Animal Culture

The first thing about critical thinking (short note)

2012-01-10T10:24:00.000-08:00

If anyone tells you any story that tugs on your heartstrings, stop and think. Your kneejerk reaction is probably wrong. Too many times they ask you to go along with your kneejerk response, the one that they want, and will berate you if you refuse. When they do this it's your choice which window you throw them out of, but if they won't let you stop and think, FORCE them to let you stop and think, and use as much force as it takes. If they get offended they weren't your friend. They were trying to use you.

"Equal Rights," My Donkey

2011-12-23T01:46:00.000-08:00

The ARs don't afford them the same rights as humans. What they actually do is put up a set of ideas, like the "five freedoms" which don't hold up under scrutiny, at all, and falsely claim that those trump human rights. If your right to eat or conduct yourself as a human or your privacy rights conflict with a vague set of wrongheaded "animal rights" then theirs trump yours. It's entirely arbitrary and intentionally confusing. They often mislabel this as "animal welfare." That is part of their drive to co-opt and coerce.

The "Five Freedoms" are listed here: http://www.fawc.org.uk/freedoms.htm The words in bold are the original wording. The words in regular type are their qualifiers. Those qualifiers were a big mistake. When your enemy hands you poison and tells you to eat it, you don't put ketchup on it and try to eat it and smile. You shove it as far down his throat as you can, doing as much damage as you can, and you explain to him that his botulism sandwich is not fit to eat.

Something had to go missing for people to be able to swallow the wording of the Five Freedoms at all, and that was the recognition of positives intentionally phrased in the negative. There is a huge difference between "freedom from hunger and thirst" and "having enough good food and clean water." The qualifiers can be shed at any time and you are left with the original crap, which the Farm Animal Welfare Council was kind enough to set in bold print. An animal that is free from hunger, thirst, exposure to uncomfortable temperatures, emotional discomfort, or injury, is dead. By species it is extinct.

It is not too strong a statement to say that the people who foisted the Five Freedoms on the world belong under the jail for infamous crimes that include vandalism, arson, death threats against human beings, and the killings of innocent animals as part of the vandalism. Let them eat what I care to feed them and they will kiss up to me and beg for Burger King.

The "Five Freedoms" were deliberately, calculatedly, written such that only dead animals could fulfill the criteria. The FAWC would have been better off biting the bullet, or shooting it at the miscreants, than modifying their demands to make them seem palatable. When they give the extremists enough rope to hang US with, our animals are DEAD.

Real animal welfare would use positives. We feed and water the animals according to their needs. We comfort them and give them medical care when they are ailing or injured. We give them happiness when we can. It's a lot easier to do that for an animal than for a human. I'm going to dismiss entirely the "normal behavior" thing because it's bunkum and not worthy of trying to explain to an extremist. None of the credit goes to the extremists for "making" me do anything. They have caused the deaths of thousands, maybe millions of animals, the non-existence of many species individuals that the world is short of, such as tigers, lions, and cheetahs, and they are crazy sick hateful. I don't worry so much that abuse is "disgusting." I am concerned with the fact that I can create a place where animals are happy and healthy and I can give happiness and health.

Molly Ivins on how we hurt ourselves.

2011-12-16T16:35:00.000-08:00

"When you make yourself less free, all that happens is that you are less free...you are not safe."

Molly Ivins video

Learn it. Know it.

When you make yourself less free I am not safe either. I am also just less free.

More rambling...

2011-12-09T07:17:00.001-08:00

They're really working to ignore the benefits to society. Someone wants control of those benefits and like the thieves that they are they want to get us to devalue them so that we will sell them at fire-sale prices. Even better for them, like the robber barons, if they can get us to pay them to haul them off, they will. Balderson is no better than the rest.

In many ways it would have been better for me to actually take advantage. I think I permanently put myself outside of a group that would have let me have what I desired as long as I was willing to bend over and RAPE the rest of the world. There I'd be trickling down on people because someone told me that I had to if I wanted the kind of life that I want. I feel like if I did that something would go badly wrong with my brain and I wouldn't be able to do useful work with it anymore. Which might explain a lot.

Am I abnormal because I want something less if someone else has it and doesn't want me to have it? Because I'm only willing to pay a fair price? Because I think if I rob someone I have already paid a price far in excess of the worth of whatever I took?

Just rambling I guess

2011-12-09T05:28:00.000-08:00

I'm not going to name one particular name but she is an obvious drugged-out prostitute whose job title is a cover for selling illicit sex and drugs to whomever has the money, and she must have made a killing driving her van around servicing workers during hurricane clean-ups, until she learned that there were people who would pay her to viciously attack Michael Sandlin. Who would they be able to use but a lowlife who's about half smart?

And then we wind up being forced to dwell upon their crap. There are a lot of decent people here who, because of their decency, can't even adequately express contempt and anger when we need to. We don't know how to say "get lost" or the more popular versions of that phrase. We don't know how to use words as weapons. Our role is "straight" versus whatever they are, I guess some kind of freak or pod people or something. In all good faith some of us "went after" certain social deviants because we had to, but as soon as we did that we found ourselves more under the control of some of them than we would have been if we tried to be them.

A book that is not even yet in the works, proposed just this day by me, belongs in the potential futures of the next few months or couple of years. It might be titled "Circle of Power." It would be about all this.

I idealize contact with tigers and other big cats for reasons that I see to be as certain as some of the laws of physics. The ones who you see who own the animals who are neurotic and who attack others are the ones who "contain" them without human contact. Neurotics want everyone to be as neurotic as they are. They don't feel "safe" even though if they thought about it, the neurosis is more dangerous to them than the external dangers that they fear. Neurosis can be forced on people.

Having no defenses, being unable to self-promote, being unable to turn on one's own lights, these disabilities do not make us good people. If you read the book that hasn't been written yet, it would be easier to understand that our normal defenses and capabilities drive out corruption. Just a very few positives in any person's day drive out evil spirits, the ones that we manufacture by brooding over our hurts. Good friends, a warm cat, a good book, television, a good meal, those are positives.

The neurotic mindset sees our animals as dangerous because they help relieve neurosis and self-destructive behaviors. Ironically and not coincidentally, the people who want our animals away from us see the ones of us who need the animals the most as least suited to have them. Lord I know that there are problems with allowing unlimited access for those who need contact the most but cutting off contact is depriving humans of needed therapy. The hideous people who pretend to love animals have already attempted to deprive us of needed food. Most of us do eat animal products. I consider animal contact to be a necessity, like food, and people shouldn't be forced to consume or use what someone cares to allow them. Those who would restrain us should be kicked to the curb.

They see virtue as dangerous

2011-11-26T19:57:00.000-08:00

In my carefully considered opinion when IFAW granted money to WAO, they wanted the Asvestases to work with them against private owners. I am suspicious that Jack Hanna and someone who we are still pretty sure is on our side have both been given "silver or lead" ultimatums, either work for them and be paid or die. I can see it in the expressions on their faces The Asvestases were already darkside. Their affects never change. If you catch that utterly fear-struck, blood-drained, "my whole world is collapsing around me" look of Jack Hanna's and you see it on someone else who has been in the news, you just know. I'll give Hanna this much credit. He knows that he's going against his better self and he can't keep the fact from showing on his face.

Weak attempts at preservation are worse than no attempts at all. Any controlling agency can suck the virtue out of a project along with the money and virtue can be bought and traded. Eric Blair, more commonly known by his pen name "George Orwell" wrote about a Ministry of Love that did exactly the opposite of its name, and conservation organizations make far more money with weak and failing attempts and policies than they would by succeeding or allowing success.

It's no surprise if someone finds an agency that they think is decent and then they want a piece of it. I can name the virtues of the big cats half a dozen different ways. Among the ways that I can name it, I could say "essence of common decency." It's real. You could call it "virtue" also. This is something that a man or a woman will strive to have a little bit of to the exclusion of every primary drive that I can name. All but the most addicted to gambling or drugs can replace them with that essence. Those who can't want to.

Having us by our sensitive parts is passe. This is something that people who have a clue about would rip their own sensitive parts off to have. It is not materially different from the love that a mother and an infant have for each other. If this is ripped out of a person everyone knows it, too.

The virtue that I am talking about is the only thing that people like John Kasich see as dangerous. They use the term "danger" as their private code word. We think that "danger" means something entirely different and we act accordingly when they tell us to get rid of or regulate "dangerous" animals. Then they laugh up their sleeves at us. With six ODNR people on the panel and Kasich egging them on we are dealing with bullies, a collection of the usual pathological jerks and cretins. Who else would twist the head off someone's pet owl in front of him?

I could of course write a longer essay and even a book on this one subject. The term "virtue" covers a lot of territory. It is the basis of competence in all areas of life. It can't be forced into a person and attempts to do so take it out of individuals and groups. Having it gives you immunity to parasite, which is why parasites see it as dangerous.

Vote "NO" on the Traveling Exotic Animal Protection Act?

2011-11-04T15:50:00.000-07:00

Before I vote "no" on the Traveling Exotic Animal Protection Act, I want to see at least three very specific people, Who Know Who They Are, vote "no" on licensing requirements for private owners of exotics.

Carte Blanche

2011-10-26T10:04:00.000-07:00

In Ohio every two-bit humane society, including quite a few that didn't exist last week, will be empowered to try to determine if every exotic animal owner in Ohio might be another Terry Thompson. The criteria will essentially add up to "he's a Terry Thompson if we feel like saying he is."

And I am another. I'm just not going to bother to try to own any exotic animals and go straight to the part where someone pretends that I killed myself with a long rifle in the gut, a rifle that wasn't at the crime scene when investigators arrived. I'm not actually going to hurt myself. It' just easy to pretend that I was shot in the gut by an unidentified assailant and pretend that I committed suicide. After the imaginary suicide I cut imaginary fences and let imaginary animals escape, which I can do because I'm not really dead and what I'm letting go of was a mirage. I am not going to keep fighting until it kills me.

I have asked to be placed on whatever blacklists they care to put me on. I own no animals. I don't know when I ever will. Will there actually be a knock on my door?

The only thing that I can do now to fight for private ownership is to end all association with Joe Exotic, the Feline Conservation Federation who Joe is now working for, and pretty much everyone else. I don't see that my participation will accomplish anything except keep me busy and let them keep an eye on me. There won't be much to watch. What they have taken from me they may keep with my blessing. They're telling me we should stop fighting each other. I can do that.

And I can keep my creepy, grubby, not-good-enough hands off everyone's animals. I actually want to now more than I want to do anything. Take away my freedom of choice and call it protecting my freedom, and it's just like 1984 and Animal Farm and every other kind of power grab. I can't help anymore.

Ethics and Terry Thompson

2011-10-25T18:05:00.001-07:00

To save someone some well-deserved embarrassment, I am not going to name the person who wants to introduce legislation in Oklahoma in the wake of the Terry Thompson incident. He is supposedly on the side of private ownership, but when you have a licensing agency that comes and molests you every few weeks, what is "private"? It is bad enough that it doesn't even make sense to try to take measures to prevent another animal release if someone actually does go off his nut. No one has ever done this before. I don't think that anyone has done this to date.

The breach of ethics and trust on the part of an organization and a person who befriended me is so severe that I did in fact expel both of them from my life. Between Jack Hanna, John Kasich who will hopefully soon be recalled from his office as governor of Ohio, and the Feline Conservation Federation, an atrocity is being committed that will go down in history as one of the worst things that has ever been done to animal owners, ever. Even if Terry Thompson had committed suicide and done all the other things, this is still bad ethics that punished owners in Oklahoma and Ohio for the actions of one man. It is also never ethical to punish owners who are taking good care of their animals. This is a punishment for being free human beings going about their legal business. The "law and order" types are going around using humane laws as a pretense for stealing exotic and more domesticated animals, and the same unethical jerks are also telling us how we should share our lives with animals, if at all.

Does someone worry that I'm lumping him in with a bunch of jerks, animal rights activists, and control freaks? I'm being lumped in with Terry Thompson, whose sins were placed upon him by other people for the purpose of labeling him, and it's all so contrived and lame that you can't logic it out, it's just an emotional grenade to throw. It has been deliberately drained of substance to make it more difficult to get a good grip on.

Somehow such people have always felt that other people's lives are their personal property to manipulate as they please. I have such bad examples of this in my life that I'm beginning to think this is a genetic defect that goes around. It has a certain pathological type of survival value.

Would I object to "fair" regulations? A lot of regulations may seem fair, but the reason that we have a Bill of Rights is because even regulations that appear to be fair will be administered by human beings who are generally liars, thieves, hoodlums, and often just plain murderous. I see what they did to Terry Thompson as drawing first blood, and Governor Kasich's plan as continuing the spilling of blood.

What did Governor Kasich do?

2011-10-21T22:17:00.000-07:00

He handed the state of Ohio over to the HSUS on a silver platter. His executive order will encourage every two-bit "humane society" in the state to go into people's homes and confiscate animals. This has been building for years, to every one of those organizations already has a list of targets. I watched the video. Kasich's part had been prepared, with the help of the fraudulent charity that sponsors domestic terrorism, for months now. So had Terry Thompson's spectacle.

Sheriff Matthew Lutz labeled it suicide before the coroner had looked at the body. While the coroner did indeed rule that it was suicide, it looks like he was killed with a 30-30. A 30-30 is a long rifle and if you even can pull the trigger while it is under your chin, no one has arms long enough when it's pointed at the stomach. The rest looks like an animal rights group attack, with locks cut off and fences cut, and of course for some reason Lutz, who has been hovering over this situation for years, had to claim that Thompson did this to himself.

As I have learned the hard way, the Feline Conservation Federation has decided that their policy would be that Terry Thompson did it to himself, and that it is incorrigible and otherwise speculative and vexatious to get on their Facebook page and claim that the animal rights people did it. Someone is having trouble remembering who is famous for cutting locks and fences. The idea that this man committed suicide and did all this insults the intelligence. Malicious releases of animals is a trademark of the Animal Liberation Front but I'll bet a dollar that they don't claim this one. Or do you all think that the ALF absolutely has to spray-paint its logo on something everywhere that they go?

Were this an animal rights assault it would look foolish for Governor Kasich of Ohio to push for a mass punishment of all exotic animal owners in Ohio, which is what his executive order amounts to. Allowing the employees of every two-bit humane society in Ohio to kick people's doors down will be punishing for thousands of owners. One can hope that the news will come out that it was an AR attack and then Kasich will have to resign in embarrassment. I have no sympathy for him. This is a horrible thing to choose to do, to mistreat every exotic animal owner in a state at once using a very exceptional incident as an excuse, even if it was a real incident.

There will be more to come on this. Joe Schreibvogel of GW Exotics in Wynnewood Oklahoma tried to help and Sheriff Lutz prevented him from doing so.

What Kind of Realities Can We Face?

2011-05-07T21:58:00.000-07:00

I would think that it would be a coward's motto. "I can't face this", "I can't face that" and "I couldn't live with myself if..." How many people remember when such phrasing would have earned you contempt from most listeners? How many of us remember when they started shoving that very thing down our throats and treated us with malice and if possible destruction if we balked at it? Moral and physical courage seem to have fallen into disuse and even contempt.

People have to face things. On what basis do we keep nursing our mental injuries? When I had to handle my first dead person as part of a job as a nurse, I simply faced it and did as I was instructed. Then when I learned what I was supposed to do, I washed them according to protocol and that was that. It was upsetting and frightening at first. I faced that. I went in knowing that it would be a problem and I faced it. I took the pain. I lived with it.

Cowboys don't turn away from their jobs when they see a friend being killed by a wild horse or a bull. They don't try to lock everything away and revamp all their systems and rules every time someone dies. It would make them crazy and paralyze them if they did. Deaths on the job and at the rodeo are a part of the life. The people who say they want to make us "safe" want us to be paralyzed cowards who can't do anything to help themselves. They also want us to do nothing but what they tell us to do.

Animal rights activists even have a book that says kill yourself if you can't face life. I would rather say pucker up and face it. Don't let the naysayers intimidate you, don't let me intimidate you or play you, don't let someone tell you that you are an idiot if you face it, be proud of being who you are and what you do, and live in that strength. You're not encouraging people to take insane risks. You are encouraging them to live. That's what I want to tell the world. Even a few years of actually living are worth more than enough to compensate for dying in a horrible accident. I'll even bid three months, or if it's really good, a single day.

You have to take risks to live.

A Proposal to Consider

2011-04-08T18:54:00.000-07:00

Would animals in general be better off if no one could ever again be punished for inhumane treatment of an animal?

The term "humane" is definitely unconstitutionally vague and we have to face the fact that the politically active humane societies use "inhumane" the same way that people once used the "n" word or words like "faggot." They use it the way that people still use the word "pervert." It is a verbal club.

How many thousands of dogs, cats, lions, tigers, and so on must be killed or prevented from being born for the sake of this "humane" crusade? If you knew for a fact that a certain number of each species would be tortured to satisfy someone's sick sadism, would you think that it is better that the whole species dies out? I've seen words to that effect, animal rights activists saying that extinction is better than humiliation at the hands of humans.

Any book that accuses a segment of the population of being evil and sadistic attracts a like-minded following. Focusing their anger creates a certain pressure that gets people to believe that something "has to be done" no matter how stupid or destructive that something is, or how unnecessary it is.

I've said it a dozen times. What actually encourages humane treatment of animals? It is love. Love is the active principle of life. That is why people risk their lives to save the lives of animals. That is why we feed them and pay a lot of money for their medical care. Threats of punishment take a lot of the virtue out of the good things that we do for animals. Worse, they give the threateners undeserved credit.

If you try to threaten people to make them get in line, you become a threat to society and yourself. Overall only scientific progress and prosperity improve animal care. Laws that threaten people have too many takebacks. If they do provide some temporary benefits, the people who wanted those laws go around and steal what they feel like stealing. The stealing, the laws that ban breeds and species, and the limit laws actually reduce the number of paws on the ground, which reduces the number of animals that are being cared for humanely.

Maybe we can do better without any humane laws at all.

"Irresponsible" Pet Owners of America

2011-04-07T19:11:00.000-07:00

It's going to be a funny-looking acronym when it is shown this way: "I"POA.

This is something that is vitally needed. I sit before you as a person who has had every responsibility in his life thrown in his face or stuffed up his behind and then forcibly ripped from him before he could "get it." What does the term mean? The term "irresponsible" is a weapon that is used against others the way that the "n" word is used against black people. Black people took to calling each other that in normal conversation. When used by black people who are talking to black people, it means "brother" and "one who I have common cause with" and also "human being." When used by a white man against a black man it means some pretty degrading things.

Both "puppy mill" and "irresponsible" are routinely used as terms of degradation, terms of bigotry, terms that denigrate others. If "responsible" means that a person is a good person and "irresponsible" means that a person is a bad person who shouldn't own a "king", then the term is used to set one's self up as the judge of another. Calling myself an "I"POA person means that I am no one's judge.

Were I to try to be an animal owner I would have to fight terrorists who work under the color of law and people who will freely label me negatively if I fail to measure up to their allegedly high standards. I've been seeing the term "irresponsible" tossed around pretty freely lately. If it is because someone was irritated with me and wanted me to shut up, she has her wish, at least on her forum.

An "I"POA person has principles and one of those is "thou shalt not judge." Another is "thou shalt not steal." A "responsible" person seems to have to be responsible for someone else's actions. The same person will fight to the death of his person and his culture to get at those "irresponsible" people. Well excuse me all to hell. I'm not going to kill myself or my culture over someone's allegedly dirty pen.

People in this society have shown a willingness to bring down society entirely to get at the black people, the sex perverts, the drug users, and now, the allegedly irresponsible pet owners. It's always something isn't it? The pattern of attack is always suicidal. They're in it for the suicide, not to get at anyone else but themselves. When you go on the attack against a class of people, it's always an attack against yourself first. This is true directly because it's usually an attack against something that you hate about or within yourself. It is true indirectly because it gives opportunities for exploiters to come back and beat you up.

The only responsible pet owner is one who defends her own.

A Simple Concept

2011-04-06T20:45:00.000-07:00

Tim Harrison has been caught lying. PETA and the HSUS have been caught lying. They perform their vocations or avocations in a manner that is threatening, dishonest, destructive, and sometimes illegal. They act as accusers, which may be the most important part of this.

The burden of proof is on the accuser. In any reasonable interpretation of legal tradition or social custom, the burden of proof is on the accuser. What has happened to our minds so that when someone pulls something out of his ass to accuse someone else of, the person who is accused has to prove his innocence? All that the accuser has to have is a slightly higher status than the person who he accuses, and a certain lack of good conscience. This is something that Carole Baskin can do with great ease, routinely, and that Zuzana Kokol couldn't do with a gun to her head and a million dollar bribe.

We have to understand that this kind of enemy is a liar. There is no "this time I'm telling the truth" with known liars such as PETA or the HSUS. It's all lies. When they make a business of lying they don't get to turn our heads with a new video or photograph or "evidence." We have to watch out for the way that every time they pull something out of thin air, people pay attention. And if it is a video where someone like them has total control of the subject matter and editing, don't believe a damn thing. If we keep believing them they will keep manipulating us. The stakes are a lot higher than whether someone might have a little too much shit in a lion's pen.

Some people might think I'm making too much of this but this is almost all of our meaningful defense. It is also how we will be able to keep from damaging each other or allowing damage. Right now it's real easy to get one owner to hate another. I've spent years cajoling one group of animal owners to get them to reach the understanding that we can't believe accusations that are being hurled at breeders by mortal enemies. I have also been looking for the understanding of the idea that we do not need to create weapons against other humans to force them to "straighten out" or whatever we want to call it. I am glad to see that at least one group is getting it.

I understand very well that when a group is under attack this kind of thing happens, and when it happens, the group fragments and we have problems. We have to solve these problems instead of hacking each other up using rules that are imposed on us by people who hate us and want us dead.

Believing the Word of Our Oppressors

2011-04-05T16:13:00.000-07:00

Another good title for the book "Malleus Maleficarum" would be "The Book of Dirty Lies." It invents, in graphic color, lies that can be told about individual humans.

The French Aristrocracy called the common human the "proletariat" which means "syphilitic." "Original sin" means that we're all trash that can only be redeemed and made human by obeying our overlords.

A witchsmeller is nothing but a dishonest storyteller who can lay down any kind of fantastical story about your neighbors and make you believe it. Had Whitley Streiber's books gained a little more credibility the witchsmeller could get us to believe tales of being abducted by UFOs and being probed by small skinny aliens.. Uh...

Why do so many of us seem to swallow a story by PETA hook, line, and sinker? Think about it.

It is so hard to believe even what we see with our own eyes, and so hard to understand the import of that which we do believe, that we are seriously harming ourselves if we believe the word of anything that comes from the HSUS or PETA. We're screwing ourselves if we believe their videos. Dan Christensen saw them in action, staging videos in trucks that they brought to the scene. I suspect that it was dog shit that Tim Harrison was shoveling out of that trailer at Terry Brumfield's place.

The rite of due process means that the evidence doesn't exist unless it is proven to some degree of certainty. We are dealing with people who would pack a dog crate with manure, shove your dog in that manure face first, and take a picture. So where does the slightest chance of believing their words come from?

I know. It's a form of suicide. They throw so much garbage that some of it sticks and since it's mental garbage you might not know which garbage stuck and what it did to you. We're too generous. We give up too much to them when we should be treating them as if none of their evidence exists.

Evidence

2011-04-05T15:51:00.000-07:00

OK, so I haven't seen "Elephant in the Living Room" and I've only heard a little bit about it.

People have already told me that there is evidence in the film against the late Terry Brumfield, that apparently he didn't keep the lion's housing too clean.

Trouble is, I don't believe the word of people who are financed by the HSUS to produce a horrible screed against animal ownership. Belief goes out the window when I see certain names as producers and cast, and when they use their ultimate dishonest: They say that this is why private ownership should be banned.

So I had a tiff with someone about this evidence and I'm obviously wrong because obviously evidence is evidence or something, I haven't worked this out. Yet this someone seems to believe evidence from known liars, thieves, swindlers, and people who hate us and wants us dead. I've seen people who should know better believe everything that comes from PETA, too. As if a known jerk can't stage sweeping shit out of a trailer for a film production.

Whatever it is I might attempt to do for the sake of our freedom to own animals, this is a handicap. It's a hell of a block. (to me)Evidence from known liars with an agenda is not just suspect, it doesn't exist. (but)As long as I am part of a certain group, or more like a dangling chad and Internet troll, let's face it, I seem to have to accept any evidence that gives ammunition to the other side.

At least on Petlaw no one seems to be believing statements by abusive raiders.

It may be pissing in the wind, but it's my piss. Asking the world to live up to its own minimal standards is pissing in the wind, but there I be. I don't even mind tolerating a certain amount of dirt and shit as long as things are somewhere near being between the rails, and the animals are happy, well-fed, and comfortable. But if people can't quit hacking at each other, I don't want to screw with it. Maybe giving me a lot of money will make me feel better. Then I could afford a psychotherapist, some antidepressants, and a real bed to sleep in. But if I can't own a pet tiger without a bunch of strangers having to share the experience and "making sure" that I satisfy whatever dark desires they have, I'll buy them each a pet tiger for themselves if I get rich, and they can have mine, too. And maybe we can talk some time, but right now I'm sick of talking about animals.

Fences

2011-02-15T09:23:00.000-08:00

They're not trying to get us to build fences high enough to contain our tigers. They're trying to make us build fences high enough and strong enough to keep them from taking our tigers. Since there is no such thing we find ourselves with a compulsive-obsessive disorder, driving ourselves to exhaustion trying to cover our backsides while failing to face them down.

The unlawful, the unruly, the people who talk out of both sides of their mouths and screw around, they have a big advantage in this field. It seems like a drug-addled idiot can get a free pass out of the people who are grabbing our cats if he just kisses their asses and helps them screw everyone else over.

(edit) Funny thing is at the same time the gun grabbers are finally failing the cat grabbers are rising to power. They even use rhetoric like "a big cat is like a loaded gun." Possession of a gun is an absolute right guaranteed under Constitutional law, so that is where we should be but of course "they really don't mean it that way."

