We’re in the midst of an evolution in how we think about animals

Chuckwagon race reminds us that cruelty is unnecessary, writes Michael Murray.

My wife and I have the head of an impala mounted on the wall over our fireplace. It was a gift from my brother-in-law, who was careful to make sure all the ethics were in order when he presented it to us. We didn’t dig too deeply into his story and were only too happy to receive the gift. That was about 10 years ago.

At the time, we loved it. The impala head was whimsical and eccentric, an expression of some form of irony that we didn’t really understand but still happily embraced. We felt downtown and hip, our fireplace trophy like a cutting-edge piece of art that all our guests praised and envied. It was, I guess, a weird kind of conspicuous consumption, even if that wasn’t entirely evident to us or our peers at the time.

The digital age is a huge accelerator of social progress and evolution, a great leap forward that reveals to us that there is infinitely more that is invisible in the world than visible, more that is unknown than known and that, in the end, we’re ridiculously ignorant. The more we become exposed to videos of baby goats jumping on things, of dogs losing their minds when their master returns from a tour of duty, or to films like Earthlings, where the brutality of factory farming is laid bare, the more our attitudes change.

Now, 10 years after my wife and I hung the impala head on our wall, it’s impossible for us to think of animals as decoration or of them being merely a means to our end, living dolls that can be manipulated or disposed of at our convenience.

No, everything we were seeing, hearing and reading, everything we knew intuitively and in our bones, proclaimed that animals were souls, that they were partners with us in this world. As this understanding began to permeate the mainstream itself in which we lived, the impala head ceased being a cool conversation piece and became a symbol of something cruel and retrograde.

Slowly, over the years, we became ashamed of the impala head, and our friends, who once were as delighted by it as they would be by a giant pinata, became very measured in their responses to the thing. Where previously we had felt nothing but pleasure in what we had been given, we now felt guilt for what we had taken. We, and the society we were living in, was changing.

This was made vivid to me recently as I was channel-surfing and came upon the Calgary Stampede, which was broadcast by the CBC after the 11 o’clock news. A previous incarnation of me would have paused and watched the novelty for a spell, I think, but now I just felt sadness, even disgust. The chuckwagon races, which resulted in the deaths of four horses this year, seemed vicious and gladiatorial, not an exhilarating throwback to an authentic, hardscrabble past.

Watching, it was impossible not to feel empathy for the poor animals, so clearly unwilling participants in this painful and terrifying circus.

In the name of tradition, the CBC broadcast an ugly and cruel spectacle, one that felt like it took place in a dark, shameful past that the public no longer wanted to acknowledge, or had an appetite for.

At some point, we will all wake up and find ourselves living on the wrong side of history, the key, I guess, is not to stay there.