The leaf dies; the tree remains
The tree dies; the earth remains
The earth dies...
For Douque, who died Oct. 12th, 2006

"I am moved by fancies that are curled
Around these images, and cling:
The notion of some infinitely gentle
Infinitely suffering thing."
T.S. Eliot, Preludes.
For Muggles, who died Aug.14th,2006

Ali Yazman's refutation of what this misguided woman has to say about old, blind dogs is absolutely correct. I would add that the person who read the passage from Tale of Two Cities did not read that passage to human beings, but to a human being. Further, it was to a human being who was presumably suffering in some manner. And, it was to a human being who was feeling suffering in one way or another. This is what sentience signifies.

The point I am pursuing? All beings are sentient. All beings suffer. All beings "feel" that suffering. The alleviation of suffering falls largely on the responsibility of human beings (or that, at the very least, is our assumption).
Although groups of beings do suffer as a whole, the alleviation of even that form of suffering is usually necessary one being at a time.

And here is our problem with beings other than human. We are led to believe that they can only be considered as a group. There are no individual cows or elk or whales or crabs or mice or ants or flies or bears. There are, however, individual dogs and cats. Why? Because we got to know them, insofar as that is possible, and discovered that they were possessed by individuality. Douque was different from Muggles. They behaved differently in the same situations. They reacted differently because they were individuals. They were different one from the other. And I got to see that and know that because I took the time. Presumably, again, I am able to extrapolate the fact that because human beings are different from one another and because dogs are different from one another that all sentient beings are different from one another. They and we are individuals. Two crabs do not necessarily feel the same kind of pain in the same way. If they did, they would be the same crab.

At this point you are perhaps questioning the reason for this exercise. It is this. Because, for whatever reason, we do not take time to know individual cows or crabs or Bengal tigers, we assume that they do not suffer in the same way that we do because we have not experienced them as individual beings. We have a difficulty empathising with beings we do not know as individuals, or who we think are not individuals through our ignorance (the infinitival root of the word 'ignorance' is 'to ignore').

In Sanskrit there is a term which has to be introduced here. That word is "pratityasamutpada". It stands for a concept known as dependant origination. Personally, I translate it as "interdependant co-arising." It means that, if it were possible to make one leaf of a particular tree to cease to exist, the entire tree would cease to exist concomitantly. It is not possible to take one aspect of a given away and retain the given. Quantum physics confirms that this is true of the entire universe and everything "within" it.

Thus, an old, blind dog and a human being are of the same significance. If you aid one, you necessarily aid the other. If you refuse aid to one, you refuse aid to the other. You must attempt to alleviate the suffering of both at the same time. They are not all that different after all. They are comnposed of the same feelings of suffering. They are both sentient.