Giving up domain name

2011-01-22T02:04:00.000-08:00

I'm sorry to be doing this on short notice but I honestly thought that I was going to be able to pay for my domain name until today. From now on the URL is realanimalculture.blogspot.com

Please Help Jean Cyhanick

2010-12-15T10:50:00.000-08:00

The whole story is at http://got50.blogspot.com/

Jean is appealing her conviction and we are helping. The information at the Got50 site may be a day or two old, but as of today, Wednesday the 15th of December 2010, pledges total about $28,000 out of $35,000 needed, so we're getting close. Walter Hutchens is taking pledges at waltah @ earthlink.net (remove spaces). Current instructions are to send no money, but promise to send what you feel you can and you want to. I'm sending $25 when they are ready.

In this case the jury was not told that by convicting Jean Cyhanick they would deprive her of her livelihood. That's deception right there. I think that the whole point of prosecuting her was to deprive her of her livelihood.

Jean Cyhanick was convicted of animal cruelty because she had dogs that had dental issues that her veterinarian had told her did not warrant immediate attention. This was after she had done a lot to avoid being a "commercial breeder" under the laws of the State of Virginia, and giving up as many dogs as she did, she sacrificed a lot of her yearly income. She had been inspected yearly by animal control officers and no one found anything to complain about until a person by the name of Amy Hammer who wore the uniform of an ACO started strongarming her, first telling Jean that if she didn't give Hammer three of her dogs, she was going to fine her $250 a day.

There is a lot in the story that will set your hair on fire. The jury was actually embarrassed to have convicted Jean, and well they should be. Even if we are talking about the law, there has always been some kind of doctrine that the law, if it is used against a person at all, should be used with common sense and compassion. I've read of cases where far more compassion was given to a murderer than to this lady who was taking very good care of her animals and helping the species by giving it a home to breed in.

Why would I want to be "safe"?

2010-11-30T22:36:00.000-08:00

Safety is a good idea. Now it has become moralistic.

Since it's "not safe" and since it "might look bad" and "what would the people who hate us and want us dead think?", I think I'm supposed to feel bad about something that I enjoy. I enjoyed watching those lions torment that man. He enjoyed it. I used to enjoy it when my dogs did it. I wish I were him.

It's a moral, that I think must be disposed of, that if it smacks the slightest bit of unsafeness or of disreputability it must not be practiced. This is even when I agree that the youngsters must be kept under control. I can tell you for certain that my German Shepherds didn't learn that kind of self-control from me but they were quite good with strangers and quite mannerly.

Collectively we worry ourselves to death and then worry that if we don't worry enough someone's going to think something's wrong with us and that will be the end of the world. Kind of silly to think that when the bastards are already going full-tilt at us with what little they have, and like the parasites they are they have to co-opt energy and resources that do not belong to them. And then we have trouble seeing why we should not close off our sources of power and connections with the rest of humanity.

The parasites are a small force that continually has to do its worst to try to erode away at a thing that is larger, better, far more beautiful, far more life-giving, than they can ever hope to be. The exotic animal trade, as is all animal-based agriculture, is a lot more important to humanity than we usually think.

I don't know. You can call me whatever but what I see in the two cubs playing with their human is one of the great manifestations of life. All things considered it is just about intense enough to help a human remain human. We have a divine spark that requires something intense to keep it at its optimum brightness. The light is what the public wants from keepers of exotic animals, something to nourish their souls. "Safety" does nothing for them. It's less than nothing. It's the promise to subtract something from their lives. When do we start celebrating life? You know, it's not celebrating life to sit in front of a machine punching a touch screen hoping that it will reward me with some spare change.

My blog: www.animalculture.org

What's the Use of a Tiger Summit?

2010-11-23T11:57:00.001-08:00

Is the WWF going to get with Vladimir Putin and blame humanity for all of the troubles that the tiger is having? Is Vladimir Putin going to become another owner of exotic animals who hates all exotic animal owners outside of his own little clique? Are they going to brew up another way to blame private ownership for the ills of the world and the always impending extinction of the tiger?

I'm sick of being yanked around like this. If it is that damned urgent to save the species, pay people to live with them and assist them in breeding. Is that too complicated, geniuses? All the complications come from people being picky about how the tiger will be made to survive the alleged oncoming end of the world as they know it. They want us to think it's Hell if the tiger sleeps on a couch in the basement watching television while being waited on hand and foot by humans who are thoroughly in love with him.

It is "urgent" enough that they send people in to fight wars against poor people who go into the forbidden territory because they need food and firewood to cook it over. It is "urgent" enough to allow brown-skinned people to be killed by hungry nuisance animals. But when it comes to breeding the animals in private, suddenly every stupid "why not" idea takes precedence. Bull. Shit.

Private owners have been the most effective force for saving the tiger. I reject the idea of subspecies purity. Any idea of "specific adaptations" is pure hooey. The tiger does quite well in a Harlem apartment, a Nevada desert, a Nebraska winter, and in my basement. In my basement the tiger also has a faithful loving companion, me. Unfortunately that tiger is imaginary. Or is she? Actually the whole basement is imaginary.

I would rather place faith in anyone who buys a tiger or breeds one, that they will do an adequate job, then in regulations that are only used as clubs to destroy the whole business. What are they willing to do to the tiger in order to "save" it? They confiscate and destroy or sterilize animals using excuses like "too small a cage." The idea of subspecies purity is simply a despicable lie, and they have destroyed tigers for not being "purebred." They are worse than useless, the WWF and IFAW and The Tiger Fund, let alone the HSUS.

All of the willingness that I might have to save the tiger by giving the tiger a portion of my own home to live in, they discount and say "obey us and send money." About how many tigers has a billion dollars a year in donations saved? I don't see it. They continually advertise their failure to, overall, save even one tiger. But I might be able to create a habitat for a healthy tiger for about a thousand dollars a month. They've already shown willingness to allow people to die, as long as the people who die aren't white Europeans, as long as they are "natives" at the same time that they talk out of the other side of their collective mouth about how "dangerous" it is to keep tigers as pets even though tigers as pets rarely kill. If they made the same bally-hoo about tigers killing people in India and China they would have to sequester or kill the wild tigers. Killing them was necessary in the 19th century because predation against humans by tigers was getting out of hand. The only necessity now is to make fraudulent charitable organizations that much wealthier, by emotional manipulation and because people are literally begging for chances to help the tiger.

If you want to help the tiger, pay me to sleep with the tiger. I can do more for the tiger by finding a random male to breed her, letting her birth the cubs in my bedroom, letting them have the backyard to run and play in, letting them share my home with me, than all of the charities that are exploiting the tiger for profit. If you divide the amount of money raised by the charities by the number of animals saved, you get a negative number, how much money they raise to subtract how many animals from the world's stock of tigers. In other words they are getting paid to reduce the number of tigers in the world. The people who snatch our pet dogs are doing exactly the same thing.

Spay/neuter too convenient?

2010-11-21T00:35:00.000-08:00

We know for sure that the HSUS does not want the average citizen to gain anything without paying the HSUS either directly or indirectly. The coin may be emotional or moral, too.

The "we prefer not to breed" attitude is one of the most cowardly ways to cater to "human convenience" and when it's for that reason you can see the ARs playing both ends against the middle. I think that it is also firmly established that we will love animals to death if we follow the AR pattern. This would be along the path that Peter Singer encourages humans to follow using the directions written up by David Benatar.

Have we always left it up to the worst people to design what passes for our morality? That's what it always looks like to me. What I think of as negative utilitarianism, or negative functionalism, or destructivism, this is a bad reflection of reality, attempting to remove that which is "wrong" or "tainted" rather than attempting to capitalize on what is good. You can look back at David Benatar's book and see a striking difference between a personality that discounts or neutralizes the joy of life rather than considering each small pleasure to have been worth the fuss. You can also look at Peter Laufer's book and see that emptiness that attempts to suck at the soul. Those are "Better Never to Have Been" and "Forbidden Creatures", respectively. I would much rather deal with an honest to God villain than emotional black hole people (black holes suck).

I have experienced joys that have filled me in ways that I still feel joyful sixteen years later, and even longer. I have had a dog who gave me so much joy that when she died I was glad she had lived and it was hard to really miss her because it was like she never left. The way that she treated me was like she wanted to make me happy forever, knew how to do that, and enjoyed every second of it. This is what I want the human race to have. This is what will make decent people of us.

Feeling that it is too inconvenient to be at least a bystander to the creation of a new life is a kind of negativity that I am familiar with. In moderation, using some kind of intelligent sense to decide when not to, this is OK. Obviously that negativity has bled way outside of its decent boundaries and has set a fire that will be difficult to put out. I love the convenience of having animals that don't reproduce very often, and there is something restful about not having to deal with their sexuality. But that's kicking life to the curb for my convenience and it's a pernicious habit. It's hard to stop catering to the "sterilize everything" crowd when it is in some ways emotionally rewarding and convenient.

If they do an about-face and tell us that they have just discovered that the natural way is for nature to produce many many animal babies and kill off a bunch of them, then we all suddenly have to be midwives to kiss up to the animal rights activists, I think I will seek one out and beat him with my fists for a few minutes. Don't even really have to hurt him. I would just need a punching bag. They started us on an emotional descent into Hell using "principles" and when they feel like putting us in a particular place, they just mutate their "principles." They want us to go through Hell, go through Purgatory, then go through Paradise, a thrill ride over the bodies of our friends, feeding them every bit of money they can contrive to grab from our wallets, and lead us right back around to where we started. Then we begin the cycle of self-torture again, as directed by "authorities" who have been sucking our blood for thousands of years.

I got your "turning point" right here

2010-11-10T14:05:00.001-08:00

Mink farmers need nightvision scopes and decent rifles to watch their farms at night. I don't even know how security fails to notice violent terrorists entering laboratories with arson materials. And I really wish at least one time a bullet would explode someone's milk jug full of gasoline that he intends to use on an innocent researcher's home and car, covering the vandal with flaming gasoline.

Good old John Goodwin of the HSUS is "ecstatic" when a family narrowly escapes death from a home that was set on fire by terrorists. Now he helps the HSUS kill dogs.

Giving the "direct action" people a little bit of undeserved free publicity, here is something from their front page. I consider it to be evidence of criminal intent and as such is legal to repost under fair use laws:

received anonymously:

"For too long we have sat back, for too long we have let our past actions justify our lack of action, but stirred by the sentencing of the young SHAC activists we are off our seats and at our doors. We are the past generation of animal liberationists, but we will now be the future, stiking at the heart of the vivisection industry, and if we have to go back to egg timers and incense sticks then we will.
Mark our words, we will destroy all who fall into our focus. This is a call for all those who feel the same, the people from campaigns past, the people who never got caught, and those who did. The animals still need our help so we must strike hard and fast.
This will be a turning point.

Justice Department"

This is from the front page of Bite Back's website, and I guess they don't mind getting in trouble because this is a direct threat of terrorist action. They'll destroy all who fall into their focus? That sounds like a threat because it is a threat. This is a threat that we know they will carry out. Iowa gave up its ass to them and they still have to bury their medical research laboratories to prevent terrorist acts.

Do they actually want the normal citizens of the United States to take our gloves off? They didn't just make it our right, they made it mandatory. Self defense is an obligation. There are more than a hundred normal people for every freak like these people and we could turn them into greasy smears in no time. Look for them at your McDonald's eating burgers.

I don't know why such lowlifes can turn so many of us into idiots but some time we will wise up. They threaten our food supply. They threaten our pets saying that those pets shouldn't even live. So shouldn't we threaten them?

A Reply to Brent Toellner

2010-10-27T20:55:00.000-07:00

Blog posting and thread

Winograd ingratiated himself with a segment of owners who would latch on to just about any hope of decent treatment from anyone involved in the "humane" community. He still supports IPB (Indecent Proposition B) in spite of its total lack of human decency and contempt for human rights.

Best Friends skeeped about Winograd allegedly backing off support of IPB. This puts Winograd in an even better position with people who haven't thought it out. The enemy of my enemy is my friend? What if the enemy of my enemy is pretending to be such? It's easy to pretend. There is so much dirt to be had on the ASPCA, Best Friends, and the HSUS, that a tiny fraction of it makes a man look like a hero when he writes a book about it.

Early on, before Winograd closed comments on his blog, I commented that he shouldn't give the HSUS any way to redeem itself (as in "Redemption") because they have already committed too many crimes against humanity. Now his latest, http://www.nathanwinograd.com/?p=4473 , sets up a condition that will buy redemption for the HSUS or other miscreants that satisfy it. If they come together and "rescue" all the dogs that are displaced by IPB, then they will be among the blessed, to paraphrase. Otherwise they're evil little devils.

In other words, they'll be the good guys if they stage a feeding frenzy on an entire state of breeders whose activities were previously legal.

It is a very bad thing to ask people to "police themselves" in a setup like dog breeding. Any attempts to do so quite rightly cause people to defend themselves and the intend is to split the group and make them suspicious of each other. There is no good way to conduct such a program, at all, and the attempts cause a lot of damage.

According to Winograd the big three humane organizations are absolutely loaded to the gills with dirt. That's gravy for those of us who have learned, quite rightly to despise them. It also means to me that they not only do not have the right to judge any breeders, they do not have the ability. They are also known for lying.

One of the harshest things about this is that it will do what was done to exotic animal owners in Missouri. It will punish people who have spent millions to become legal. This is the HSUS's incrementalism. First it imposed unnecessary burdens on breeders. Now it's going to chop their income tremendously while they're still paying off the financing.

It is better to have no solution than a solution this destructive. The destruction is on purpose, from Winograd, from the ASPCA, Best Friends, and the HSUS. The handwriting has been on the wall because these miscreants have been lying to people. We haven't the slightest chance of knowing what is really going on.

Winograd follows the pattern of labeling commercial breeders as "puppy mills", therefore commercial breeders, in his mind, are automatically abusive, and if they are bigger breeders they are automatically more abusive. This is far less insightful than his usual material, so he is definitely doing this on purpose. Winograd ingratiated himself with the breeders to some extent, who seem not to have realized that he does not exempt them from the "puppy mill" label, and like I said, the complaints that Winograd has allied himself with the breeders has created a false impression.

I don't know what Winograd's definition of a "puppy mill" is or what definition he will stand behind, or what yours is, but you, Brent Toellner, were quoted by Winograd as saying this: "According to the US Department of Agriculture, there are 1,525 licensed commercial breeders in the state—nearly [three times] more than any other state. The rest… are unlicensed. In other words, Missouri could cut in half the number of ‘puppy mills’ just by closing down all of the unlicensed operations in the state."

You and Winograd have both said in writing that all of the licensed breeders in Missouri are "puppy mills." Please explain.

Pet Owner's Rights: The Puppy Mill Label

2010-10-19T19:13:00.000-07:00

The first right that a pet owner has is to be treated like a human being who has rights, just like it says in the Constitution.

There are negative rights and positive rights. A negative right is like the right NOT to be raided and treated like a convicted rapist. A positive right is to the right to be treated with the respect that is due any citizen and that we generally extend to non-citizens because respectable and respectful people do this as a matter of course. This respectful treatment is part of a good and respectful person.

There is a word that begins with "n" and ends with the loss of a 30 year career as a radio personality. I was tempted to use it to jolt people a little in this essay. Probably not all that much wrong with it if I do it right, but it would be distracting. The fact is that this word and other labels have been used with destructive effect. Every time that it has been used this way, the person who used it was wrong. This kind of labeling is used exclusively to push bad ideas, inspire unjust violence, and even to incite the killing of innocent people. And it works. It always seems to work.

The use of the "puppy mill" label has been debunked so many times and so many ways that we're actually reinforcing its use. It's kind of like saying "I'm not a faggot." This is something that the bullier already knows. The purpose of the use of that label, as most people already know, is to put a mark on someone and to demonize and demoralize. They know it hurts so they keep on doing it. I have proposed defusing the label by telling people that yes, mills are good, factories are good, puppies are good, so the use of the term "puppy mill" as a derogatory term is simply silly.

The HSUS depends on the repeated, malicious, and stupid use of the term "puppy mill" because it already knows that it cannot present a reasoned argument for restricting the number of animals that a breeder is legally allowed to own or breed. Did we learn nothing from the oppression of Jews or black people? Maybe if we don't remember the derogatory terms used against Jews and blacks we won't remember the lessons of history. Maybe I should spell out the "n" word to tell people that the anti-breeding political groups use the term "puppy mill" to call people "niggers." You and I both know what that word means when used by a white man. It means "think of these people as dirt under your feet and ignore their humanity."

It also means "do something mean and stupid to these people." So, no, I don't want to use that word, or the term "puppy mill" because doing so makes me look like a stupid jerk who just wants to hurt people.

I'm surprised that I even have to argue that dog breeders are good people.

Also, because Nathan Winograd insists on using the term "puppy mill" I cannot believe in him or his program. There is a huge difference between believing in humane treatment at commercial breeders and pet stores and using terms like "puppy mill" against them. It makes me feel like Winograd isn't all there.

Dear Christie Keith

2010-10-07T23:21:00.001-07:00

It was when you taunted me that I knew for certain that every bad thing that I said about you was true.

Tigers as Pets

2010-09-15T04:32:00.000-07:00

I have never believed that owning a tiger as a pet was so dangerous that it should be banned or regulated. I believe it even less these days because the reasons given to ban or regulate are at best over-hyped. They are usually deliberately dishonest and come from the usual suspects who hate humanity and want the human race to live miserable lives (go to Hell) and die.

You can even see that pattern in the behavior of people who say that they want to preserve our lives who are not animal activists. They might not believe it themselves or think of it that way, but it is a negative tradition to continually attack another person's pleasures as health hazards and worse. They have done the Orwellian inversion really well. That which gives life these days is often cast as being worse than death. Both human and animal methods of propagating life are being condemned by social custom that has a lot more to do with self-hatred than with the kind of love of life and family that should be the basis for morality. The feelings are so soundly condemned that I fear to talk about them.

Negatives are granted way too much of our time and energy. This grant wastes our energies, our money, and for God's sake our time, time that I miss dreadfully, thinking now that my initiation to the big cat world was sixteen years ago and during that time the animal rights activists have caused massive damage to our rights. One animal demonstrated to me that there was so much love in the world and that a big cat could contain so much love that it was worth every misery that humans have contrived to inflict on ourselves and others. Imagine the fact that if a giant predator meets a human being who is new to him, he seeks that person's approval and affection, and if that person seems "just right" in some way, he showers that "destructive human" with love like few humans have ever known.

This is what the sociopaths of the world truly hate. How many of us in school have seen people work to break up young love affairs just to be doing it? That has to be jealousy. They might make contact and they might feel the current flowing through them, but they do not benefit from it the way that a normal human does.

You know very well that the "bully" or "sociopath" who wants to take away what we love or value can't tell us so. They have to disguise it as something else and themselves as fearsome warriors who will protect us from the evils that lurk in the dark woods. The darkness has to make us hide our lights under bushel baskets, behind veils, behind circumlocutory speech, so that the darkness can do what darkness does. The light always chases away the darkness and forces it to hide behind things. This metaphor is always true.

A predator is a creature of light. She does best with a population that is strong because she draws her strength from the creatures that she eats. Parasites are always sickly creatures because although they at least in part control the animals that they burrow into, by necessity, they always draw their sustenance by being less than those who they take it from. This metaphor is also always true. Social parasites always have to take something from you and make you less. A real predator has to make you more powerful to become more powerful itself, as predators are raised from below. Parasites eat away at the foundation of life. Predators have to nurture and protect their foundations to survive. Parasites live and prosper, insofar as they can prosper, in a constantly degrading world. That's why they become tiny worms that feed on the flesh of much larger and better creatures. Predators create and live in a world of constant improvement. Their prey improve and so do they. Their natural temperaments are consistent with this.

When I approach a tiger, I am attracted to life. Everything that we know about predators points to and illustrates the fact that a predator, as I just said, depends on supporting the life of its prey. More so with animals and less so with humans, that support is expressed as physical love. Humans do it too, or can. Predators and humans also, almost always, mentally mark those individuals whom they love as "not food." When pet tigers attack and kill, it is usually by accident. Humans also accidentally kill pets and loved ones. Also, even if it is usually not considered justifiable, humans who kill other humans or animals on purpose believe that they have a legitimate problem that must be solved by killing.

Compare and contrast, engage in weighty philosophical discussion for years on end, brawl online and whine and moan, and while the philosophy is enlightening and the brawling is social, it comes to me that the more people who simply decide that they want a tiger as a pet, the more they can find legal places and means to do it, and the more they can create legal places and means. In 1980 when they made the tiger a legal domestic pet in British Columbia, Canada, it worked mostly because that is what they wanted to do. These days tiger owners generally say "please don't hurt us too much." They actually want "regulations." When they do, how can they then object to the "more is better" approach to regulations? How can they contain the regulations and keep them from becoming destructive? It was a lot easier when regulations either did not exist or were extremely lax. "Strict" regulations are only good for acts of destruction. That is why social parasites love them.

If a tiger loves you, he or she will give you their strength free of charge. Because the emotional bond is symbiotic the tiger loses no strength in doing so. Shared strength is like shared warmth. When two creatures cling to each other on a cold night they are both warmer. This is literally sharing life. This is what the parasites want to stop us from doing. A strong animal's immune system sickens and kills parasites.

What I am saying about tigers is true of other animals. To me it is simple biology. It is also true that most animals are not as intense as the tiger and that a lot of humans have a strong compatibility with the tiger and are able to be full partners with the tiger. This kind of relationship is valuable in and of itself. People pay billions of dollars just for the slightest whiff of this relationship.

Who would even be willing to pick your friends and life partners for you? Even being willing to do that is a sign of mental illness. Being willing to use force is violently insane. Stealing your beloved tiger from you then treating it like junk, like the animal junkyard created near San Antonio by Ron and Carole Asvestas, is an even sicker act. Possession of the tiger in a very real way is possession of health. The taking of the pet tiger deliberately inflicts sickness on the victim by removing health. People have sickened and died shortly after losing their animals, be they dogs or tigers.

The cruelty of the methods of taking also contributes to the deaths of human beings and inflicts illness. That is the point of gaining the power to choose another person's friends and life partners. A compromised life is at greater risk of being lost altogether. This causes desperation, naturally. A desperate, weakened, compromised person is much easier to exploit. A strong person finds ways to remove the profit from these scams.

It is worth noting that parasites cannot live without their hosts. They die back after they have used too many hosts. When they get desperate they attack stronger people and they get knocked back. The program of the animal rights activists is to attempt to saturate the world with enough of their poison to weaken those who would be strong against them and they have just a few people who would kill those who would stand strong against them. If they do get obvious enough about the killing then strong people will find ways to kill them and that is an unequal war because strong people are smarter, can get away with more, and they will do a more thorough job of it. Good people are getting sick of a one-sided shooting war. Make no mistake about it. When they set things on fire, destroy cars and homes, vandalize, and release valuable animals, this is a shooting war.

The content of this essay reflects a lot of internalized abuse. One should, like Ralph Helfer, be able to talk about the desire to have a pet tiger or lion or other animal without even mentioning the damned animal rights activist or their antics.

People are afraid of the power of life, we really are. It doesn't seem to take much to tip that fear into self-destructive action and action that is destructive of other human and non-human animals.

"The Ends Justify the Means."

2010-09-14T20:22:00.001-07:00

I was browsing some of the entries at the Blue Dog State blog. In this entry the writer made a very pertinent and useful statement:

What kind of word games are these people playing?

It's all about the animals. [Not.]

Frequently cited, rarely clarified -- and often thoughtlessly uttered -- this statement needs translation. What it really means is:

The ends justify the means.

They really do act as if they are above the law and their actions remind me of a sequence in "Free the Animals!" (only buy used and if you must buy it, buy it from me, please *grin*). "Valerie" and her black-bandannaed friend are at a terrorist camp dreaming out loud and one of them says "think of the things that we will outlaw." There's a statement to make a real American try to get his legislators to impose some social justice upon their hides.

It seems to be working, doesn't it? When Scottlund Haisley terrorizes middle-aged ladies, when Bill Smith lies about pipes being shoved down the throats of dogs, when teenage children set cars on fire, they get what they want. Come on. There should be a natural intransigence against this kind of abuse.

Their kind of "the end justifies the means" involves the illegal and corrupt use of force against people who are engaged in legal activities. Often the people they use this force against are better for the animals than they are,not a high standard to beat. Often they kill the animals that they tear away from loving owners, or they put them in degrading conditions. That's the point of the exercise, to damage humanity first by destroying our animals. The word from Chicago and New York recently is that the animal control people are horribly abusing their own volunteers and the animals. This is a deliberate program of emotional and physical abuse.

Now suppose we took this "the ends justify the means" and look at it another way. Suppose that not the human participants in the program are more than willing? If the means can ever be justified by the means, when the means are most benign that's when. They're telling us that the environment is being destroyed at the same time that they work ruthlessly and maliciously to stamp out private breeding.

The "ends" include the maintenance of populations of animals that are of inestimable worth to the human race. Most of us are willing to contribute time, energy, and money to the cause. "Risk" seems to be an issue, as if only brown-skinned people should risk their lives to allow lions to be their neighbors. The push to erase risk is a swindle. If you look at the means that we sort of let slide, it becomes clear that there is less risk in a more or less properly contained pet tiger than there is in a spread of gasoline bombs in an otherwise quiet suburb.

The "means" are not just benign, but pleasant and life-enhancing. The animals take to it well. Happy animals reproduce and you know that an animal that showers you with love is in some way pretty happy. Animals are pretty easy to keep happy. Good food, good company, comfortable places to sleep, you generally have a happy camper.

What "means" do we want to justify? Burning down civilization or keeping a few pets that are somewhat more dangerous than teddy bears? That's my take on it. I don't know about you but I think that a house that is on fire is a lot more dangerous than a pet tiger.

What I do to fight animal abuse.

2010-09-13T20:29:00.001-07:00

I give the animals adequate shelter, food, water, and medical care.

I endeavor to make the animals not just comfortable but happy and well socialized.

I check on them during extreme weather conditions, sometimes at a substantial risk to my own health and safety.

I continually seek to improve my care of those animals.

I do not cause unnecessary suffering. The phrase is always "unnecessary suffering."

