Leave the dragons alone

So here’s a couple of random facts about me. Where my deeply mourned and well-beloved husband was someone whose sympathies veered towards humans of any shape or kind, when it comes to me and to situations where animals enter the situational mix, my sympathies are instantly with the animals. Humans have that thing called free will and although there are certainly situations where they suffer under abuse (physical or psychological) that is not their own doing, they are still humans, and there are still, in whatever small ways, choices involved. With animals… we “higher life forms” think we OWN THEIR SOULS. They are here for us to do whatever we wish with them, whether that’s exploiting them for our own needs of diet or comfort, or driving them straight into the arms of extinction if that seems to be expedient or convenient or useful to some subsection of so-called “humanity”. Things like trophy hunting come to mind and my instant reaction to that is that if those people want their trophies they should be made to fight their trophy animals in more sporting ways. If you can wrestle a goddamn lion to the ground with your own two hands and break his neck, he’s yours. Not otherwise. No hunting rifles. No stalking. No murder so that you can flay that animal  in order to have a lion skin rug on your floor. When I watched “Gorillas in the Mist”, I was wholly and completely on Dian Fossey’s side and if she chose to hang with her own hand the poachers who had murdered her own gorilla friend and companion in order to cut off his massive hands to sell as ashtrays to idiot tourists I was  ready to go and help her do it, in a white hot rage.

Any abuse of any animal makes me see red; I am usually a fairly quiet, calm, gentle, almost self-effacing, creature… except when an animal is involved. I actually saw a guy trying to tie an emaciated horse (one that had given up, his head bowed down in surrender, all his ribs showing) to a scrawny tree beside a road I was driving on, with clear intentions of dumping it there to die – this quiet infinitely vulnerable single white female screeched to a halt, erupted from the car, flew over to the miscreant with the horse, and SCREAMED AT THEM telling them that I would sic the authorities on them RIGHT NOW because of what they were doing. Nobody else was there to speak for the horse, so I did. I have relatively little income as income goes but every year I support the local animal shelter with what I have. I adopted a half-blind ex-street-feral cat from there and gave him the best life I knew how. Animals matter to me. Deeply and viscerally. And to anyone out there who insists that “animals don’t have souls” and are therefore not going to “be in Heaven” when the sanctimonious humans get there, all I have to say is, then I want to go where the animals are going. I’ll leave my own kind to their own devices and I’ll go where the cats and the dogs and the horses and the lions and the tigers and the bears oh my have gone, and take my chances with them. Anyone who says a dog that has given his whole heart to you and tells you so with his eyes every day, that the cat who knows when you are hurting and chooses to curl up next to you and purr you better, has no soul, well, that person is the one who is soulless. Sorry. But they are.

All this by way of a slight preamble about animals which are imaginary.

I recently watched Episode 7 of Season 3 of HBO’s “House of the Dragon” series… which included an extended scene of four dragons falling on one another, red in tooth and claw. If you know anything about George R R Martin’s original Ice And Fire series and the TV shows it spawned, you will know that they are chock full of human cruelty to humans, of blood and guts and death and disaster and rape and torture and vicious battles and even more vicious betrayals. Humans being humans, as it were, and turning and tearing at one another as humans always have, and always will, because we are a vicious species, when it comes to that. Again, as I said above, humans are gifted with CHOICE so anything any human does to another human whose status or physical stature/abilities are lower than their own is something that is a chosen thing to do, a decision made, a human intention of causing harm BECAUSE THEY CAN. I watched multiple seasons of “Game of Thrones” where human beings were despatched in various creative ways. I then watched “House of the Dragon”, when that came along. Humans turning on humans, ho hum. Sometimes I was deeply revolted, sometimes I just turned away with a grimace, but I kind of kept watching. In Ep 7 of the third season of HOTD… dragons turned on each other, and I WEPT. There is only death and destruction waiting for those dragons in episodes (and the final season) to come… and I honestly don’t know if I have it in me to watch them all being annihilated on screen in front of my eyes. If I had been there, I would have been standing with nothing but a pitchfork in my hands if that was all I could get, there in front of the dragons, snarling against my own kind, defending the dragons (who need no such defense from me…) and screaming “over my dead body” (which would probably have been handed to me in short order… but you know what I mean.) The pain and damage inflicted on those dragons in that one Episode 7 scene hurt me to watch, more than all the pain and damage inflicted on generations of humans in the entire collected opus of the matter under consideration. Humans can go away and slaughter each other all they want, but leave the dragons alone. LEAVE THE DRAGONS ALONE. Despite the apparent mismatch in size and power and lethality it was the humans who were the dragons’ doom in the end, not the other way around. Leave them alone. They are beautiful, and noble, and wild, and they do not belong to us – not to use, not to torture, not to chain, not to demand obedience from, and they did not deserve their end because humans in the end realised that they could not control them, and managed to ensure their extinction. And the world is the poorer without dragons in it, I say. A little bit of magic disappears when they do. Humans KILL magic. They crave it, but then they turn on it and stab it with shivs and then they tell lies about the shattered remains. Think about the HOTD situation – here they are, the dragons some of whom are generational and OLD and have carried several bonded riders in their lifetimes simply because their humans live shorter spans than they do. In other words, left alone they could live for centuries. It takes HUMAN BEINGS to destroy them.

I don’t know I I am going to be able to watch the episode in which dragons die because of human folly. I don’t know how I I am going to stop myself from driving the car that is my life to a screeching halt and flying out to scream at the people who are murdering magic, just like I did with that long-ago guy and his old nag who did not deserve to be abandoned to just DIE alone.

Human beings have a lot to answer for. A LOT.