Mouood Mouood English Edition
Love of Animals
Certain Western nations are dog-lovers to the point of madness. An Iranian scientist who took his medical degree in Germany wrote: “My landlord loved his dog, kissed it and cuddled it. I tried to warn him of the danger of infection with hydatid cysts. He dismissed my remarks as unfounded, so I fetched him a medical book, which he studied with dismay, and then asked me: ‘If contact with a dog is so dangerous, why do physicians and university professors keep dogs in their homes?’ I replied that there are many habits professionally recognized as harmful to health which medical men indulge in because they like them, making a mockery of commonsense, science and reason, preferring to risk their welfare!”
Iran’s National Society for the Protection of Animals, in its journal, quotes an American magazine, which sent a questionnaire to all its dog-loving clients (mostly women), asking:
1. Do you like your dog or your spouse best?
2. If you and your dog were both hungry, with insufficient food even for one, would you give that little to your dog, or eat it yourself?
3. Does your dog sleep in your bedroom?
4. If your dog died would you shed tears?
5. Do you credit your dog with a personality above animal level?
6. If your dog bit your child and your child hit the dog with a stone and both were howling, which would you rush to comfort?
7. If your dog and your husband both fell sick simultaneously, which would you call the doctor to first?
8. Does your mind frequently wander to thoughts of your dog while you are working at your office?
Of 75,000 replies, the answers worked out as follows:
1. Close on two-thirds loved their husbands when the husband loved the dog. A number roundly stated that their dog was everything for them!
2. 60,000 said they’d give the dog the food, since it mattered less if they starved to death themselves than if the dog should fail to survive.
3. 49,000 had their dog sleeping in the bedroom. “He’s better than anyone else,” wrote the women.
4. Two-thirds would shed tears if the dog died, and give it a funeral ceremony.
5. Practically all replies regarded their dog as more than an animal, with a spiritual personality.
6. We’d try to quiet both.”
7. “First the vet, then the doctor.”
8. “Of course our thoughts frequently turn to our dogs while we’re away at work—or anywhere else, for that matter. The dog plays too important a part in life for anyone not to keep on thinking of it.”
Fancy crediting a dog with a spiritual personality and mourning its death! These are idealists, who espouse the cause of freedom and independence. Yet they condone the ruthless bombing with incendiaries and atomic warheads of entire nations without a qualm. They let the dog sleep in their bedroom yet they refuse entry into society to millions of fellow-humans, just for the crime of having a black skin.
They call the vet as soon as the dog is ill and fix its cure yet they let humans die, in groups, of famine, poverty and disease, without compunction. In America the special shops for dogs stock ten kinds of eau de cologne and even sell toothpaste, cosmetics, combs and all beauty-specialties for dogs!
“Time Magazine” is quoted in “Ettela’at” (No. 13241), thus: “Some of our great cities are literally ‘the dog house’ — e.g. London, Tokyo, Mexico City. In these, dogs are so numerous that they cause discomfort and dirt everywhere. They bite children in growing numbers and make confusion more confounded. Tokyo has 280,000; Los Angeles 300,000; New York 500,000; London 700,000; Mexico City over a million. Dogs are making a mess of the world.”
The French periodical “Animal” reported that American dog-owners spend $300,000,000 annually on beauty goods and garments for their pets. In New York, San Francisco, Chicago, Los Angeles, beauty-shops for dogs do a roaring trade. Their attendants have to take a six or twelve-month course for a “Diploma of Dog-Beautician” to get the job! Most cities have at least one dog cemetery with funeral-rites for dogs.
Meantime, five million unemployed suffer neglect and indigence.
Of course, Societies for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals are maintained by humane and tenderhearted people. Should they not extend their humane care to their own kind? Dr. Alexis Carrel rightly voiced the protest of all sane people against the contradictions tolerated in this world. “This should ye have done; and also not have left the other undone.” Meaning “Do the lesser humane work (i.e. for animals) without neglecting the greater humane work for people.”
Childhood Traumas
The physical and biological equipment of a woman fit her for certain creative functions in life, peculiar to her sex, which she is called to fulfill. Her capacity for motherhood carries with it certain emotional, mental and nervous conformations of spirit. She is formed to care for and to bring up children with supreme art and heart. The meeting of an infant’s many wants, and the careful nurture of its delicate instincts in the secure climate of a loving home, is, amidst the raging passions and deadly violence prevailing in our modern world, the most vital and basic task offered to any human being. No nursery school, no infants’ crèche, however well-equipped or psychologically planned, can supply a mother’s place. A child deprived of mother-love suffers psychological injuries.
Western women, busied with jobs outside the home, have abandoned nature’s destiny; and diverted the wonderful talents innate in the feminine personality into unnatural and disastrous sidetracks. The materialisms of East and West are alike incapable of changing the ingredients of human nature. Both have removed woman from the role for which she was designed. Untold malformations result —in personalities, in communities, in moral conduct. Juveniles brought up without the proper home-environment suffer incurable traumas. Nurseries run by people whose only motive is to make a living and who lack the passion to bring children up, treat their charges from the start as potential rebels, and thereby rob them of patience and of self-respect.
Dr. Alexis Carrel writes:
“Modern society has committed a serious mistake by entirely substituting the school for familial training. The mothers abandon their children to the kindergarten in order to attend to their careers, their social ambitions, their sexual pleasures, their literary or artistic fancies, or simply to play bridge, go to the cinema, and waste their time in busy idleness. They are, thus, responsible for the disappearance of the familial group, where the child was kept in contact with adults and learned a great deal from them. Children brought up in schools with a crowd of other children of their own age [Carrel writes `young dogs brought up in kennels with others of the same age do not develop as well as puppies free to run about with their parents’. Translator] do not develop as well as those living in the company of intelligent adults. The child easily molds his physiological, affective, and mental activities upon those of his surroundings. He learns little from children of his own age. When he is only a unit in a school he remains incomplete. To reach full strength the individual requires the relative isolation and the attention of the restricted social group consisting of the family.” 8
Tehran weekly “Ettela’at” (No. 1206) quotes a foreign report that in America 25% of women in divorce suits suffer from mental ailments, while 150,000 children per annum fall victims to the ills consequent upon a divided home. Women, after a day’s work, go home tired out; while home-life itself is so painful for many that they take tranquillizers or other pills, and frequent psychiatric clinics, in search of relief from nervous debility. Youth psychiatrist Dr. George Mally says: “Many psychological ailments in young people are due to memories of babyhood for which their mothers bear the blame. Lying, torturing dumb animals, delinquency, appear in young people who have lacked a mother’s care.”
Where affection and love between father and mother is weak, children feel less sense of duty to parents. In some families the members never see each other for years, and children by the age of 17 turn surly and rebellious. Some parents turn the children out of the home to fend for themselves at the earliest age allowed by law. Others allow the children to continue to live at home, if they contribute the expenses of their board and lodging, and replace any crockery they break at once out of their own pocket. Such treatment is worse for girls, who tend to seek solace for the loneliness caused by lack of parental care in undesirable friendships with boys.
