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.
Showing posts with label exotic pets. Show all posts
Showing posts with label exotic pets. Show all posts
Friday, April 10, 2009
Tuesday, April 7, 2009
Give the HSUS Nothing
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.
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.
Friday, March 27, 2009
An Animal Rights-ish Feeling
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.
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.
Tuesday, March 3, 2009
Is "Safety" What We're Even Looking For?
Some degree of safety is necessary, of course. The thing is, what are we protecting? Our lives are what we are protecting. Too much safety means that we don't live our lives. We lose what we try to save.
You can't build positives from negatives. Anything that is worth having is made of something that has some intrinsic positive value. Anything that is worth doing is made of positive actions that result in added value or pleasure. Rules that say "don't do this or that or you will be hurt" obscure the positive and may even successfully conceal it. They create fear just by warning people of dangers.
When people tell me about rules for handling or encountering animals, all too often it's like that. All too rarely it's "do these things and you will do well." It's like telling people how to bake a cake by saying "don't cook it too long" or "don't use too many eggs" without telling people the correct cooking temperature or number of eggs. Maybe some people seem like morons because they're used to being treated as if they can't retain the simplest of instructions.
There are events and circumstances that get people killed, like rides at carnivals, air shows, auto races, and rodeos. They don't get bad reputations because of this. Also, in spite of or maybe even because of the number of deaths and injuries involving various animals, they are still very very popular. I think that the public is just fine with the danger but we submit to the use of the danger as an excuse when a public official wants to make a name for himself. This is something that people of good faith have no control of because bad situations can be made to order or even completely faked, any day that the activists want. Even if we were actually losing ground because of incidents like the chimpanzee attack, and exotic animal owners could stop all such incidents from happening within their ranks, animal rights activists would produce one if need be.
People really aren't looking for the "safe" experience, though. Thrill-seeking is a very positive side of human nature. So is the quest for pleasure. We're seeking experiences that we will enjoy or achieve some kind of fulfillment from. Sometimes we seek to be scared half to death. We also seek reality in its rawest forms. There are people who regularly tour active volcanoes, so many that some places have regular tours that skirt molten rock. These are the things that we do to live. Safety in those cases is like "most likely we'll survive the experience."
Maybe the malaise against ownership is because of the "safety first" attitude. People who own big cats act like they're doing something dangerous with little redeeming quality. They even try to conceal the redeeming features for fear that other people will want to do the same thing, get hurt, hurt their reputations, and so on. Don't they hurt their own reputations by doing this, though? One of the treatments for fear is an emotional reward. Too much "safety first" creates the fear and denies the reward. Fear-based thinking is self-destructive and doesn't even make the fearful ones any safer. By the formula that I just described it puts animal owners in more danger of being voted off the island.
Sadly, one of the verbal weapons that animal owners and animal lovers use is the "I wouldn't let you near my animals." It's the nuclear option in arguments. I can't think of anything at the moment that is more likely to dampen someone's positive attitude. A fear-based attitude makes it easy for someone to say that about someone who expresses too positive an attitude towards animals and the idea of contact with them. Take seriously the idea that the fear-based attitude could be directed towards someone who is trusting of horses or dogs. I've seen some of that on occasion. The idea that someone who loves and trusts animals should never go near said animals is one of the most frustrating, depression-inducing ideas that ever came down the wires. Animal owners should be striving to create positive feelings and when people feel them, they get slapped in the face with a cold wet towel. Owners who do this may want to rethink their positions.
Like I said, people aren't looking for ultimate safety anyway. They desire a thrill, or a pleasant encounter with an animal, or even for an ego boost. These are the desires that we need to respect. Guidelines should become conduits for people to achieve the experiences that they want, not obstacles to trip people up.
[additional]
I liked this quote so I added it. It sums up my feelings about some people's views of "safety":
You can't build positives from negatives. Anything that is worth having is made of something that has some intrinsic positive value. Anything that is worth doing is made of positive actions that result in added value or pleasure. Rules that say "don't do this or that or you will be hurt" obscure the positive and may even successfully conceal it. They create fear just by warning people of dangers.
