Empathy and Animals

 There's a story which has gone fairly viral over the last week, featuring an American tourist to Australia, her Aussie boyfriend, and, as their unwilling costars, a mother wombat and her joey.  The American woman gleefully runs down the joey and snatches it up for a photo-op while her boyfriend films, the mother wombat racing after them, wailing piteously.  The video has generated a lot of outrage, with calls for the young woman to be deported (if not worse), coming at a time when opinions of Americans around the world seems to have, shall we say, soured.

I've spent most of my life working with and around wild and domestic animals, and instantly saw this as the bad idea as it was.  To be fair, so did most people, even without any specialized knowledge, but I wanted to be fair, here, because I've also come across an amazing number of people over the course of my life who have zero animal sense.  I could, to be charitable, understand how someone who is particularly vapid, or doesn't think of animals as autonomous beings, rather than props, might not realize that grabbing the youngster would be so upsetting, both for the joey and for its mother.

But to hear the mother wombat crying, to feel the joey frantically trying to free itself from your grasp, and to not, in that instant, realize what you're doing is wrong and to stop, but instead to laugh and ham it up for the camera?  That's not stupid.  That's just... well, wrong.

US Army psychologist Captain G. M. Gilbert, assigned to assess the defendants at the Nuremberg Trails after World War II - some of the most infamous war criminals of all time, said "I was searching for the nature of evil and I know think I have come close to defining it.  A lack of empathy... Evil, I think, is the absence of empathy."  Not saying that this dumb young couple are Nazis, of course, or on that tier of badness, but I think there is a question that you have to ask about some folks - can they, or can they not, actually understand that other living creatures - humans or other animals - have feelings and awareness?  And, if they can understand this fact, do they care?

You live a charmed life as a zookeeper without coming across a few folks who come to the zoo to bully or tease the animals.  Sometimes you come across a straight up sadist.  Zoo animals are more vulnerable, of course, because they have limited avenues of escape, but at least they also have advocates watching over them in the form of keepers, curators, and vets.  I've seen and heard of bizarrely cruel behavior aimed at wild animals.  Last year, for instance, a wild wolf in Wyoming was chased down, tied up, and dragged around a bar for the amusement of the patrons, still alive and struggling.  I've likewise seen footage of baby dolphins dragged onto the beach for photo ops, and not surviving the experience.

I'm not a vegan, and I'm aware that participating in animal agriculture raises major welfare concerns.  I've had to euthanize many animals over the course of my career.  There are times when I've had to perform procedures or transfers which I know have been stressful or upsetting to animals, though I like to think that all of those were done for specific purposes, usually the health and well-being of the animal.  People who can inflict fear, pain, or death on animals for personal amusement - or for social media clout - will be something that I will never understand.  I'd happily see the enaction of new animal cruelty laws that make the harming of an animal for the purposes of social media carry extra penalties - including the permanent banning from all social media platforms, to hit these would-be influencers where it would really hurt them.

Fortunately, in this case, the wombat joey and mother were reunited and escaped off into the bush together.  The next animal that comes across some idiot with an Instagram account may not be so fortunate.