The charity and predation I see on YouTube

BarcelonaAnyone who uses YouTube and opens this page looking for anything will have noticed that it's very common to find, right from the start, short reports on animal behavior. They're also found on Facebook, but these have been added by users.

There are, on the one hand—these predominate on Facebook, edited by very beautiful souls—animated images of animals that have been abandoned and are rescued by a kind-hearted man or woman, who takes the little animal home, cleans it, then takes it to the vet, always saving its life by the skin of their teeth. It's almost a luxury.

On the other hand—and these are the ones that predominate on YouTube—there are shocking visions of predatory animals bravely eating any other defenseless animal, or one that's smaller, or one that runs less quickly, or one that has strayed from the herd, amidst the desperate cries of the victim and the bellows or roars of the victim. They're not funny at all, but the images mean more than what's seen. Now, for example, Komodo dragons are running around this page, capable of devouring an entire calf, if necessary, live from the dead.

Both have this characteristic: they are metaphors, or analogies of animal behavior with respect to human behavior. Since it's not easy to see anything like a human being being tortured, murdered, or eaten, we have these moving images to shudder at the possibility that we ourselves might one day be the perpetrators or victims of such violence. We are greatly relieved to consider that we, such civilized human beings (?), would never do something like that to a flywheel.

As for the beautiful souls who rescue a little animal, the matter has an ambiguous and deceptive moral dimension: animals deserve our full respect, certainly. But this charity hides and almost forgives the fact that human beings, among ourselves, rarely practice the same solidarity and care.