Lisa Hutcheon makes a valid point. And her point brings to mind a further question: "Is their a purpose to suffering?" For animals, other than human, it seems to me that the answer is, "No." The vast majority of suffering that animals bear is caused by human animals. There is no purpose to that suffering other than to fulfill the whims of the humans that cause it. "I want to wear your coat to keep me warm, to use your skin to protect my feet and keep my pants from falling down in public, to use your flesh to fill my stomach and cause my heart to malfunction and my digestive tract to degenerate, to use the biochemicals of your body to smooth my skin and slow its aging, to educate me about your life by placing you in a prison, to confiscate your habitat because we don't have any more room to contain the results of our overactive genitals and, I want to do this because you do not feel pain the same way that I feel pain, or, if you do, I don't care; I am unable to relate because it would make it necessary to change my comfortable life. And besides, I do not see your suffering. It is hidden in secluded internment camps. I cannot infer the suffering involved in a pork chop because it is neatly wrapped in styrofoam and plastic on a shelf in a sterile supermarket or your fur because it is tightly wrapped around the body of a Calvin Klein model. The examples are endless. Even S. C. Johnson, a Family Company, gets in on the act when I wash my clothes, or my floor, or deodorize my living room, or Swiffer my hallway. According to The Turkey Farmers of British Columbia, it isn't even Christmas without a corpse on my celebratory dining table.

And now for human suffering: and the answer is, "There can be a purpose." One possibility is that I can infer that my pain, for whatever reason, is also felt, in a similar circumstance, by you. Iago makes it plain when he says, "If I am cut do I not bleed!", inferring that he is like all others. There is the possibility that my experiences with pain will open me to the pain in others, all others, and allow me to empathize and act on that empathy. The alternative response is that I will ask the infamous question, "Why me?" As if I am the only one who has felt the horror of pain. It turns me inward: makes me egotistical: blinds me with my self-pity: precludes my sensitivity to all others' pain and the suffering which it may cause.

It is the rampant human ego which justifies the death by torture of rabbits who eat my daisies, of bears who dare to cross MY path, of wolves who eat my caribou, of dogs who bite my sacred hand.

There is no MY. There is only OURS. And OURS includes all those who feel what I feel, who run from the torturers' instruments of pain, whatever those instruments happen to be, who must be hideously restrained that I may place caustic chemicals in their eyes or electrodes in their brain in order to minimize even the possibility of my own vain suffering.

Suffering is suffering is suffering (period)