EDITORIAL — Animal cruelty

Even as many Filipinos have become more aware of animal rights and are willing to stand up for those that don’t have a voice, it would seem that others still think they are just trash.

A video that recently became viral on the internet raised the hackles of activists and animal lovers after it showed how an old man tied a cat to the back of his tricycle in Pangasinan and then drove off, forcing the poor animal to run until it collapsed from exhaustion and was dragged along behind his vehicle.

He later apologized for his actions saying he wanted to punish the cat --which thankfully survived the ordeal-- for always scratching everything and causing trouble.

Another story that surfaced involved the killing of Nami, a husky that escaped from its house in Antique last week. According to reports, before the dog was found dead it had been seen being chased by barangay tanods.

This calls to mind another incident of animal cruelty where live puppies were fed to a python. It has not been determined exactly where that incident happened, although rumors had it that it happened in a town in Cebu.

The old man who dragged the cat around has apologized for his actions, although some netizens called for the man himself to be dragged behind his tricycle to teach him a lesson, but the perpetrators in Nami’s death have yet to be found. Or the man who fed puppies to a snake.

We will never understand how some people find it so easy to be cruel to animals. It’s one thing to butcher animals for food, control diseases, or manage an ecosystem, but to hurt or kill them for sport, or even for mere amusement, is beyond cruel.

And while animal lives may not have equal value to human lives in the eyes of some people, they are still living beings that feel love, anger, fear, sorrow, and even pain. The same things we feel.

Those who don’t think twice about being cruel to animals must be made to pay for their actions.