Beasts!

Leaking bags of dripping animal blood, receptacles crawling with maggots, goat, sheep and lamb stools, drains clogged with bird droppings and feathers, spoiled, ashen meat by-products hosting larvae and vermin, tortured sentient creatures in minuscule enclosures.

There are around 80 of these ghastly paradises in New York City. They produce wildlife carnage . Sometimes they're called "wet markets.”

Agonized creatures of numerous species are throttled in sight of the consumer for their delectation because they feel the flesh tastes better at the point of death and reminds them of their bonds of home. Sometimes the beasts are sold live and in ritually wasted to fulfill some sanctification delusion. 

People repelled by this should not be labelled culturally insensitive, religiously intolerant or anti-immigrant.

People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) believe that animals have natural and divine right to co-inhabit our planet un-brutalized. Not only common pets, but even snakes and fish have consciousness and even sentiments, even when we are disabled from channeling them.

Many parents could learn a lot about child-rearing from observing pigs and tilapia, that pan-fried favorite.

Many people don't bother, dare or are hypocrites, low on imagination. They will eat butchered animals as long as they have been prepackaged for the shopping cart in unrecognizable form. 

The great majority of meat is processed for popular consumption without any thought of scriptural mandate. Critics who advocate for the abolition of slaughtering techniques favored by ethnic or religious traditions, should parse their convictions respectfully and not call for the abrogation of non-hurtful cultural traditions. 

But no matter for how long ancient practices of animal slaughter have been deemed sacredly ordained, humanitarian standards must prevail. Even the modern standard is not enlightened, and new laws should be codified.

There are medical concerns also. 

The bird flu virus, which is contractible by humans, has been found in several New York City wet markets, where more than 1 million live birds are sold every month to thousands of customers. These birds from different farms are commingled in extremely tight and stressful quarters that invite pathogens which multiply and spread.

The executive director of New Yorkers for Clean, Livable and Safe Streets, Edita Birnkrant, documented sightings of "body parts...open wounds because the birds are cannibalizing each other.”

But there are activists who downplay the shame and apocryphal sadism. One was quoted as saying, "This isn't about food safety. This is about food justice.” Such defense is beyond the ken of turtles still alive as their shells are being cut off. A marketer of carcasses clarified, "People fear what they don't know.” A CUNY professor opined, "Banning these markets would eliminate some of the cultural diversity of our food system…. It potentially sanitizes the city in a bad way.” 

Merciless exploitation of animals is not restricted to blood sports such as organized combat between domesticated roosters for lip-smacking onlookers (a violation that the police don't enforce). The animal "harvesting' industry is a cruel enterprise not limited to wet markets. Atrocities are mainstream from our storied stockyards to our state-of-the art abattoirs.

Gratuitous slayings of animals is wrong, no matter the who, where, when, what and why.

People who don't rule out the transmigration of souls from humans to animals in a hypothetical next life have an advantage, because their reverence for all life is powered by investment and jump-started by self-interest. It sensitizes them to the plights and pleas of "all creatures, great and small.”

For sure, if animal throat-slitters felt that after their send-off from the present and after their awakening in the next life, the same treatment might be  in store for them, it might give them pause. Trepidation over fear of karma may have a civilizing effect.

Indifference to animals' survival has become an instrument of national policy.

By presidential executive order, the Oval Office will harm animals on a vastly larger scale than all the world's wet markets. To kowtow to the fossil-fuel industrialists and the "drill, baby drill" mania, a fake "energy emergency" has been conjured as a pretext for neutralizing the Endangered Species Act, which has saved from extinction many species that had evolved over millions of years. 

Now unfathomably complex and wondrous creatures, from warblers to whales, will be eternally withdrawn from human gaze. Even Central Park Horse Carriage Whisperers, whips resting comfortably at their sides, are attuned.

All creatures, according to their own metaphysical contract with their creator, are doing the creator's work. If they were federal employees,  DOGE and the fracking brigades would classify them as "non-essential.”

Witch hunt or manhunt, what's the difference? Never mind shutting down the government — they'd shut down creation, if it would bring down gas prices at the pump a few pennies between blood moons.

The Avenue of Disillusionment is the widest of thoroughfares and no segue is needed to change the lane of focus. And so let me tell you where I dropped my pants.

I took a bundle of around one hundred items of my used menswear, all washed or dry-cleaned and in perfect condition, to a "drop-off" bin in the parking lot of a shopping center, because I was in random-act-of-kindness mode and wanted to donate to the needy. On the bin was a notice in language that seemed crafted by lawyers to avoid liability, to the effect that the renters of the bin had agreed to donate a percentage of the value of the bin's contents to a medical research charity.

At first, I felt I was doing the right thing helping people less fortunate than myself. Then I realized I may have been duped and scammed. I realized this after I had already dumped my irretrievable donation. 

There was no way to determine what was in the bin, so its total value couldn't be assessed, and the disposition of its contents couldn't be tracked. Neither was a specific mandated percentage of total value mentioned in the posted notice, so a fraction of 1 percent would probably have sufficed to avoid legal jeopardy. 

For all I knew, they might have been consigned to one of those funky "vintage boutiques" where an "antique" shirt that couldn't fetch 50 cents at a suburban garage sale, would be lapped up for $75 in trust-fund kid in Tribeca, anxious to look fashionably indigent.

Most people in the beneficence business are above-board and intermittently even saintly, but there is also a proliferation of poverty entrepreneurs and charity pimps.

But as long as there is that one total stranger who offers to jump start our car battery after it died suddenly while you were blocking a double driveway with irate homeowners approaching and won't accept anything but a "thank you,” the world may be salvageable for the human race or human species, or whatever the hell our taxonomy is.