i am a firm believer

animals do have feelings and emotions. we should treat them as such. hell, we can't even treat each other with compassion, i guess it's too much for me to expect us to treat animals kindly.

Photo Gallery: Dying Elephant Elicits ''Compassion'' (click on the title above, it's a link to the rest of the story and pictures)

Warning: This gallery contains graphic images.
Day One: Grace Aids Eleanor
Grace, of a family of elephants that researchers call the Virtues, touches the ailing Eleanor, the matriarch of the First Ladies family, who has fallen in Kenya's Samburu National Reserve on October 10, 2003. Grace will soon push Eleanor back to her feet, though the ailing elephant's resurgence will be short-lived.
Elephants show compassionate behavior to others in distress, even to elephants not closely related to them, according to the researchers who produced these photos and an accompanying report, published in the July 2006 issue of the journal Applied Animal Behaviour Science.
Before this picture was taken, Eleanor, a new mother, had been found with a swollen trunk, abrasions to an ear and a leg, and a broken tusk—probably from a previous fall. ..............


and this from the ny times

A Chinese Outcry: Doesn’t a Dog Have Rights?

SHANGHAI, Aug. 9 — It was late last month, the boy said, his voice still tinged with emotion, when he and his father were forced to march their two German shepherds to a public square and hang them from a tree.
The boy, Xia Shaoli, was not alone in his pain. Officials in Mouding County in southwestern Yunnan Province had ordered the mass extermination of dogs, pets as well as strays, after three people died in a rabies outbreak. And as a crowd gathered around a large tree in the village of Xiajiashan, owners complied one after another with commands to string their dogs up.
According to official figures, 54,429 dogs were killed during the Yunnan campaign. Reports in the Chinese news media say that some people out walking their dogs had the animals seized by gangs of vigilantes, who clubbed the dogs to death on the spot.
The events in Yunnan have been quickly followed by rabies scares in other parts of China. On Wednesday, the Chinese news media reported the killings of 280 dogs in Wuxi, a city near Shanghai, and 13 in the city of Fuzhou in southern Fujian Province. ..........