Flyaway.....

is the title of a book that I just finished. Suzie Gilbert, a wild bird rehabilitation practitioner writes about her experiences with bird rehabbing and trying to balance the demands of caring for birds and the needs of her family....as well as her own needs.

It all reinforced my belief that humans were perverse and their decisions arbitrary, that animals were always true to themselves but at the mercy of a species not qualified to be in charge. p. 9, Flyaway

As you can see from the quote above,  the author is apparently a thoughtful and insightful person. She later writes, in reference to an encounter between her and a goshawk:

Theirs was a world in which I longed to play a part, in which could witness the transcendent and perhaps even begin to atone for the sins of my own kind. p. 77, Flyaway

 She feels a connection with animals, admires and cares for them. She also seems to be quite tuned in to the individuality of each living being. She writes on page 127:

What rehabilitators learn all too quickly is that each animal, each bird who comes through the door is unique. Species may have general traits, but each individual is different, each one is memorable and as soon as this becomes clear, the enormity of what humankind is doing to the natural world becomes all the more harrowing.

Ah, she gets it! Right?

Nope, as the book reveals the author is neither vegetarian or vegan.....at one point she writes about shelter animals and their plight and then turns around and writes about searching for and finding and buying a puppy from a breeder.

She writes about rehabbing a wild turkey at home and going out to thanksgiving dinner and eating a turkey drumstick....apparently while being admonished by her daughter for being inconsistent in her caring and her behavior.

And finally she writes about anger and dismay about hunting and then adds an exception for deer hunting....justifying it because she says there are too many of them and starvation is a bad way to die. Apparently it is better to be blown apart with an assault rifle.

It is disappointing and a little astonishing to read how a person that cares, obviously and deeply, for nature and animals is.....even with multiple pieces of evidence available to her...unable to struggle through the indoctrination and contradictions and understand that our fellow animals are not ours to cause harm to or to cause suffering to or to use.

The book is well written, her style of writing is engaging and often humorous.....this is a compassionate, aware and caring person......look again at the quotes above.....she knows human animals are wreaking havoc on their fellow animals....she knows it and then she goes right on and continues to blithely contribute to the mayhem....without pausing.

She is caring and compassionate.....up to a point....then it stops and stops dramatically and somebody better help you if you are an animal that is in the road after her caring and compassion stop....factory farms, hunting, deliberate breeding of animals that are being killed by the millions because they are "unwanted".....no compassion at all if it involves animals and something she wants to do. There is a blindness exhibited here that it is a blindness akin to that of a black hole.....so blind that awareness of the blindness is hidden too.

In a way, the author exemplifies billions of human animals......caring, compassionate, intelligent, sensitive, aware.........until nature or an animal gets in between them and something they want to do......then all that sensitivity and caring count for naught and animals die for no good reason and nature is destroyed and obliterated because....well, just because.

And if you say something about the suffering, the blindness, the lack of caring, if you object....why then you are just being weird.......or mean or.....something.

It seems to me to be the height of absurdity to be someone that is devoted to saving animals, to caring for sick and injured animals and to be also someone that eats animals or exploits animals.

Humans do not have to eat animals to live. Humans do not have to exploit or use animals to live. Hello?

It is astonishing, so weird that sometimes I think somebody is putting me on....some cosmic joke or something. But not a very funny joke........

By the way, the book received lots of great reviews over on Amazon, and the book is very readable and enjoyable......and a good example of the black-hole-like, culturally created and maintained,  blind-spot that hides awareness of the horrors that we human animals inflict on the other earthlings and the earth herself.