Nonviolence Includes Animals
Excerpted from a presentation by PeTA President Ingrid Newkirk at the International Nonviolence Conference in Bethlehem, in which she tells the story of a man who trapped a pair of hawks for sale to a distant zoo, and in the process, was attacked by one, allowing the other to escape:
The next morning, Eisley took the box in which the little hawk was imprisoned out onto the grass and started building a cage. As he worked in the sunshine, he thought to himself how fine a day it was to be alive. Then, he opened the box. He says: “I got the hawk right out in my hand with his wings folded, and I was careful not to startle him. He did not resist and now lay limp in my grasp. I could feel his heart pound under the feathers, but he only looked beyond me and up. I saw him look that last look away beyond me into a sky so full of light that I could not follow his gaze. I suppose then I must have realized what I was going to do. I just put the hawk on the grass.” For a long minute, the male simply lay with his breast pressed against the grass, then he was gone, like a flicker of light.
Eisley recalls: “He flew up into the towering emptiness of light and crystal that was so intense my eyes could scarcely bear to penetrate it. Then, from far up somewhere, a cry. When I heard that cry, my heart turned over. By shifting my position against the sun, I could see, coming straight out of the sun’s eyes, where she must have been soaring restlessly above us for untold hours, his mate. And from far up, ringing from peak to peak, came a cry of such unutterable and ecstatic joy that it sounds down across the years as I write. They met in a great soaring gyre that turned into a whirling circle and a dance of wings. Once more, just once, their two voices, joined in a harsh wild medley of question and response, echoed across the valley. Then they were gone forever somewhere into those upper regions beyond the eyes of men.”
Practising non-violence in the face of violence requires great strength. We must ask ourselves: Don’t animal mothers experience love? Don’t animals scream if we burn them? Don’t they deserve freedom as we do?
Nonviolence can begin with our first meal of the day and be part of everything we do all day long. We [must] stop saying, “We are human beings, treat us like human beings,” and start saying, “We are living beings, treat us like all living beings!”
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