Dear President Obama

I am going to send a letter to President Obama and it goes something like this:

Dear Mr. President:

Someone committed terrorist acts against Linda Brown for selling a dog to your Vice President Joe Biden. You've probably heard already. I consider this to be a terrorist act against the Presidency, against Linda Brown, and against human rights. Linda Brown needs your support and any kindnesses that you can do for her. A good breeder is worth ten PETAs or HSUSes.

This is exactly what animal rights is. It is placing animal rights against the rights of most humans then enforcing this using violence. I hope that the FBI is already investigating PETA's complicity in this and the state inspector who accepted evidence from PETA. Are you kidding me? Evidence from PETA has zero reliability. It is tainted. How can you expect any evidence from them to be good when they have absolutely no respect for the law? The whole system of attacking so-called puppy mills for profit needs to be torn out and replaced.

Here are a couple of quotes from Ingrid Newkirk. I got them from the Talented Animals website:

….we would like an end to pet shops and the breeding of animals.—–Ingrid Newkirk, President of PETA

A burning building doesn’t help melt people’s hearts, but times change and tactics, I’m sure, have to change with them. If you choose to carry out ALF-style actions, I ask you to please not say more than you need to, to think carefully who you trust, to learn all you can about how to behave if arrested, and so to try to live to fight another day.—–Ingrid Newkirk, President of PETA

Mr. President, they used you and Mr. Biden to further their agenda by attacking someone who was associated with you. I would like to hope that this is their last mistake and that you will do something decisive to put away the animal rights movement. Placing the rights of non-human animals ahead of those of humans is the worst thing that can be done to the human race.

I have to tell you that the best way to get at them is to repeal laws that they have asked for. These people actually think that they have the God-given right to punish the presidency, by proxy, for not obeying them.

Yes, they are all like this. Always look behind the smokescreens:

It won’t ruin our movement if someone gets killed in an animal rights action. It’s going to happen sooner or later. The Animal Liberation Front, the Earth Liberation Front — sooner or later there’s going to be someone getting hurt. And we have to accept that fact. It’s going to happen. It’s not going to hurt our movement. Our movement will go on. And it’s important that we not let the bully pulpit of the FBI and the other oppression agencies stop us from what we’re doing. —–Dr. Jerry Vlasak, Animal Defense League

They want laws but they break the laws. They attack everything that makes this a nation of free people in order to enslave us to their agenda and, to repeat myself, they attacked you and Joe Biden, openly. They harmed someone in order to do this.

As you probably already know, the FBI named animal rights groups as the number one domestic terrorist threats. A list of the things that they have done will probably demonstrate that they are the only significant terrorist threat that has materialized in the United States after 9/11. I haven't heard of anything else worse than someone setting his own shoes on fire. You can strike back on Linda Brown's behalf by asking the FBI for its dossier on animal rights terrorism and speaking against PETA and the HSUS and the rest of them at press conferences. Could have Joe Biden do it, too. Think about this. Animal rights terrorists depend on donations from the public. A word from you can deal a devastating blow to their organizations every time that they commit a terrorist act like setting someone's house on fire or releasing their animals. You can do more real damage to the AR movement in an hour or two than in all the thousands of human-hours that the FBI has expended on it.

Come on. The animal rights groups are killing more animals than anyone else. They're trying to stop all breeding of domesticated animals, including the slick-haired liar who has said "one generation and out" and "we have no ethical obligation to preserve the different breeds of livestock produced through selective breeding." They are attacking humanity's most basic achievements and trying to destroy thousands of years of progress. This is no exaggeration.
The HSUS gave a nice cushy job to a man who committed terrorism on U.S. soil, one John Goodwin. Look up his police record. I'm glad that they did this because it lets us know what the HSUS is. Goodwin's work for the terrorist organization Animal Liberation Front is the only reason that he has his current job at the HSUS.

There is a lot of stuff out there. Start with the Center for Consumer Freedom's website.

Captive Breeding

I just had to answer this article about captive breeding.

Breeding of animals is not rocket science. The only way to fail at it is to never attempt it. Usually the problem is how to deal with an embarrassment of riches. I personally would rather have a few too many dogs, cats, or tigers than none at all. Captive breeding is in no way an "extreme tactic", it's a perfectly ordinary thing that billions of people have done.

