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Malaysiakini :
Mar 2010

Of doggone stick-y savagery

I refer to the letter Ghastly animal abuse at Kepong KTM station.

Man, I can assure you, is a nasty creature. He demands, he deceives, he destroys. And since the beginning of civilisation, he's been propagating this veni, vidi, vici behaviour ubiquitously. In the latest episode of the 'Malaysia, Truly Beastly' series, this brutish barbarism has yet again been exposed extravagantly.

The above letter revealed a shackled dog with a mouthful of stick! Yes! A stick! To my surprise, I wasn't surprised. With the butchery of babies, the crushing of civil rights and legislation on lexicon, it seems almost natural to fetter a dog to a fence and feed it some timber.

Also not blood-curdling shocking is the complete and absolute show of apathy by those who bared witness to this gruesome scene. Save for the benevolent individuals who made the frantic report, a howling and hemorrhaging living being seemed to not bother the vast commuting commuters that day.

It was after all just a dog. A fang-filled, diseased-ridden, faeces-producing, oxygen-stealing dog. Its eventual death would be a mere kitchen matter to these folk.

So what has become of this country, one might ask. Are its people as heartless as this incident suggests? Or are we as Allah-fearing as we piously proclaim? All religions, mind you, preach custodianship of the world we inhabit; a world that includes animals.

But it is shamefully clear that while we human beings are religiously taken up with heavenly fooleries, we continually treat our animals like hell. We doggedly refuse to concern ourselves with something as pedestrian as the welfare of the animals in our 'custody'.

We would much rather train them for our sadistic amusement; slaughter them for our gastronomical indulgence and subject them to torture for our 'security'. Hence, as is with most animal cruelty cases in this country, the chorus of outrage will begin, torrential tears will be wept and animal activism will be re-awakened.

And with a modicum of luck, these Malaysian mindset-manufactured monsters will get a verbal walloping. But justice will not be served for this poor dog. One must be delusional to believe otherwise.

The circumstances surrounding the stick-shoving, shackling and subsequent release of the dog still elude me. But what has become damningly apparent is that Malaysia needs a fresh soul.

by Shenaaz - a Muslim