Watching Ricky Gervais talk on this chat show is quite uncomfortable. His comedy is uncomfortable. It is a mixture of seriousness and comedy. I find it hard to watch sometimes. I don’t find it particularly funny either. I think a lot of people would agree with me. He does it deliberately. He makes jokes about taboo topics.
But he loves animals. He has made this clear on many occasions. For example, he supports a ban on cat declawing in America. And he supports the campaign against culling millions of kangaroos in Australia for their meat and pelts to make leather uppers for football boots and other products.
He really does love animals and it’s clear to me that he prefer animals to people. And in that vein, he mentions two things in this interview one of which is that humans live too long and the second is that he can’t wait for humanity to be wiped out. And he means it. Strong stuff.
And I think he can’t wait for humanity to be wiped out because he sees a lot of foolishness in humankind taken as a whole. I’m sure he would agree that there are many millions of fantastic people. Individuals can be superb in every way although every human has flaws.
But taken as a whole humanity has screwed up in so many ways. Global warming is the glaring example and another is the relationship between humankind and animals both wild and domestic.
You could take almost any of the cat species about which I know a lot and you will find that they are nearly all endangered because of human activity. Some are on the verge of extinction. In essence, humankind no longer has a place on the planet for wild cat species and other wild animals unless there are in zoos.
They are being pushed off the planet because their habitat is being destroyed by human activity in converting their habitat into commercial assets and destroying it to make way for other commercial assets.
And of course, Ricky Gervais hates sport and trophy hunting. He hates the cruelty of sport hunting and of declawing. He probably sees it as a form of collective madness and I’m sure that he dislikes humankind for this animal cruelty.
And he believes that humans live too long, I would guess, because we do live too long. We are kept alive in the last 10 years of our lives when it can be a real struggle in terms of health. Many people just exist until they check out.
And I suspect that he would like humans to live shorter lives because it would, in effect, mean less people on the planet at any one time. This would make room for the wild animals. And it would mean less slaughtering of livestock in abattoirs which are horrible places as we all know.
The point is, that Ricky Gervais cares about animal welfare. I sense he loves animals and if you love animals, you see the dark side of humankind in their failure to be sufficiently concerned about animal welfare.
I don’t think he has talked about the domestication of the cat but if he has, he would probably agree that it is a failure. The general public see domestication as a success because there are hundreds of millions of homes with happy cats keeping their human caregiver company.
But when you analyse it, you recognise that half of the world’s domestic cats are in fact feral. This means that 250 million feral cats exist on the planet and according to PETA nearly all of them are miserable and living short lives. Humankind did that. We put them there. We made them miserable. They should be in homes, happy. We failed. Domestication of the cat is a failure if you look at it that way. And I haven’t mentioned all the cat abuse and general animal cruelty.
The point is this, I think exactly the same as Ricky Gervais. I agree with everything he says.