When people tell me about rules for handling or encountering animals, all too often it's like that. All too rarely it's "do these things and you will do well." It's like telling people how to bake a cake by saying "don't cook it too long" or "don't use too many eggs" without telling people the correct cooking temperature or number of eggs. Maybe some people seem like morons because they're used to being treated as if they can't retain the simplest of instructions.
There are events and circumstances that get people killed, like rides at carnivals, air shows, auto races, and rodeos. They don't get bad reputations because of this. Also, in spite of or maybe even because of the number of deaths and injuries involving various animals, they are still very very popular. I think that the public is just fine with the danger but we submit to the use of the danger as an excuse when a public official wants to make a name for himself. This is something that people of good faith have no control of because bad situations can be made to order or even completely faked, any day that the activists want. Even if we were actually losing ground because of incidents like the chimpanzee attack, and exotic animal owners could stop all such incidents from happening within their ranks, animal rights activists would produce one if need be.
People really aren't looking for the "safe" experience, though. Thrill-seeking is a very positive side of human nature. So is the quest for pleasure. We're seeking experiences that we will enjoy or achieve some kind of fulfillment from. Sometimes we seek to be scared half to death. We also seek reality in its rawest forms. There are people who regularly tour active volcanoes, so many that some places have regular tours that skirt molten rock. These are the things that we do to live. Safety in those cases is like "most likely we'll survive the experience."
Maybe the malaise against ownership is because of the "safety first" attitude. People who own big cats act like they're doing something dangerous with little redeeming quality. They even try to conceal the redeeming features for fear that other people will want to do the same thing, get hurt, hurt their reputations, and so on. Don't they hurt their own reputations by doing this, though? One of the treatments for fear is an emotional reward. Too much "safety first" creates the fear and denies the reward. Fear-based thinking is self-destructive and doesn't even make the fearful ones any safer. By the formula that I just described it puts animal owners in more danger of being voted off the island.
Sadly, one of the verbal weapons that animal owners and animal lovers use is the "I wouldn't let you near my animals." It's the nuclear option in arguments. I can't think of anything at the moment that is more likely to dampen someone's positive attitude. A fear-based attitude makes it easy for someone to say that about someone who expresses too positive an attitude towards animals and the idea of contact with them. Take seriously the idea that the fear-based attitude could be directed towards someone who is trusting of horses or dogs. I've seen some of that on occasion. The idea that someone who loves and trusts animals should never go near said animals is one of the most frustrating, depression-inducing ideas that ever came down the wires. Animal owners should be striving to create positive feelings and when people feel them, they get slapped in the face with a cold wet towel. Owners who do this may want to rethink their positions.
Like I said, people aren't looking for ultimate safety anyway. They desire a thrill, or a pleasant encounter with an animal, or even for an ego boost. These are the desires that we need to respect. Guidelines should become conduits for people to achieve the experiences that they want, not obstacles to trip people up.
[additional]
I liked this quote so I added it. It sums up my feelings about some people's views of "safety":
"In our country are evangelists and zealots of many different political,
economic and religious persuasions whose fanatical conviction is that all
thought is divinely classified into two kinds -- that which is their own and that which is false and
dangerous."
-- Justice Robert H. Jackson (1892-1954), U. S. Supreme Court Justice
Sunday, February 22, 2009
Why Risk Your Life for a Chimpanzee or a Tiger?
Extremely few humans are killed by captive-bred exotics. It's reasonable to take some risks for a measurable gain. In some way or another these animals are worth a lot of risk to some humans. Environmentalists insist that tigers, lions, chimpanzees, and other animals that can kill humans be allowed to run free in their native habitat which also happens to be the native habitat of humans. That's a lot easier to sell to people who are willing to let Africans deal with lions and chimpanzees in their backyards, and East Indians and Chinese deal with tigers in their backyards. Any English-speaking culture tightly controls its predators, using lethal means, and calls that "conservation."
