Snails are not the highest form of life. Nor are they universally loved, especially when they eat all the new growth in the garden. Most people regard them as little more than animated slime.
I was trying to be humane about killing them (to give the ambitious new seedlings a chance to thrive). So I followed the recommended way of picking them off by hand and drowning them.
I dropped them into a dustbin I was using as a water butt, which had a rock in the bottom to stop it from blowing away when it hadn’t rained for a while.
The water was deep enough, but the snails didn’t want to drown. They scrambled on to the rock and clung to it. They hid in its crevices. They scaled the shiny plastic sides of the dustbin and some of them – disturbingly – let out an audible scream when I prised them off.
For such a primitive form of life, they had a very strong will to live. I suppose all living creatures have the same.
Who decides when a human is human enough to deserve human rights?
When an embryo qualifies for a right to live - before or after a number of weeks of life?
Who calculates their life as not yet human, a clump of living cells, undifferentiated, unable to experience anguish …. animated slime?
I’m not sure about this.
What I do feel sure of is that we shouldn’t stop asking the questions.
And shouldn’t stop anyone else asking those questions either.
The will to live and the desire to think for ourselves, to ask uncomfortable questions and not always to trust the official answers is surely what makes us humans who have all grown from tiny forms of life to bigger, more complex structures but who have always – surely? – been human and alive.
I was trying to be humane about killing them (to give the ambitious new seedlings a chance to thrive). So I followed the recommended way of picking them off by hand and drowning them.
I dropped them into a dustbin I was using as a water butt, which had a rock in the bottom to stop it from blowing away when it hadn’t rained for a while.
The water was deep enough, but the snails didn’t want to drown. They scrambled on to the rock and clung to it. They hid in its crevices. They scaled the shiny plastic sides of the dustbin and some of them – disturbingly – let out an audible scream when I prised them off.
For such a primitive form of life, they had a very strong will to live. I suppose all living creatures have the same.
Who decides when a human is human enough to deserve human rights?
When an embryo qualifies for a right to live - before or after a number of weeks of life?
Who calculates their life as not yet human, a clump of living cells, undifferentiated, unable to experience anguish …. animated slime?
I’m not sure about this.
What I do feel sure of is that we shouldn’t stop asking the questions.
And shouldn’t stop anyone else asking those questions either.
The will to live and the desire to think for ourselves, to ask uncomfortable questions and not always to trust the official answers is surely what makes us humans who have all grown from tiny forms of life to bigger, more complex structures but who have always – surely? – been human and alive.
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