In a large expanse of wilderness, the sounds of children playing become far more disturbing.
They played, unable to be seen but very able to be heard. I thought of the reality of the children, wondering if they were being watched. I wondered if they were real, or if they were just figments of the wild. A child in front of me snapped me from my thoughts.
The small bean screamed and cried. He didn’t want to be in the wild… at least I thought they were a he. Maybe he was indeed a she? Only the inane color-coding really showed what gender they were. How funny that the thing people harbor most secretively, genitalia, was what told small children’s parents what to have their children wear.
So shy, but so plainly plastered on everyone’s pink or blue tops. A dress, a girl. A ball-cap on a small child, a boy most of the time, especially if it was a “boy” color.
A dog passed me by in a wheelchair, the back legs of the German Shepherd not seeming to work at all, dangling there. The dog was happy as can be though, hardly noticing their handicap. The child, parent, and dog walked together. The child wailed, but the dog was happy with life. Why could the fluffy thing be so content, whereas the child had such an upset though they were just outside.
Wild, it fit. The Shepherd fit here. The child, a product of modern first-world society, no longer fit here. The air was cool, and the Shepherd wouldn’t notice. The child, if they weren’t in a long sleeve miniaturization of a sweater, would notice, be more upset, wail more. They don’t have fur to keep them safe. We lost that privilege so long ago when we split from others and became Homo Sapiens Sapiens.
Those few with fur are seen as monsters, disorder that causes it or not. Why are we not the defective ones when we cannot keep ourselves warm without clothes? We cannot simply coexist.
I am a meat-eater. I enjoy it, and do not feel bad for it. They are tasty creatures. Still, we are the species that takes more than just the meat. We take skin for clothing. We take territory like it’s going out of style. We take their right to exist, and in many places we do so without trying to breed their numbers back up.
Meat-eating is fine when you replace what you have taken. It is a part of nature. People always think that we will destroy the Earth. We won’t. We are a blip on the radar. We will destroy ourselves, not Earth, aside from the bizarre mental snapshot of a frozen timeline.