Please Help Jean Cyhanick

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"?

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?

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?

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

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

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

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

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

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."

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.

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

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

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

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

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?

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

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

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

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

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?

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

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

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)

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

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:

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:

(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.