Professor H sat by the campfire and said something like: -A place is neither beautiful or ugly before man walks into the landscape. It just is.
He didn´t continue speaking about it much, but what he meant was (as i would interpret it) that the human defines the value of things that have no value before that moment. More precisely, there is no such thing as value without a human beeing creating it.
Professor H said this a number of years ago, and I hadn´t thought about it for a long time until a couple of loud hunters made the walls shake last evening. One of the guys started the discussion by asking if the other would go sealhunting with him sometime soon. The invited one wasn´t too eager, as he felt that the way a seal resembled a dog made him feel bad. -I could never shoot a dog, he said. -Cats, ok, but not dogs. I asked him what it was that made it easier to shoot a cat. He answered: -The cats are wily (sv: lömsk, suomi: katala), while dogs are loyal like true friends. If you hit a cat real hard you´ll see that it will run away and won´t come back. If you do the same to a dog, it will forgive you and stay by your side. I asked him: -What does this example tell about you? Also, doesn´t the animal show wisdom by staying as far away from you as possible?
He was quick in replying: -Well, I wouldn´t hit an animal, but this is just how it works.
There´s a variety of ways that we form our relationship to animals every day. We have them as pets, tools, toys, stories, in our environment, in commercials and on the stuff we buy, in and on our clothes, on the sofa and in our beds, in jewellery and accesories, in cosmetics and chemicals, on the front page of the tabloids, in glue and candy etc. Every single day we take part in the enormous machinery that has tamed and reshaped rules of nature, whether we want it or not. The moral in us humans makes us emotionally react on utilisation or behaviour that doesn´t fit the conception we´ve built up. The values we´ve given to the different creatures we share this planet with are like day and night in relation to each other. It´s just agreement. In China they eat dogs, here we dress them in Burberry-coats. Cows can be holy or mad, depending on what continent they grow on. On this island they print t-shirts with ”Fuck the union” when they get orders to stop killing eider-ducks, while I´ve been told that the farmers on a distant shore in the arctic cry as if they´ve lost a child when they find a dead individual of this same species. Relativity, culture. The conception of us colours all we have around us.
