How Can These Trolls Be So Callous?

Source Medium

By Pathless Pilgrim

What The Death of Our Beloved Family Cat Taught Me About People

We had some tragic news recently. We lost our beloved cat.

He’d been with us for years and would go out every day, but never went very far or stayed out for very long. He’d pop out for a while, have a bit of an explore, get some fresh air and some exercise, check out any new smells that had been left in his territory, then dash back in to make sure we were still around, and to tell us all about it.

We knew there was something wrong when we hadn’t seen him all day. It just wasn’t like him to disappear for such a long period of time. Over the next two weeks, we spent many hours looking for him. We leafletted our local area and put up posters everywhere. We talked to neighbours and local business owners, asking them to keep an eye open for him. We contacted local vets and animal shelters in case he’d been brought in. We joined community Facebook groups and lost pet groups and put out his information all over social media.

People were great. There was so much support. A printer produced a load of free posters for us, local business owners put up the posters in windows, almost every day we had calls and messages from helpful people thinking they might have seen him. None of the sightings proved to be him, but it kept our hope alive and gave us encouragement.

After close to two weeks, we had a message from a lady who thought she’d found him. Early on the morning that he’d disappeared, she’d spotted him sitting in the middle of the road near our home, apparently unable to walk. Her daughter had picked him up and they’d rushed him to a vet but, tragically, he didn’t make it and died in her arms.

A call to the vets confirmed the story and we were told they still had him in cold storage. When I collected him and brought him home, our worst fears were confirmed — it was our beloved little lad.

We were devastated.

After taking some time to get over the initial shock, we decided we had better let people know what had happened, especially since many people were still searching for him. We put out various messages and social media posts informing people of the sad news.

That’s when the vile trolling started.

First, it was laughing emojis.

Then came photos of dead and mutilated cats.

Some people even told us they enjoyed eating cat meat and sent us pictures of meals they had eaten with bits of cat flesh in them.

It was obscene, cruel and totally senseless. We couldn’t understand what motivated these people to do this, or why they seemed to get such sick pleasure from taunting people who genuinely cared about animals and were just trying to do the right thing.

Okay… this isn’t exactly true.

Losing our little fella, searching for him, eventually finding out what had happened to him and collecting his little body from the vet’s — that was all true. But the reaction from the trolls — I added that because I want to highlight a particularly disturbing trait among people on social media — I hope you’ll forgive me and read on…

In fact, when we announced that he’d been killed, we received nothing but kind condolences and messages of support — people were lovely. It was heart-warming to discover that there are so many kind people out there.

But the vile, sick, cruel messages from the trolls — that’s not entirely untrue, either. You see, I’ve seen those messages over and over again — as have most people who campaign against animal abuse. These kinds of replies will be familiar to almost anyone who campaigns on social media for animal rights and veganism.

The same people who show respect, caring and support for a missing, injured or deceased cat or dog will readily show utter contempt and disdain for other animals, such as pigs, cows, sheep, chickens, goats or fish, for example, (who) they treat as nothing more than inanimate objects.

The suffering of farmed animals is, in many ways, even worse than the suffering of our beloved companion animals, because it is prolonged, deliberate and takes place on such a vast scale. Yet post about it on social media and you are likely to get exactly the same response from trolls as I described above.

People laughing at you for showing care and concern.

People posting photos of animal abuse.

People posting pictures of bacon and talking about how delicious their dead pig was.

It’s sickening. It’s also sick. Seriously. If people are so uncomfortable with someone showing compassion for the animals which they so carelessly and callously put on their plates three times a day, without a second thought about their lives, their feelings or their deaths… so uncomfortable that they feel an overwhelming urge to troll vegans and other people who show concern about the suffering of those animals, then they really do have a problem.

And their problem isn’t really with vegans; their real problem is their own cognitive dissonance.

You see, as my experience with the death of our cat shows, most ordinary people do care about animals, at least on some level. Yet we all know, deep down, that this natural compassion cannot be reconciled with paying for them to be horribly torture and killed for products we don’t even need.

We all know, deep down, we should be vegan. It’s just a question of when the penny will drop.

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The bitterness and self loathing of trolls and such
Using the keyboard as a crutch
To spew to share their
Vile screed
Our world keeps sinking
In deed and indeed

Karen Lyons Kalmenson