I love animals.

I love them mostly because they are not humans.

I love them also, because, as my dad always said, they ‘don’t answer back’.

I have more animals than humans in our house for the reasons listed above.

I love cats, dogs, birds (the fact that they shit all over other people’s ‘writing’ is a boon). I also love watching them in the wild and a few days in the Kruger National Park will remain for ever entrenched in my mind – I would return in a jiffy were South Africa a bus-ride away. Sadly it is not.

I also find zoos to be horrendous. Even when I was 9 years old and on a school trip to Tunisia, I remember watching the emaciated lions behind those bars and thinking: is this my namesake (I’m a Leo)? He’s so thin miskin. How can he be thin when they are feeding him so many other dead animals? Why does he looks so washed out? Then I went to Africa and watched the lion in the wild: he looked washed out and emaciated and he was completely in his element. That put paid to my pre teen anthropomorphism.

In Singapore I went to an open zoo. The animals were behind invisible wires which I am positive shocked them if they tried to go beyond them: many of them were dangerous and with the idiotic Indians shouting in the carriage I wouldn’t have trust myself, let alone a leopard.  The zoo made me feel sick.

Nonetheless I come from generations of farmers and land-tillers: for us animals are also something that we take a technical, almost functional approach to. A cow is cute but she’s also tomorrow’s steak. Or next week’s Louis Vuitton bag. It is also, sometimes, tomorrow’s Primark bag. I have nursed horses until they succumbed to their disease. I cried afterwards. Then I got on with it.

I have never been to an animal circus. I hardly see the point in it: if children want to see animals they are much better off watching the Discovery Channel or a documentary by Attenborough. Television these days is more real than the ‘reality’ of a big top and a bunch of overweight men wielding whips and a tiger, far far away, jumping from a silly chair to another silly chair.

Although I do see the point behind anti-animal-circus publicity, the anti-video has not only left me cold in terms of how riled I should be: it is actually an embarrassment. A bunch of Maltese ‘celebrities’, most of who I have never heard about take it in turns to sometimes protest against fur, sometimes against the animal circus in Malta. Fine. But who on earth are they?

Joe a.k.a. Peppi Azzopardi does a Xarabankism with his question, literally looks as if somebody has dragged him out of bed and he never even bothered to shave or shape his hair: it looks as if he was having a nightmare about wind tunnels. Moira Delia does a faux-heart-wrenching plea. Ira [who is one my besties, so I can say whatever the hell I like about her and she’s just slap me in the face next time we’re stuffing our faces] is hoarse and her question looks like this was a ‘one shot and that’s it’ kind of filming. She also posted ‘YOU’re their ONLY hope’ later on facebook. Ir, come on: we bloody ain’t. These moments are worrying: some of the organisers are the kind of bonkers people who would break into a lab and release all the rats because they are against animal testing. In the video there are the Zoo people (no, it’s not ironic enough to be funny). And...?

Some time ago I got into a facebook argument with Moira’s best mates (undeclared of course but this island is too damn small not to know these things) about her shoot on First magazine. I found the cover and the shoot boring and saw it exactly for what it was – publicity for her and publicity for the magazine which had a new editor and sorely needed an injection of ‘modernity’.  They said she was ‘at least doing her bit for animal freedom’. Oh no she ain’t. But she sure is doing her bit for self-publicity. And so are the rest, including Joe Azzopardi who jumps at each opportunity at a 'protest' and can always be found, completely by chance, at the front, right behind the banner. The least they can do is admit it: there’s nothing wrong with publicising oneself but some opportunism just riles.

Do you know why there are so many protests against fur but none against leather? It’s easier to hit old ladies than it is to hit a bunch of Hell’s Angels.

 

Here is the mish-mash video from Cedric Vella - mai bed ist mai tojlit.  And it looks like it.

 

Picture credit: from those idiots PETA – oops, where have I seen exactly the same pose before? The best, best, best description of what PETA are really about is in the South Park version of them.

Copy-writer, blogger and sometime contributor to Malta Restaurant Review website planetmona Mark Biwwa has also written about this

For more words and explanations on xarabankism, David Friggieri has enlightened us