Yes.

(But why do we always,
reflexively,
ritually,
appropriate animal suffering
for solemn admonitions
about human suffering?

Because it’s not tragic enough
on its own?)

You may reply,
“Yes,
but why do you always
turn it in this direction?”

Maybe because most
keep turning it in the other…

The inevitable downfall of the egregious upstart 
would seem like fair come-uppance 
were it not for all the collateral damage 
to its countless victims, 
without and within. 

But is there a homology
between biological evolution
and cosmology? 
Is the inevitability of the adaptation of nonhuman life
to human depredations 
— until the eventual devolution
or dissolution
of human DNA —
also a sign that
humankind
is destined to keep re-appearing,
elsewhere in the universe,
along with life itself? 
and all our too-big-for-our breeches
antics?

I wish not.

And I also wish to register a vote
for another mutation, may its tribe increase:
Zombies. 
Insentient organisms. 
I hope they (quickly) supplant
the sentients,
till there is no feeling left,
with no return path,
if such a thing is possible…

But there too, the law of large numbers,
combinatorics,
time without end,
seem stacked against such wishes.

Besides,
sentience
(hence suffering),
the only thing that matters in the universe,
is a solipsistic matter;
the speculations of cosmologists
( like those of ecologists,
metempsychoticists
and utilitarians)
— about cyclic universes,
generations,
incarnations,
populations —
are nothing but sterile,
actuarial
numerology.

It’s all just lone sparrows,
all the way down.

Time thus prescribes
rude awakenings all round.