can’t unsee what I’ve seen. A cow’s head crushed with a gas cylinder. A dog tied to a moving vehicle and dragged until its cries fade into silence. Boiling water poured over a cat as laughter fills the background. A leopard beaten to death by a mob. None of these images leave me. They live behind my eyelids, replaying every time I try to sleep.
I don’t look for them. The algorithm finds me — because it has decided I love animals. And it’s right. But it’s also cruel. Loving animals in this world means being shown their pain again and again. It’s a punishment for empathy. The very thing that makes us human becomes the source of our deepest anguish.
People say, “Don’t watch those videos.” But ignorance isn’t a cure. Because somewhere, right now, a creature is being tortured for no reason other than human apathy — or worse, amusement. We share this planet with them, yet we act like landlords who believe in eviction by extinction.
And this is what breaks me: the lack of outrage. The absence of mass grief. We weep for war victims, for political tragedies, for celebrity deaths. But when an animal screams, it echoes into a void. There are no protests, no vigils, no breaking news alerts. Only a few of us stay awake at night, clutching our hearts, wondering how humanity can be this numb.
I know — the world is cruel in many ways. There are bombs and gas chambers, rape and murder, children dying of hunger, queer people shamed and driven to suicide. Humanity has fallen before; it will fall again. But how far do we fall before we admit that we’re broken? That our capacity for destruction has outgrown our will for compassion?
It’s not just about animals. It’s about us. What we manifest when we refuse to care. What we become when we scroll past cruelty as if it’s another meme, another clip for engagement. We cannot expect a peaceful world when we thrive on violence — even the kind we consume in silence.
I don’t have answers. Only sleepless nights. And this constant question: When will we rise?
When will we take responsibility for the world we’ve built — for the pain we inflict, directly or by indifference? When will empathy stop being an inconvenience, and start being our instinct again?
Because if we don’t learn to protect the voiceless, we will lose our own voice one day. And the silence that follows will be the sound of everything beautiful dying.
Hearts Still Care 
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