If Compassion Is Not Tempered With Reason, It Can Be A Destructive Force

by John Hawkins | December 1, 2004 11:59 pm

Stories like this[1] seem to pop up every few weeks…

“Miami-Dade County animal control officers and homicide investigators are investigating the death of a woman found dead inside her home, surrounded by dozens of animals.

Police said the woman lived alone and neighbors told them she hadn’t been seen for days.

Police found about 30 cats, three dogs, two birds and three dead ducks inside the house.

Animal control officers said the animals were living in poor conditions, in and out of cages. All the animals were extremely dirty and some of the dogs and birds were sickly.”

Now some of you might think people who do this sort of thing, take huge numbers of animals into their homes, are crazy…and they are, at least a little bit.

But there’s actually a lesson here that liberals would do well to pay attention to. Bear with me and you’ll see what I mean…

First of all, think about the sort of people who would take all these animals into their homes. Are they bad people who are doing this so they can hurt animals? No way! To the contrary, much like a lot of liberals, they’re just trying to be nice people and do what they think is the right thing.

It’s easy to imagine how it starts. One of these women gets a dog or two and she loves her little doggies! All of us who have pets can relate to that, right?

However, most of us can also understand that taking care of an animal requires a lot of work and expense. You have to take the dog outside, take it to the vet when it’s sick, feed it, play with it…there’s just a lot to taking care of a dog properly and it ain’t cheap either.

The sort of people who end up with a houseful of animals must understand how difficult it is to take care of animals…after all, they’re doing it. But, they’re so focused on being nice, on being compassionate, they just say, “screw the consequences,” I’m taking these animals in.

And who’s really to say how many animals are “too many”? Is it 5, 6, 7, 8? That seems like a lot of animals for one person to take care of, but there are people who can pull it off. But what happens when the numbers keep climbing to 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16? But these people just can’t turn away a dog that is hurt, sick, hungry, or has nobody to take care of it, just as liberals are willing to spend almost any amount of tax payer dollars to help people they think are in need.

Eventually, if these animal collectors don’t come to their senses or someone doesn’t step in, things get way out of hand. The floor gets covered with feces and urine and they don’t have time to clean it up, their house is ruined, they can’t afford to take the pets to the vet when they get sick, and it spirals downward from there. Then these decent people, who love and adore pets, end up abusing them horribly through their neglect.

Unbridled compassion causes grave difficulties when people are involved as well. Welfare caused an explosion of illegitimate children. A program like Social Security, which was initially envisioned as a small supplemental income that most Americans would never live to collect, now takes up to 23%[2] of Federal Expenditures, and I’m sure whoever came up with the idea of socialized medicine in Canada never envisioned people “who require major knee surgery” having to wait two years[3] to get an operation.

The lesson here is that if compassion is not tempered with reason, it can be a destructive force not just for the person who’s trying to help, but for those they are aiding…

Endnotes:
  1. Stories like this: http://www.wftv.com/news/3958960/detail.html
  2. 23%: http://www.ssa.gov/history/percent.html
  3. two years: https://rightwingnews1.wpenginepowered.com/archives/week_2004_09_12.PHP#002426

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