Myself, just in the interest of fairness, I believe that the risks that a person or group takes should be similar to those that we ask of others. The question of whether this kind of risk should be taken has already been settled in the minds of animal rights activists and environmentalists who advocate the sharp culling of the human race or its total extinction. That bit of information doesn't really process. It's hard to take in. Add in the contradiction when they scream at us that we just can't keep exotic animals as pets because it's "too dangerous." Sort of causes a brain seizure, doesn't it? That's why adults make their own decisions.
Everyone wants the animals to be saved and everyone wants someone to take some risks and spend some money to do it. Most people don't want it in their backyard and some of us find out the hard way that they think that my backyard is their backyard. Once the fear button is pushed they don't want it near them, they don't want to process it in their minds, but they still want someone else to do it and will pay them to do it. That's how we get "sanctuaries" that promise to keep the allegedly dangerous animals on small reservations. Just send them the money and they will put them on display and only breed what the government says that they can breed, and they can explain why it's best for the animals too, even if it contradicts established science and experience.
Why take the risks at all? It is because there is an ethical sense that most people have that says that we don't have to make extinct the creatures that sometimes inconvenience us and even kill us. We think that fair is fair. We also like the creatures and benefit from their company even when we don't use their physical carcasses for food and useful materials. For their benefit, humans can farm tigers and just about anything else so that their numbers remain stable or even grow. On at least some of China's farms the tigers die of old age before they are used for materials. The market for tiger parts is just going to have to do without wild-caught tigers. Not that the wild is going to exist much further. Americans seem to demand a buffer zone between us and the wild animals that's larger than some countries, so you can't even count most of what's outside of city limits. Other countries are growing even faster. We either find a way to breed in captivity or we lose them as resources and we lose their ability to live for their own sakes.
One side of this controversy produces large numbers of new animals who are quite fit to carry on the species. The other side, the animal rights/conservation side, does what it can to gather up those captive-breds and eliminate them. Which side do you think has the greater ability to preserve non-human life?
Myself, just in the interest of fairness, I believe that the risks that a person or group takes should be similar to those that we ask of others. The question of whether this kind of risk should be taken has already been settled in the minds of animal rights activists and environmentalists who advocate the sharp culling of the human race or its total extinction. That bit of information doesn't really process. It's hard to take in. Add in the contradiction when they scream at us that we just can't keep exotic animals as pets because it's "too dangerous." Sort of causes a brain seizure, doesn't it? That's why adults make their own decisions.
Everyone wants the animals to be saved and everyone wants someone to take some risks and spend some money to do it. Most people don't want it in their backyard and some of us find out the hard way that they think that my backyard is their backyard. Once the fear button is pushed they don't want it near them, they don't want to process it in their minds, but they still want someone else to do it and will pay them to do it. That's how we get "sanctuaries" that promise to keep the allegedly dangerous animals on small reservations. Just send them the money and they will put them on display and only breed what the government says that they can breed, and they can explain why it's best for the animals too, even if it contradicts established science and experience.
Why take the risks at all? It is because there is an ethical sense that most people have that says that we don't have to make extinct the creatures that sometimes inconvenience us and even kill us. We think that fair is fair. We also like the creatures and benefit from their company even when we don't use their physical carcasses for food and useful materials. For their benefit, humans can farm tigers and just about anything else so that their numbers remain stable or even grow. On at least some of China's farms the tigers die of old age before they are used for materials. The market for tiger parts is just going to have to do without wild-caught tigers. Not that the wild is going to exist much further. Americans seem to demand a buffer zone between us and the wild animals that's larger than some countries, so you can't even count most of what's outside of city limits. Other countries are growing even faster. We either find a way to breed in captivity or we lose them as resources and we lose their ability to live for their own sakes.
One side of this controversy produces large numbers of new animals who are quite fit to carry on the species. The other side, the animal rights/conservation side, does what it can to gather up those captive-breds and eliminate them. Which side do you think has the greater ability to preserve non-human life?
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