What I do not do is manipulate people emotionally to get them angry at someone else who might be abusing their animals. I do not vandalize people's property for the "crime" of inconveniencing the animals.

I decide what suffering is "necessary" and freaky little immature twits from the A.L.F. can talk to my shotgun if they don't like it.

I take care of my own business because any responsible owner has their hands full taking care of their own business.

If you don't like what I just said, ~~you can go and fuck yourself~~ I don't really care.

My little declaration

2010-09-10T07:26:00.000-07:00

When I touch a big cat I live. I'm a lot like the autistic boy who came out of his shell when he touched a cheetah. I know very well that it doesn't take "years of experience" just to be able to survive handling a big cat. If it did most of the people who handle them would already be dead.

I am not going to go through any years and years of "training" with so many months no-touch, so many years touching only through a fence, maybe ten years before flying solo. Some would think it suicidal, but with an owner's permission I would go into a situation where they give a few hours instruction and a few days supervised practice then allow me to be a handler. If there is a slightly increased chance that I would be injured and/or die, so be it. I think that anything beyond a few weeks training would be trying to put way too fine a point on it. Any increase in survivability would be too small to measure within the limits of error in that measurement. Doing the ten year stretch would simply be OCD.

When a person tries to have a life, he's screwed if he spends hours and hours of angst-filled introspection and lengthy philosophical discussion over things that can't be decided by the entire community with centuries to cogitate. (Guess how I know.) This is why at least hypothetically in the United States an individual is free to live in his own way. In practice even your best buds will lock you in a closet when in their opinion you are too free.

Since I don't want to do what they want me to do and won't be what they want me to be, the "professionals" of the exotic animal community will refuse to attempt to help me except to warn me that I am going to die. I'm sorry, the people who I have met online seem like decent people, but this ten years of ascension, with the permission of the guru, on a tightrope, is not my thing and I do not believe in it. It might impress the rubes but if it is an attempt to persuade people that their group of animal handlers (definitely not "we") is safe, they're missing some points.

One point is that everything that we do to try to impress the animal grabbers is wasted. They have a vested interest in doing things their way. You and I, if you are also interested in working with big cats, are "dangerous" unless we belong to their group, then we get a free pass on everything. As long as we are not caught with dropped trou in the town square we're fine. We would have to very very very blatantly embarrass the grabbers, which is very hard to do, and even if we manage that, they will just pretend that they don't know us. It works for the animal rights activists.

We simply don't know how to fight back. Too many people people started out trying to impress the cat grabbers in the beginning and the realization still doesn't seem to have sunk in, not in the right place in so many minds. The people who want to grab our animals away from us are going to tell any lie that it takes. They are going to negate any effort to impress them favorably by lying and by being the same sociopathic jerks that they always have been. Trying to impress them is spinning their wheels.

If this sounds like an appeal for someone to invite me to their home to play with their big cat, hey, I'd love it, I'd put my money and my tender body where my mouth is, but don't fall for it. If you as a responsible animal owner decide that I should be kept at arm's length, said arm ending in a hand resting on a keyboard, please do so. As everyone knows, if a person such as me benefits from any such idea, he is a selfish bastard who is manipulating things to get what he wants and that proves that his idea is of no benefit to anyone. Just tell yourself that you have my number.

They will use any "safety measure" to harass the exotic animal community. If they increase the required height of a fence from 12 to 14 feet and say that everyone has to "comply" it will cost tens of thousands of dollars at the very least per facility. They just claim that this makes things safer. It absolutely does not matter to them if we can prove that the savings in lives will be so few that they can't even be measured with any degree of certainty. As long as they can maintain a pretense, in other words, until the end of time, they will use that. People who believe in freedom, i.e. "suicidal idiots who are a danger to the community and should be Baker acted", are obviously wrong because 14 feet is safer than 12 feet.

And "our side" which I am not even nominally a part of wants to go them one or more better on training requirements. Does "our side" want to have enough members to fill a Suburban?

Because I am a selfish git in addition to being a suicidal idiot who should be Baker acted and who walks and talks funny anyway, I don't see the point of hanging on to something that is emotionally unrewarding. I want the joy of living with animals along with the work. This joy will not be happening. It will be ground out of me if I even reach the place where I am so lucky as to be in the grinder. Then I guess I won't be selfish anymore, anyway.

Just a couple of quick points

2010-09-09T22:10:00.000-07:00

All of the "irresponsible" ownership of dogs, cats, or other animals does not cause as much problems as the rampant stealing by humane societies and owners of "scamtuaries" under color of law.

Our worst dangerous dogs and our worst dangerous animals of other species kill fewer people each year than almost any other cause of death and thousands of times fewer than mistakes made by doctors. Even without improvements in the sense of responsibility of the average human, we do not have a significant problem there.

A really strong bout of the Black Plague would overwhelm our medical system in modernized countries such as the U.S.A. The common housecat saved us from the plagues that decimated Europe. They save billions of tons of food from rodents each year. Small predators are necessary to prevent rats and mice from destroying homes, crops, stored foods, and bird populations. This means that we risk human and animal lives when we "clean out" feral cat colonies.

It is impossible to underestimate AR

2010-09-05T19:46:00.000-07:00

I feel relieved. I thought for a minute that the Animal Liberation Front wasn't going to say something ignorant about the shooter at Silver Spring Maryland, who took the violence of the animal rights movement to a slightly higher level not far from where Alex Pacheco lied to get Edward Taub in trouble with the police, the ASPCA, and Roger Caras.

Their headline: Environmental, Animal Activist James Jae Lee Executed by Police After Washington DC-Area Seige. I don't like linking to the ALF site and it's easy to find on Google.

I have been a pretty strong advocate against the death penalty and against tasering people who are handicapped by age whose crime is to talk back to crazy animal control people, but for crying out loud. They say "execute" like it's a bad thing when a crazy man is threatening a room full of hostages.

Even though Dr. Keith Ablow said on Fox News that the nameless idiot was "not a terrorist", come on. There are several organizations that have a vested interest in maintaining the illusion that in some way the animal liberation and environmental groups are not terrorists. That vested interest includes the trillions of dollars that will be spent in the yet to be announced "war to save the environment" that will be launched as a profitable substitute for the actions in Iraq and Afghanistan. The Chicago mob has been arranging for quite some time to control the bulk of those government funds, which will be no more carefully monitored than any other "superfund" or the AIDS billions that quietly disappeared. The thefts of all kinds of animals becomes much more understandable when you know that under the guise of "saving the environment" each animal will become a profit center worth millions, and the HSUS, the WWF, and others have banded together to create the Global Federation of Animal Sanctuaries.

In spite of the fact that they hired known and convicted terrorist John Goodwin to a very cushy job as a reward for his terrorist activities for the ALF, the HSUS wants us to believe that they are against terrorism. Yeah, right, Goodwin's terrorist activities are his qualifications for the job. They want us to believe that they are not a sponsor of terrorism. I can understand that. If I were sponsoring terrorism I would want people to believe that I wasn't.

They want people to believe and disbelieve at the same time. Obviously the HSUS has a connection with terrorism. When PETA helps out Rodney Coronado and even one of its founders has been caught in overt terrorist activities, it has a connection with terrorism. Then when we want to nail them against the wall, they somehow wriggle out of it with denials. Something's missing here. What stays our hand? Is there interference from a cabal that knows that it is going to profit tremendously from the war to save the environment?

The Inquisitions were designed not to get at a few old ladies who had some cats and dogs and valuable real estate although that was a profitable sideline. The real thrust was social control by terror. If anyone is going to kick, that's the time. It is hard on people to see sweet old ladies being burned in bonfires. This also inflames the usual town lowlifes. Whoever protested found themselves accused and burned also. These days they do you in with political correctness.

The AR movements and the environmental movements need the terrorists. The leaders can't own these things without them. Some of us relax and go to sleep again because we think that they're fighting to save wildlife and the environment. We give them a pass. Most of us have such a tyrannical conscience over alleged environmental destruction that we let them abuse us. We even pay our dominators and dominatrixes for the favor.

Terrorists should be taken out and shot and their sponsoring organizations should be disbanded and the leadership jail for life. It's a fine line to walk when you're a greasy sociopath from Chicago who needs the terrorists, who needs to curry their favor, and who needs them to singe people once in a while. You all know which sociopath I am talking about.

So they just keep playing the game. They reward and help the terrorists with one hand and deny and "renounce" violence with the other sides of their mouths. We sort of sit still confused if we haven't decided that yes, the animal rights cultists and the environmentalists have been violent since the 1970s and this is a shooting war. To me it's a shooting war if my home, my car, or my workplace has been bombed or set on fire. It's a lot more of a shooting war if one of theirs straps on a suicide bomb and takes hostages. I'm glad that the police put a bullet in James Lee. They need to do it a lot more often instead of sucking up to them.

Negative versus positive

2010-09-03T07:07:00.000-07:00

This is an issue that I've had and it's been building up inside me. The so-called humane people base their careers on the real criminality of just a very few people and the imagined criminality of the many.

Then they become hoarders and abusers themselves plus they beg and whine for and get the authority to "straighten things out" by attacking people as they see fit, which winds up with a lot of innocent people being mauled by their local law enforcement and a lot of animals being killed and given up to the theft rings.

That is the result of negativity. I've mentioned this here several times in the past two or three years. I'm convinced that all attempts at a humane system should be positive and constructive. What we have depends on killing perfectly healthy animals to get them away from "inhumane" treatment.

Negativity is like that. By its nature it cannot be handled responsibly. They get it upside down and see it as other people being unable to raise animals responsibly but since they are wearing negative-colored glasses they can't see it in any other light or lack of light. "So mad I can't see straight" is a common phrase. If you can't see straight, how do you fix things? You don't. You just make them worse.

If the world suffered a catastrophic blow?

2010-09-02T19:04:00.001-07:00

Could the vegans, AR nuts, and environmentalists survive if the world were struck a catastrophic blow, such as an asteroid strike or a supervolcano explosion?

Most likely we would have to kill or convert most of them if we wanted to survive. They take advantage of our complacency and sense of security to put in all their little "measures" and their hurts, and to continually reduce our standard of living and the value of our lives. I would rather not have to have the world reduced to a smoking ruin before I woke up to this. An ounce of prevention could save the human race, so please stop these people.

One of them just took a few shots at some human beings. I would just as soon forget his name. Its name. I'm glad that it's dead. I've read its manifesto and its a retard.

People who hate humanity are this sick. I guess we brush them off and don't think about it but now we have a good reason to stop and think. They will use singular examples of bad dog breeders, if they can pretend that one exists and make us believe it, to tar all dog breeders with an ugly brush, but no matter how many times they blow up houses and cars and drive people out of business with terrorist acts, too few people seem to wake up and smell the coffee. Did one of them actually have to shoot a person? Arson and bombs aren't enough? As usual, is someone effing kidding me?

You go to the Animal Liberation Front's website and click on "Press Office" and you can see that they have constantly been congratulating people who commit acts of arson which risk human deaths and should be considered death threats. I'm surprised that they have the wisdom to speak not one fucking word about this incident. It's a good time to remind people that John Goodwin of the HSUS has said that he was ecstatic when a family was run out of their home by an ALF arson. How many people here know that Ira Einhorn of "Earth Day" fame killed his girlfriend and kept the body in a trunk in his apartment? There is the constant clamor that we must curtail human reproduction and human activities, by deadly means if deemed necessary, deemed by whom I don't know.

Could this be the beginning of a wave of attacks? Now here we have a dilemma. No one on the side of the human beings wants to go around killing people for being environmentalists. They constantly attack our lifestyles, our freedoms, what we love, the way that we think, and our diets, and they constantly find ways to hurt us and actually compromise our lives. Yet somehow the "butcher of Baghdad" was more important although we have problems to take care of here at home, and our people went over there and killed a lot of people in the name of freedom. In the name of everyone's freedoms but those of Americans? And the freedoms of Americans have been labeled as "too dangerous" and thus we just give them away to the worst groups that exist in this day and age, groups that have murdered millions of perfectly good animals just to get them away from the people who love them?

They want to say that their calls for mass human genocide are "in the abstract" but the longer it remains "in the abstract" the more it seems to become set to become a reality, all at once, thousands of these people with guns charging into legal businesses, rather like a puppy mill raid but firing the guns as they go, like they did in the raid of Terry Cullen's business, killing two dogs. This is so very close to being the end result of a planned military buildup.

Rambling on: Pieces of our souls are held hostage when they take our animals. New York and Chicago are reaching a peak of keeping thousands of dogs in durance vile, as hostages, holding pieces of our souls in evil conditions, making them suffer long painful deaths. They lead the nation in stealing animals. Cook County (Chicago) deputies actually went out of jurisdiction to steal one woman's dogs. They have a hoard that they have stolen and the HSUS's projections about hoarding actually tell their own story, that they hoard on purpose, by stealing, in order to have an evil effect on humanity. Do not ever underestimate the effect of psychological warfare. They can use the animals to send messages of hope or they can send messages of despondency that paralyze us. The only defense is to stand up for ourselves, to think for ourselves.

And I was talking about ARs and environmentalists wanting us dead and shooting at us and setting our property on fire? Killing our animals is the same thing. The ALF takes credit for arsons, literally saying that they take credit for arsons. It's a small step to deliberate killings and if they haven't killed anyone yet it's dumb luck. There is that "Negotiation is Over" website. They are very open about advocating violence against persons. One Walter Bond complains about his likely fictional experience at a slaughterhouse. He likes to set things on fire so he just might be a turd.

They like to pretend that even before September 1, 2010, they didn't fire the first shot, but a lot of legal businesses have been destroyed by them, so it's a little bit vague, and a lot of people lead lives that were diminished by them. I don't know how many suicides their actions inspired. They talk like they're badasses until something comes along that can really land them in hot water, then they're talking chickenshit. All arson fires are a death threat. One fireman a few years ago in Bellevue Nebraska was killed by a ceiling collapse after the fire was out and that's how dangerous it is. When Walter Bond fails, through no virtue of his own, to kill anyone with his criminal use of fire, he's an ALF darling. Notice that the ALF, PETA, and the HSUS are saying "not one fucking word" on their sites and they don't know the Anonymous Turd. Say what? A legal business is burned and they give support to the terrorist. They pretend that the AR groups haven't crossed the line by disowning one of their own turds.

That's how people like that maintain an unblemished record. They just rewrite history the way they want it to look. If Anonymous had set a building on fire he would be their hero. Same turd, same shit, just juggle the rhetoric a little. And they want like anything to pretend that this never was a shooting war. This is a very good time for them to pretend that they are nonviolent and that this has never been a shooting war. Yet PETA has continually given aid and comfort to terrorists, including the one who screwed Edward Taub over at Silver Spring Maryland, ironically. (Spring is singular, no "s" at the end.) The HSUS gave at least one terrorist a cushy job, an action that speaks louder than lying disclaimers. The ALF does nothing but encouraging terrorism.

He Whose Name Shall be Written in Fecal Matter and Urinated On is more one of their babies than they are themselves.

But I've got to ask you all, whoever read down this far. We would "get" to shoot real bullets at them if any eco-terrorist or animal rights group gave vocal support to the shooter at the Discovery Channel, right? And all they have to do is keep their damn mouths shut for once? They can just suspend us that way? Think long and hard about that. The same thing keeps a lot of us from tearing them new ones in the legislative arena.

I've got an answer

2010-09-02T17:06:00.000-07:00

Why would I want an exotic?

In my case, I have been kissed and touched by big cats and they are wonderful. They heal my spirit. They make me feel warm and good all over.

Every home that has a living animal is, obviously, one more viable habitat for that animal.

I don't believe the argument that private breeding encourages poaching. Who is going to go for an illegal supply when there is a legal supply that is much easier to obtain and runs no risks of being put in jail? That is one of the big lies of conservation.

Unlike SOME people I respect the need that people have to be recognized for something. I hear tell that it is a fair accomplishment to grow a healthy tiger from a cub.

Some people find an affinity for a particular beast and find that they have never been so much in love in their life. Being in love is always a desirable state.

Having pets helps us live longer.

What mistake did I make?

I allowed an animal rights twit to treat this as an open question, open for discussion with a Luddite who hates humanity and wants a lot of us to die, or even to never have existed.

The right answer is that I as an adult citizen decided that I wanted the animal. It was my decision and it is not subject to their review or approval or disapproval.

An Explanation

2010-08-31T14:45:00.000-07:00

If someone wants to dismiss me as a nutjob, so be it. People used to shout "faggot" and "pussy" at me and then knock me to the ground and kick and stomp on me, so if you want to call me a nutjob, you're a piker.

Any time someone points the finger at someone else I want to tear that finger off and stomp on it. Why? One scene that I saw in a few different movies was the angry mob gathering around someone who was peculiar. Then some woman, and in two or three different movies it always seemed to be the same actress, would pull a face, point a finger, and shout something like "Witch!" then the mob would storm their victim and pull him or her to pieces or throw them on a fire or something. This is a spectacle that is also arranged periodically in real life, to this day, as the public stoning, for example, of a girl who was raped by her male relatives, who complained about it to the police, then was convicted of adultery because after all she confessed to having sex with them.

The public stoning, public hanging, the dependency on ganging up on someone and showing his severed head around, these are anathema to me personally. They are indications that this society is going retrograde. Since around 1970 I have seen the signs of decreasing scientific literacy and competency, and similar problems with social skills. People work for less money and pay higher rent and utility bills. We have a lot fewer freedoms. The alleged misconduct of one person is used by our so-called legislators as an excuse to punish everyone who can be classed with that person, and we can't fight that by gang-beating someone who we identify as an offender because that won't stop the real ones and it definitely won't stop the ones that are put-up deals.

The evil ones, the animal liberation people who hate humanity and want us to die, depend on doing just this thing and it is easy to take away from them if we put away our desire to "go after" alleged animal abusers. I could give a crap what happens to animal abusers but it is not worth losing essentially everything that millions of people live for.

Think about that. People live for their animals. What kind of people live for their animals? Good people who do not deserve to be punished for the misdeeds of others who they cannot control in any way, shape or form. If the machinations of a few sociopaths end up punishing all of us severely, in the form of taking ruthless advantage of people who cannot afford decent attorneys, and we are reduced to shouting "Witch!" at a few animal abusers and perverts and burning them in a woodpile, we might as well not even bother to take out our anger. It's too little and too late. Every one of us who wants to attend that party would be a lot better off going home and cracking a few books, maybe some on science, on sociology and psychology, and some Chomsky for sure.

Not even the exercise of taking the most evil person on Earth, torturing him, watching his body being slowly eaten away by acid, poking him with icepicks, hearing his screams, would be better than that. Not even turning Iraq, Iran, and Afghanistan into glowing craters will do your hearts as much good. Grow up, kiss your dog, open a book, and become a citizen again.

Landowners Killing Endangered Animals

2010-08-25T09:54:00.000-07:00

On a recent episode of "The Mentalist" Patrick Jane got a man to admit to killing turkey vultures that were on his property because the endangered species laws would have prevented him from profiting from the oil sands that were buried there.

How could I possibly have sympathy for someone who would shoot, shovel, and shut up so that he and his family will have money for the rest of their lives? Maybe I've read too much Charles Dickens. Maybe I have a little too much sympathy for people whose lives have been ruined when jobs were sent overseas and the Department of Labor came up with tricky-dicky excuses for stealing their unemployment payments, including the young man who died in Kansas City in the fall of 2008 because he couldn't pay his utilities.

Wanting to be extremely wealthy is a logical and pragmatic extension of the desire to protect and nurture one's own family. A man in India shoots a tiger and lugs the carcass to a dealer, and if he doesn't get shot and does get paid, his family might eat for a couple of years on the tiny amount of money he gets. It's his family that he does it for. At the same time the law would force him to let the tiger walk unmolested through his village even though that is a far greater risk to human life than a tiger on a leash or in a cage.

Just one of the ways that an animal protection law can backfire is that if a citizen does his legal duty and reports that an endangered bird is living on his property, he may lose a lot of money because in spite of the law, they will take his land for public use without just compensation. So instead of reaching some kind of compromise where maybe the birds wind up moving, perhaps to an oil field that is being pumped but is fairly inactive, he either shoots, shovels, and shuts up, or accepts the fact that his family will not financially benefit from the land that he pays taxes on.

I'm not going to hold this against him. Everyone wants to make a small sacrifice to help the animals, and that definitely includes me. There is no need to sacrifice your family, your society, your technology, or your mind in order to help the animals. You can see how the people who gave up their minds behave. They would kill a man to save the turkey vultures. They would also starve him and prevent him from being able to pay his family's medical bills. That's what they really mean when they screech at anyone who makes money.

And on the other hand even a dirty, nasty, ratty dump of a place can save more precious lives than all of the refinement and high standards of an AZA zoo or a World Wildlife Fund project, neither of which have significantly helped any species. It's kind of inevitable because looking at a smattering of history there is a strong tendency to pretty but totally unproductive projects like the Necropolis. So if I were given a choice between a new 100 million dollar facility that looks really good or one that "mills" out the tiger cubs, I'm buying into the mill with all of its alleged mess and squalor because the mill will actually produce. The other choice is a high priced mausoleum whose exhibits are alive now but will not pass on their genes.

Disappointment in Ohio

2010-07-19T06:59:00.000-07:00

The HSUS was set to lose their ballot initiative by a narrow margin. The Farm Bureau, the Livestock Care Standards Board, and Governor Ted Strickland had to act quickly to snatch defeat from the slavering jaws of victory on behalf of farmers. They handed the HSUS an unearned victory and now the Farm Bureau is trying to explain it away.

The governor plans to ask or order the Ohio Department of Agriculture to set fees for licensing exotic animal possession. The public is apparently not going to be asked for its input on this in any meaningful way. Licensing fees can make it impossible for a pet owner to own a pet if the state decides to raise those fees too high. This is one of the things that exotic animal owners have been fighting in the legislatures. This is an end run around the legislature. It could be very costly to set this one right. This is way too much of a victory for the carpetbaggers from the HSUS.

These people do not own Ohio or its citizens. They have no right to turn the citizens or their pets over to the control of any pressure group. The pressure that the group exerts is just one of several good reasons not to do it. The HSUS's ideas are not just wrong enough that they have to be forced on people. They are designed to be forced on people. They are designed to persuade those who have a little bit of power to jerk other people around.

If this had been such a good idea, and their best explanations for it are that they were trying a squirrely maneuver, it could have been an open meeting, something that Wayne Pacelle hates. The HSUS has been in more than one secret meeting with California legislatures that violated California law. I've got some news for the Ohio Farm Bureau, too. God will not strike them dead with a bolt of lightning if they do the research and find out what kind of criminal organization the HSUS is, then disseminate the information. I don't think that I've ever seen any evidence that the agricultural "authorities" in Ohio have ever had a bad word to say about the HSUS, which they could if they just looked around the net. They're afraid to try to change the "political climate" that they do so much handwringing about. Had they done the research would they have refused to sit down with the HSUS? I would like to think so.

The Ohio Farm Bureau either didn't bother to take one hour to research the HSUS or they just like it. I'm voting for the "they just like it" because they held a secret meeting and announced the results afterwards. This is the only thing that they could have done to ensure an HSUS victory of some kind in Ohio. They threw exotic animal owners under the bus. This to "protect the viability of Ohio agriculture? What about researching and getting the dirt on the HSUS and using that to protect the viability of Ohio agriculture? What about having the balls to stand up to the HSUS and announce to Ohio that they are going to protect the citizens of Ohio and Ohio agriculture from these fiends?

How Do We See Ourselves?

2010-07-18T18:17:00.001-07:00

If you judge humanity by its worst people, you see a mostly bad people. If you judge humanity by its best, you see mostly good people. There is a lot of overlap.

We've had two atrocity stories in the last week. In one a man forced his dog to die of starvation and thirst in the heat just a few feet away from water and food. I'm having trouble even believing this. It sounds like a hoax. Photographs can be hoaxed. In the other a man and a friend of his, probably drunk, shot a dog six times for "not settling down." How about pushing all of an animal lover's emotional buttons in one week? There's also the guy who got put away for a parole violation for associating with people who have sex with animals, and as we all know, as we've all been told a thousand times so that we cannot forget, sex between a human and an animal is a lot worse than killing the animal in a hotbox or shooting it six times, so the horror of this heatwave week has been capped off nicely.

I guess that we're supposed to judge an animal activist charity by its best people but the rest of humanity by the worst. If we blind ourselves to the misconduct of a charity to the point that we can't see it when they do wrong, and if we sensitize ourselves to what ordinary human beings do wrong to the point that we can't see the ones who do right, then we have a huge problem.

This is really convenient for the charity. If you put anyone anywhere who has any human decency on the payroll of, for example, the HSUS, and you occasionally hear that this human did something decent, they're golden, aren't they? We become subservient to them. Then we are all rotten little pieces of dirt who are lucky to occasionally be sprinkled with gold by the golden ones (sometimes we get showered with gold, just often enough to make it believable), and we regularly buy indulgences from people whose best qualifications for their jobs include a rotten attitude towards life and humanity, no conscience, no real compassion for humans or animals, and a lot of greed. Check out Martha Stout's "The Sociopath Next Door" for the type.

What does the HSUS tell us about the horrors that they hire, like John Goodwin who teaches college-age people to burn down their own society? Don't judge the HSUS by what Goodwin "used to do" and don't judge Goodwin by what Goodwin "used to do." Judge an ordinary human harshly and forever by something that he did when he was a teenager, or something that he thought of doing when he was a teenager, or something that someone said he did, or something that someone else did that he has no control over. It's all good. It's all profit.

One way to look at a "hoarder" is to understand that he or she has given up their life for the animals, which is exactly what animal activists want us to do. The persecution of hoarders is like the persecution of people who are overly pious and actually want to live a Christian lifestyle. We see both all the time. Even more, it's simply because the so-called hoarder really does care about the animals and keeps them going because the hoarder does what life does. He or she is a real part of the living world. The people who persecute them are something else.

Do we judge ourselves by the worst or the best? At work do I judge myself by the work that I had to leave behind for lack of time or by the way that I straightened things out and made an extra effort for the customers? Did I leave a mess for someone else to clean up or did I clean up more than half of the daily mess? At home do I judge myself for not putting away the dishes or do I judge myself for making sure that all the humans and animals were properly fed and for fixing the bathroom sink?

