Cattle, sheep, goats, dogs, cats, and horses are beasts. On the normal scale of value, beasts are far above inhumane people. But Michael Vick lives by the abnormal inverted scale of value. He revealed so when he said "I am not the bad person or the beast I've been made out to be" in a letter to a judge asking for leniency.
Writing in the 14 December 1984 issue of The Times, Mrs. Elspeth Huxley asked:
Could we have a moratorium on the use of the phrase ‘they behaved like animals’ to describe any especially nasty form of human brutality? Carnivores certainly kill when they need their dinners but do so as quickly as they can. Herbivores just eat vegetation and do not interfere with others.
Do we hear of dolphins torturing other dolphins, gorillas cutting, or biting, bits off other gorillas, elephants inflicting prolonged periods of terror on other elephants, or indeed on any other animal?
Rather should dolphins left to die in nets, gorillas killed in order that their dried heads should be sold to tourists, elephants dying in agony from poisons for the sake of their tusks, exclaim, in condemnation of acts of savagery (should these ever occur) committed by members of their own species: ‘They behaved like humans’.
For a brief biography of Elspeth Huxley, click here.
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