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?