| It's the has-anyone-seen-this-paperclip-it-has-great-sentimental-value phenomenon. We humans are capable of investing considerable emotion in inanimate objects, let alone our fellow sentient creatures such as pets. When it comes to two billion ill-nourished people, however, we simply lack the imagination. They remain an abstraction. Yet when you actually see street kids in the Third World you kick yourself for not adopting each and every one.
I was strangely moved by the recent death (I suppose) of the cricket in the flower box on the balcony that sang every night all summer. I know how that sounds, but there you are. Yet I wouldn't hesitate to crush a cockroach. And I'm not, I'm sorry to say, a vegetarian.
"I wish I was as cocksure of anything as Tom Macaulay is of everything."
-- Viscount Melbourne |