Have we ever wondered about why we love wildlife on the Discovery Channel but hate stray cats and dogs?
Even if we are not cat lovers, we do love the Persian cats but ignore local cats.
Even if we are not dog lovers, we admire Golden Retrievers and German Shepherds but shout at or kick at stray dogs on the streets.
We proudly post videos of foreign wildlife or AI made animal videos, speak tenderly about pandas and penguins, and even cry over documentaries or films made on animals.
But a crying mother dog in Pabna, sniffing the ground where her eight puppies were drowned, fails to touch many of us the same way.
That is why the dog innocently sitting by Khan Jahan Ali Mazar dighi, unaware of the presence of crocodiles, does not receive help from people for its protection.
The question is this: Why does the grief of an animal matter only when it is cinematic?
What makes this selective compassion even more troubling is the way we justify it to ourselves.
We say local dogs are “dirty,” local cats are “noisy,” crows are “annoying,” monkeys are “obstacles,” and birds in our balconies are “disturbances.”
Yet the moment we see the same animals framed beautifully in a foreign documentary, filmed in slow motion, narrated with dramatic music, we suddenly discover empathy.
Do we need National Geographic to tell us in 4K that suffering is suffering?
This is where anthropocentrism quietly enters our lives. We see animals only as they serve us -- some as entertainment, some as pets, some as inconveniences, and some disposable. We measure their worth by our tastes, our comfort, our preferences.
How is anthropocentrism negatively influencing us?
We as children grow up with an idea of human-centricity and know very little about our responsibilities to the rest of the planet. We grow up imagining animals as props, considering them cute when they amuse us, and disposable when they inconvenience us.
That is why the horror of Pabna does not emerge suddenly; it is a symptom of an old illness.
That is why people watch and record a crocodile attacking a dog instead of helping it.
That is why a man can scoop out a cat’s eye in the Dhanmondi Lake area and still return home like nothing happened.
That is why the caged lioness Daisy’s escape from Mirpur Zoo is not a national concern but a weekend meme.
That is why the hungry, limping cats and dogs of Katabon sleep on cardboard boxes beside pet shops that sell expensive kittens with glittery bows.
Why does our empathy have a double standard?
Our empathy reflects a double standard because our philosophy is selective just like our ethics. We have inherited a worldview where humans are the protagonists and every other species is a background character -- silent, interchangeable, unnamed.
When we believe everything exists for us, cruelty becomes unnoticed, compassion becomes optional, and ethics become limited to human entities.
And perhaps the saddest part is this -- we were not born cruel. We were taught to forget that animals feel. We were raised to see the non-human world as something that exists to serve us, so we begin to feel entitled to control or discard animals and nature whenever they inconvenience us.
This cruelty and limited compassion should end with us. We need to aspire to a more compassionate, humane society. For this, we must start at the root.
Let our stories, songs, and rhymes remind us that every living being has intrinsic worth though they lack human voices.
Let us raise children who see animals not as disposable props but as fellow creatures, deserving respect, dignity, and love. Let them feel for the non-human world as a friend.
Because the measure of our humanity lies not in how we treat our own, but how we treat those who cannot speak for themselves.
At the end of the day, compassion is not a luxury to reserve for exotic animals but a basic human responsibility. When we fail the creatures closest to us -- the local dogs, the street cats, the birds outside our window -- we fail our own humanity.
Tanjila Habib is a lecturer at the School of General Education, BRAC University. Md Inzamul Haque is a lecturer at the Department of English, Southeast University.