In the game of life the worst mistake is to let an adversary tally your score. Keep your own score. Give yourself the benefit of the doubt. Stop taking the blame for others and start giving yourself credit for the good that you do.

The Argument Least Likely to Win

2010-07-09T10:13:00.000-07:00

It seems like the argument that "we want our animals" is the least likely to win. There are few of us who are completely free of just a little bit of shame and guilt, just enough to believe that this argument is dead.

Maybe this is actually the best argument to use. If we argue that the HSUS or Humane Society doesn't have the facilities, that implies that it's OK if they have the facilities to take our animals to, or if they round up a volunteer and make temporary facilities. At those facilities a lot of animals have died and gotten pregnant, too.

The argument that we want our animals seems like a weak link. Don't they say to break a chain at its weakest link?

The entire substance of that link is the desire to own and use animals. It is a link in the chain whether we want to admit that to ourselves or not. It breaks first. It needs the most reinforcement. All of the reasons why we might want to run away from it are the reasons why we must cling to it. It's the first thing that they attack. We are as strong as our weakest link and we have only one option in regards to that link. It can't be replaced. It has to be made strong.

The Point System

2010-06-28T18:52:00.000-07:00

It's one of those things that we always know is there and it is usually not written about. There is a point system and a scorecard and it can be made into a computer program or just totted up on a "sacred board" if that's what you want to call it. If there is such a thing as a "sacred board" it's simply a way of depicting the progress of a business or a religion or a swindle.

People on the side of ownership rights have voluntarily deprived themselves of ways to score points. You know what I'm talking about when you read this, don't you? Our consciences often inspire us to continue to lose points in the game because we think that it is for the sake of the dogs, or the children, or a higher morality to give up those points. We get nothing back for that because trading in that currency allows the animal activists to keep score. They cheat.

Trading good money for marijuana or cocaine, alcohol, or the chance to win millions of dollars are ways to trade money to feel good. We trade money, personal autonomy which means control over our lives, our worldly goods, and our say about the care of our animals to feel good about ourselves. What we actually trade them for is permission to feel slightly better than slime mold and that permission is granted to us at great cost to ourselves while it costs them little. That's a basic principle of business.

If a point system is established, as in gin rummy, golf, Dungeons and Dragons, and those of us who are human can access and understand this point system, we have a much better chance of winning the game. This is like having a bank account that we have to spend money from. We obviously have to keep track of what goes into and comes out of the account and we have to be able to see the books. We have to know what is in the account to know whether we are adding money or taking money out.

Part of the morality of subservience is that the subservient never audit the leadership's books.

Among other things, the deceivers have persuaded us that every pet lion, tiger, alligator, snake, and other exotic animal is a liability. At best we lose more slowly, using their point system, a system that we don't understand or realize that it exists. If we do just one thing and regard each pet, exotic or domestic, as an asset, the way that the shelters and scamtuaries do, then we start with a whole lot of points, not quite as many as we had ten years ago, but a lot. If we think of them as liabilities it's a bit easier to pry them from our warm living hands.

If one part of your mind sees things as assets and another part sees the same things as liabilities, or you just plain see assets as liabilities, then you don't know what you're investing in and what you're going to get out of it. Misdirected altruism lets dishonest charities take advantage of people and when exercising that altruism we don't allow ourselves to see our own balance sheet. We even disdain the idea of a balance sheet. At that we still expect something back, which is permission to feel slightly better about ourselves, with our worse enemies deciding what constitutes "better." This leads to outrageous behavior on the part of people who are struggling for scraps of God's favor.

We see people who want to pet our animals or live with them as potential liabilities, also. Yes, that's a bit self-serving, but someone has to say it. They might be plants from animal rights groups. The threshold for the label of "animal abuser" is ridiculously low these days and it's easy to see the label and not the person even when you know this. Various dirty tricks, rumors, and even laws are designed to set up barriers between private menageries and the public. The people who got the laws passed exempted themselves from those laws, too. They took our assets away from us. They're stealing our customers, from any of us who breed and sell animals or who keep menageries and want to display them. It's easier when we don't see them as assets.

The solution is obviously to keep our own books and our own history, along with our own morality. Our pets are assets. Our friends are assets. Our dreams are assets, and we have a better morality than they do.

Animal Cruelty Kills Us (Revised)

2010-06-21T15:58:00.000-07:00

That's the trouble. Animal cruelty kills us. Have you thought about what that means? Someone else is cruel to an animal, we die inside. Accuse us of cruelty, we die inside. They use this thing as emotional button-pushing in books like The Lady and Her Tiger. It genuinely hurts us, a psychic injury that they can exploit.

The people who push the buttons live on and for animal cruelty. We see that they actually perform the deed, using their ill-gotten powers to cover it up. They live on the backs of the animals that are cruelly treated and on the backs of animals that they cruelly tear from the arms of people who love them. Finger-pointing literally transfers our power to them for them to use and we give it away and we give up potential friends and allies. The current crap about hoarding mentally prepares us to give up our friends and relatives.

Because they profit from it, the swindlers literally do not consider factual innocence to be proof that any of us should be exempt from penalties that they assess against us. They don't consider our good works to be an exemption. Good works actually incense them as we've seen proven by their attacks against breeders and well-run menageries. The incensing takes the form of stimulating their greed for our property and money. (They see value that can be stolen.)

When animal cruelty kills us it enriches them. When animal cruelty kills us it makes us vulnerable to manipulations by those who live on and for animal cruelty. We let them do what they want because we are weakened by the way that animal cruelty "kills" us. When they see someone who does not allow himself to be vulnerable like that they descend upon him, accuse him of being an "animal abuser" and do what they can to make him miserable, to mentally break him. This sometimes gets physical. This has obviously never happened to me (joke). They have to break that one person because he is the tiger who guards the pass such that a thousand deer cannot cross, or maybe the cat who guards the mouse-hole so that a thousand vermin cannot get in. When others follow his example the exploiters become powerless.

When we are kind and caring owners, we do not deserve to be vulnerable to verbal attacks by the usual suspects who act like jerks and expect us to give them goods and services as a reward. We deserve to be able to hold up our kindness, our caring, and our innocence as a shield against false accusations, malicious accusations, and exaggerated claims based on a twisted morality. We also deserve to keep these as the basis of what we do with animals. We have earned it. We must defend our minds and our properties from these swindlers.

Letting go of things too easily

2010-06-19T22:32:00.001-07:00

I've sometimes accused people of being "AR Lite" and a lot of times the problem isn't that we're "AR Lite." We're "Freedom Lite." We give over a little bit of our freedom for a "good reason." The only people who suggest "good reasons" are hostile to the cause of freedom and in fact they are hostile to humanity's eating, drinking, excreting, and living. The vine that a fruit comes from does not get more poisonous than that.

"Freedom Lite" means that we want freedom for everyone except drug users, perverts, hoarders, and people who cut you off in traffic and talk in the movies. We all have "good reasons" why a marijuana user can't be allowed to stock groceries at Walmart, why anyone who ever had sex for any reason other than procreation must not be allowed near any civilized company, and why smokers must endanger their health by smoking outside in below zero weather. Breeders are necessary for the perpetuation of any non-human species that has trouble surviving in what's left of the wild, and guess what. We have "good reasons" why anyone who breeds animals outside of a carefully managed program is "irresponsible" at the same time that the AZA wants to manage their "generic" tigers to extinction and their program is too complicated to allow for breeding of the animals that they do value.

"Freedom Lite" also means that we easily cave in to restrictions on our freedom for something like the Endangered Species Act, which is much more punishing for breeders than poachers. An act that has caused a lot more harm than good, if we can't make more than a faint protest against this act, we need to pull it together here. Just one of the ideas that I like is the idea that if anything, government should subsidize the breeding of endangered animals, and forget "genetic purity." Most likely the buffalo have benefited from being crossbred with the common cow, proves they're the same species anyway. It would be like being forced to only have purebred dogs, and in fact the AR people are yanking us both directions. They say no purebred dogs and only purebred big cats. We know what's up with that. They hate us. They say so in their rantings.

If we want to ask good and decent people for anything, we have to ask for something that has substance. "Freedom" is a good thing to ask for, and put something behind it. It's better to be more explicit, as in "we want the freedom to breed tigers, lions, leopards, ocelots, cheetahs, and other exotic animals." Then when our Congress people sent back boilerplate, write them again and again and again. We will be a lot better able to pull together when we all know that we are pulling for the same thing, not just for a privileged few to have essentially the same thing they would have without a big tea party.

How important are we to ourselves? By use of shame, shame that we haven't earned but is like a magical tarball that some people seem to be able to paste on our souls, a lot of us have become convinced that what we want is not important. At the same time the same people tell us what we should want. Huh? They tell us that our animals have rights that matter more than our own then they come and take those animals away and kill them, using excuses and "good reasons." Gee, I think I'll order a bunch of select literature from the library, including Aristotle's Rhetoric and Noam Chomsky's "Manufacturing Consent" and see if I can figure out the message. Gentlemen, we are saved, a linguist has arrived.

Even this crap about "hoarders" is geared to make a lot of us more eager to part with our worldly treasures. We've got a modern bonfire of the vanities. So while they sell the idea of rescuing a lot of animals and keeping them in comfort for the rest of their lives, they have a label and a power and limits to our freedom and somehow anyone who doesn't work for the HSUS becomes a "hoarder" and local sheriffs can treat them the way that they do suspected pedophiles, or worse.

I know it's discouraging. The only way that we can feel better is to work with each other, comfort and console each other, and let each other be who we are.

To a Generic Animal Rights Twit:

2010-06-04T05:25:00.000-07:00

When you have a problem, you seem to be unable to stay away from inflammatory and disrespectful rhetoric which tests the bounds of civility. This throws your alleged empathy for the animals in people's faces and you seem to believe that you have license to hurt people if they don't measure up to what you think of as standards, using that "empathy" as an excuse.

My caring is genuine and it is a real part of me, deserving of respect. I look at people funny when they declare that I must not care if I do not do things as they believe that I should. If I go along with them then they have control, as if they own my animals and I do not. I would not say that they actually have any standards outside of "he's always wrong." The argument shifts to keep whoever they target in the wrong. They just move the goalposts and the crosshairs. You're still targeted.

Were I to make no concessions to practicality I would be a poor caretaker of animals. If I decide that I can take care of four animals and I do not intervene to keep a fifth from dying because I am conserving resources to take care of the four that I already have, I don't want to hear it. If I put their needs ahead of my own too much that can become abusive of myself and frankly, those people who ask me to do so hate me and want me dead. If I have five animals and I am overextended, if I kill one and eat it (or any variation thereof) that is because I have to. Human needs and appetites have validity and are at least as valid of those of non-humans. I will not keep four animals that I do not want just to prevent myself from receiving verbal abuse from any given person. That would also be a bad reason to keep the animals. It is more respectable to keep them to for my personal satisfaction than it is to keep them to feed the political monster that "humane" has become or to avoid criticisms from people who usually have less than no standing in my life. This would include but not be limited to fighting them for entertainment, and it is through no virtue of yours that I detest animal fighting and will avoid it.

Because I am extending myself to help maintain the lives of several other creatures, oh yes it does mean that I have rights to what I want and need. I have earned a greater right through my work, exactly the way that a worker earns wages. I rarely push the "they're socialists" button but animal rights twits seem to universally hate the capable wage-earner who earns their money by actually working for it. This goes hand in hand with hating the meaning that another human gains from his or her life, the intangible profit. Threatening people into "good" behavior takes away that meaning. It robs them of that meaning and gives it to those who are making the threats. There is no meaning to an act of kindness to an animal if I do it because someone threatened me. Taking that meaning away from me takes away one good reason that I have to be kind to animals.

The one valid measure of whether I should keep an animal is if I want that animal or have a use for it. I do not alter my choices to try to gain left or right-handed compliments from you. What you "find disturbing" is a rhetorical device. Perhaps you need more experience in the real world. Perhaps you just need to shut up.

A Response I Left On Petlaw:

2010-06-01T08:51:00.000-07:00

(This was a reply to a post on Petlaw)

The same people advocate laws to prohibit bark softening. Bark softening causes a tiny bit of damage to a very small piece of tissue and is pretty much non-invasive. Early spay/neuter causes significant damage to the development of a dog and it's not just the skeleton. Then they say that it doesn't matter, you should spay and neuter anyway. If I wanted to physically damage a dog for my convenience or because of my belief system, without their prior approval, they would tell me that I should be taken out and shot. Ear cropping and tail docking is much less damaging than spaying or neutering and they condemn those practices. It's always about getting over on people.

They want us to be "bleeding hearts" about what they want and actually, leaving the animals intact should be one of those things that a "bleeding heart" is reluctant to do because it "denatures" the animal. That's sure changed not that they're talking about using poisons to sterilize wild animals so that there "won't be any killing." Why do I support killing and believe that "no kill" is a McGuffin? It's because nature's model is to produce many species individuals. Most of them become food for other animals. Humans have been part of that for longer than many of these "ecosystems" have existed.

I like the fact that the killing of pets is way less than five percent now. At worst it was never as often as would occur in unaided nature. However, when do they have the most power over us? When we want to "stop the killing." We have to think very hard before we try to "stop the killing." We can easily wind up with deer populations that disappear altogether as whackos surreptitiously dope them with contraceptives. I could wind up being labeled AR myself if I voice what I think should be done with a laboratory that produces an oral contraceptive or sterilant that can be surreptitiously administered to animals. Let's just say that it should not be in operation. This stuff is likely not to be good for humans, either, and while the avian version might not hurt predatory birds directly, those birds need to eat.

Preventing a hundred births to try to prevent less than five premature deaths in shelters is not beneficial to a species. Doing this completely destroys the thesis that humans are supposed to give up a little in order to keep other species safe. Many of their other tenets also do this. I harp on pet tigers. That's giving a little to keep the species safe and we gain a lot. To me it is an unequivocal and massive benefit to exotics to be kept as pets.

Telling us that humans should not benefit from the use of animals is a way to turn humans off to using our resources to keep animals. It also jacks up the price so that instead of five to ten thousand dollars a year to keep a generic tiger it can cost ten to a hundred times as much, and someone gets that money. We don't know the people who make millions from animal care efforts, from hospitals, from local news outlets, or grocery stores, or anything, and they're pretty much in the gray. The bureaucracies of so-called cruelty prevention or humane societies are also pretty much in the gray.

I will say that we need to breed without being too sensitive to how many are sent to their final destination by shelters. The shelter people mess with us when we try to give the animals forever homes. They mess with us when we try to stop them from killing, using the deaths of the animals as extortion. Going along with their uninformed, unprofessional, and just plain cruel dictates causes us much worse problems, like all these illegal and wrongful takings of private property. The solutions are worse than the problems.

You know, people get the most wired and anxious about preventing a given problem for a reason. They're trying to get a non-result. They're trying to make something "not happen" and the vigilance and effort against that loss has to be extended forever or what they fear will happen. Working for a positive result, like a new tiger cub, has a clear endpoint. Working for a negative result invests a whole lot of effort, energy, and anger, and it always cuts too broad a swath, but when you set out to make a litter of puppies, your focus is tight, you only involve the people and resources that it takes to make a litter of puppies, and you only have to work on the one project instead of seeing that you have to change the whole world to get what you want. This is why I like making things a lot better than I like trying to stop other people's lives.

Risks and Sacrifices

2010-05-31T16:54:00.000-07:00

I would put a human at risk to save the lives of an animal species or even one animal, but what does "risk" even mean? Too often we truncate phrases like "unacceptable risk" or "irresponsible risk." Then they become zero-tolerance, one-drop-rule memes. They become the kind of meme that makes a child afraid to cross the street when there is no traffic coming, or even according to established safety rules.

Kim Carlton walked his pet tigers to the mall and let people pet them. I think that was a very good thing that taught people to be comfortable around animals that we live with. Were the children at risk? It was a good kind of risk. Saying that it's a bad risk is saying that the experience with the animals is worthless. Ask the autistic child who comes out of his shell to hug a cheetah what that experience is worth. It's worth a lot. That makes it a productive risk, a good risk. The sacrifice of a tiny bit of our safety is well worth it. This is just saying that we take a millionth of a chance that someone will die, or maybe a thousandth of a millionth of a chance, to live an extraordinarily good moment.

The pursuit of life, liberty, and happiness are not just enumerated in the Constitution. They are in the body of the Constitution and they are the primary focus of the Constitution. This is the point by which I justify my next statements.

It is right to allow an animal to die to protect the rights of its owner. That got some knee-jerk emotional reactions, didn't it? But think about it. Our human rights are considered so important that even when protecting them in another nation many people can justify the use of death on a large scale. The case can be pretty vaguely connected to our own personal rights, but it would look like the defense of our own rights would be far more vigorous. I read about the child who was bitten in the face by a rescued dog. He pulled the dog off his daughter and the dog attacked her again. If I faced the same situation and were mentally prepared by having read his, the dog would die in my hands. I would twist its collar or I would crush its throat until it was thoroughly and unmistakably dead. Immediately. I am speaking as someone who has actually slept in the same bed with a dog the same day that it bit me, accidentally of course. I understand the difference between an accidental nip and tearing someone's face off. There are a few people out there who seem to need a little education in that area.

If we're not thinking clearly we do find ourselves killing the pet tiger just in case, although no pet tigers have ever broken loose and harmed someone off the property that they live on. Just like dogs they would be more likely to either stay away from people or make new friends and some of them are as easy to handle as dogs, not all but some, and the risk is very minimal. On the other hand, in a schizophrenic split, we might try to preserve the life of a dog that is actually in the midst of a deadly attack instead of killing it when we get the upper hand. In the case I mentioned, killing the dog would have prevented further injury to the girl. If we somehow "can't sacrifice the life of an animal" to protect a human, we are so very very sick. This is upside down, too, because the animal that actually causes harm might be protected over one that has never so much as scratched anyone.

Then we have confiscations of animals without due process of the law based on the idea that the animals might be unhealthy, might be dying or starving, might be about to die, and so on. So an inspector from the USDA can just write up a confiscation order. What if the owner's own judgment and that of his veterinarian is that he's doing the right thing, perhaps feeding less because his animal has a long-term illness that requires the animal's movements to be restricted? I've seen a medically dependent human die because a "federal inspector" ordered an increase in that human's feedings, and I am willing to testify to this.

All that controversy matters little because the issue of due process under the law overrides. Yes, it trumps the risk that an animal will die. We're talking about animals that under other circumstances the exact same authorities order killed for no reason besides breed and species. See how it gets to be schizoid?

Due process of the law is necessary because with it we have a justice system. Without it, we don't. It is the weapon with which we defend our rights. We are not only allowed but obligated to protect our human rights from any agency, governmental or otherwise. It is a higher obligation than saving the life of an animal. Giving up our right to ownership, voluntarily, on a case by case basis, without coercion, exercises our right to make our own choices, so that's OK, but those who coerce should be read the Riot Act. We should also demand money.

It should be all too easy. Roy Cooper's tigers should only have been taken, if then, after he had his day in court without a rush to judgment and their lives should have been left at what little risk there was in order to preserve his human rights. The person who violated his rights should have to be an assistant manager at a fast food restaurant for five years, or better yet, have to perform manual labor on a cattle farm. Too many other people have experienced arbitrary confiscations and this contradictory use of concepts, practices that nullify, in real terms, the very existence of the law and the justice system.

Way too much has been sacrificed of our justice system and of essential due process using the alleged safety of animals as an excuse. Even the lives of animals have been sacrificed, and their safety is in question when the number of homes available for those animals keeps shrinking. Humans can all sacrifice a little bit of our safety to give homes or allow homes to exist, to respect the rights of people who want to keep those animals, and it's a very tiny bit, and at the same time we are preserving our own rights in general, which are worth more than the lives of the tigers or dogs or whatever.

Many of us humans consistently use our rights to serve the needs of animals, so it's a win for them and a win for us. That is a central theory of animal culture.

On the one hand...

2010-04-19T17:05:00.000-07:00

On the one hand, "they" demand that we alter our dogs to prevent the possibility of reproduction, a surgical mutilation that affects future health and skeletal development adversely and causes significant structural alteration. On the other hand, they denounce bark softening as a horrible mutilation, even though bark softening involves a little bit of cutting on very small pieces of tissue, which has very little effect on the dog as a whole. That's just yanking us back and forth.

On the one hand, "they" claim that owning exotic animals is dangerous. On the other hand they demand that people in developing nations with growing human populations allow tigers and lions to run around as nuisance animals with no protection for the humans.

In reference to the previous paragraph, another "one hand, other hand": They complain that humans destroy habitat then they work to deny habitat that humans freely offer to the animals.

On the one hand, they say that we must "adopt." Then they dictate how many we can keep, which also has the effect of reducing the number of homes for animals.

They tell us that the population of humans should be reduced by any means necessary. Then they warn us of the dangers of keeping animals as pets.

They want to write laws for us to obey but they disobey any laws that are inconvenient to them, such as open meetings laws, laws against arson and vandalism, and laws against cruelty to animals.

They demand that we "register" our animals yet the entire state of Missouri can tell you that they will use the registries as lists for shopping for targets.

They prosecute owners and breeders over the slightest nitpicky excuse and at the same time they pack dogs into crates that are too small for them and let them rot in their own shit in their "humane" shelters. They're real good at taking animals from any situation and making that situation worse.

They pick on people for having animal bodies in freezers. PETA keeps a walk-in freezer for animal bodies and that's a standard for shelters. That one is simply good hygiene.

The hypocrisy of the movement is most evident when they claim that they're about saving the animals and they destroy so many.

Pets Are Luxuries?

2010-04-13T09:31:00.000-07:00

You could just as well say that a feeling of well-being is not "necessary", nor are any of the proven benefits of keeping a pet. I could show you where the studies have been mentioned that prove that keeping at least one pet tremendously increases the chance that a human will survive having a heart attack. I could also show you stories about how people have died shortly after losing pets or after having them forcibly removed. When a pet helps us keep ourselves up, that is a necessity, not a luxury. A shortened lifespan and poorer health are the result of the loss of a necessity.

The propaganda also tells us to open our homes but they soft-peddle the fact that they're going to pick those homes to pieces.

I'm not real hip on the idea that poor people shouldn't have luxuries, either.

I am quite willing to risk my own life, however, to opt out of a system where the people who want me to bring them money and take their living liabilities off their hands want to control so much of what I do with what I am allegedly doing them a favor by taking. If it isn't my property when I pay for it or when it is given to me, I don't want it. One way or the other I'm investing time, energy, and money in something that is not mine. I am also inviting scrutiny by people who I do not know, have every reason to distrust, and ridiculous penalties and ridiculous harsh treatment if I am seen as somehow out of line.

So, I am going to make a point of either accepting a free puppy from an individual, or going to a breeder, or even just allow that if I have a heart attack my chances of long-term survival won't be as good. Any of those options are better.

I have learned that pets are a necessity for several reasons, including a longer lifespan. Unfortunately I have also learned that sometimes for the sake of one's own personal integrity it is better to do without some necessities.

The Social Dynamic

2010-03-21T18:08:00.000-07:00

The social dynamic is simple. The animal rights activists persuaded owners of traditional pets to fight each other and fight against owners of exotic animals. This took power away from owners of traditional pets, who seem to be blissfully unaware that this war has been fought back and forth for at least fifty years.

They got this "adopt, don't buy" garbage going in which they got way too many people to believe that dogs should not be bred, else the species will be irreparably harmed. In doing so they also gained a measure of control over the use of the term "extinction" that is frightening.

Some dog owners, perhaps a loud minority, were persuaded of a false and damaging paradigm. "Rescuing" somehow helps the species, but reproduction, the only way to replace animals that have died of old age, is now villified. There are people who believe that surgical sterilization saves lives when that actually prevents lives, kills their chances before they are even conceived. It's like death, only pre-emptive.

Attacking the owners of tigers and other exotics further wastes the power of traditional pet owners. Most owners of tigers and other exotics, except for a few bastards, are one hundred percent behind pet ownership rights, the right to own cats and dogs. As owners of exotics they have some pull. When they were forcibly disenfranchised they became much less able to help dog and cat owners.

I've lost count of the ways that owners of so-called traditional pets have hurt themselves at the behest of the animal rights activists. They got dog and cat owners to fight against ownership of big cats and primates, wasting the power that dog and cat owners have and empowering the activists. The punishment for this is being administered to dog and cat owners by the activists. When deaths of dogs in shelters hit an all-time low, the activists became more demanding, more dictatorial, more punitive, and more destructive. They are also corrupt.

It has happened before and the bad laws have been repealed before. Pennsylvania repealed most of their dog laws in 1965. Other states have done the same. Several states have laws against "animal control" in unincorporated areas because of previous bad experiences with activists, who can pop up out of nowhere, lie about how you're taking care of your dogs and horses, and make off with them.

The way in is the way out. We will not regain our right to choose our so-called traditional pets until people who want tigers, lions, chimpanzees, and so on regain their rights.

No One Under the Bus

2010-03-19T19:54:00.000-07:00

Owners of so-called traditional pets have always been able to count on owners of exotic animals to support the right to own those so-called traditional pets. Owners of exotics have not always received the same courtesy. A lot of owners of dogs and horses say "Why would you want to own a snake? Why would you want to own a tiger?" Don't you know those animals can kill you?!" As if horses and dogs can't and don't.

There is poetic justice in the fact that owners of traditional pets are suffering in the hands of the people that they have empowered to attack the owners of so-called exotics like lions and tigers. Some really infamous stories are coming from Florida about the mistreatment of dog breeders and owners by animal control there. Florida is a state where a small board is allowed to decide that people may no longer own their pet lions, snakes, or anything else, even though that board is commissioned to protect native wildlife, not people's pets.

Iowa is going through some really hard times for the same reason. The activists got the power when they went after exotic animal owners. Now they are the ones punishing people who own dogs and horses, which is what they intended to do in the first place. Anyone who has any familiarity with them at all knows about the Wayne Pacelle quotes like "one generation and out." There are other famous quotes from activists including the one about not wanting to see another dog or cat born and Bruce Friederich's wanting McDonald's to explode because they serve meat.

