You don't have to be an animal lover and fan to respect them and treat them with dignity.

In this era I have seen how the lives of animals are now respected, and also a more extreme side that humanizes them (they buy them shoes, clothes, cars and even human events like birthday parties and weddings).

But I also continue to see how they are despised and mistreated in different ways and to varying degrees. That is regrettable.

I saw a case that filled me with outrage, anger, and secondhand shame. A dog survived both earthquakes last month, was pulled from the rubble, only to die this week at the hands of some imbecile who, for some inconceivable reason, decided to brutally beat it with a stick studded with nails. If that isn't the definition of a potential psychopath, then I don't know what is.

I can understand the ignorance of not knowing all the care a pet requires, I can understand not knowing what things harm an animal. But hurting them just for pleasure or simply because you believe it's the only way to correct behavior is something that shouldn't be tolerated. Unless, of course, it's in self defense, in a high risk situation.

We live in a society that believes it's okay to harm defenseless living beings, that it's okay to feed them garbage, that they don't care what conditions they live in, that they breed them to exploit them and produce offspring to sell (dogs), that they keep them tied up 24/7 or let them sleep on the roofs of their houses exposed to sun and rain, that they can watch them suffer and not feel even a little empathy. And with this, I don't mean that we should all fill our homes with stray animals or that we should each have a 5-hectare shelter to be empathetic. The least we can do is not normalize animal abuse.

This week, a woman who runs a shelter was asking for help for a dog and her puppies they found living in a horrendous, garbage filled place. She wasn't asking for money; all she needed were temporary homes for the puppies for 20 days. She would cover the cost of transportation, food, and medical care. She couldn't take them to the shelter right away because she already has other animals there, and these puppies would most likely have some kind of illness. Until they were 100% healthy, she couldn't put them with the others (that's how she explained it). These dogs weren't purebred, and honestly, no one had come forward to help. So, she conducted an experiment in which she altered the dogs' photo using AI, replacing them with Huskies. The result was this: In 20 minutes, she received hundreds of messages from people in every state "offering help" for the dogs, and they weren't just offering temporary homes but also permanent adoptions. The hypocrisy is enormous, and "help" is only given to aesthetically pleasing or purebred animals.