Traditional Chinese culture poses difficulty for new animal welfare laws
| Autor | Song Wei |
| Cargo | Attorney and Professor of University of Science and Technology of China ? USTC |
| Páginas | 87-92 |
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Few people in China care about the feelings of animals or possess the concept of animal welfare. Some traditional factors play a positive role in this field.
From childhood, anything about animals, most Chinese children get in touch with has undoubtedly put man above them. Even some of the children’s songs have described the nature of animals as malicious, such as slippery fox and ruthless wolf and so on, which not only casts a dark shadow over their naïve hearts, but also leaves a wide gap between animals and children. It then appears in human ideology the discrimination of inferiority and superiority, eminence and humbleness, primary and secondary. These can all be taken in at a glance at the old saying: Man is the master of the universe. Disdain in spirit may lead to cruelty in action.
As a result, man endows himself the natural rights to dominate the universe at the thought of "Human rights is gifted by the God", and take the life of animals as trifling matters. Along with the continuous development of human "civilization", the global eco-environment worsens, and the number of species re-
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duces considerably. Over ten of them become extinct each day. Humans have at last woken to the reality that they will suffer the same ending if nothing is done to stop it. Consequently, the strategy of sustainable development was put forward. This is, however, not comforting, because while the same idea is contained in the current Wildlife Protection Laws (which is enacted to protect and save valuable wildlife in imminent danger, to protect, develop and reasonably exploit resources of wild animals, and to keep the balance of eco-system). But the law has turned out to be no more than the most recent and practical way humans have found to make "use" of natural resources for selfish reasons, and not for the long term well being of any of the animals.
The "Civilized" man always divides creatures into "man-kind" and "animals". The reason is no doubt that man thinks high of himself. Then is the deep-rooted human priority really true? Why should we insist on the inferiority of animals? Darwin has particularly compared the intellect of man and so-called lower orders animals. He hold the opinion that we now know that the sensory organs, intuition, all kinds of emotions and functions, such as, love, memory, attention, curiosity, imitating and reasoning abilities, etc. on which man keeps priding himself, can also be found on lower animals...
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