It is poetic justice. Poetic justice is the kind of retribution that people bring on themselves, arrange for themselves, and provide the power and money for. Owners of traditional pets in several places around the world have arranged the loss of their own rights by what they think of as a circuitous route. They gave up the opportunity to stop the activists. They took away a lot of the motivation that owners of foxes, bears, lions, and tigers had and practically all of their power. They stripped themselves of their allies and of a buffer between them and the activists. They took away from good people animals that were very special to them. In every way they made the actions of the activists appear to be justifiable. I am not sure why I still think that it's wrong, except that it's wrong to swindle people.

This is something that a lot of pet owners have done to themselves and still do to themselves. I just want everyone to go back to taking care of each other like we used to instead of this crap.

Someone Pushes Some Emotional Buttons

2010-01-29T22:37:00.002-08:00

And then it becomes verboten to say bad things about the death of Daniel Shaull, who set himself on fire and then tried to use his flaming body to set fire to a business, Nicholas Ungar Furs.

Someone actually asked me to "prove it" about, I guess, a statement that I made that a lot of people could have died or that he intended to catch the business on fire when he attempted to run inside, or maybe I was supposed to prove that he attempted to go through a locked door. I don't know why.

Fascinating is how many newspapers shut down the comments on this case. What, does not every terrorist have family? The people who own the businesses that the animal rights activists destroy, don't they have family? What about the people who might have been seriously injured or died in that attack?

Victoria Taft says that the demonstrators egged Shaull on to do this. I would like to see more evidence but I'm not skeptical. If he was not "political" and not "religious" like his father says, how did it occur to him to do this? Someone had to put him up to it. I think that a very careful investigation needs to be made here. A local businessman said that Shaull had protested at the store "regularly" which implies having been in Portland more than the five days that his father claimed. There should also be some witnesses who saw who egged him on and who provided the gasoline and matches.

If you read "Free the Animals!" you can learn that for over thirty years there have been training camps for animal rights terrorists. They learn to form terrorist cells and conduct disciplined attacks against targeted installations like mink farms, a Bureau of Land Management horse barn, slaughterhouses (they burned two slaughterhouses that processed horses) and medical researchers. They demonize their targets, often lying, then go after them with fire, vandalism, and animal releases that often result in dead animals. Their more respectable fronts include by now almost countless "SPCAs" and "humane societies" that prey on anyone who has a breeding or rescue and lie about them to get them into trouble.

Are the legislators who pass laws that are pushed by the animal rights activists any better than the activists themselves? When they passed the laws against exotic animals they were serving the same animal rights terrorists. When they passed the "puppy mill" bills they were doing the same thing. I would guess that about 95 percent of Americans are not sympathetic animal rights terrorists and are not being served by what amounts to morality laws that come from extremists who would bait a man into killing himself to protest against animal use. We have to understand that any time that we support part of the animal rights agenda by "regulating" animal use the way that they want, we strengthen their entire agenda: No meat, no fur, no leather, no pets, no nothing.

Unfortunately some major newspapers seem to have clamped down on news and opinions about this, but the fact is that we have to get totally sick of this sometime. Why not when someone dies doing the same thing that has been so destructive to everyone in the animal businesses? I don't know that Daniel Shaull was entirely an innocent. He did in fact set himself on fire and try to burn down a business, like a suicide bomber, and he had enough of his faculties to travel around the U.S. on a bus, find employment as a "youth counselor" at least until they decided his screws were too loose, then find this store in a strange city.

I would have to say that someone might get burned for not cooperating with the AR terrorists. It looks like if you do cooperate with them you will, sooner or later, get burned a lot worse.

So a Terrorist Runs Into a Locked Door...

2010-01-28T11:55:00.000-08:00

http://www.oregonlive.com/news/index.ssf/2010/01/father_of_man_who_set_himself.html or http://tinyurl.com/yl6dz6w

Daniel Shaull left Dodge City for Oregon five days ago. He somehow had the money to take a bus from Dodge City, Kansas to Portland, Oregon, after he had called his family for assistance because he was broke. He attacked a very specific store that had been the site of animal rights demonstrations before. He set himself on fire and would have set the store on fire had he not run into a locked door. Mentally ill or not, there is both purposeful behavior which requires a good amount of mental effort and the possibility of a third party providing him with the money and the address to go to. At the end he was a suicide (fire) bomber, the first one I've heard of in the United States.

It is distasteful to attack the mentally ill dead, but the fact is that he tried to set someone's store on fire. This is a heinous crime without counting the number of firefighters who would have been put at risk. I remember when a firefighter died in Omaha because an acoustical ceiling collapsed from the weight of the water that had been poured into the building, crushing him to death. Like I have to explain to anyone that firefighters risk death every time that they put out a fire.

Terrorist acts deserve contempt and ridicule. It's politically correct to withhold some of that from a person who committed such an act when he seems to be mentally compromised, but he attempted a terrorist act. He targeted a store that was 1800 miles from where he had been living on the streets, and rode a bus those 1800 miles (plus all the transfers and roaming around). How did he even find the place?

The article doesn't say what kind of mental problems the man had.

If a somewhat mentally ill person robs a convenience store at gunpoint I have no sympathy for him if someone pots him on the spot. Daniel Shaull had the mental faculties to call for money, collect it from wherever (if you've done it you know that this task requires mental faculties), and conduct himself unaided from Dodge City, Kansas to Portland, Oregon. He was probably sane enough to assist in his own defense.

My conclusion is that this was a terrorist act conducted by a person who was sane enough to be held responsible for his own actions. It's a tragedy for his family, yes, but he did commit a terrorist act. He was as able as any of us to tell right from wrong.

Also, many citizens have suffered arson attacks, thefts, property destruction, deaths of their animals, and death threats against humans. Being politically correct in this case and "making allowances" or "having sympathy for the family" dodges the question of just how much contempt to have for a domestic terrorist. We're all sick of it. I am really disgusted with the idea that I might be denied a forum to express my contempt for these acts. The one terrorist who acts on behalf of the animal rights groups, we should be nice to because he's dead and mentally ill. No sir, not this time.

The best weapon against terror attacks is utter and complete contempt of the attack, the attacker, and particularly the ideas and organizations behind the attacks. I have mentioned before, also, that the terrorists just get worse when they get anything. In spite of the misdirection I'm pretty sure that the same people who got the bad laws passed in Oregon are somehow behind this.

Daniel Shaull is outside the pale, totally undeserving of sympathy, and yes it's funny that after all that effort, after all of the windup, our would-be suicide (fire)bomber runs into a locked door. The act deserves no more respect than that. I can't believe that anyone's heart bleeds for him.

Half-assed Support

2010-01-23T07:09:00.000-08:00

Support groups just aren't what they used to be. I suppose that every new social movement, revolutionary or reactionary, thinks that it can reinvent the rules.

The first rule of a support group is that you don't point fingers at each other and make accusations. Maybe it being the first rule is why it is the first rule that is always broken. It's sort of like thinking that your car doesn't need fuel or energy to get you where you are going. At least with a car there is a visible difference between going somewhere and going nowhere.

Some have an arbitrary notion of what constitutes "responsibility" coupled with the idea that a person shouldn't be part of the group if they are not "responsible." One or two who are reading this know which argument inspired this blog entry. It is predictable that someone in the crowd is going to try to attain dominance using this arbitrary notion.

Now we have people who oppose ownership rights and use the idea of human safety in bad faith. A lot of these people do not care if we humans live or die and would launch lethal viruses if they were sure that they were immune. The environmental movement and the humane movement have become bent on the destruction of at least part of the human race and a lot of them want it all gone, all of our technology, all of us, everything, and they really mean it. The leaders just want to be billionaires. They are the ones who shout "safety!" when someone wants a tiger.

A lot of people think that they are for ownership rights but they carry the same message to legislatures: Do something about people who keep tigers in backyards and apartments. Do something about irresponsible people who let their pet tigers touch other humans. Do something about people who keep dangerous pets. And by the way, let us have the right to own tigers and sell photos of people handling tiger cubs.

It's no wonder if legislators don't know who we are. Even if the owner of a menagerie or zoo is not AR, they believe that a monopoly on the business in their area could increase sales. I guess it doesn't matter much to them that the people who they need most to help them actually run the business are the ones who are least likely to be tolerant of abuse. Those who are still attracted to working near tigers when they can't touch them, well, what do you think you're going to get? People who sneak touches and who are eventually just going to jump in the cage with an animal that isn't being handled. Those who are a little less obsessive and think it through stay away from the menagerie that won't allow touching. Smarter people, saner people, won't go there. You also have people who don't give two pennies about the animal and it's just a job for them. If I had to work in a no-contact facility and couldn't wash dishes or haul trash instead I'd rather just not give a crap.

People who say that they love animals and say don't touch them can't be entirely sane unless they are saying that for personal gain. At least when they do it for gain it makes some kind of sense.

It's half-ass support when they want to stop a ban law that will adversely affect their own businesses but they want that same law to stop everyone who they think of as "irresponsible." There is little worse than this AR-lite kind of business because AR-lite is the major source of credibility for the animal rights activists. It's how their ideas get into the mainstream. It is also trying to stop a train by pushing the same direction that your opponents are pushing.

It gets where I want to tell them to shove their business up, well, half their asses.

The Fight Against Animal Abuse Will Kill Us

2009-12-29T05:57:00.000-08:00

It's intended to kill us. It's not just intended to end or tax the use of animals. It is intended to kill human society, to end the modern era, and to kill off a lot of humans.

The "Voluntary Human Extinction Movement" or "VeHeMent" is just one of several who do not have the grace to immediately kill themselves as they recommend that the human race commit suicide. To them I say that I want to live my life even at the expense of the planet. It only makes sense to continue what evolution has led up to, what the planet seems to have willingly given itself to creating, which is humanity.

PETA and the HSUS sell the mass extinction of humans and human-owned animals to its followers, even to the grandmothers who send them $25 a year. They've soft-peddled that lately because they know that a smoking gun can derail their entire program. They look on the surface as if they are succeeding more and more but the ice is getting thinner under them.

Somehow they have us thinking that it's "just" the meat industry. Ladies and gentlemen, our brains run on meat. It takes cholesterol to grow a brain. Even the historical vegetarians in India use milk because cholesterol is a necessity. It's also because the original "don't eat cows" edict was for the purpose of preserving the use of cows for food.

Maybe some of us have noticed that animal owners have trouble tolerating each other, even within a class. Any time in any social setting when someone brings up "issues" there is some kind of fight, anywhere from a low-key verbal conflict to fist-fights and shooting.

Tolerance is a matter of survival. Learn it or die. A mind can kill the body that it possesses by intolerance, by the "Oh my God I'm so allergic to cat dander" reaction that often means that the reactor is a passive-aggressive whiny controlling brat. At one time this was well-known, that allergies are often psycho-somatic and can be created or eliminated by psychological means. The same thing can happen to a human population and the way it works is much more clear. People start destroying each other, directly or by proxy, over any kind of issue. It's generally easier to see that the issue is irrational when we can see it from the outside. Someone might be killed in LA for wearing red and green to celebrate Christmas because those are a rival gang's colors. Isn't it also irrational to want someone dead because his sixteen-year-old dog died in an outdoor kennel? "But that's a legitimate issue"?

Don't "legitimate issues" seem to be far more important to people who can't understand the meaning of those issues and don't have the requisite brainpower to deal with those issues?

Abhorring Violence

2009-10-21T07:09:00.000-07:00

My philosophy may be hard to explain because there is an abhorrence of physical aggression that is also compounded with a fear of hitting back at a bully. A lot of us have experienced hitting a bully only to be pounced on by several other bullies. A lot more of us believe that's what's going to happen. In fact most of the time the bullies scatter and stay away when someone hits back.

It's good that the more human, more normal, "nicer" side of the animal rights controversy abhors violence. We are the mainstream of humanity. We are almost everyone. Almost everyone hates to be violent even in self-defense.

The abhorrence of violence can be taken too far. If you're not willing to wring the neck of the little cretin who set your house on fire, twice, that might be taking a reluctance to be violent too far. That's saying that your home and family are not worth fighting for. By default that supports people who hate you and who would murder your children.

This is not a difficult problem. It's not new, either. In some form or another there have always been sneaky little cowards who would sneak into people's homes and steal and break things. There have always been small groups of people in every town who would form little gangs and believe that they stole and vandalized for some kind of high moral purpose. The humane movement allows just one easy moral loophole. Nothing else like it exists. The same moral loophole that allows these gangs to terrorize medical researchers also allows them to steal your dog and sell it, to allow deer to starve to death instead of being cleanly culled, to raise the price of your food that you can barely afford to buy now, and to inflict a whole host of other miseries on the human race.

The recent BB gun assault against animal rights demonstrators may be deplorable. I don't waste sympathy on people who want a law that mandates spaying and neutering of all pets in the state of California. I have even less than no sympathy when I know that this same group is strongly connected with exploding cars in Los Angeles. The demonstration was a gang action by a terrorist group targeting a legal business. People need to cross that picket line and make a point of attending the targeted store and buying things and the owner of the store has a legitimate need for self defense if the picketing interferes with his legal business.

Nothing dispels intimidation like doing something that scatters a crowd of cowardly terrorists. I'm laughing at the whining of Judie Mancuso about being shot at with BBs. This really doesn't match up against someone's car exploding in his driveway, or someone's house on fire, or millions of dollars in research being destroyed by a bunch of little jerks who are no better than the neighborhood troublemakers who steal your DVD player and scatter flour all over your kitchen.

They do a few things that intimidate people from doing so much as contradicting them. They seem to form an impenetrable shield, but when this shield is broken they are so screwed. They're peeing their pants right now, afraid that real bullets are next. This puts us in a better position to deal with them politically because we wake up and realize that we are dealing with impotent cowards rather than a political juggernaut. They've lived by undermining society way too long. It's time to take it all away from them.

Protecting Innocent Owners

2009-09-14T06:54:00.000-07:00

What are human rights worth? We kill billions of animals in order to eat, and that is completely acceptable. I even applaud the practice. This way we feed other species first and we manage their populations so that there are large, healthy populations of pigs, goats, horses, cattle, sheep, chickens, and more. We even do this in a way that reduces the impact on wild animals. This is a good thing.

I don't believe that one set of rights is more important than another. You could argue that the right to keep and bear arms is important because it helps defend the rest of the list, and the right to free speech is like that too. "Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" are being treated with contempt even though they are listed in the body of the Constitution as rights.

We are in a war and we have to understand what the animal rights activists want to compromise and how they plan to do it. They want to compromise our rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness and the Bill of Rights is intended to spell out in a little more detail how the Constitution is to protect that.

Isn't it more important to protect the quality of life of the vast majority of humans who have committed no offense heinous enough to warrant the loss of life and limb, liberty, or property? The ability to use excessive force against anyone who is accused or suspected of animal abuse is being widely used against animal owners. Animal control has actually stunned older disabled people with a stungun. The Yellowstone County sheriff's department broke dogs trying to stuff them into carriers that they didn't fit into. There was nothing wrong with the dogs before the sheriff's department arrived. Some damn animal rights representative always seems to be able to wind these people up to do atrocities against citizens and that's exactly what they did to Germany.

The right to confiscate animals enables bad people to do bad things to good people and use animal cruelty as an excuse. The damage is done before the courts can decide if any abuse has been taken place and the same confiscations are used to psychologically damage the victims and coerce them into signing away their rights. The dogs are often killed or given away before the court date. It is actually possible for the animal rights activists to use this, as they plan, to get rid of all animal breeders without any of the breeders being convicted of a crime.

This is why confiscation of animals should be banned. No one, period, should be allowed to confiscate any animals. Confiscation destroys the innocent. Those who think that the rights of innocent humans are not worth this much, maybe you should just kill yourself. My right to keep my animals humanely and safe from inhumane shelters and rescues supersedes their right to "do something about animal abusers." They don't know how to go after the ones who need to be shut down while protecting the ones who are doing good for the animals, so they should have no power at all and no money.

Terrorist Attack Planned Against German-Owned Power Plant in England

2009-09-01T20:32:00.000-07:00

No kidding. As I've been saying, give the environmentalists an inch and they'll take your food, your water, your fuel, and leave you shivering in the cold and starving.

Protesters target E.ON's Ratcliffe plant
Environmentalists campaigning against climate change said on Monday
they would attempt to shut down German utility E.ON’s power station at
Ratcliffe in central England in a mass action planned for October.

What do I have to say to the police and security forces who are guarding this power plant that is vital to the security and safety of the citizens of the human race? Shoot to kill. Load up the worst people-killer rounds that you have. They work on environmentalists also. If they want to make martyrs, draw a one hundred meter perimeter and drop them there. I would also be happy to see them bleeding on razor wire.

These people will kill their fellow human, actively or by neglect, for the sake of a rat or an owl. They want laws against what other people do but do not want to obey laws. They will destroy animals alleging that those animals are tainted by human manipulation. If they successfully shut down a power plant they will have succeeded in committing a terrorist act, blatantly, and I would just as soon they die before they get in the door rather than have good men risk their lives trying to root these damned rodents out. So happy hunting, whoever is guarding the Ratcliffe plant. Let Ratcliffe be their Waterloo.

"Shoot to Kill"

2009-08-04T05:52:00.000-07:00

I've said this about people whose children rob convenience stores using threats of violence or weapons: If you want your demon-spawn to come back alive, teach them how to behave in a civilized world. You expect civilized behavior of the clerk at the store when he deals with your children. You expect it of me when I deal with your children. Expect that of your children and you've got a shot.

My ride, that is, my car, is worth more to me than the life of some idiot who wants to steal it, break it, or burn it. That is because like so many people my age, and I am over 18, I don't have the time or the energy to walk as far as my job is. My house is worth even more, and if I have a home business, a farm, or a profitable kennel, that is also worth more than the lives of people who want to break it, burn it, or steal it. I advocate a shoot to kill mentality for home invaders, vandals, car thieves, and of course anyone who sets fire to anything that belongs to you. A fire should legally be considered a death threat and a deadly assault. Whosoever initiates an arson attack should be considered a dangerous person who should be shot to death on the spot.

There is a tremendous difference between violence that is used to coerce people who are minding their own business and violence that is used to defend what rightfully belongs to you on your own property. The first is wrong even when the law does it. The second is right.

Most puppy mill raids are illegal, period. If you can get the legal representation that will follow up on it, the city, or usually the county that conducted the raid is responsible for damages when they do them. It's difficult to impossible to get away with asserting your rights by using a gun, but insist enough and you can get something done legally. That's costly and I can understand people who simply run out of money, time, and energy.

A "shoot to kill" mentality in this arena means that one should be willing to go all out to gain a legal redress of grievances. Someone's going to have to build a law firm that is willing to predate against a county government and local humane societies. "Shoot to kill" means that your legal team goes after all assets belonging to whoever judgments are gained against, and you don't back down because they claim "it was for the animals" or "we won't be able to help the animals if you bankrupt us." You don't fall for the sociopath's "pity me" act either.

A particular humane society has such a horrible history of attacking owners for no good reason that its hundred-year-plus history should be brought to an end. Saving animals by destroying their homes and owners is the wrong way to do things. Profiting by illegal acts is wrong. They even take animals out of circumstances that they are comfortable with and place them in far worse circumstances. They should be treated as the criminals that they are. I won't name the one I'm thinking about largely because they aren't the only one. Don't pity them. They've had over a hundred years to learn how to take care of animals and if they don't understand how it works that's their problem.

Even a somewhat less than standard commercial breeder is better than most of these so-called humane societies and SPCAs and they do one thing that is positive: They breed. Above all a species needs to breed and propagate to survive. The pet trade is how humans assist in this vital function. I don't place the rights of animals above human rights but it is fitting that the pet trade works for the animals, perhaps better than it works for the humans involved. Humans are the one species that is often willing to live with the excrement of another species just to keep that other species alive. We also work our hearts out for them. Give us a lot of credit.

Michael Vick or the HSUS?

2009-07-31T13:00:00.000-07:00

I've said before that it's a step down for Michael Vick to consort with the HSUS. Let's look at some facts:

Michael Vick helped out his mother with a lot of money. The HSUS helps attack elderly women for breeding dogs, at all, and lies to get then in trouble. So does the SPCA.

The HSUS got more dogs killed at one time than Michael Vick is alleged to have killed, and in a way it's worse because it's colder, it was done for political purposes, and they are supposed to be the people who would know that it is unnecessary to do this to pups who haven't been fight-trained.

Michael Vick may have taken the blame for some of his friend's actions to get them out of trouble. The HSUS tries to get people in trouble for small things like dirty water dishes.

The HSUS has secretly killed thousands of dogs and hurts owners whenever it can. Michael Vick is only just now starting to do that.

They are NOT for Animal Rights

2009-07-26T22:29:00.000-07:00

The party line is that animals have a right to live free of human interference. I'm not giving them the "free of human interference" part for several reasons. One is because if it is a moral principle, then moral principles come from the alleged minds of people who have anti-social personality disorder because their "reasoning" comes from a hatred of their own species.

The human species is the first species that has shown a desire or an ability to be less destructive to its own environment. This destruction is a normal product of use. Herbivores use the environment and if predation and disease didn't stop them they would eat all of the greenery and starve and die. Even the greenery would choke itself off and die if it didn't have the herbivores and fire to kill some of it off once in a while. An intelligent species can control this process with less waste, less disease, and can ensure the future of other species. One of the best things that we have done is transplant other species around the planet, thus increasing the geographical spread of unique genomes.

I can't say that a species has a right to what it needs as long as it doesn't interfere with the rights of others. Other life competes with and fights with each other. Humans have at least as much right as other animals to be a part of this. There are other examples of different species that cooperate with each other but humans are the one species that seems to be willing and able to work cooperatively with a very wide variety of non-human species. We are also the one species that is willing and able to work on behalf of that wide variety of species.

Were there such a thing as an animal rights activist, that activist would be for the most essential rights of an animal. These would be the right to exist and the right to propagate. They would be for legislation that forced humans to take in as many animals as possible, and considering how loosely connected to reality the "animal rights" activist is, "possible" takes on a whole new meaning. It's kind of a relief because I might find out that I only want one or two big cats, not the whole hoard that keeps getting thrust on big cat enthusiasts.

It's not just PETA killing animals or the HSUS with its killing vans and swindling judges into ordering the deaths of pitbull pups. It's a determined effort to stop private breeding and to get as many non-humans dead or under their control as they can. Preventing births looks a little like saving lives, but it works like euthanasia in advance. When one to three percent of the pet population ends up being killed as "overpopulation" then for every pet saved from that experience, at least thirty-three births have to be prevented. That's a dead loss. If we looked at it from a viewpoint that permitted joy, we would take pleasure in the fact that very few pets die that way.

PETA, the HSUS, and the growing cottage industry of swindlers, self-haters, and terrorists don't care about the animals. They just care about money and the pain that they can cause humans and animals.

Very Good Ideas

2009-07-23T13:38:00.000-07:00

Most of what the ownership rights side says is negative. It needs to be done, it is good work, we're right to do it, but it is still negative. We report government abuses and the solutions are always implied. In order to progress we need to take that very frightening next step, often onto a surface that we can't see, don't know if it even exists, and seems to be over a bottomless abyss.

If the government abuse is banning people's pets, the implied positive response is that those pets should not be banned because it is a very good idea to keep pets and everyone knows that. It's been hard to get everyone to admit that, hasn't it?

Sometimes we need to say that "it's a very good idea to..." whatever it is, to add positive energy to the whole thing. Appropriate to the situation, we might say that it's a very good idea and explain why, or just say that it's a very good idea. This is the treatment for all those people who say that something's a bad idea for reasons that carry very little strength. Arguing their reasons down without explicitly saying "it's good" robs us of most of the impact of the argument. They don't have that handicap. Here are some examples of arguments that have more positive impact:

"It is a very good idea to keep a wallaby as a pet because it helps conserve the species, wallabies are pretty good pets, they are very harmless, and they make people happy. This argument outweighs the arguments against that are loaded with negative emotion and bogus science."

"It is a very good idea to keep a lion as a pet if one is able to keep it fed and clean, because this helps conserve the species, it puts a person's humanity to good use, because lions give a lot of love, because a human should have the right to choose, and because the danger is less than riding a bicycle in Kansas City."

Or, for a short one: "It is a very good idea to keep a monkey as a pet" with no explanation needed.

We need the positive attitude. We need to talk about specific benefits and stand on the idea that those benefits, for human and animals, far outweigh the drawbacks. We need to keep away from qualifiers that can be interpreted broadly and stick with specifics, such as keeping the animals clean, healthy, and well-fed, which is part of healthy. "Humane" and "responsible" are catch-all, overly broad terms that have been abused to death the last few years. We must use specific terms so people can know what we're talking about.

It is a very good idea to do this so that we have a better chance of winning back our rights. We do after all have to tell them what we want, don't we? Don't we also have to tell them that it would give us pleasure and improve our lives?

A Note to the Citizens of British Columbia

2009-07-17T15:33:00.000-07:00

Some people may freeze to death because of the eco-terrorist bombings of natural gas pipelines, and we know that up in Canada it's cold. These people want you to freeze to death. Here's my opinion about that:

When you let characters like Barry Penner, the B.C. Minister of Environment, decide the fate of your pets and livestock, the eco-terrorists do not give you a break. They get worse. You earned it, citizens of B.C. The people who you've allowed to run wild, are.

That's right. Give up your "exotic" pets and they will bomb your natural gas pipelines because they know that you're wimps and you won't do anything about it like shoot them or even tell your legislators that they are wrong.

The eco-terrorists, the SPCA, and Barry Penner have made the citizens of B.C. their bitches. That's when you know that too much civilization has come to Canada. Enjoy what you have left. It ain't much.

Another Righteous Tirade That Features Bill Smith

2009-07-16T18:10:00.000-07:00

This is a rewrite of something that I posted to Pet-Law's Yahoo group:

I really think that Bill Smith lies about the "squalor." I'm sorry that he gets so much done that way. I read a piece about his mother getting a veterinarian and one of his customers in trouble and it sounds like the nut doesn't fall far from the tree.

