[For those who don’t know, Cenobites are the sadomasochistic torturers in the Hellraiser movies]

Most animals, absent contact with humans, would never know the feeling of having their ears deep cleaned or their bellies full all day every day. They’d never feel scritches and pets once they grow into adults. They’d never have a big fat human belly to sleep on in complete contentment and security, inside a warm and secure house, a house filled with soft furnishings they’d never otherwise feel. They don’t even know that many sensations and psychological states are possible until we give them to them.

Ever seen videos of a cow playing with a yoga ball? They have the capacity for joy and play that they almost never get to express or feel. But we can do that for them if we want. Yet they seem to not know such things without kind humans showing them.

We suck when it comes to mistreating animals, of course. But those of us who love the hairy bastards must be like gods to them. My wee dog would surely never in his entire life know the pleasure of having that part of his back where his tail joins with his spine scratched if not for being around me, because he has no way to reach it himself, and dogs don’t scratch each other. Cats being played like bongos would never get that experience anywhere else.

Well-treated pets must talk about us like “they’re explorers in the further regions of experience; angels to some, even bigger angels to others”.

All of this is true for wild animals especially, although I’d never advocate interfering with their lives in that way. But if you gained the trust of a bear and got to the point where you could scratch its back and maybe even relieve pain from a wound or something, it’d be like an entirely new lobe of its brain was born and activated. It would wander off thinking “what the fuck just happened??” in a good way. The fact that it’s a bad idea to socialise large wild animals actually makes me a bit sad, because they’ll never really experience any of the things our pets and domesticated animals will experience, and will go their entire lives without even knowing that their minds and bodies can reach such plateaus. They have all of this neural wiring that just never gets lit up.

It gives us a lot of power that can do a lot of good at no cost to ourselves (in fact, it benefits us as much as it does the animal in question). Pretty nice state of affairs, really. I believe it was Nietzsche who said “scritch the pet, and the pet scritches you”.