07/29/24 For a foreigner to arrive in Brazil and comment "Hopefully people will learn from our example on how to treat other people and animals with the respect they deserve." will always come across as an off-the-cuff cultural criticism, whatever your intentions are. This is an area where context may matter, but intention hardly matters at all: what the people you're speaking to hear is everything. But there's a much more important point involved here than interpersonal relations with Brazilians, significant as I think that should be, particularly while in their own country.
I agree with you that every kind act has an intrinsic value regardless of downstream effects, and I don't discourage them. But as @Droplover has written elsewhere (https://www.expat.com/forum/viewtopic.p … 76#5948574), it's complicated. This is a huge, complex country and the Law of Unintended Consequences works overtime here, creating many downstream effects that can be as unwanted as they are unexpected. Here's a case in point.
I live in Centro, Manaus, in Amazonas. When I moved here, the neighborhood was infested with feral cats. I know of at least two elderly "cat ladies" (there were probably more) who put food out daily for the cats, all of them. A kind act, and I understood it as such. I soon noticed two additional things, though. First, there were virtually no songbirds: in the metropolis of the greatest rainforest on earth, we were living in a little avian desert, a place without birdsong. The second thing was the the rats and the cats lived in a state of mutually respectful détante. The rats are big, mean, and numerous; the hawks would hunt them occasionally, but not the cats: birds are a lot easier.
Then, the pandemic hit, and the ladies who fed the cats had to stay in their houses. With their food supply disrupted, the feral cats naturally dispersed to seek food elsewhere, and a surprising thing happened: the songbirds re-colonized Centro -- fast. At least it began with songbirds, but other birds followed, climaxing in the return of the first breeding (I hope!) population of Scarlet Macaws to settle in Centro in living memory, as well as more Great Egrets, Large-mouthed Terns, and Green Ibises. I hope that at least some of them have established viable beachheads for when the cats inevitably return.
Were the cat ladies in the wrong? Not really: I believe every act of kindness really DOES have an intrinsic value, and they were just being kind. But kind acts can't only be judged in isolation. Life is clearly MUCH better for the birds with the cats gone, and I believe that the return of the birds has improved the quality of life for the people, too. The rat situation doesn't seem to have changed, one way or another. It's complicated.
