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.