People love animals.
It's other people we can't stand.
For most residents, Thursday's front page photo of one of the dogs seized by the B.C. SPCA from a rural property near Burns Lake prompted a strong emotional reaction. The striking eyes, two different colours, was only part of it, as was the attentive face behind the fence. It was the fact the dog, along with 12 other adult canines, seven puppies and seven horses appear to have been neglected but were now being safely housed in Prince George.
Whenever The Citizen runs stories and photos like that, the phone won't stop ringing at the North Cariboo SPCA, offering homes and money to help. If the owner doesn't challenge the seizure of the animals, it's guaranteed that dog will soon have a new home, living with a family that first saw him on the front page of the newspaper.
Too bad more hearts don't open that way when we see pictures of homeless people sleeping on cold sidewalks or refugees fleeing war and violence.
Some people see the plight of refugees and devote themselves to delivering aid and to bringing those people to the safety of Canada and Prince George, where they can rebuild their lives and raise their families in peace.
Too many other people, however, close their hearts at the very thought. They don't want those refugees to come to Canada because they look different, they speak different, they eat different foods, they don't worship the same God and they just don't have Canadian values. The homeless on the streets are losers, alcoholics and drug addicts who brought their misery onto themselves.
It's important to stress that helping animals isn't unethical. There is nothing immoral about people helping animals, so long as others are helping the individuals in need. That being said, helping animals would be unethical if no one was coming to the aid of people in need.
Still, it's troubling to consider how suffering animals with sad eyes get so much more sympathy than suffering people.
The animals themselves influence human emotion. Dogs, in particular, have sophisticated relationships with people. They are the only species that not only look humans in the eyes, as the front page photograph showed, but they look to our faces to gauge our feelings, just like people do when they see each other.
Humans also project their own emotions onto animals and humanize them. The feelings run the gamut from the outrage over abused animals to the automatic "awww" reaction when people see critters looking and acting cute. Those emotions are instant and far more powerful than the passive "oh, those poor people" response to the suffering of earthquake victims or civilians trapped in a war zone or cancer patients or the mentally ill.
It's hard to look away when Sarah McLachlan, backed by tearjerking music and disturbing video, implores viewers to send money for the poor animals. It's much easier to change the channel when Tom Cochrane comes in to talk about starving and diseased kids in Africa.
That common reaction is a sad statement about people and their priorities. We find it instinctually easy to feel sorry for animals and as instinctually easy to turn away from people in need.
That could explain why those individuals who devote their professional and personal lives to reduce human suffering are held in such high regard. People can't help but be thankful to the doctors, nurses and social workers because they do a job most people would rather not.
Animals get the love because they can't control their own destiny when they are locked in a cage or not given proper care and feeding. It's their helplessness we find so compelling.
When we look at people in need, however, so many of us respond with blame and judgment.
Why care about people who can't take care of themselves? Why can't they work hard and look after their family like I do? In other words, why can't they be more like me?
So easily do we attribute our success to our own intelligence and hard work, yet so easily do we blame others for our misfortunes. From that same blind spot come the emotions that spring us into action to help animals and turn us away in disgust at the sight of human anguish.
-- Managing editor Neil Godbout
