Support Your Local Puppy Mill

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.

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.

Never Cry "Cruelty"

In his book The Mass Psychology of Fascism, in the last chapter which is titled On Natural Work-Democracy, Wilhelm Reich wrote a very good illustrative story of fair versus unfair criticism.

Here it is briefly: Imagine that an engineer has to repair a large engine that his factory needs by the next day. He's working well into the late evening. One person comes along and just smashes wires to be doing it because his wife nagged him earlier. The next one gives the engineer a pile of nonsense about how he's doing it wrong, tells him he's filthy (from working on the engine), and that he's immoral for abandoning his family that evening. Number two knows nothing about repairing engines. The third one had a hard time with his mother-in-law and spits in the engineer's face. Reich says that they are like highwaymen who disturb honest work. Does that sound familiar? This was written at the beginning of the establishment of the Third Reich in Germany, when a bunch of animal rights activists/ environmentalists took over a more or less democratic country and we know what they did with it.





The next person who comes along is another engineer who rolls up his sleeves and pitches in and helps. He knows the work and in the story he spots a mistake that he helps correct, and is POLITE, something that the activists are quite incapable of being.

Compare this to the kind of personal experiences that either teach a person when it is appropriate to be critical or prove that the would-be critic used his brains first. One example was when I was at a stable and a horse in a small round pipe enclosure without food and water begged me to give him some food. Using my brains and my own experience I realized that the horse was a valuable animal and if he was being "starved" it was for a reason. He might have gotten into the sacked feed and was being treated to prevent laminitis. He might have been due for a visit to the veterinarian and needed to be kept from food and water for a prescribed time. The most important thing to realize was that most likely the owner knew what he was doing and I didn't. The horse looked like he was in very good shape, too.

I've seen dirty houses and yards that had dogs that were reasonably clean, healthy, quite well-fed, and free of fleas and disease. This could be genuinely objectionable but it's a home and they're happy and cared for. On the balance it is still good and if I want better I should be willing to pitch in and help. I have done this before and if I were someone who would cry "cruelty" instead of cleaning Edward Taub's laboratory like I volunteered to do, I don't belong around the animals and I don't belong there because I'm either clueless or malicious. In other words, I should be like the engineer who goes in and helps to the best of his ability. Even if I didn't know much he might need another set of hands, maybe someone to bring in drinks and a snack and so on, but to me someone who helps does so by actually helping. A real helper has to be trustworthy, honest, and polite. He has to serve. He has to be truly tolerant. He has to be respectful.

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.