Despre animale (desi sunt in Romania, vorbesc la propriu)

"The greatness of a nation and its moral progress can be judged by the way its animals are treated."
- Mahatma Gandhi

Easy for him to say, he was a vegetarian. Just a joke, that’s not what I want to talk about.
Having spent most of the summer time on the beach in Mamaia, combined with the fact that lately I think more and more about my physical state and health, I decided to make a routine about running on the beach every day. Since I haven’t done this before, I thought I would be better motivated if I convinced a couple of friends to do together. Generally I am a lazy person (who isn’t?), so I need guilt, duty, or some other motivation to commit to something like running.

So, I did convince my sister in law, and here we are the first evening. It’s about 5:00 o’clock and we start from Rasarit de Soare towards the Casino, in Mamaia. The weather is wonderful for running, a bit windy, with dramatic sky, covered with intriguing beautiful-dangerous-before-the-storm clouds. The beach is empty of humans just some lost souls who walk their sorrows, nostalgias, melancholies or whatever else. It’s the end of another summer, so I, myself am a bit drown. So we run for a while, then we walk some, and again we run and again we walk, our plan is to get to Casino and then return. We don’t want to push it, for a first day. At some point a pack of ugly, stray, bad dogs sees us. They have wild, scary eyes and start running like mad towards and after us. At that point I felt it was either us or them. If I had a gun…

So, coming back to the topic, and what Gandhi was saying about how we treat animals, I guess we qualify as a great nation, morally progressed since we choose to let the dogs walk free. But, was it our choice? Or have we been forced into our greatness by Brigitte Bardot?

By choice or not, I adapt and accept the planet is theirs too, so no more running outside! That’s why the treadmill was invented. Let the dogs run free! Don’t forget to feed them.