Some of these people have been giving out sketchier information than they used to. When they give enough details inconsistencies creep in. Now the news stories that I see in the Kansas City Star and the stories on the Missouri Humane Society website leave out anything that a person might analyze. That's another indicator that they lie on purpose. The longer a story you can get a liar to tell the more you can tell that they are lying. They know this. The stories have gotten awful short and the KC Star is keeping their stories very sketchy so that critics can't pick on them in the comments section.

I think that Bill Smith is a hard core swindler, actually. Both times that I saw him do a video segment he told obvious lies. They were made obvious by the video and the degree of detail that he went into that contradicted the video. Here's one:

http://abcnews. go.com/Business/ story?id= 7187712&page= 1

Obvious lies: The idea that any commercial farmer would shove a pipe down the throat of a dog and risk killing it to soften its bark is a lie. The idea that a large female golden retriever was ever kept on "chicken wire" boggles the mind, it is so stupidly obviously a lie. The dog is too big. They carry her around to keep the audience from seeing whether she can walk on other than "chicken wire." Get a load of where Bill Smith keeps his hand when he carries her, too. It's disgusting. I can say that because that's the way that he treats people.

The "chicken wire" itself is an obvious lie because chicken wire is very narrow gauge wire with fairly broad spacing, that hexagonal pattern, and it can't support any weight. The material that they stand on is not chicken wire. Big dogs like Golden Retrievers couldn't be kept in rabbit hutches, either. It's too expensive to try to build an off the ground "hutch" for a 100 pound dog. At the same time that they were talking about chicken wire they were showing Labrador Retrievers running around on the ground.

I thought that they were saying that the 300 registered breeders in Lancaster County were trying to avoid discovery, but that was the alleged 600 unregistered breeders. When he talks about those, instead of saying "these unregistered breeders" he says that "The farmers, the Amish and the Mennonites, they pull the heads back and then they hammer sharp instruments down their throats to scar their vocal cords so they can't bark." I don't see how that's physically impossible without losing most of your breeding stock and he slams their religion by name when he says this.

They talk about fecal matter falling into cages from above when they are stacked but the stacked cages that they show have trays to catch that. When the news crew goes into a breeder's facility to look around, you can see that the flooring of the cages is more like some kind of extruded plastic. I'm not familiar with that material but it looks like it's molded, not wire at all. Most of the material I saw was stiff "wire" that is large enough to be easy on feet.

I am extremely sick of being beset by liars and being unable to fire back. People should at least get comfortable with suggesting that Bill Smith and others like him are lying. That's not saying that we should rest our case on that. Breeding animals is important work. It is among our oldest technologies and it fulfills a need for humans and animals. What we do has merit.

A deception by omission is the way that Bill Smith treated the breeders. He didn't tell them that he was going to lie about them to destroy their businesses. If they had known of course they would have done anything except give their dogs to him. So would I. Fine, give the vet a few dollars to put down a dog that isn't producing anymore. It's better than giving the dog to Bill Smith to do God knows what with.

Other issues that are not side issues include his continually criticizing them for treating the dogs like an agricultural product. This is also a slam at agriculture. He is slamming the Amish religion too and treating them as if there is something wrong with being Amish. The Amish and the Mennonites are easier targets when they are less likely to know what is being said about them on Oprah or ABC news, and less likely to be on the Internet. I'm not informed enough to know whether any of them keep track of these news stories. What I've heard about the Amish is that they don't watch television or use computers, so how would they know that they are being libeled in this manner? They are an even more vulnerable target than the general public in that it is even harder for them to find out what is going on.

A Response to Kay Simpson of Arkansas

2009-07-03T19:13:00.000-07:00

That would be the Kay Simpson who is mentioned in this article from the Arkansas Times. She says that she is literally crying now that the felony animal abuse law passed in Arkansas. She is crying because she doesn't have the resources as head of the Pulaski County Humane Society to conduct a bust of that kind. The law allows law enforcement to "raid" a breeder and it allows devices to avoid any kind of due process of the law.

The American judicial system is supposed to be based on the concept of "guilty until proven innocent." In other words, the accused is required to be allowed full due process of the law. This law has a provision that is as hostile as it gets towards that due process. If a person is accused of mistreating the animals that they own, they have to post some kind of bond, a percentage of the estimated cost of keeping the animals, or lose ownership of those animals. The way that Kay Simpson puts it, most of the owners then "abandon" such animals. What actually happens in many cases is that the shelters get a fresh supply of purebred dogs with many puppies that can be sold out the door in as little as four days, only they call the price tag an "adoption fee."

This way they can scatter a breeder's inventory and make it unrecoverable. Since they also surgically sterilize most of the dogs, they have made that inventory worthless to the breeder. We don't just have a right to breed dogs when the Humane Society feels like letting us, it's a basic human right. What you might call overly strict enforcement is actually a deliberate failure to allow due process of the law before taking property. It is a deliberate attack against a breeder that they want to shut down and I'm building a long list of dirty tactics that are used to do this.

If someone is deprived of the opportunity to do this, too bad. The felony law should never have been passed because its only use is going to be to extort money and property. All authorities involved in this are liable under section 1863 of the Civil Rights Act of 1871 and the courts still take that Civil Rights Act seriously, at least some of them. Every jurisdiction involved in such busts should know that they may soon be liable for extremely large lawsuits. There should also be criminal penalties and we don't have to be particularly creative to do that. The threat of force under color of law to get property away from people is extortion. Police have gone to jail for it before and hopefully they will again. Also, there is the taking of property for public use without just compensation. It doesn't matter if they immediately destroy that property, the "taking" is in the denial of the use of that property to its owner.

People are slowing down their donations to the shelters in part because the shelter system has proven itself unworthy of the donations by supporting these laws. Kay Simpson should count herself lucky that she can't drive around making a reputation for herself by violating the rights of citizens. She could count herself lucky that she isn't destroying legitimate businesses and making false accusations of abuse. Someone who supports a law like that law that just passed doesn't know the difference anyway. It's above their level of competence. That "brick wall" that Kay Simpson has run into is simple reality. No one has resources to waste on things that violate human rights.

It's Really Ridiculous

2009-07-01T21:45:00.000-07:00

Wayne Pacelle approaches the agricultural business in Ohio and says "surrender or we'll beat your ass." Anyone he recruits in a state, he uses against everyone else in the state. If none of them had surrendered to him or accepted bribes he would not have won any states. He wouldn't have had part of the dog breeding community to use against the rest of the dog breeding community, and the recent atrocity in Tennessee is just one example of this.

http://www.agritalk.com/

There is no reward for compromise with the HSUS. They have rewards only for criminal behavior like abusive busts of commercial breeders whose dogs are in good enough shape to turn around and sell within the week. The only threat that they pose is if anyone is damn fool enough to let them have anything that they want. They are a terrorist organization that certainly doesn't deserve anything. They were named in a Department of Homeland Security report and in other reports to Congress, so the United States Congress does know enough about the HSUS that anyone who takes just a minute to think would say "these people are terrorists and don't have an opinion to contribute." Terrorists are criminals. That report is at Rexano under Commentary and Editorials.

If people would think of themselves as deserving of the company of animals and deserving of the use of animals, swindlers like the HSUS would never be able to gain the power that they have. It makes a huge difference what we think of ourselves. Think well of ourselves and each other and no one is going to be looking for anything from the HSUS. We'll already have it. They offer us a bill of goods and we are the ones who own those goods.

This is the Typical AR Mentality

2009-06-30T13:17:00.000-07:00

Article

It's like Mat Sitte wanted to act out the AR program in his own home:

For an instant, he stood and watched as the flames circled her body then engulfed her.

"I could feel the heat of the fire. I could smell the flesh burning ... I stay a few seconds and say a prayer to set her soul free," he said. Suddenly, he said, he realized he forgot to get the kids' three pet rabbits out of their bedrooms.

"I ran upstairs and got two cages and brought them outside. Then I ran back in to get the third one," he said. "The heat was pretty intense. On my way back downstairs I hear a big bang. And I see the kitchen floor collapse and I realize it's time for me to get out of there. I barely get out alive ... then I grab my bottle of rum and sit across the street and watch the fire."

You Have to Give People Something

2009-06-24T14:35:00.000-07:00

A lot of people who are on the ownership rights side also jump on the cruelty bandwagon. We want everyone to have their rights as long as they "aren't cruel" and "don't neglect." Even when we make somewhat finer distinctions and sound more positive, if it adds up to the same or a similar program, it doesn't look any different to the public. We can call it animal welfare or animal protection, and it still does not say that we have a progressive purpose in owning animals. It still says that the thrust is to eliminate abuse. When all that gravitates to its logical conclusion, the fewer animals there are the fewer animals are abused. This is a really bad policy that has grave consequences for the animals and humanity. What we practice on the animals we really will do to humans, like mass slaughter to send everyone else to Heaven ahead of us.

The public wants something for the animals and in all the confusion the smartest of us will have trouble figuring out what. Of course, just because it took me a while doesn't mean that, but I think it's true anyway. Of course people want good lives for nonhuman animals. It's just natural.

The animal rights activists found it more profitable to do good by fighting evil because they could slap a label on everyone they felt like. Agriculture does a lot more good for the animals because their health and well-being are our health and well-being. The activists sell this in the negative and as it always happens, the negative campaigns have spiraled out of control and have to be stopped.

We who believe in the right to own animals have to give the public something. Warm fuzzies are still good. People hugging tigers is good, and a message that I would like to see would be something like "you can have this yourself." Tell people the truth, that breeding is good for animals. That's where new animals come from. Animal-based agriculture provides us with safe and nutritious food and we feed the animals first. Give people something to respect, to honor, to love. Help them understand what a rodeo means, or a cattle drive, or why people should play with big cats, elephants, wolves, bears, or big birds. Share the love.

No-Kill: A Performance Trap

2009-06-22T15:18:00.001-07:00

Any number of animal activists say that no more animals should be bred until the shelters are empty and the shelters no longer kill any animals.

I bought this bridge from a crazy-eyed man for $50 and my soul, but the tolls that I collect at both ends of the bridge will make me rich, rich rich.

What's wrong with their logic? What's wrong is that if there is any substantial number of dogs in any city, some are going to die in shelters. Trying to reduce the number of shelter deaths by reducing the number of animals out there might work, but we will never reach zero. These people have announced that they will fight a war against our ownership rights forever. They know that shelter deaths will never reach zero. If we accept their conditions they have trapped us into an agreement to do the impossible. We will have handed over our rights in order to satisfy their delusion.

If nothing else the AR people will breed dogs themselves and kill them in their own shelters. This is actually a practice that dates back to the 19th century and ASPCA people were caught doing it.

It Is This Simple

2009-06-22T00:19:00.000-07:00

When all this crap got started, animal owners should not have tried to "prove" anything to the animal rights activists, not one thing. Whenever humans try to talk to these bullies, there is one expectation, one way that it goes: No one realistically expects the animal rights activists to be swayed by science or any kind of rationality, reason, or evidence. The human being is expected to be swayed by science, rationality, reason, and evidence. However, this expectation comes from a bully who does not feel obligated to tell the truth. The science is bogus. The evidence is manufactured and tainted. Going through the process is an act of submission in the eyes of the bully. Submitting anything to them, evidence, science, anything, is an act of submission and in their view you have already lost.

This is why the animal loving community should have made firm decisions a long time ago. We should have decided that almost every human being is good enough to have an animal, outside of being habitual, egregious abusers who routinely injure animals sadistically. We should have decided not to be swayed by arguments about "safety." None of us should ever have backed down, which is of course why the bullies pick on the safest targets that they can. A lot of us became cowardly and even lazy, using the attacks against us as an excuse. It's easier to take the path of excusing one's ownlack of ambition or lack of courage. A lot of authority got handed off way too easily.

It was as simple as saying that we can tolerate the dangers of owning tigers. It was as simple as telling the press that tragic deaths are part of living and should be no cause for any sweeping changes; general policy should not be made from sweeping changes. It was as simple as telling the world that it is wrong to bully others for owning the animals that they love.

Maybe it still is.

That is all that people like Carole Baskin have been doing. They've been telling government officials what they want and giving reasons. The reasons haven't been truly honest. They appeal to least-common-denominator thinking like "it's dangerous, please keep it away from me I'm so scared I'm wetting my pants." This kind of thing has to be backed by the usual violence and vandalism for it to have taken the hold that it seems to have. Also, I think that the government officials have to have been compromised in the first place.

Animal lovers didn't want to get into politics in the first place but we let other people do politics. Didn't we know that this would lead to deadly consequences?

Toxic Workplaces

2009-06-19T17:01:00.000-07:00

I've worked in places where the management seemed ridiculously high-strung before. A lot of times it was because they had marital problems, were overstressed from working at least two jobs, were the wrong people for the job, or were disappointed with their level of achievement in life.

There might not be a workplace in existence that is as toxic as an animal menagerie these days. "Tight safety regulations" are the refuges of the incompetent, the scoundrels, and the sociopaths, with a lot of overlap between the named groups. A person who does not handle the animals does not learn how to handle the animals. If you spend years to even get to handle the animals, generally you move on and start the whole process over again, if you even get in. Someone who is the worthless nephew of the boss's sister-in-law might go straight in and learn how to "handle" while someone who the cats obviously love might be restrained from even touching through the fence.

Zero tolerance creates a toxic workplace. Humans aren't made for that. Zero tolerance policy cannot and will not be administered honestly. Tolerance necessarily creeps in or you don't have a workforce. Even with the best of faith it's subjective and depends on the mood of whichever authority figure happens to be in a given place at a given time. With zero tolerance a worker is treated as if he has just violated the world's fertile womb with nuclear poisons if he happens to brush against the fur of a snow leopard and it can be construed as a voluntary act.

At the same time the workers are there to be with the animals. If an invisible barrier of authority stands between the workers and the animals, things happen. One is of course that that the worker never learns to work with the animals, a thing that you cannot learn without some kind of interaction. That's a thing that doesn't happen. Another is that workers get frustrated and go independent, so they interact without the help of a person who knows how to be safe around the animals. It's like learning how to drive a motorcycle by spending years cleaning the showroom floor while someone else moves them in and out. Yet another thing is that you get toxic personalities in the workplace who could give a crap about the animals but like to horse animal lovers around.

There is a toxic personality who recently took all of her son's big cats away from him and has banned her workers from contact with them. This was his mother, for the love of God. So his dream has been taken away by his mother. He probably should have read Iron John. And she's taking it away from a lot of other people who work there. The emotional atmosphere has changed with may account for the recent death that occurred there. She is going to have her profit center, she is going to change the trade for the worse, and she is going to be in league with some of the most destructive people on Earth.

As for myself, I live to have contact with the animals. Even without the "no contact" extreme, as near as I can tell opportunities for real contact with the animals are few and far between. They are few and far between enough that the professionals who are working these menageries now are failing to create enough new "trained professionals" to keep the industry going. I foresee a downward spiral as planned by some of the most evil sentient beings that the universe has brought forth. There is a lot of pork-barrel in constructing sealed habitats with their own little carefully tended artificial ecosystems that will be allowed to fall into rack and ruin in just twenty or thirty years while the scammers abscond with the money and leave their employees holding the bag.

I suppose that I will never voluntarily attempt to put myself in a position to make any kind of contact with big cats. My choice as I understand it is to obey the rules or live without. I'm not choosing the former because the rules are tainted. There is even some kind of deliberate sadism in treating animal lovers this way and it is the same sadism that is practiced by animal rights activists. There is no chance that I will put myself in a position where I have to obey "no contact" rules except occasionally I might visit a zoo and stay well away from any barriers. Mostly I figure if they don't want me to touch it they don't want me to have anything to do with it. They want some money out of me? Are they kidding?

The owners of the menageries did it to themselves. They did not dig in their heels nearly soon enough. They have let it get to the point where more drastic actions are needed and of course they could use a white knight, but if I were that white knight I would want something for that and if I'm not good enough to touch, my money is not good enough for them. I can't believe the cowardly chickenshit. All of the abuse is passed on to the customers and to the next generation of animal handlers, and then they expect good service, lots of money, and tremendous goodwill in return, just like their abusers and just like the dysfunctional family and the toxic schoolteachers.

I have to care what is in it for me. People would have me drain everything that I have into their pockets and for all I know their bloodstreams and life-forces and they want me to expect nothing in return, to give "charity" and be "altruistic." This is the epitome of the thieving scoundrel. If I could even tithe to something reasonable, group efforts to do good things, that would be all right, but they're not going to treat me like a human. They're going to treat me like a member of their own personal living blood bank. Screw them.

Full Text of California's Proposition 2

2009-06-12T00:06:00.000-07:00

Link or http://tinyurl.com/kvbhh2

HEALTH AND SAFETY CODE
SECTION 25990-25994



25990.  Prohibitions.  In addition to other applicable provisions of
law, a person shall not tether or confine any covered animal, on a
farm, for all or the majority of any day, in a manner that prevents
such animal from:
(a) Lying down, standing up, and fully extending his or her limbs;
and
(b) Turning around freely.



25991.  Definitions.  For the purposes of this chapter, the
following terms have the following meanings:
(a) "Calf raised for veal" means any calf of the bovine species
kept for the purpose of producing the food product described as veal.

(b) "Covered animal" means any pig during pregnancy, calf raised
for veal, or egg-laying hen who is kept on a farm.
(c) "Egg-laying hen" means any female domesticated chicken,
turkey, duck, goose, or guinea fowl kept for the purpose of egg
production.
(d) "Enclosure" means any cage, crate, or other structure
(including what is commonly described as a "gestation crate" for
pigs; a "veal crate" for calves; or a "battery cage" for egg-laying
hens) used to confine a covered animal.
(e) "Farm" means the land, building, support facilities, and other
equipment that are wholly or partially used for the commercial
production of animals or animal products used for food or fiber; and
does not include live animal markets.
(f) "Fully extending his or her limbs" means fully extending all
limbs without touching the side of an enclosure, including, in the
case of egg-laying hens, fully spreading both wings without touching
the side of an enclosure or other egg-laying hens.
(g) "Person" means any individual, firm, partnership, joint
venture, association, limited liability company, corporation, estate,
trust, receiver, or syndicate.
(h) "Pig during pregnancy" means any pregnant pig of the porcine
species kept for the primary purpose of breeding.
(i) "Turning around freely" means turning in a complete circle
without any impediment, including a tether, and without touching the
side of an enclosure.

25992.  Exceptions.  This chapter shall not apply:
(a) During scientific or agricultural research.
(b) During examination, testing, individual treatment or operation
for veterinary purposes.
(c) During transportation.
(d) During rodeo exhibitions, state or county fair exhibitions,
4-H programs, and similar exhibitions.
(e) During the slaughter of a covered animal in accordance with
the provisions of Chapter 6 (commencing with Section 19501) of Part 3
of Division 9 of the Food and Agricultural Code, relating to humane
methods of slaughter, and other applicable law and regulations.
(f) To a pig during the seven-day period prior to the pig's
expected date of giving birth.

25993.  Enforcement.  Any person who violates any of the provisions
of this chapter is guilty of a misdemeanor, and upon conviction
thereof shall be punished by a fine not to exceed one thousand
dollars ($1,000) or by imprisonment in the county jail for a period
not to exceed 180 days or by both such fine and imprisonment.

25994.  Construction of Chapter.
The provisions of this chapter are in addition to, and not in lieu
of, any other laws protecting animal welfare, including the
California Penal Code. This chapter shall not be construed to limit
any state law or regulations protecting the welfare of animals, nor
shall anything in this chapter prevent a local governing body from
adopting and enforcing its own animal welfare laws and regulations.

I Will Tolerate Animal Abuse

2009-06-09T09:26:00.000-07:00

That sounds like a bizarre, in your face thing to say doesn't it? Yet I will stand behind it. Zero tolerance for animal abuse is one of the most destructive things going these days. Zero tolerance means that if you're late feeding your already well-fed dog one evening, you're just as bad as someone who puts kittens in ovens. If there's a bit of kibble on the floor, as the person who sold the dog to Vice President Joe Biden found out, a zero tolerance "officer" will use it to violate you and your reputation.

A few times in history states have pared back their humane laws to the bare minimum because it was utterly ridiculous. There has to be some tolerance for things that are not exactly as someone would want them. Tolerance may be the only thing that will save us. Animal owners and users have to have a goal to achieve, preferably total freedom from regulation. It is OK to want what we want. Our rights are superior to those of animals. Fortunately for the animals our desires are to care for them in ways that are often extravagantly pleasing to the animals. The animal rights people are fighting against that. It is very wrong to eliminate the use of animals in the hopes that a few will suffer less. Most of them won't even exist to feel pain or pleasure.

If any animal owner wants to win this fight, we have to decide that we want what we want and stop giving any kind of power to the humane organizations. If the humane organizations want to operate they must do so under very strict guidelines which include no knocking over of little old ladies to try to "save" a few cats who are doing quite well. They shouldn't have any problems with being service organizations instead of armed robbers.

Tolerance of abuse means that humane care and use of animals becomes possible. With that tolerance we make this care possible, diligently, and diligently make certain that legal powers are not abused, so that it is possible for humans to do what so many of us want to do, to live with animals and take good care of them. It is the only way. Intolerance destroys.

I'm Sorry About "Tiger Lily"

2009-06-06T12:40:00.000-07:00

I am sorry that a kitten was cruelly burned to death in an oven. I feel bad for the kitten who screamed its life out in intolerable heat, not only frightened by the pain and heat but by the loss of trust in its humans. Her screams may haunt me for the rest of my life even though I can only imagine them (thank God that I can only imagine). This hurts someone very much who loves animals more than he loves himself. So I love property more than myself, especially living property, so sue me. They happen to be more lovable than I am.

Still, I do not support felony animal abuse charges against Cheyenne Cherry who has confessed to the killing of that kitten. I will admit that I'm tempted. Who wouldn't want someone like that thrown in jail and the key lost?

I would think that whoever has been following the crimes committed by the HSUS against animal owners and breeders would want them jailed and the key lost. They have been very cruel to the commercial breeder who they recently busted in Indiana, on the pretext that they weren't paying sales taxes. They and other so-called humane organizations use felony animal abuse charges to force people to hand over their own property, sometimes hundreds of thousands of dollars worth. Those charges are obviously bogus if they can be bought out. Even worse, in this case they also took the property that was to be held for a tax lien, so there's even more corruption than usual.

Felony property damage I will support. The Bronx teenager broke into someone's apartment and burned valuable property, so that's also arson. Animals are property and we're better for it. Owners do not get charged with ridiculous crimes for ridiculous reasons and face ridiculous penalities if their cars are dirty. Yet. We can kill and eat our own property and the HSUS wants to take that right away from us as they want to take away our right to keep pets humanely. Felony property damage kicks in when someone who does not own the property damages or destroys it. That protects the owner and the animal. Current laws have failed to protect owners from bogus charges leveled by AR-infested humane organizations and a good felony property damage/felony theft under color of law regulation, if followed, would put a lot of those people in jail where they belong. Some of them have done worse than Cheyenne Cherry did. Some of the so-called humane organizations have killed a lot of valuable lives, more than any other abusers that I know of.

California Senator Fran Pavley Betrays Pet Owners

2009-06-05T05:51:00.000-07:00

After AB1634 was defeated, so was Lloyd Levine, who attempted to perpetrate that bill on California. Then SB250 came along which was just a re-written version of AB1634. Fran Pavley beat Lloyd Levine out of a Senate seat with the help of voters who were against AB1634. People even sent campaign contributions to Pavley in the amount of $16.34 to make it clear why they voted for her. I've been reading posts by people who worked hard to get Pavley in.

Now Fran Pavley gave the deciding vote to get another mandatory spay/neuter bill on the floor, and that bill has passed the California Senate but not the Assembly. She betrayed the people who voted her in.

Any senator who betrays the people whose votes she solicited should shortly become the former senator (apply that to any position of authority). For some reason this seems to be the pattern with people who use the animal rights or environmentalists platforms to gain votes, and Pavley is one of those who sells global warming. I suppose that puppy farts are now considered harmful to the ozone layer.

Anyone who betrays people like that to get a seat on the legislature is just not a good person with a good cause.

A Few Simple Declarations

2009-06-03T18:33:00.001-07:00

Possibly preventing some dogs from being killed in shelters is not worth mandatory spay/neuter laws that destroy property rights.

There is no safety problem with the ownership of any animal that is worth the compromise of human rights.

Animals are property and you animal rights activists out there are going to live with it. Owners will strike back.

The right of a chicken to spread its wings is inferior to my right to be able to afford my next meal.

The right of a sow to be able to turn around is inferior to my right to be able to afford my next meal.

The animal rights activists have proven that they have absolutely nothing intelligent to add to the realm of animal husbandry.

Fur and leather are environmentally friendly.

Breeding is the best way to preserve a species.

The idea that cow farts are hurting the ozone layer is utter crap.

Never Say "They're Taking Away Our Rights."

2009-05-25T21:59:00.001-07:00

The person who violates your rights does not take them away. If they raid your breeding operation and trample over your rights, they haven't taken your rights away. Neither has the person who forces you to give up your lion or your tiger.

They have committed a crime against you by violating your rights. They owe you for that. They took away your dignity for a time, your property, your feeling of safety in your own home, and they should suffer a just punishment for doing that, something that will deter them from doing it again.

Further, a citizen must stop denying that they do this. Generally, the police did not come and rescue a bunch of animals in dire straits. They went with a hired sociopath who told them what to do. That hired sociopath is like a witch-smeller, pretending to see "signs." The truth is that they see what they want to see and say what they want to say. There are always signs. An animal rights activist thinks that the biggest sign of abuse is keeping the animal, and even when they keep them themselves, they think that. Some of them deny that they are animal rights activists and they could be telling the truth. They're just social parasites who work with whatever group gives them someone to rape.

