Dear Editor,
There are hundreds of Guyanese who daily go about doing good in their communities without thought of recognition or reward. It is in their nature to do so. They knit up the fabric of society when so much else seems to rend it.
Among them are those dedicated persons who assist in the care of animals and continually call attention to their rights which are so often cruelly ignored – especially in poor countries where there is so much human neglect to divert attention from “lesser” needs. I think of Steve Surujbally whose service in this regard as in so much else has been phenomenal. And I have grown to admire over time the passionate advocacy of Syeada Manbodh in the cause of treating animals as living creatures on this earth with rights of their own which we must respect.
A passage I read recently from a memoir by Leonard Woolf, the English writer and publisher and husband of Virginia Woolf, made a powerful impression on me and brought home the individuality and therefore the rights of non-human beings.
Leonard Woolf recalled when he was young being asked to drown some unwanted day-old puppies. He did what he was told but was horrified all the same and years later wrote as follows:
“Looked at casually, day-old puppies are little, blind, squirming, undifferentiated objects or things. I put one of them in the bucket of water, and instantly an extraordinary, a terrible thing happened. This blind, amorphous thing began to fight desperately for its life, struggling, beating the water with its paws. I suddenly saw that it was an individual, that like me it was an ‘I’, that in its bucket of water it was experiencing what I would experience and fighting death, as I would fight death if I were drowning in the multitudinous seas. It was I felt and feel a horrible, an uncivilized thing to drown that ‘I’ in a bucket of water.”
In such a passage I see clearly what people like Steve Surujbally and Syeada Manbodh are fighting hard to bring home to us. Their constant advocacy deserves a full measure of praise and support.
Yours faithfully,
Ian McDonald
