Humanitarian inclusion

On my residential community's website the other day, someone asked whether anyone else had heard early-morning gunshots nearby. Someone else wondered whether local people were taking shots at the coyotes, which she had several times seen early in the morning as she headed out to work.
    A gun enthusiast in our community commented approvingly:

There is no closed season for coyotes, so as long as it is daylight, then you can hunt them. This area is also outside the city limits, so there are no limitations on discharging firearms. I am a hunter/shooter and I say more power to these folks if they are hunting coyotes. Coyote packs are a danger to small pets in the neighborhood and perhaps even to calves and small livestock in the pastures down the road.

    While predators of course need to be dealt with for such reasons as he gives (I do not condemn the killing of a home-invader, for example, if that's the only way to protect oneself or one's family), I asked this hunter/shooter to suggest humane ways to reduce the local coyote population. I pointed out that shooting them might not result in a clean kill, but only wound the animals and result in their prolonged suffering. I told him that I was opposed to hunting on philosophical grounds (and I cited my statement on sentients rights).
    This morning, I was thinking about the grounds of my opposition, but in doing so I misremembered characterizing the grounds as humanitarian rather than "philosophical." Humanitarian, of course, seems perfectly congruent with my asking the hunter about humane ways to deal with the coyotes.
    But opposition on humanitarian grounds doesn't seem quite right. Humanitarian is usually used in the context of the mistreatment of humans (human animals), even if humane has a wider berth—the humane treatment of animals is a common phrase, focusing on the idea that compassionate human beings would not treat animals badly.
    It didn't take me long to identify a nearly perfect synonym for humanitarian to include the mistreatment of other animals as well as human ones: sentientarian, derived easily from my statement of sentients rights.

I say nearly perfect. In fact, plants, too, are sentients, as my wife correctly observed (in attempting to demolish the moral foundation of my opposition to eating animals, but not to eating plants). "Plants can react to their environment. That's practically the definition of life."
    Which brings me back to a sentence from Wikipedia's entry on sentience, which I omitted in my statement on sentients rights:

For Eastern philosophy, sentience is a metaphysical quality of all things [emphasis mine] that requires respect and care.

(I myself avoid phrases like "metaphysical quality," however much they impressed me when I was in school.)
    Respect for life should of course take in respect for plants, but also for our environment, for our planet—the laboratory of our natural creation and evolution fueled by solar energy.

Rainer Maria Rilke
(1875-1926)

    And Rainer Maria Rilke (and others of a mystical bent, myself included) would count manufactured things as well. From the eighth of his Duino Elegies:

...Are we here, perhaps, for saying: house,
bridge, fountain, gate, jug, fruit-tree, window—
at most: column, tower......but for saying, realise,
oh, for a saying such as the things themselves would never
have profoundly said. Is not the secret intent
of this discreet Earth to draw lovers on,
so that each and every thing is delight within their feeling?

I didn't see it coming, that I would end up quoting Rilke this morning. But it is most agreeable to be reminded of the many transfixed hours I have spent reading his Duino Elegies, his Sonnets to Orpheus, and many others of his poems....

We cannot know his legendary head
with eyes like ripening fruit. And yet his torso
is still suffused with brilliance from inside,
like a lamp, in which his gaze, now turned to low,

gleams in all its power. Otherwise
the curved breast could not dazzle you so, nor could
a smile run through the placid hips and thighs
to that dark center where procreation flared.

Otherwise this stone would seem defaced
beneath the translucent cascade of the shoulders
and would not glisten like a wild beast's fur:

would not, from all the borders of itself,
burst like a star: for here there is no place
that does not see you. You must change your life.
                [– Archaic Torso of Apollo, Stephen Mitchell's translation]