Communion

by Whitley Strieber

If they were real visitors, though, I wanted to know the ethics behind their assertion of their “right.” Of course, we ourselves barely question our rights over the other species on earth. How odd it was to find oneself suddenly under the very power that one so easily assumes over the animals. I thought of some lowing cows, their bells tinkling on a long-ago Texas evening, or of my cat asleep on my lap back in the city, trusting its little self utterly to an affection that to me was casual, but to Sadie was the center of the universe. I remembered when my father took me to a slaughterhouse in Fort Worth, and I heard the rumble of panic and saw the bucking backs of the steers and the creamy whites of their eyes. I smelled the slick of manure and urine and blood, and heard the steady crunching of the blows and the blare of the saws. And at a research institute in San Antonio I saw monkey cages with rows of doctored capuchins, shaved, their pink heads sewn or laid delicately open, and the trembling brain probes and the gabble of noise when the vocalization center of one of them was stimulated for the information of graduate students. What did the monkey with the needle in its brain think of its observers? Were they gods to whom it submitted itself with a noble passivity because it could do nothing else? I saw monkey carcasses in the dumpster, too.