote that they should be laughing at those efforts from a hare to a simple fish, that they would win the races without needing a year of physical effort to win the prize.
And more and more the proud Homo Sapiens He begins to realize that animals, all animals and not just mammals, know how to feel and love sometimes as much or more than so-called humans. It is an awareness that both scientists and those who live with animals are beginning to have. Today we know that the vast majority of what we call bugs, even ants, have a series of qualities that we lack. Think about what we need to fly in space and how easy it is for an eagle or a simple goldfinch.
The new fact that is appearing in Brazil during this natural tragedy to save animals in danger and take care of them as well as people, began with the image that has gone around the world of the horse named Candy Because of the color of his skin, he was trapped for three days on the roof of a half-destroyed house without being able to get down.
The first to react emotionally to that tender and painful image at the same time was President Lula, who commented that he could not sleep thinking about the loneliness and desperation of Candy and together with his wife Janja he asked the Army for help to rescue him as quickly as possible. And the horse ended up being a symbol. Since then, the attention of the emergency services for animals in danger has doubled and feed planes arrived in the region for those thousands of rescued animals, many of them injured.
This new awareness of the dignity of animals is growing today in the world and new discoveries about the brain are revealing that we, the so-called people, are not so different in our feelings and abilities from the vast majority of animals that we live in. We consider them inferior and for centuries they were treated as beings with whom we could even have fun in bloody games. Little more than objects.
Perhaps along with this new awareness about the qualities and importance of animals, of all of them, whom Francis of Assisi called “our brothers”, we should begin to change the language about them. We often say that we so-called humans are “thinking beings.” Don’t animals think? Ask my cats Babel and Moon, whose reactions sometimes leave me and my wife cold because of how sophisticated they are. That is why we sometimes say that “they look human.” What if one day it were discovered that, in so many ways, these animals would have a lot to teach us proud humans?
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