Wednesday 25 August 2010

Wheelie-Bin Cruelty


It´s an absolutely horrific news story – the one about the woman in the UK who deliberately chucked a cat into a wheelie-bin - and I´m guessing most of you will have read or heard about it by now, but for those of you who haven´t, here´s what happened.

A middle-aged woman is caught on CCTV petting a tabby cat, then glancing around to make sure no-one is watching before grabbing her by the scruff of the neck, dumping her into a wheelie-bin, then walking away. The cat, Lola, was trapped in the bin for almost 16 hours before her owners finally heard her calls for help and it was their own security camera that caught the woman in the act. They posted the clip on Facebook and the woman was subsequently identified and is now under investigation by the RSPCA. Not surprisingly, the story has caused uproar to the degree that the woman has been receiving death threats and had to be put under police protection.

Like most rational, caring human beings, I was shocked and appalled at such a callous act when I read the on-line news report & watched the clip, but it was the deluge of readers´comments that really affected me and got me to thinking. These comments ranged from absolute hatred towards the woman, Mary Bale, to incredulity that there could be such a hoo-haa over “just a cat” when there is so much suffering going on elsewhere in the world. So many different points of view, but the thing they all had in common was a tone of anger, aggression, and an insistence that they were right and anyone else thinking differently was clearly deranged. So, let me ask you...what good has any of this done? Absolutely none...a negative situation has just been made worse by negative energy being directed at it.

Now, I´m not trying to be all holier-than-thou here, and I confess that the first word out of my mouth when I read the story was “bitch” (well, OK then...that was the second, the first began with an f and ended in ing!) and I was upset, angered even by comments such as “so what? The only good animal is one that´s on my plate.” I love all animals and am a vegetarian, so of course, I´m not going to understand that way of thinking. But then I realised what I was doing...beaming out negative energy and thoughts and that, believe me, is the most dangerous thing we can do.

Let´s face it, it´s ignorance that caused Bale to behave the way she did and to then justify it by saying it just seemed like a fun thing to do and she expected the cat would have been able to get herself out, and it´s ignorance that causes certain people to see nothing wrong in such an act. But ignorance, by its very nature, is never going to listen to reason – it´s an ignorant son-of-a-bitch at the end of the day – so us getting all het-up and shouting at these people will only cause them to shout back louder.

I´m not saying that they shouldn´t be held accountable for their actions, or that they shouldn´t be encouraged to live their lives in a less destructive and harmful manner – and if we can play a part in that then all well and good - but me shouting my mouth off in Ibiza, calling them all the names under the sun, is simply not going to serve any positive purpose. And that is what I believe is the most important thing to focus on. Serving a positive purpose.

What I´m suggesting is that living on a planet with almost 7 billion other people, there is always going to be someone doing something that we personally find offensive, evil even. Some of these stories will make the papers and be brought to our attention, but most of them won´t. As spiritual beings of light who genuinely care for our planet, who are concerned only with working for the higher good, it is our responsibility to ensure that our thoughts and actions are always love-based, and that we are contributing and serving as much as we possibly can – that way, maybe the positive can start to outweigh the negative.

We do not need to be dragged down to the level of rottenness displayed by the likes of Mary Bane and her supporters. We do not need to let their clearly joyless and destructive lives affect our own. If, instead of retaliating in anger to such stories, we make it our business to ensure that we do at least one hugely positive act of service, then their negative act is cancelled out.

For my part, I have decided to use this event to catapult me into action. For a while now, I have had the sense that I was guided to do my Reiki attunements in order to heal animals, but never actually acted on it. Well, now I am setting the wheels in motion to offer hands-on healing to animals and pets on the island, and distance healing to those further afield. You see, Mary Bale, you treat one cat with cruelty, and I´ll heal hundreds more! Game, set and match Love & Light!

And I´m convinced that the more of us doing this - focusing on positivity - the more powerful it will become. Love is the highest energy there is and the more we concentrate our energies on that, the bigger the difference we can make.

Anyone with me??

:)