Take the attitude that a crime has actually been committed when this happens. There is a federal law, 42 U.S.C. § 1983, which defines what should be painfully obvious: “Every person who, under color of any statute, ordinance, regulation, custom, or usage, of any State . . . subjects, or causes to be subjected, any citizen of the United States or other person within the jurisdiction thereof to the deprivation of any rights, privileges, or immunities secured by the Constitution and laws, shall be liable to the party injured in an action at law, suit in equity, or other proper proceeding for redress. . . .” Click here for source

The ability to freely exercise a right is generally lost by a failure to enforce those rights, and a failure to deal correctly with the parasites who would violate them. First clue: don't use them to go after people you don't like. The parasites feed on your fear of what your neighbor does. They come up ways that your neighbor is dangerous to you because of the drugs that he uses, or the pets that he keeps, or because just one time in his life he might have acted like a man. Then they have you. Your money is theirs, they hold a proxy on your rights, and you may feel that you have to like it.

Wayne Pacelle and Michael Vick to help each other victimize pitbulls, owners

2009-05-21T17:51:00.000-07:00

Story on New York Times NFL blog.

Just when you thought he couldn't go any lower...

2009-05-20T20:31:00.000-07:00

Michael Vick has agreed to work for the HSUS. Now he can help get pitbull dogs killed wholesale instead of retail. 'Nuff said.

Will the HSUS Try to Shut Down Websites?

2009-05-19T22:30:00.000-07:00

Armed with the disingenuous claim that we have been telling lies, the HSUS could decide to threaten Google and other providers to try to get blogs and websites shut down. WSB-TV in Atlanta repeated the claims of the Center for Consumer Freedom about the HSUS's use of money that they gathered to allegedly help victims of Katrina.

The rumor, which Wayne Pacelle knows to be true, is that during the worst of the aftermath, HSUS rescuers allowed a lot of dogs to die when they knew where the dogs were. There are a lot of witnesses to this fact and they need to speak to their local TV and radio stations and newspapers. It may not have occurred to a lot of people in time that the disaster aid was for photo opportunities and that they needed to watch the "Humane Society of the United States."

I suppose that the HSUS intends to quibble about the definition of using the money for Katrina victims, because even though WSB-TV issued a "correction" the fact is that a lot of the uses that the HSUS claims to have put the money to are not what you expect when you send money to help save pets who are stranded by floodwaters. I say in good faith because I have received word from eyewitnesses that the HSUS actually got in the way of rescuers who actually went into the water to save pets.

The HSUS's career has included hurling a lot of false accusations at animal owners, including horse owners and commercial breeders, so it's not surprising if they are using the quibble over some CCF facts to get David Martosko's Twitter account suspended, or to get the video segment pulled, or someone's blog or site suspended or closed.

WSB is supposed to eventually issue a new report. If it goes the way that the HSUS wants, the first mainstream media outlet to report what the HSUS has been doing wrong is going to be the first to issue a retraction. This is an attempt to deter any television, radio station, or mainstream media from reporting accurately what the HSUS has been doing to our rights and what kind of charities fraud it has been perpetrating.

The HSUS still has this guy who has all kinds of connections with people who he has taught to commit arson. Even if they "fire" him I'm sure they won't be strangers. This is one more chilling effect on freedom of speech. In Los Angeles people are afraid to go to their city commission meetings because all sorts of freaks show up for the animal rights side. Some leather-wearing character with tattoos shows me a Zippo lighter engraved with a devil's head and I'm probably going to wet my pants and leave the room. Most of the people who have the absolute right to be there can't take the pressure and shouldn't have to in a country like the U.S. Good people don't bully others, and the HSUS has been witnessed bullying people who were trying to save pets after Katrina.

Did the HSUS Suppress the WSB-TV Story?

2009-05-19T05:10:00.000-07:00

On Thursday, May 14, 2009, WSB-TV in Atlanta Georgia, U.S., ran an expose against the HSUS, the Humane Society of the United States. By late Friday, that article was removed from their website. On her site, Erica Saunders says that Wayne Pacelle, president of the HSUS, claims that all of their information was from the Center for Consumer Freedom website and was discredited. As Erica says, how can it be "discredited" when the information comes from the HSUS's own IRS filings?

I suppose that more "discredited" information is the fact that John P. Goodwin now works for the HSUS in a high-paying job because of his experience working with the terrorist organization ALF, which has been burning more animals lately in an attempt to save them from the torment of human ownership.

The HSUS is a fraudulent charity with many front organizations. I say this without reservation because the HSUS tells lies about pet ownership, it gathers funds fraudulently, and it illegally spends those charitable contributions to influence legislation.

I have also been reading that various TV stations are blocking E-mails from people who want them to buy and play that segment in other markets. This is just weird.

If the HSUS is applying some form of intimidation to stop this broadcast from being aired, that is also proof that the HSUS does not want the truth to be told. Well, they've just made it so that this will go viral. The Center for Consumer Freedom put the video on Youtube. It is well worth watching. Please ask your local TV stations to air it.

Stop Fighting Animal Abuse, Part III

2009-05-16T10:27:00.001-07:00

Removing animals from allegedly abusive situations is not the same thing as providing an adequate level of humane care. In fact, "puppy mill" dogs are often put in even more abusive situations at the impound or in foster care. They are often killed. In fact the HSUS both decries the alleged rough treatment of pitbull type dogs and works hard to get them killed.

Fighting against abuse attracts sadistic people. They get their jollies by attacking people who they know that few or none will defend, just like they got their jollies when they beat up small children in high school, violating some of our society's most sacred tenants, particularly the protection of innocence. They get the same thrill out of this as does the child molester or rapist. It's the violence that attracts them, and the opportunity to drain mana from people by domineering them. It's a sick thrill.

There's talk on the forums about creating an organization that helps animal owners who are in trouble. Someone has suggested that the organization only turn into the law those very worst abusers. I'm not comfortable with the idea of any loopholes. The mere allegation of abuse with zero substantiation is already adequate to get the police to raid someone's home. They do not have to prove injury to the animals. Instead of diligently protecting the rights of the humans who they go after, puppy mill raiders do everything that they can to circumvent human rights. We do not live in a situation in which anyone can be reported for animal abuse and be certain of a fair trial.

The thing that should attract the most disapproval and punishment is the circumvention or violation of human rights. Alex Pacheco should have been jailed for a minimum of five years. He committed acts of animal abuse in order to stage photographs to use to bear false witness against Dr. Edward Taub at Silver Springs. In fact, he delayed medical progress by a few years in the area of treatment of human victims of strokes and CVAs.

This is to drive home the point that helpers of animal owners should exercise loyalty to their employers, even as volunteers, and they should suffer when they do dirt to their employers. Whistleblower protection is abused of it protects someone who stages an alleged incident. And I'm sorry, some people may disagree, but letting an animal die without paying thousands of dollars for a kidney transplant is simply not a crime. Because the option of reporting someone for animal abuse results in abuses itself, it is useless and worse than useless.

An ethic needs to prevail that is entirely positive. Every bit of diligence must be exercised to stay within that ethic, too, and to err on the side of the rights of the owner of the animals. Some animal deaths, injuries, and suffering will result from this, but I believe far less than results from the puppy mill raider system. We also must count the loss of animals. We may have lost millions of canine lives due to those who were never born. Also we have lost a lot of lions, tigers, cougars, bears, housecats, and just about everything else. Neglect is considered a form of abuse. It is also neglect, which is forced on people far too many times, to fail to breed animals.

If you want to compare moral imperatives, compare the imperative of survival of a species with the imperative to reduce abuses of the animals. One is at odds with the other. We have to admit that there will be abusive situations as long as their are animals. We are also damned if we don't, as I said in the previous paragraph. So, as a mature and responsible choice, we must decide what is more beneficial to the animals. I've been among a lot of animals and seen that they consider existence to be of benefit to them. Everyone knows that nature is a bloody mess out there, and it's only the lucky that make it past the first year and reproduce. Humans are more efficient at producing animals that survive to reproductive age and this is a good thing. Reproduction may or may not need to be regulated, but if we do kill a large percentage of that which we assist to breed, we're just taking care of nature's business.

The uniquely human context is one in which we feel tenderness for members of other species. Dogfighters are pretty much just being animals. This does not place humanity beneath the animals. In fact many dogfighters work hard to be good to their animals outside of the ring, as can still be learned in some books that haven't yet been banned. Instead of thinking of them as dragging us down, we would do far better to think of ourselves as doing our best to climb that ladder towards enlightenment and better relations with our natures. All but the meanest of capable humans share our homes with animals, just about any animal. Every animal taken into a home and fed and sheltered shows compassion. The spectrum correctly runs from some compassion to a lot of compassion, or from some love to a lot of love. People who hoard should be revered and treated as saints even though it's messy. It's not really compassion for people if you can't tolerate mess and smell. People who breed also deserve the utmost respect and care because they are doing things that the animals need, helping them evolve and propagate.

Not That Much to Say Tonight

2009-05-09T19:58:00.000-07:00

The animal rights movement has been a full-blown movement towards fascism for quite a while now. They use the same tactics as the common bullies so many of us knew and despised in school. It is better to remember them as human trash than to think of them as some kind of overwhelming moral agency. Not that there's a lot of difference between a batch of trash and a moral agency.

America, Australia, England, and other civilized nations have had many opportunities to exercise some intelligence and render this fascist movement harmless. I suggest that while most of us humans have not yet been neutered we find something inside of ourselves to use to defend our lives. When the same person who used to give wedgies and swirlies now wears a uniform and gets his jollies by abusing that uniform, we've got to do something.

Stop Fighting Animal Abuse, Part II

2009-05-03T20:38:00.000-07:00

It takes more than one part to explain this.

How does anyone "fight" animal abuse? They have to find a person to fight. They have to label that person as an abuser and fight that person. They make that person the personification of evil in the eyes of their chosen audience. When scapegoating old ladies as witches was in fashion, they also had to make some kind of profit doing it. This is why the properties of the accused were turned over to the state for the state to sell. This gave the governing bodies involved a cash incentive to convict an old lady of witchcraft. "Puppy mill" and "animal abuse" are the modern witchcraft.

It's hard to separate the idea of corruption from the idea that a humane society can be overzealous. "Overzealous" is just as bad if not worse. Go to Care2 and look at the comments for any subject line that has any kind of connection with animal abuse. Some of those "animal protection" people want humans to be tortured and murdered because they had animals in pens with wire floors, that were designed to help the animals stay clean. I suppose Care2 might get wind of this and clean up some of their comments and pretend this never happened, too.

The only legitimate reason to fight animal abuse is to try to improve living conditions for animals. It is not legitimate to do this to hurt other humans, to corrupt a free society, or to profit from the abuse while also increasing the incidence of abuse and unnecessary deaths. The Blue Dog State blog is just one good source of information about the fact that the HSUS puts a great deal of effort into getting dogs killed. A great number of atrocities have been performed against all kinds of dogs, including cramming dogs into crates too small for them, choking them, and basically breaking the animals to get them into the crates. There's someone who knows how to fight animal abuse. That's what I'm talking about.

The animal rights movement is already famous for fighting every kind of human care of animals as "exploitation." When they fight abuse, they sometimes set homes on fire, or cars, or laboratories that are doing research into improving the health of animals. As I reported earlier, they also sometimes set fires that kill animals, or release animals from confinement to die in the wild or on the highways. They also get laws passed to deny homes for animals. They try to get all domesticated animals outlawed, sterilized, and they kill them by the millions. This is also a method for "fighting abuse."

The simple fact is that there is rarely anything to actually fight. You bring food, clean pens, work with the animals, and help the human. This is not a fight. It's work. A person doesn't "fight" against it, he works to bring about the desired conditions that are "not abuse." "Not abuse" isn't a state of being. It isn't anything. Caring about your animals, loving them, feeding them, grooming them, sheltering and protecting them, these are far better things than "not abuse." It's sickening to think that anyone has ever been under attack for giving care to an animal, has spent even one hour in jail, has had to answer to some neurotic stupid useless person, or has spent even one minute feeling guilty because a so-called animal advocate said something.

The place that we want to be is where we have our pets and livestock and do the best that we can by them. Instead of a thousand words here about how we're being abused, we need to write stories about how glorious it all is, and how even when we're tired and weak there is still goodness and light.

Stop Fighting Animal Abuse

2009-05-02T08:05:00.000-07:00

It is time to stop fighting animal abuse. The fight reached the point of diminishing returns a long time ago. Activists are no longer fighting people who beat animals to death. They're fighting people who try to provide comfortable lives for animals and the industries that produce our food. The fight generates a lot of profits for lawyers, so-called humane societies and shelters, and politicians. It also allows the most anti-social element of our society to band together to damage other humans.

When Dwight David Eisenhower left office as President of the United States, he said "beware the military-industrial complex." The puppy mill raiders have developed a little military-industrial complex of their own. They have become dependent on finding people guilty of animal abuse in order to gain donations and a bit of money from the people whose homes and businesses they invade.

This does mean that the humane societies have sought and obtained undue influence over the process of law-making and law enforcement. They first demanded licensing then treated the results of mandatory state inspections with contempt, re-inspecting and "finding" things wrong. They handle and interpret all of the evidence. They get the local prosecutor to present the animal owner with a choice: Give the animals to the Humane Society or be charged with a felony. A lot of kennel owners have no choice but to comply, largely because they are also forced to secure their property by posting a bond. Their property can be taken from them for failure to give a lot of money, tens of thousands of dollars, to the county and to the Humane Society that has stolen their property under color of law. This is done to the owners before a trial. Doing this denies them due process. An organization that would do this is as criminal as it gets and should go to jail for doing it, let alone have any credibility with the press, the judiciary, or the police. This is a tremendous fault in our justice system, that rarely does law enforcement get prosecuted for violating civil rights. The prosecutors often help them do it, and for the sake of animals! They are already acting as if animals have more rights than humans do.

Fighting against animal abuse makes this kind of corruption a lot easier to perform. People excuse it thinking that we're getting at the bad guys. Our bad guys turn out to be people who humanely breed a variety of animals to sell to consumers, essentially honest farmers who do take good care of their animals. When "fighting animal abuse" sometimes so-called humane society officers will pick on as little as a few hairs and a piece of dogfood on the floor, as they did to Linda Brown for the high crime of selling a purebred dog to the Vice President of the United States. This is because, corrupt or not, a "fight" includes a bone of contention, no pun. It's hard to contrive a better illustration of how corrupt fighting animal abuse has made the humane authorities.

I used to say that I was fighting abuse when I fed an animal, gave it comfort, took it to the vet, and so on. Not any more. In a way it's a good position to take but that's giving PETA, the HSUS, and their various followers far too much credit. Anything that a human does with an animal can be and has been interpreted as abuse of that animal, by people who although human harbor a sick grudge and contempt against humanity. It's giving them too much credit to say that doing this is anything but malicious, even if this malice is disguised, poorly, as some kind of philosophy. Now I say what I should have said all along, that I'm caring for the animal. "Abuse" or "not abuse" is not rightly judged by isolated incidents or a little bit of dirt on the floor, and certainly not by malicious lies about cruel exploitation. It is judged by whether, on the balance, the care of the animal is of benefit to that animal. The caged tiger doesn't tell me that she's miserable and that the cage is "all that can be done." She tells me that she is happy and wants to play. She and the pet dog range between "happy" and "ecstatic" most of the time. And no matter how happy they are, I will always wish that I could make their lives even happier, and that's a fight I'm happy to join.

A Real Animal Rights Activist Would...

2009-04-25T09:37:00.000-07:00

The animal rights movement is already dead and it cannot be fixed. No coat of paint, no rearrangement of the furniture, no extreme measures can fix it. It always has been and always will be an expression of the desire of some humans never to have existed, projected mentally onto the circumstances of non-human animals. Unfortunately, their kind of suicide is always murder-suicide, taking humans and animals with them. The animal rights movement is more dangerous to the lives of animals than anything.

The new movement is what I call animal culture, which depends upon and values human rights and the human right to own animals. I do not want this to be a new animal rights movement or a "real" animal rights movement. The use of animals is one of the most normal things about humans, even when you regard humans as just another animal. Life feeds on life. Life depends on life. It has always been done this way because it has to be done this way. Study biology from the first molecules on up. It becomes plain that the products of life are shared in a complex system that benefits from animals and plants feeding on each other and that the eating of meat has its place biologically.

There are human needs that find some kind of satisfaction in the idea of animal rights. Humans have a need to be compassionate. This need is not well satisfied by finding humans to be violent against or by finding animals that are better off dead or not having offspring. At the same time that someone employing the witch-hunt mentality has done "something good for the animals" he or she has participated in the destruction of a business that breeds animals, that may have been more than good enough to produce healthy and happy animals, and nothing has improved. This is the same emotional downhill slide that every crusade against an alleged evil takes people. That is how atrocities happen.

Real compassion is a positive thing. People help each other when they're down. We are polite to each other. We share our strengths. When did anyone last get together to help a neighbor who was down, maybe a wage-earner who couldn't afford to pay someone to fix her floor or the owner of a breeding operation whose heart couldn't take the stress while she couldn't live without the income? Where is the humanity for humans?

Those who have real compassion for animals have compassion for humans too. I've just explained what real compassion is. If we want well-run stores, restaurants, governments, menageries, or dog breeders, we need to give more than just our checks. We need to give of ourselves, to contribute to the smooth operation of the businesses that provide us our goods and services. Breeders and keepers of menageries literally provide us with life, so it is all the more important to give of ourselves to help them. Giving up the ego needs that require some of us to be controlling and adversarial is just one of the things that we have to do. We have to add positive emotional energy. We have to say that so and so who has a breeding kennel is doing a service for humanity and for the animals, and that such service requires respect, admiration, and even love.

Whining All the Way to the Bank

2009-04-16T21:09:00.000-07:00

Of course Jana Kohl thinks, like so many other alleged animal welfare activists, that the way to improve human nature is to accuse humans of all kinds of crimes. It's a habit. Most charities use some kind of sob story. I wasn't able to believe the story that one major "animal protection" charity told because they simply laid it on too thick. Too much was happening at once in the letter that they send to old ladies to try to get them to send $25 a month.

The animal rights activists are a loyal following of over two million putative adults who can be counted on to buy just about every book written by an AR approved author even if they dont' read it or the book just isn't readable. One way that PETA pays one author, who I'm not going to bother to bash on here by name, is by buying her book in bulk and handing it out for free. They wear her name for credibility, anyone who can sound a little bit sane and professional instead of like a nutcase. Any time they're passing someone's book around, which may be about dog training, dog psychology, or more general animal topics, they have to pay the publisher and the author gets a royalty. That "giveaway" can make an author a lot of money, sometimes millions but certainly enough to make the author a comfortable living. This way they get around various rules about how charitable donations are spent.

Right now, though, Jana Kohl is whining that President Obama betrayed her after she mentioned his name in her book. He bought a dog from a breeder. Isn't that just awful (snort)? How much money does she make every time she whines and the news services pick it up? The story includes the title of the book. She gets her name mentioned in the news alongside President Obama's and the title of her book, and people go out and buy it. When they buy it they reward this kind of disrespectful nastiness and further her agenda against respectable business.

Animal Breeders Deserve to Make Money

2009-04-13T22:20:00.000-07:00

The people who do the harshest criticisms of breeders for making a profit, they make a profit. They even sell other people's dogs to do it. Look at what happens after the bust of a so-called puppy mill. The Humane Society or local SPCA that wins the bust gets to sell not only the puppies, but the right to feel good about yourself when you press the "donate" button. Maybe I ought to get a "donate" button for people to use to contribute to the support of our human rights.

The parts that we don't talk about much include the fact that a lot of mass breeding is done by retired or semi-retired people who found an honest way to make a dollar. There is also the fact that a mass commercial breeder can be a professional and still make good money. I'm convinced that it is quite all right for a commercial breeder to give the minimum number of vaccinations necessary, have the vet give a few litters of pups a once-over, and it is almost mandatory to sell in advance, a practice that just ensures homes for the animals.

Several of the high profile cases have been against owners of animals whose care was worked out with a veterinarian. I'm convinced that more than nine tenths of the evidence against commercial breeders consists of lies motivated by hate.

A question that needs to be confronted is, who said that it's wrong for breeders to make money? Worse, when did "good breeders" decide that a "good breeder" had to lose money? You know why the activists don't want breeders to have any money. It takes money to defend yourself against false accusations in court. If "good breeders" do it to themselves, they're driving themselves out of business and this helps the haters.

A "good breeder" wants to be at least one tier higher than a farmer. That's a little bit strange because the farmer gives us our life, all of it, every bit and scrap that we eat. Maybe a lot of us have a self-image problem such that we don't give proper respect to those who feed us because what's wrong with a Kansan farmer who would feed the likes of us? So this "one tier higher" means, figuratively, donning the robes of a penniless cleric who wanders the paths of India with a wooden bowl in his hand. There's something of the "selfless service" in all that, but I have to say that the person who gives a service to humanity and animals is worthy of respect and money. "Selfless service" is a hangover from the popularity of East Indian practices in English-speaking cultures and it is an insult to anyone who truly is doing good works. It's self-destructive. It might explain why India has myths (which they consider to be absolute truth) of wars that included the use of what appeared to be atomic bombs, destroying each other very badly over and over again for the last five thousand years.

If a dog breeder, or a lion breeder, or any other human being wants to be good, his or her worst enemy is going to tell them the absolute worst way to do it, if they allow it. Generally our worst enemies pretend to be those who are going to make us over in God's image, which contradicts the Book that says that we came that way out of the box. At the same time they claim that man's work is corrupt, they want men to make over what God is said to have made perfect in the first place. That's a swindle.

So we have to do what we should have been doing in the first place. Don't let the crazies tell us how to run things. Decide as responsible adults to resolve the moral questions ourselves.

For Five Million Dollars?

2009-04-12T09:30:00.000-07:00

T. Boone Pickens's wife says no to money for veterinary school at OSU. She granted the school some money but said don't give any to the veterinary school because she doesn't know where their animals come from. I'm going out on a limb and presuming that she is believing stories from animal rights sources. No one should believe animal rights activists about anything. Fortunately most of the time their threats aren't true either. Not that they wouldn't, they just usually don't.

Veterinary schools have every reason not to want animal rights activists to speak to them, to walk by their campuses, or to have any effect whatsoever on their operations. Every kind of business, legal businesses mind you, that uses animals for any purpose whatsoever has been attacked by animal rights extremists, lied about, vandalized, or burned to the ground. A veterinary school has to try even harder than many businesses to stay within the letter and spirit of the law because it has so many reasons to maintain its integrity. Illegal attacks by an organization that pretends to be enforcing morality go around the law that the victims are trying to obey. I say "as best they can" about that obedience because regulations sometimes contradict each other. You don't know which agency is going to tell you something different from what the other agency tells you. Sometimes inspectors just plain lie because they work for animal rights interests. Did anyone believe that the "undercover investigators" were limited to those who sneak in with cameras? Or that systemic dishonesty is limited to the times that the ARs are caught?

A wealthy patron spanked Oklahoma State University and forced them to allow an animal rights activist to preach to them about morals and ethics. Say what? That's pretty humiliating. It's like having the school bully preach to his favorite victims about why we should be kind to each other. It's like having Michael Vick teach a course on how to be kind to animals. I'm sorry, but to do this Madeleine Pickens must not have a clue about what is going on.

Someone to Love

2009-04-10T13:56:00.000-07:00

Please write President Obama about the attack on Linda Brown!

This has to be talked about: The big reason why people want exotic pets.

They want someone to love. For some reason every human has a different set of affinities for different other creatures. Some seem to have no natural affection for anyone or any animal, and that's another story. Most humans can love some or all members of some non-human species, up close and personal the way that it should be.

The point of a free society is not just to tolerate diversity but love it. The fact that different people like different plants and animals is a blessing. We have three hundred million humans in the U.S. alone who can make a difference in the life of an animal or a plant by giving it a home and helping it to propagate With all the varied tastes, not only do people take in different animal species, they are certain to promote genetic variety. Look at the difference between a Cocker Spaniel and a Great Dane.

The fact that a person loves an animal is in itself a good reason to allow that person to keep that animal if at all possible, and yes, to allow propagation of that species. We should be suspicious and more than a little afraid of the people who try to prevent that. Those people often have a history of physical and psychological violence and alcohol and drug abuse. Take a look at the behavior of the animal rights activists who want to stop us from owning animals. That tells you in the negative. A picture of a cougar hugging his human tells you in the positive why we should own animals. The human-animal bond is more important than that little bit of safety that some people keep yammering about.

There is a duty as caretaker that humans acquire when we take over an animal's habitat. Fortunately there is also a surfeit of willing volunteers. To some degree all animals can be tamed. It's certainly a good time to begin the process of domestication when human growth threatens to wipe out several species. By making them more or less domesticated humanity can save them all.

A caretaker should love the animals that he works for, hands-on. This makes for much safer, more cooperative animals and less monetary expense. The caretaker deserves the love and pleasure from caring for the animals. He or she has earned it. Animals understand caretaker duties to the point that some have successfully raised human babies without human supervision, which is more difficult than caring for their own young. Wolves and tigers have shown that much understanding. There is also the story about the tigress who placed her cubs in Roy Horn's lap. She not only understood the duty of a caretaker, she assigned it!

Humans and the human mind do very well as assistants and servants for the animal kingdom.

Dear President Obama

2009-04-09T19:38:00.000-07:00

I am going to send a letter to President Obama and it goes something like this:

Dear Mr. President:

Someone committed terrorist acts against Linda Brown for selling a dog to your Vice President Joe Biden. You've probably heard already. I consider this to be a terrorist act against the Presidency, against Linda Brown, and against human rights. Linda Brown needs your support and any kindnesses that you can do for her. A good breeder is worth ten PETAs or HSUSes.

This is exactly what animal rights is. It is placing animal rights against the rights of most humans then enforcing this using violence. I hope that the FBI is already investigating PETA's complicity in this and the state inspector who accepted evidence from PETA. Are you kidding me? Evidence from PETA has zero reliability. It is tainted. How can you expect any evidence from them to be good when they have absolutely no respect for the law? The whole system of attacking so-called puppy mills for profit needs to be torn out and replaced.

Here are a couple of quotes from Ingrid Newkirk. I got them from the Talented Animals website:

….we would like an end to pet shops and the breeding of animals.—–Ingrid Newkirk, President of PETA

A burning building doesn’t help melt people’s hearts, but times change and tactics, I’m sure, have to change with them. If you choose to carry out ALF-style actions, I ask you to please not say more than you need to, to think carefully who you trust, to learn all you can about how to behave if arrested, and so to try to live to fight another day.—–Ingrid Newkirk, President of PETA

Mr. President, they used you and Mr. Biden to further their agenda by attacking someone who was associated with you. I would like to hope that this is their last mistake and that you will do something decisive to put away the animal rights movement. Placing the rights of non-human animals ahead of those of humans is the worst thing that can be done to the human race.

