Lettera all’Observer riguardo l’articolo
“A Cow Is Just a Cow” di Cristina Odone
(Sui roghi di animali durante le epurazioni di bestiame per il morbo della mucca pazza in Inghilterra)
Regarding : A Cow Is Just a Cow. By Cristina Odone.
London 6.3.2001
Dear Sirs,
I read the incredible article by Ms. Odone with the utmost surprise. It was like falling back in time, into the abyss of the mechanicalistic world view with its grotesque assumption that animals are purely machines and not living beings. The Baconian – Cartesian world views animals similar to clocks and the cries of pain like simple reactions of springs and mechanisms.
I read your magazine every Sunday and the article by Ms. Odone, whose surname appears to be of Italian origin, shocked me with its the utter crudity and callousness. Not to be able to feel anything for the devastation happening around us is simply horrid. She chose the right word- “Holocaust”, but a cow, as I see it, is a living being regardless what Ms. Odone thinks.
I am Italian and I lived in Tuscany for five years before coming back to London. I lived in a isolated house in the countryside and when I saw what Mrs. Odone wrote about France and Italy I felt simply perplexed and a little sick. I was in the Tuscan countryside when I witnessed the events that I described in a letter that you can find in the enclosed Attachment: “Europe1”.
Perhaps Ms. Odone should try to find out more about Italy and France before spewing forth idiotic statements regarding southern European realism versus British Disneyland sentimentalism. A dominant species on a planet creates its own rules, invents its own gods, imagines its own immortality, believes that everything and anything is permissible to its dominant species including to think the way Ms. Odone does.
The idea that people who love animals are careless about humans is simply trash. Before my battle against the hunters who were exterminating every living thing in Tuscany, I was deeply involved with East Timor. My friends, who are active in defending animal’s right, don’t forget for a moment the atrocities being committed against humanity in Rwanda or Kosovo. If you respect animals, you respect all life. And if you respect all life, you respect human life.
Catholicism plays a significant role in the obtuse anthropocentric view held by Ms. Odone.. A priest in Tuscany, with a parish in a place called Foiano Della Chiana, near Arezzo, used to organise a large Mass for the hunters. When asked about this awful event he answered that in killing animals, hunters were limiting the level of blasphemies that they would generally utter. The killing of animals in order to reduce the level of blasphemies: a truly mystical jewel of logic. In Italy we have Franciscan friars that hunt and organise hunting dinners. Did you know that ?
What Ms. Odone forgets is that even in Italy the animal rights movement is growing stronger everyday and the ideas that she has regarding my country are really obsolete and offensive. Hunters that used to number close to 2,000,000 in the 1980’s have now been reduced to 800,000. And even this small minority is despised by the rest of the population- even in the countryside. There are now over 1,500,000 vegetarians and countless animal rights activists in Italy.
If some journalist in the Observer would be interested in reporting the grotesque story of the hunter-priest I would be very happy to inform them. But while the priest in Foiano continues his massacres and his absurd Mass another priest in Rome blesses the souls of dead cats. But according to Ms.Odone, the first priest would be considered sane and the second mad. So much for Ms. Odone’s bovine inspired logic. Yes: cows are cows.
Yours truly.
Paolo Ricci.