MORE and more, because of the numbers reached and the speed of access, social media is used to ask for help. It can be a missing person and one finds oneself searching the photo and particularly the eyes, for clues as to why an ordinary, often shy-looking girl or boy should walk out of their house, catch a bus and a train and simply disappear.
Thankfully, in the majority of cases there’s usually a follow up tweet or Facebook message saying they’ve been found safe and well and are now back home.
In the odd case though, they’ll never go home again and the photo, much enlarged now, features on television and in newspapers and all hope is forever lost.
Theirs are the faces that imprint on us…..for a time. Unless the details of their demise are grotesque or particularly poignant, they do disappear from our minds until the next one comes along.
We never, thank God, have graphic images or videos of what they suffered on a link shuttling and being re-tweeted through the day. Yet.
For the moving picture is hard to dislodge when fixed in memory. Who can forget the little hand of Jamie Bulger, held by the boys as they walked him away to torment, torture and kill him?
It has been shown so often that we will forever see the shopping mail and trusting walk when many of our own personal memories have vanished.
There is though, I’m slowly coming to believe, an increasing hunger to witness scenes of cruelty, violence and carnage that is more and more being catered for.
In certain newspapers read online, videos switch on automatically during a story and the plane crash plays over and over in a corner of the screen; the girl being dragged down an alley before being beaten and raped repeats the action over and over again; the children fleeing from the bombed ruins over their companions’ bloodied bodies are somehow acceptable to show if a warning of violent images is given seconds before the tape plays.
Of course many people lead lives where none of this impinges, for their news comes from a hand held newspaper or at a certain television time.
They don’t flip through the Internet and they are most certainly in ignorance of the horrors and sadistic ‘pleasures’ awaiting those who tinker with the deep net.
I now find I blank out and click off the videos that come at me, block those I can but now I’m bombarded with different images which makes me question further what lurks in the putrid pools of humanity.
I have just seen on my twitter a video, which came on without clicking and froze me such that it played out. A huge bearded man was sitting on a baby donkey probably no more than three months old.
He was yanking its ears to move it forward and round. Dismounting he beat it repeatedly around the head, then grasping its legs flung it to ground, pounding it.
The shocked little animal, its sweet face a nursery toy, made no attempt to run. The scene, played out somewhere in the Middle East, mercifully cut at that point.
Throughout it all a young boy stood to one side and seemed to be taking instruction from the man. He showed no emotion either way.
I came on here intending to write about the annual abandonment of dogs in France and the streak of animal cruelty and abuse that is prevalent here.
One hundred thousand cats and dogs are blithely discarded when the annual holidays arrive. Despite massive poster and television campaigns and the threat of hefty fines, the practice continues and in fact each year the figures rise.
The lucky ones are handed into the SPAs, refuge centres, or left nearby to be found.
The unlucky ones are dropped on the road miles from home; shut in a barn with a bit of food and water; taken to the forest and lashed to a tree.
A recent case was of a 13-year-old Yorkshire Terrier left in a flat when her owners tottered off to the seaside. She didn’t survive.
So huge has the drop off been this summer, that many SPAs have had to close their doors to new orphans. Many will end up euthanised if homes cannot be found for them.
The others will starve on the roads or in the forests.
But we have no right any more to point the finger. Again my twitter feed is filled with pleas for homes for dogs and cats, found or abandoned in dreadful circumstances.
These are animals from a nation famed and even ridiculed for its sentimental attachment to its pets.
Yet look at the UK papers again – added to the plane crash videos, the multi-car pile-ups, the street punch-ups, there are now the vet scenes of cats with mouths glued, dogs tied and left to starve, horses their ribs showing yet still ridden to exhaustion.
Tale after tale of sub-humans proving some perverted right of passage in chopping the paws off a kitten or cross bowing a swan.
I despair at what we’ve all become. This sick abuse crosses now all nations. That baby donkey will haunt my dreams.
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