We Treat Animals with More
Dignity
The Advertiser, Adelaide Mon 4 April 2005,
By Angela Goode
When I get sick, please treat me like an animal. If my brain
has gone and I can't eat, please do what every farmer in this
country is compelled to do by law to an animal: put me down. Do
not starve me to death.
No-one in this country could get away with knowingly starving
an animal to death as happened to that poor brain-damagedAmerican
woman, Terri Schiavo.
As a farmer, I'd be prosecuted by the RSPCA if we did not shoot
a cow that couldn't feed itself because of illness. If your dog
is suffering, miserable and terminal, you'd be negligent if you
didn't put it down. Indeed, humans often get into more of a lather
about an animal suffering than about people going through hell
on their way to a drawn-out demise.
The American PETA campaign against Australian farmers' removal
of a sheep's breech skin to prevent death from maggot invasion
looks limp against human rights questions raised by the conundrums
of medical science.
This is not a pretty or easy topic. But it does seem odd that
only vets can administer a drug which quickly puts an animal to
death. Doctors do not have access to this drug, Nembutal, so human
patients in pain tend to be sedated with increasing amounts of
morphine until they eventually cease to be alive. It gets clumsy
if you don't happen to be able to feel pain like Terri - so there
is an unforgivable charade carried out by the righteous about
not taking life even if the situation is hopeless and methods
of keeping the body alive are extreme.
The Bush push of religious fundamentalist thinkers, while slaughtering
healthy families in other countries, fought to keep a half-living
American body beating no matter what the cost. Then, when the
battle was lost to continue artificial means of life in perpetuity,
the only legal means of achieving death was through starvation.
What sort of society lets someone perish from lack of food and
water, simply because it is allowing ``nature to take its course''?
Where does nature any longer have a role in modern Western life?
From birth to death, medical intervention rules.
If someone is inexorably en route to death, situation hopeless,
no quality of life, no ability to keep beating without massively
unnatural assistance, there can be no immorality in helping them
leave the land of the living, if that has been their stated choice.
Immorality is using vast lakes of expensive drugs and hospital
space to sustain a sliver of life in the belief that where there
is life, there is hope. This so-called luxury of prolonging life
is of course only the prerogative of the wealthy Western world.
Others in less fortunate and less pampered nations die for want
of a simple antibiotic.
In my more cynical moments, I wonder if the fight to prolong life
beyond what is sensible and reasonable is driven not so much by
compassion but by pharmaceutical companies with much to gain in
the supply of hugely expensive drugs.
Meanwhile, American murderers get an easier death than the innocents.
And so do our old working dogs.
As Western populations and particularly the young drift from organised
religion and dogma, end-of-life questions inevitably will be more
vigorously debated. Perhaps future generations will demand ever
more elaborate, expensive and fruitless extensions of their dying
days. Or perhaps the possession of a pill to end life in a gentle
and quick snooze will become the accepted choice for the hopelessly
ill who have made their wishes clear.
agoode@rbm.com.au
