I love animals

My boyfriend came back from the bathroom yesterday to find me sitting at my computer in tears.  He said-

“Oh NO! What’s wrong, Stinky?”

And I said-

“Oh, Foofy, I’m just so sad that there are so many dogs in the world that nobody loves!”

He was a bit confused, so I showed him that I’d been watching videos of abandoned dogs being rescued, including one blind dog that was so scared of people that he was shaking and weeing everywhere, but instantly as he was given a hug and a stroke, he learnt to trust people again, and within weeks he was bounding around, happy as anything.

It’s strange that I seem to care far more about animals in pain than about people in pain.  This is me sitting through one of those Oxfam adverts where they show starving children in Africa:

And this is me watching a video on youtube about a frightened dog:

It’s not that I don’t care about people, I DO, but somehow a person harming an animal seems far worse than a person harming a person, or people being at the mercy of natural disasters, perhaps because many animals, especially dogs, (I’m not talking about killer whales or anything) have no capacity for maliciousness, and everything they do is to please people.  If a person kicks a dog out of their own anger, the dog is not clever enough to rationalise it; he will merely believe that he deserved it, and will continue to be steadfastly loyal to his owner despite the abuse he is sure to receive.

All this led to a new game that my boyfriend and I now play- one of us is a terrified, yelping, abandoned puppy, and the other one has to get close enough (avoiding getting bitten or scratched) to tickle it under the chin and stroke its head, making it happy and calming it down.  I need to stress right now that this game in NO WAY has led to anything sexual.  Yet.