Ever wonder how the world turned into such a complete craphole almost overnight?
Sure, violence and general human awfulness are nothing new. They've been around since Cain was clubbing Abel over the head with a rock. But with a public shooting just about every other day, madmen using vehicles to ram into crowds so frequently that it’s bordering on trendy, and hysterical political rhetoric and social media warfare reaching an all-out fever pitch, the world certainly doesn’t seem to be getting more peaceful.
Perhaps its our near-total lack of empathy toward other people.
Need proof? Here’s some. It turns out people actually care about dogs more than they care about other human beings. Business Insider explains:
A study published in the journal Society & Animals found that people are more empathetic towards dogs than fellow humans.
In an experiment, 240 students were presented with fake newspaper clippings of a police report either about an attack on a person, or on a dog.In the fake report, the victim was attacked "with a baseball bat by an unknown assailant," and was left unconscious "with one broken leg" and "multiple lacerations."
Participants were each given the same report with the victim being either a one-year-old baby, a 30-year-old adult, a puppy, or a six-year-old dog. Then they were asked about how they felt using questions to measure their levels of empathy.
…empathy levels for the puppy, older dog, and baby human were on similar levels, while the adult person came last. The adult dog only received lower scores of empathy when compared to the infant human victim.
Now, don’t get me wrong. Dogs are super cute. Many of us have at least one, and no sane person wants to see them beaten with a baseball bat.
But they aren’t people.
Should you have sympathy for a beaten animal? Of course, and we do. We have laws against abusing animals and harsh penalties for those who do.. But when your sympathy for a dog is on equal ground with your sympathy for a tortured human infant, or when it comes ahead of your compassion for an assaulted adult human, you’ve got a problem.
Then again, perhaps we should expect little more from a society that willfully exterminates over a million pre-born infants a year, prefers pets and houseplants to having children, and is filled with self-involved young adults who can’t look past the end of their own nose long enough to establish a meaningful relationship with another person -- and that's just the United States. So the next time you flip on your television to yet another horrific act of violence, or question how mankind can turn a blind eye to rampant atrocities and open human rights violations by dictatorial regimes, or wonder why no one seems to give two rips about Chicago’s open war zone, just remember this:
People care more about dogs than other people.
That’s why.
(Cover Photo: Louellakillingerdm7651)