Life is unfair

I’m not a religious man, and I try not to be judgemental of those who are; in many ways, I’m in awe of their certainty.

I’m the sort of person who, when push comes to shove, is not absolutely sure whether his favourite movie is Jaws or The Big Lebowski. To be absolutely confident about the metaphysical entity that created the universe – that’s a level of conviction I’m unlikely to ever achieve.

Despite this, I seem to have an innate, subconscious sense of fairness. Life, my brain tells me, should be fair. Good things should happen to good people, and bad things should happen to bad people. Life can be strange and confusing, but above it, it shouldn’t be unfair. It shouldn’t be cruel.

Prevention is impossible

I have been a vet for 18 years now, and you would think, if I had learned just one thing from nearly two decades on the front line, it would be that nothing – absolutely nothing – exists preventing life being unfair. Life can be, and frequently is, a bloody rotten bastard.

In the past few weeks, as a clinical pathologist, I have seen:

• an extremely aggressive mast cell tumour recur not only at the surgical site, but in the spleen and liver of a six-year-old boxer
• a malignant osteosarcoma present in both hindlimbs of a seven-year-old greyhound
• end stage renal failure in a three-year-old cat
• histiocytic sarcoma in multiple skin nodules, the lymph nodes, spleen and liver of a four-year-old Burmese mountain dog

Every time I send one of these reports out, I think of the vet receiving the results at the other end, and of the telephone call that will have to be made, of the eventual result of the diagnosis – but most of all, I think of just how bloody buggeringly unfair it all is. What did these poor animals do to deserve their fate?

Without reason

I remember, one evening surgery, a young woman rushed in hysterically with her 18-month-old Labrador retriever that wasn’t breathing. Despite all our attempts, we couldn’t resuscitate it.

After I stood in the consult room telling the distressed woman her companion was dead, she told me what had happened – the young dog had managed to work its way into one of the kitchen cupboards, pull out a box of cereal, proceed to snaffle its way through the munchy goodness until its head was trapped inside the plastic wrapper and suffocate. The woman had been upstairs with her child, and had come down to find her dog already dead. Just like that.

I remember thinking, as I consoled the woman on her loss, what sort of a stupid bloody reason was that to die? How is that a crime punishable by death, just wanting to stuff your face, like every other Labrador retriever in the history of Labrador retrievers? I thought of the dog, excited, tail wagging, rapidly glurping its way towards the end of its existence, and I couldn’t find it funny.

Even now, though, the thought is unbearable – it’s so bloody unfair! What had the dog done to deserve it?

No outside concept

The answer, of course, is nothing. Life doesn’t give two short stuffs whether you deserve anything. We’re just delicate biological machines that go wrong and wear out, and if you mess with the mechanisms too much then we break. There’s no fair or unfair about it – it’s just how we work.

And yet… and yet… there’s a part of me, every time – even after all this time, and after all the evidence to the contrary – that is deeply offended when life is blatantly, egregiously unfair. I feel as though there should be justice in the world.

Maybe it’s evolutionary – maybe the kind of mind that easily accepts the essential fundamental unfairness of life is not one well suited to live in a society? Or possibly I’m just naive. As the wonderfully deadpan Death explains in the late, lamented Terry Pratchett’s Discworld books: THERE’S NO JUSTICE. THERE’S JUST US.

Life is unfair. Outside of our own heads, the concept of “fair” is as meaningless as the colour of God’s holy trousers. But the contents of our heads shape the world around us, and I, for one, am glad of that irrational outraged voice that shouts with anger when bad things happen to undeserving creatures. Maybe, without it, the world would be in an even bigger mess than it is right now.