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":

"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

The Danger of the Animal Rights Movement

Yes, they actually intend to kill off at least a substantial fraction of humanity. Yes, they intend to do it by fair means and by foul. Yes, they want everyone who doesn't like them dead, preferably painfully. The first principles of animal rights activism include the idea that humans should voluntarily choose extinction to protect the lives of other animals.

If you watch their statements on Internet forums and in print, they actually say it. In conversations face to face or avatar to avatar they actually lie about it even when they know that you're read what they wrote. Some of the lies are like "I didn't actually mean it that way." How did they mean it when they said nine tenths of humanity should die, or that the owner of a dog should die horribly?

What is the meaning of a message like this?

"Rest in peace my Angel.
Schuler you ****ing bastard I pray to god that your time is soon and that you burn in hell! " Pretty clear, isn't it? This one was about a dog who the vet and the humane society checked and was doing just fine.

Here's another good one:

"If I were reincarnated I would wish to be returned to earth as a killer virus to lower human population levels."
-- Prince Phillip, Duke of Edinburgh, leader of the World Wildlife Fund

Proud sponsor of Jane Goodall, by the way.

"Isn't the only hope for the planet that the industrialized civilizations collapse? Isn't it our responsibility to bring that about?"
-- Maurice Strong, head of the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro and Executive Officer for Reform in the Office of the Secretary General of the United Nations

"Among environmentalists sharing two or three beers, the notion is quite common that if only some calamity could wipe out the entire human race, other species might once again have a chance."
-- Richard Conniff, Audubon Magazine

More environmentalists, but the movements are not separate now if they ever were. There are a lot of quotes at the "Target of Opportunity" website.

These people warn us of the danger of "exotic" pets and some domesticated pets. They use the warnings as leverage, the danger as a trump card, to pry our animals, our property, away from us, for public disuse without compensation. This also is part of a plan to eliminate humanity from the picture.

It's a form of suicide. It's common knowledge that they're angry with humanity for messing up the world, and for doing what other animals do: exist, use our brains, eat what we need to eat, and change the environment to be more useful to us. Ironically humans are animals so you can't hate humans without somehow hating animals and life. All the warnings that we've tainted them, that we shouldn't have them living with us, they are aimed at killing the bond between humans and animals, denying the animals the benefits of relationships with humans, and denying humans the life that we share with the animals.

When they are banning particular animals as pets, they deny homes to those animals. This matters because in doing this they prevent people from repairing or mitigating the damage that they are so upset about. It would cut into their charitable donations if it came out that owners of pets and livestock had created a larger, more stable population of non-human animals than would have existed without them, with greater safety, using fewer government hand-outs and bail-outs. The conservationists risk the extinction of a lot of species by attempting to end private ownership, and the best thing for increasing the number of a species is to make it a commodity that people will buy. This is at least as good a deal as unassisted nature provides.

The bottom line is that it seems like we could come pretty close to saying that the average environmentalist/animal rights activist is more dangerous to more humans, individually, than all of the exotic and domesticated pets on the entire planet. You might be able to count the livestock too. This is if you count animals as a danger, just for the sake of the argument. The truth is that animals are by far of net benefit to humanity, and humanity is of net benefit to the animals. Thus it is beyond doubt that every single animal rights activist is more dangerous to humanity than all pets and livestock. They don't want humanity to save the planet. They want humanity to die out and save the planet by not being here.