One of the animals we rescued was euthanised recently. We adopted her after her ‘owner’ decided it was too expensive to treat her arthritic condition — a condition directly resulting from the inappropriate enclosure she was kept in for may years — and requested she be euthanised (i.e discarded). The final year of her life was much more enriching (as many photo’s attest), succumbing, in the end to, metastatic nodules in her lungs and liver and lots of thoracic fluid, leading to respiratory distress. Whislt enriching, her passing has invoked past thoughts on whether we really do enough for the animals whose lives we dictate and the moral dilemma those of us who try to help regularly face.

Quite often the argument is made that as people in western society are far removed from certain aspects of society they are able to disassociate themselves, often unconsciously. This is visible in the lack of awareness of the working conditions of people who make many of the clothes those in the west wear — including the exploitation of children in sweatshops. Perhaps the most clear manifestation of this can be seen in the ability, for lack of a more appropriate term, of people to disassociate, for example, the chicken they purchase in the supermarket from the conditions in which the chicken was reared, before finally being slaughtered. There are psychological reasons for this, and this is often a focus of advertising campaigns (i.e.