What brought on the previous article rambling on about the morality of caring for dogs more than fellow human beings, is because of a recent incident concerning the killing and eating of a dog.
Last year's Metro Manila Film Fest included a movie called "Oro". First things first, I didn't watch any of the offerings of the MMFF. I usually don't because they're usually garbage pushed by the big studios to promote their "products", both human and material. I heard the recent line-up was much better since it featured "indie" stuff. Whatever.
Oro had a scene which involved the slaughter and eating of a dog. Apparently, the scene was so graphic, that the Chairperson of the Film Development Council of the Philippines asked a representative of the film production team about it. She was told that it was just a goat and some prosthetics. As it turns out, that was a lie and they really did kill and eat a dog.
Personally, I find lies much more offensive than the death of an animal. Nevertheless, this didn't sit well with animal rights groups. Social media, or the "outrage machine" as I like to call it, raised a big stink, as expected. The whole thing devolved to a he-said, she-said. Some say a pig was used. There was talk that two dogs were killed. I don't have the patience to dig into any more to this story because this story isn't the ultimate point. Besides, you probably already know how the story goes.
The point is this: there was outrage over the killing of a dog. In response to this outrage was outrage that the outraged people were more outraged over the killing of a dog than the outrageous killing of four people, which was a true story (The "Gata 4" Massacre) that the movie was based on. Taking the outrage a step further, and making it more topical, people expressed outrage that people are more outraged over the death of a dog than the thousands allegedly killed in President Duterte's outrageous campaign against drugs, which is outrageous.
I hate social media.
If I may go off on a tangent, social media, I've observed, is just full of people signalling their virtue and trying to one-up one another in appearing more virtuous. The first group of the condescenderati wanted to appear all good and noble in protesting the dog slaughter as animal rights is still kind of chic. They were outdone when a second group protested the misplaced priorities of Philippine society in holding the lives of dogs higher than the supposed hundreds of people being killed every day. Taking it a step even further, and advertising their leftist street cred, some even argued that dog-eating is done because the poor do what they must to survive and its just those privileged bourgeois who whine about it and forbid the oh-so-noble Filipino "tradition" of eating canines. They never mentioned that in the Social Studies books.
I am aware of, and have no problem with, the dog-eating that happens in many parts of the country. However, I wasn't aware that people would go so far as to elevate it to some kind of proud cultural rite. Sometimes people are just hungry, you know?
So back to square one. Was all the outrage about the butchered dog, when our own countrymen are butchered, misplaced? Well the whole thing stands on a flimsy premise: that the people outraged over the dog are the same people who cheer on President Duterte's alleged killing of suspected criminals. It's possible to be outraged by both. They're not mutually exclusive. It's just cheap rhetoric. The outrage over the dog just seems amplified and high-profile while the outrage over the ever-rising pile of human corpses seems muted.
Perhaps the real kicker in all of this is that something was done about the dog but nothing is being done about the killings in the streets. With regards to the movie, people were reprimanded, people were suspended and awards were revoked. As for the humans...? That's the thing that really stings, eh?
Maybe we are really going to the dogs.
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