The Gifts of Emotion and Cruelty

"Emotions are a gift from our animal ancestors. Cruelty is a gift humanity has given itself."

— Hannibal Lecter, Hannibal s1e6 

This quoted is explained over dinner to an off-duty FBI official Jack Crawford and his wife Bella, to her passive aggressive protests against the dishes prepared by a psychiatric consultant and expert cook Hannibal Lecter for the matter of their inclusion of meat in the dishes he was serving them that evening, insinuating that the methods of obtaining such was more barbarous in acquirement than need be for sustenance to relish. It's an interesting way of phrasing the matter seeing it is an undeniable observation that humans are sometimes better, more often worse than those that walk on all-fours, who, because of his “divine spiritual and intellectual development,” has become the most vicious animal of all, though simultaneously not the only animal observed to take what can be characterised as delight in sadistic enactments with other creatures. Dolphins do such with the blowfish, playing and puffing them up then puncturing the sea animal to inhale the potent chemical produced in their inflation, to the effect of what would seem a sort of narcotic; cats toy with their prey, both so as to tire it out as well as in that the performance delivers pleasure chemicals even beyond the simple idea of hunting— it's fun. 

Where this label of cruelty on other animals is dubious is that it's a projected prescription of human attributes onto other species and assuming they're of the same intent; even if the chemical rewards and actions are likenable. It's ascribing a rhyme and reason, for entities we have no way of fully knowing the thoughts (or lack thereof) behind the actions beyond biological impulses. 

For better, worse or whatever the vantage point may be here on these gifts, Captain Jack Sparrow said it best in the third instalment of Pirates Of The Caribbean to Davy Jones at the climax of the movie: cruelty is a matter of perspective. Davy Jones does challenge this assertion, though by enacting his own example of the matter unto those watching him stab Will Turner... And to that end then, what is a gift? A present, or the German word for poison? Both at once? Neither?