I have to tell you that the best way to get at them is to repeal laws that they have asked for. These people actually think that they have the God-given right to punish the presidency, by proxy, for not obeying them.

Yes, they are all like this. Always look behind the smokescreens:

It won’t ruin our movement if someone gets killed in an animal rights action. It’s going to happen sooner or later. The Animal Liberation Front, the Earth Liberation Front — sooner or later there’s going to be someone getting hurt. And we have to accept that fact. It’s going to happen. It’s not going to hurt our movement. Our movement will go on. And it’s important that we not let the bully pulpit of the FBI and the other oppression agencies stop us from what we’re doing. —–Dr. Jerry Vlasak, Animal Defense League

They want laws but they break the laws. They attack everything that makes this a nation of free people in order to enslave us to their agenda and, to repeat myself, they attacked you and Joe Biden, openly. They harmed someone in order to do this.

As you probably already know, the FBI named animal rights groups as the number one domestic terrorist threats. A list of the things that they have done will probably demonstrate that they are the only significant terrorist threat that has materialized in the United States after 9/11. I haven't heard of anything else worse than someone setting his own shoes on fire. You can strike back on Linda Brown's behalf by asking the FBI for its dossier on animal rights terrorism and speaking against PETA and the HSUS and the rest of them at press conferences. Could have Joe Biden do it, too. Think about this. Animal rights terrorists depend on donations from the public. A word from you can deal a devastating blow to their organizations every time that they commit a terrorist act like setting someone's house on fire or releasing their animals. You can do more real damage to the AR movement in an hour or two than in all the thousands of human-hours that the FBI has expended on it.

Come on. The animal rights groups are killing more animals than anyone else. They're trying to stop all breeding of domesticated animals, including the slick-haired liar who has said "one generation and out" and "we have no ethical obligation to preserve the different breeds of livestock produced through selective breeding." They are attacking humanity's most basic achievements and trying to destroy thousands of years of progress. This is no exaggeration.
The HSUS gave a nice cushy job to a man who committed terrorism on U.S. soil, one John Goodwin. Look up his police record. I'm glad that they did this because it lets us know what the HSUS is. Goodwin's work for the terrorist organization Animal Liberation Front is the only reason that he has his current job at the HSUS.

There is a lot of stuff out there. Start with the Center for Consumer Freedom's website.

Support Your Local Puppy Mill

2009-04-08T17:11:00.000-07:00

There are several good reasons to support puppy mills. Not the least is because "puppy mill" should be an innocent term. The idea of a business that mass-produces good dogs should be a blessed one, one that people sing the praises of. I haven't personally worked in one but I know a few things about industry. One of them is that most people who work in factories or "mills" are goodhearted people who work hard to produce a quality product. I was actually surprised to learn how good.

A real humane society would find owners who were in trouble and without threat of punishment, help them out of that trouble. "It's for the sake of the animals" becomes a pretty bleak statement when you know that puppy mill busts are hugely profitable for humane societies. They use the busts to extort money and puppies and then sell those puppies en masse to the public and beg for donations, right in the middle of articles condemning the people who bred them. For shame. Genuine criminal charges should not be able to be bought off this way, by giving money and dogs to a non-governmental agency. This is a conflict of interest and I don't know how prosecutors and police can stand being a part of it.

It is also an outrage when a so-called humane society re-inspects a kennel that has already been inspected by the state. It strips a compliant owner of their place of safety that should be provided for them by the state inspectors. Time and time again the "puppy mill" accusations have been thrown at people and their businesses have been raided right after a state inspection gave them a clean bill of health. There should be a law that if the state says it's clean, it's clean.

There is always something to pick on about someone's care of their animals. The fact is that there is almost always far more to praise than to pick on. Most puppy mill dogs and pups are found in good physical condition and that says a lot. Most likely it says that those dogs and pups were in a good place. It's real easy to say that someone's facility was covered in feces. Just exaggerate. It's also easy to exaggerate about the smell. Or we could decide that a place with a lot of animals is going to have an animal smell and those who have a clue know that's normal.

All people who own pets, who practice animal husbandry, or who hunt have a common interest and a common cause. We need the animals. Human needs and desires are legitimate. We have to remember that. Hunters need the animals for trophies, fur, and meat. Pet owners need the animals to satisfy the need to nurture and share affection. We all need the animals for food, and the farmer (animal husbandry) produces the animals. Treating an animal as an agricultural product is a good thing because farmers work as hard as anyone to treat their animals humanely regardless of species. The term "puppy mill" should be a badge of honor.

Give the HSUS Nothing

2009-04-07T01:39:00.000-07:00

The HSUS has succeeded in costing California farmers billions of dollars for their "Proposition 2" that has the government spending money it can't afford to micromanage farmers and force them to spend money that they can't afford. They are basically repealing the science of mass production of animal products and replacing it with whatever. Who wants a cage-free egg after it's rolled around a concrete floor picking up chicken droppings? How about an infant mortality rate for pork producers that exceeds fifty percent? I guess we're going to have to like them apples, 'cause we ain't going to be able to afford pork chops. Raising the price of our food places the interests of animals ahead of the interests of humans.

They want to bring this crap to Ohio. They want to "negotiate." What is there to negotiate about? Giving up less to the HSUS? They are entitled to less than nothing. They should have to pay massive fines for the damage that they've already done. The only thing that they should be "given" is a massive investigation of its fraudulent charitable collecting, which diverts money from legitimate animal-based charities.

The HSUS went around killing animals in their euthanasia van during the Katrina crisis. They have a convicted terrorist on their payroll. He earned his qualifications both by acting as a publicity agent for the terrorist group Animal Liberation Front and by committing terrorist acts on U.S. soil. This is also a point because such actions make it so that legal businesses, legal businesspeople, legal workers in every animal related field are not safe even when they are in compliance with the law. John Goodwin's employment by the HSUS is a large stinking mess of proof that the HSUS uses people who disrespect our legal rights. I'm glad they hired him.

Is there actually something wrong with pet ownership that makes it so that owners of pets have to mind everyone else's business? It's not something wrong with pet ownership. It's a bad mental habit that people get into. They worry too much about the negatives and blow them out of proportion. Of course that attaches to pet ownership and everything else. It narrows a person's comfort zone to that which she or he can control. Maybe it's narcissistic and maybe narcissism is an inevitable result of casting one's self as the hero who can remove all negatives from life. So what's wrong with taking positives and amplifying on them? The love that a person can have for his dog makes it easy to forgive messes and broken screen doors. A love of humanity makes it easy to forgive someone whose worst crime is caring too much.

Take the Slaughter and Euthanasia Issues Away from the Animal Rights Activists

2009-04-06T13:09:00.000-07:00

First, look at the way it's done in the wild. Prey animals are viciously attacked by gangs of ravening wolves or lions, or by solitary hunters like tigers and jaguars. This is not quite as bad as it sounds, I don't want to drive a horror spike into anyone's hearts. It's safer for the predators to do it this way and the targeted animal suffers less pain when it is attacked in a way that induces shock, which causes numbness and euphoria, then quick death.

Predation is absolutely necessary. Every animal can outgrow its food supply. Caribou and deer strip vegetation down to nothing, then they die slowly and painfully in ruined and diseased ecology. Some contagious disease may even be a reaction that protects the ecology. Carnivorous species had to develop to protect the vegetation so that herbivore populations could be more stable.

It's the same thing when humans kill a certain number of herbivores and eat them. Fur and leather get more use out of the carcasses, and grinding up mink to use as fish feed, pet food, and fertilizer is using them for food. Industry doesn't like to waste usable biomass. It's more profitable then gold. Most likely if an environmentalist can think of a good way to use biomass, it's not only been thought of by industry, industry already has a better idea because that's the way that industry lives. Boiling down bones for gelatin and glue is a long-established art and that's getting close to salvaging everything but the squeal.

When humans slaughter animals for food, we have to be pretty bad at it to be worse than nature at the slaughter, and we don't leave wounded animals to die of infections and starvation weeks later. I personally don't even want them to die, but it's a necessity that has to be faced. Better to face it in an orderly fashion and with protection for the animals and the humans involved.

Nature kills off old and sick animals to make room for young fresh ones. Reproduction has to be maintained at some reasonable pace to keep up genetic variety. We can't go around forcing people to stop breeding animals on account of we're too successful in the job of keeping them alive. Nature usually kills off the majority of animals before they reach their first year. Humans are miraculously effective in keeping them alive, which fits our nature. Humanely killing selected animals for population control is a very acceptable alternative to allowing the lot of them to be subjected to slower painful deaths from diseases, parasites, and crippling physical and genetic illnesses.

Killing for population control should be an acceptable method and it should be actively disallowed as an issue in these fights to pass breeding bans or controls. Thus far we still have the right to decide which animals are pets, which are breeders, and which are food or culls, and this is a right that every animal owner must insist on. It is very nearly the only button that AR factions can consistently push. Without that they have less than half the power to legally disrupt animal owners. They use their own killings of animals in shelters as leverage against everyone else. They also use the deaths of animals when the legislation that they pushed for forces those animals out of loving homes. They use this issue in bad faith to damage every animal-using industry. We must take this issue out of their hands.

They Have Got to be Kidding Us (Amish Puppy Mills)

2009-03-29T17:29:00.000-07:00

Or is it more like gaslighting us? Bill Smith of "Mainline Animal Rescue (MLAR)" is at it again beating up on the Amish. This was shown on ABC's Nightline news program on March 27, 2009. This link should take you directly to the story.

To really understand this news item, look at both what they say and what they don't say. They say that the Amish are hiding a "secret world", and also use the term "culture of secrecy." People are often either alarmed at the idea of such secret things or are fascinated, or both at the same time. "Secret" in this context is like a code word. They say "secret world" without saying explicitly that this is wrong, but they apparently hope that the viewer will catch the implication that there is indeed something wrong. There is a transparent pretense of journalistic neutrality.

They say that the dogs run on "chicken wire" but it's harder to catch the fact that this wire is coated to prevent harm to the dog's feet. This time, unlike when Bill Smith and MLAR were on Oprah, they don't claim that the dog's feet are torn up by the wire but that claim is implicit when they mention the coated wire. In the Oprah video I didn't see any torn up paws or claws and maybe that's why they're not making the claim in the Nightline video.

If you look carefully the stacked cages have catch trays to prevent feces and anything else from falling through to the cages underneath. I have yet to see a video of an alleged puppy mill where the cages lacked such trays but several of those videos included the claim that feces were falling through the wire onto other dogs. The Nightline video says outright that the cages are stacked so that feces fall into the cages below. You can see the trays that catch the feces and urine. In the Nightline video they're easier to see. Often when viewing these videos one has to hit the back button a few times to catch it.

They didn't show us the golden retriever in the ABC video trying to walk. They carried her everywhere. MLAR's claim was the only thing that it would have hurt. I just looked at some of the video from when they were on Oprah and I am not impressed. Ramming pipes down an animal's throat I do not believe because that would risk damaging valuable breeding animals. You also have the fact that there is a lot of barking in their footage at the puppy farms. I think that on Oprah the dog that they showed that didn't bark was a Basenji, which doesn't bark but uses other vocalizations. It's kind of like they don't want to get caught in a lie.

In the Oprah video Lisa Ling's voiceover said that the swollen teats of a mother dog were "sad testimony" to all the pups that she had bred. In nature often canids and other species live to reproduce because they have to, and there's nothing sad about that in and of itself, and why think so? And if some people are treating them like "agricultural products" that's their right. Animal rights activists don't like anyone to have "agricultural products" and I think they don't want us to eat at all. They do say no meat, no fur, no pets, and I say they need to move off the planet.

At least in the Nightline video the owner was allowed to speak in his own defense and I think he was right. He keeps them clean, he exercises them, and I think he's right to say that letting them run outside can be dangerous.

Proposed laws would among other things require solid floors and that would be less humane because the animals would be constantly walking in feces and urine. This law would force a breeder to maintain conditions that are inhumane to the animals. A cage that stays relatively clean is better than one that pools nastiness. A requirement for individual dishes means that less water will be available and it will not be as clean because water in dishes gets dirty.

The "secret society" stuff and the "they think of them as agricultural products" verbiage make appeals to bigotry. We can't prove them wrong about the Amish and the Mennonites quite as easily because they aren't nearly as much on the net as the rest of us. They get very little chance to tell their own side of the story.

Really, there are better ways to help animals.

An Animal Rights-ish Feeling

2009-03-27T19:12:00.000-07:00

I have to admit that I like most animals better than I like most humans. When there is a quandary between saving an animal and a human, I don't always have a clear answer. Maybe I'd save the animal because I can eat the animal. Those questions don't answer the big question as well as how I live my life in real life.

Why would I want people to keep pets and livestock if I think that animals are better than humans? Part of the reason is because I don't think that better in some ways means better in all ways. Also, even if an animal or human is better in all ways, we can still associate and live and play together. They're really good at putting on their best to be with their humans and that's why they will always make us feel as if they are better people.

Love and happiness are resources. These are resources that humans provide for animals.Love is something that humans seem to be uniquely able to be good at in the company of an animal, largely because of something that I tried to explain earlier. A companion animal relationship is based on shared love, happiness, and pleasure. Farmers who keep livestock and draft animals also find that kind of relationship.

An animal that might have been doomed to a lonely search for the rare morsel of food, and that would have starved to death if it didn't, can find a precious resource in humans. Wild deer, bears, and raccoons routinely beg for food, or steal it, or scavenge it from humans because humans are good at getting food and often have a lot of it.

Even if animals are better than humans, smell better, are more pleasant to the touch, are happier beings filled with more light, are somehow morally or ethically better, they have uses for us and they love us. Nature produces an animal that can do everything that requires technical expertise simply because nature accretes genetic and outside-world information and that's how to deal with it, to produce a brain that can process this information in practical ways. Of course the other animals that are part of nature want a part of this. They have curiosity, even a sort of intellectual curiosity. They helped make us. They definitely have a right to share.

IPCC Scientists Caught Faking Global Warming Data

2009-03-24T05:41:00.000-07:00

Ingrid Newkirk's been milking the global warming myth for all it's worth lately. So have "real" environmentalists, the people who want to move millions of humans for the sake of a thousand tigers and who want massive die-offs of the human race. Never mind the fact that it is a million or more times as hard to move one human to a new home as it is to consider the idea from a perspective as removed as an American's is from a village in India.

I'm not sure what makes anyone think that there is any integrity in the environmental movement. It's too much against its own race to be particularly reliable. When it denies the validity of human judgment it undercuts itself. The rest of us have to hope for their integrity and reliability based on the logic that they are educated, they are scientists, and we depend on science. What we see in the news is them saying that human judgment is bad but the judgment of environmental scientists is good as long as they stick to the political party line.

Global warming would seem to be one of those absolute "end of the world" scenarios that should cut off all debate against measures designed to prevent it. It's emotional button-pushing of course, which you will see over and over again in environmental and animal rights presentations.

The global warming game is all over. The Goddard Institute at NASA has been caught lying. To make October of 2007 appear to be the hottest October on record, they carried over figures from September of 2007, which always has at least a few very hot days in the Northern Hemisphere. An article in the London Telegraph explains the anomaly of all of the record low temperatures and record high snowfalls in Russia during the hottest October on record:

So what explained the anomaly? GISS's computerised temperature maps seemed to show readings across a large part of Russia had been up to 10 degrees higher than normal. But when expert readers of the two leading warming-sceptic blogs, Watts Up With That and Climate Audit, began detailed analysis of the GISS data they made an astonishing discovery. The reason for the freak figures was that scores of temperature records from Russia and elsewhere were not based on October readings at all. Figures from the previous month had simply been carried over and repeated two months running.

The article from Alex Jones's Prison Planet is also worth reading. That's where I got the link to the article about the lying by the Goddard Institute.

As far as I am concerned the game is all over. Carbon dioxide is plant food. Plant cover is what we live on and it needs that carbon dioxide. Plants can even take in pollutants like carbon monoxide and sulfur and nitrogen compounds and make them into more plants. When industry emits carbon dioxide and some other compounds it feeds the environment. Consider the fact that carbon that is buried is anywhere from less available for plant growth to unavailable. Unchecked vegetation tends to sequester carbon in the soil under it, and up to a point this is actually very useful, but at some time it has to be replenished. A declining phase would be hazardous as we already need about as much biomass for food, fuel, and construction as we can get. Burn some coal and some underbrush and get that precious compound back in the air to feed useful plants.

Generalizations

2009-03-23T19:25:00.000-07:00

The animal rights activists propose that animals are too dangerous to keep on the strength of single attacks, sometimes even when the attacks are not fatal. On what is this based, exactly? Just on the strength of the assertion. Proof by assertion is considered one of the basic logical fallacies, but somehow it works well with the human brain when repeated enough. Any evidence without evidence to counter it works as proof. A lot of people know better but it wears in with repetition. Repetition increases the weight of otherwise weightless evidence.

So they believe that one incident proves that people should have their animals taken away by force. They hammer on this as if singular incidents are all of the evidence in the world and all that is needed to justify everything that is done to hurt animal owners. One person starves an animal in Muskogee Oklahoma and everyone's starving their animals. They recommend lengthy jail sentences. I have also seen them advocate the torture and murder of other human beings, including specific humans beings, who have abused animals and who they have obviously falsely accused, such as Michael Sandlin with his "truck stop tiger" who I wish was still breeding tigers, and a man who was cleared of all charges of abuse, surprisingly, by his local humane society.

Apply their own logic to their own actions. Animal rights activists have beaten people and left them for dead. Just recently some ALF people burned a zoo and burned several animals to death. They have killed many animals as well as destroyed non-living property that represented a lot of time, money, energy, and physical research. There is a list of crimes that could fill several books, committed by animal rights activists. Many of these crimes constitute terrorism and conspiracy to commit. You can also count PETA's thousands killed and I count the millions that the SPCA claims that it has to kill.

By their own logic a lot of human beings should be tortured and killed for their crimes against animals. There is no severability in their logic, such that if one owner or organization does badly, the others are innocent, so by their own logic the Friends of Animals are just as guilty as the ALF, and you won't find an animal rights organization that allows this necessary severability for their own enemies, or fails to use singular incidents against an entire industry.

By the logic that they use against animal owners, all animal rights activists should be taken out and shot. They should be tortured first. Those that survive being shot should spend the rest of their lives in jail and eat porridge and rat droppings.

How much damage do they have to do to us for us to even be tempted to think such things? They know that they're targeting good people who are harmless and don't think that way. It's the way of bullies. They're always after good people. The miscreants do them a lot of good and are more like them anyway. You and I would never harm anyone on purpose. We're useless to them.

Canada's "Regulations"

2009-03-20T23:21:00.000-07:00

Here's what I wrote about the new bans on exotic animals in British Columbia, Canada:

Thank you for the links, Lianne. I've been looking over the regulations on the different sites and I still don't see where it's written into any legally citable regulations. I haven't found a reference to something in writing that says what conditions a person has to meet to keep their animal, either. If it's up to the SPCA whether they keep their animals or not, everyone's toast and the regulations are in bad faith.

There may be some way to characterize the regulations as "reasonable" but I have always thought that keeping lions and tigers is worth some risk. Maybe Canada doesn't care about equal protection under the law, but Barry Penner's thing about animals that present a risk to human life, which is totally slaved to the SPCA's propaganda, applies to just about every species of animal that you can name. So what are you seeing that is so "reasonable"?

This one person, who so blatantly works for the SPCA, should not have been given this power. If the Assembly is unable to do this in a more fair and reasonable manner they should not have fobbed it off on a person who essentially works for the animal rights activists, which is a conflict of interest with his duty as a Minister of the government of B.C. He and the SPCA have been jonesing for this kind of power over pet owners. And many of the species in question have been defined as "domestic" for over 25 years. Redefining them as wildlife is a betrayal. Such a basic change in the status of personal pets, by species, should not be in the hands of one man even if you don't like their teeth and claws.

Then you have the permit applications. People will submit these applications in good faith and whether those applications will be accepted may not be in good faith. Submitting the applications in good faith will be giving up their right to privacy, not that Canada, the SPCA, or the U.S. any of them has given a fig for privacy, and that will make them targets for abuse.

I consider the new regulations to be an unnecessary abuse of power and a giving of quasi-governmental powers to special interests of the animal rights activist type.

How could this not be legislating the exotic animal industry out of business? The regulation clearly excludes almost everything.

The way that I see it the pet industry is at least as valid as zoological parks and recreation. Personal property is the basis of personal freedom. A regulation that says that scientists can own something and humans can't makes everyone a second-class citizen under the scientists, and the animals don't benefit all that much. Animals like being raised with families better than they like being raised in institutions.

Hyperbole on the High Seas

2009-03-18T20:51:00.001-07:00

I was just looking at Charlie Moore's presentation about the alleged "Great Pacific Garbage Patch." The concept sounds really nasty until you look at the Wikipedia entry that contains the information that they go on about. It tends to prove that the ocean is really big and environmentalists are really nitpicky. The high concentration of garbage is about 3.34 pieces per "square meter" with an average weight of 5.1 milligrams per square meter. My calculator says that's 17.034 milligrams per square meter. I'm presuming that this is floating garbage and that there is little or nothing in between the surface and the depths. It either sinks or it floats.

One manufacturer of molds for bottle-caps says that their plastic bottlecaps weight 2.35 grams. The average mass figure is satisfied by a floating bottle-cap in every 138 square meters, one bottle-cap in a square about 33 feet on a side. If we actually do have this 17 milligrams per square meter, that's 17,000 kilograms per square kilometer, about 37,400 pounds. That sounds impressive except that a cubic meter of sea water weighs 1000 kilograms and a square kilometer of ocean, to a depth of a meter, weights 1,000,000,000 kilograms or 2.2 billion pounds. 17 milligrams of plastic in one billion milligrams (one cubic meter) of seawater equals 17 parts per billion plastic versus seawater in the notorious "garbage path" of the Pacific, and that's just going to a depth of one meter.

There is a lot of doom and gloom in the predictions but this has been going on for more than 20 years and there are still millions of albatrosses out there, the bird that seems most affected by the garbage. Perhaps we're just making a smarter albatross by weeding out those that can't tell food from garbage.

We're never really sure how thin the justifications are for a new "measure" proposed by the environmentalists until we actually run the numbers. This sounds thin to me.

Captive Breeding

2009-03-13T20:22:00.000-07:00

I just had to answer this article about captive breeding.

Breeding of animals is not rocket science. The only way to fail at it is to never attempt it. Usually the problem is how to deal with an embarrassment of riches. I personally would rather have a few too many dogs, cats, or tigers than none at all. Captive breeding is in no way an "extreme tactic", it's a perfectly ordinary thing that billions of people have done.

The World Wildlife Fund uses one simple technique to persuade people that it is wrong to breed animals in captivity. I sometimes call it the "You'll shoot your eye out!" technique. They tell the reader or the listener to think only of all the things that can go wrong if someone tries to breed a rare animal. They might even admit that thousands have successfully bred those animals, but it's still "think of all the things that can go wrong." Why would anyone even listen to these people? All that they want you to do is stop doing what you think is right and obey them.

Think of all the things that can go right. Where there were no tigers there can be hundreds or thousands depending on the resources a group has. You might have mixed breeds but all of the animals whose genes went into the mix have many descendants and the more the merrier for genetic variety. The more genetic variety the better. Can you believe that so-called conservationists actually argue for "subspecies purity"? That's a lot like saying that a dog that is half Great Dane and half Saint Bernard is no good. When they say that Siberian/Bengal tiger mixes are no good for a species survival program, that's so wrong. They are the same species and genes from both populations are preserved. What they mean is that they want their programs to go their way, like an obsessive-compulsive thing.

They argue that there are "many difficulties" associated with captive breeding. So? We do it not because it is easy but because it is hard. They try to paralyze our thinking by talking about the dangers, and now the difficulties. Think of the reward: Most humans love animals. We get to keep them with us and take them into the future with us. A truly "natural" lifestyle includes as many plants and animals as we can have around us.

A species does not become uniform when humans take charge of its breeding. Look at the differences between the poodle, the dachshund, the border collie, the great dane, the pariah dog, the dingo, and all other dog breeds. Their genetic variety has obviously increased. This goes for horses, cattle, goats, sheep, pigs, and everything else. There are known and well-established methods for multiplying the number of "subspecies" of any animal, plant, or even bacteria. The only animals that have limited gene pools are the ones that people have been forcibly prevented from using in captive breeding programs, like the ocelot and the cheetah. Both of those species would number in the millions and they would be quite varied by now.

There are a lot of failures but that is the price of success. When they breed "naturally" in the wild every species loses a lot of its young. Fewer are lost in captive breeding. There is inbreeding in the wild, always. Lions are known for mating with their daughters. So are stallions. Those are just two species that live in family groups and the dominant males drive out their male progeny, or kill them, and mate with the females that stay. Outbreeding is actually alien to them.

The hopefully large number of tigers and lions in captivity in the United States reflect the success of an informal grassroots breeding program. Some say that there are as many as 25,000 tigers in the U.S. and I could only wish. No one ever seems to estimate the number of lions but it would seem that there would be more because even fewer of them kill their owners than tigers do and they like to live in family groups. Any true conservationist would congratulate the private owner on the success of breeding thousands of species individuals of endangered and threatened animals. A really good conservationist finds ways to help them and make it legal to breed the really endangered animals.

Were I to be in charge of a conservation program I would do this: Live-capture orphaned cubs from the wild and hand-raise them as pets. Take advantage of the large body of knowledge from successful private owners, and their enthusiasm, and their money and time and energy, and use them to raise the next generation of that endangered animal. Let's not kid ourselves. The wild is disappearing. People are living there. A war to move those people would destroy the habitat and kill a lot of humans. So let's put the animals on the dole and do it right. They'll be living better than they do in the wild. Humans will be a happier and calmer species. Everyone benefits.