The World Wildlife Fund uses one simple technique to persuade people that it is wrong to breed animals in captivity. I sometimes call it the "You'll shoot your eye out!" technique. They tell the reader or the listener to think only of all the things that can go wrong if someone tries to breed a rare animal. They might even admit that thousands have successfully bred those animals, but it's still "think of all the things that can go wrong." Why would anyone even listen to these people? All that they want you to do is stop doing what you think is right and obey them.

Think of all the things that can go right. Where there were no tigers there can be hundreds or thousands depending on the resources a group has. You might have mixed breeds but all of the animals whose genes went into the mix have many descendants and the more the merrier for genetic variety. The more genetic variety the better. Can you believe that so-called conservationists actually argue for "subspecies purity"? That's a lot like saying that a dog that is half Great Dane and half Saint Bernard is no good. When they say that Siberian/Bengal tiger mixes are no good for a species survival program, that's so wrong. They are the same species and genes from both populations are preserved. What they mean is that they want their programs to go their way, like an obsessive-compulsive thing.

They argue that there are "many difficulties" associated with captive breeding. So? We do it not because it is easy but because it is hard. They try to paralyze our thinking by talking about the dangers, and now the difficulties. Think of the reward: Most humans love animals. We get to keep them with us and take them into the future with us. A truly "natural" lifestyle includes as many plants and animals as we can have around us.

A species does not become uniform when humans take charge of its breeding. Look at the differences between the poodle, the dachshund, the border collie, the great dane, the pariah dog, the dingo, and all other dog breeds. Their genetic variety has obviously increased. This goes for horses, cattle, goats, sheep, pigs, and everything else. There are known and well-established methods for multiplying the number of "subspecies" of any animal, plant, or even bacteria. The only animals that have limited gene pools are the ones that people have been forcibly prevented from using in captive breeding programs, like the ocelot and the cheetah. Both of those species would number in the millions and they would be quite varied by now.

There are a lot of failures but that is the price of success. When they breed "naturally" in the wild every species loses a lot of its young. Fewer are lost in captive breeding. There is inbreeding in the wild, always. Lions are known for mating with their daughters. So are stallions. Those are just two species that live in family groups and the dominant males drive out their male progeny, or kill them, and mate with the females that stay. Outbreeding is actually alien to them.

The hopefully large number of tigers and lions in captivity in the United States reflect the success of an informal grassroots breeding program. Some say that there are as many as 25,000 tigers in the U.S. and I could only wish. No one ever seems to estimate the number of lions but it would seem that there would be more because even fewer of them kill their owners than tigers do and they like to live in family groups. Any true conservationist would congratulate the private owner on the success of breeding thousands of species individuals of endangered and threatened animals. A really good conservationist finds ways to help them and make it legal to breed the really endangered animals.

Were I to be in charge of a conservation program I would do this: Live-capture orphaned cubs from the wild and hand-raise them as pets. Take advantage of the large body of knowledge from successful private owners, and their enthusiasm, and their money and time and energy, and use them to raise the next generation of that endangered animal. Let's not kid ourselves. The wild is disappearing. People are living there. A war to move those people would destroy the habitat and kill a lot of humans. So let's put the animals on the dole and do it right. They'll be living better than they do in the wild. Humans will be a happier and calmer species. Everyone benefits.

In Praise of Farms

Farms in general are good for conservation and good for animals. The average American farmer feeds about 130 people. If we were still stuck with 17^th century farming methods it would take a lot more land, we would all be starving, and that land would become exhausted. Modern farming methods actually do build soil, which is easy to see if you've ever lived in a cornfield. All that organic matter that corn harvest leaves behind builds soil, as does waste from wheat and soy. Soybeans are legumes that put nitrogen in the soil, as are peanuts. Cattle are grazed after corn harvest, which salvages corn, helps restore soil bacteria and makes the organic leavings easier for the plants to use.

It is absolutely necessary for industry to increase the viability of any food animals that it uses and of the plants that it uses. "Maize" is practically a weed in its natural state and the corn that was developed from maize produces a lot more usable biomass per acre, thus more organic material for soil, and more food from an acre. These days we do also have the means to produce fuel from that corn, although that technology would be better used to produce fuel from landfills. Biomass isn't a good solution when it takes the equivalent of a gallon of gas in petroleum to produce a gallon of ethanol, and ethanol contains about two thirds of the energy per gallon. The best way to produce liquid fuel for cars is probably going to be biomass conversion plants that can process garbage with water at high temperatures, powered by small nuclear plants that are just now going into production. These mini-nukes produce about 70 megawatts of heat, are proof against meltdowns, produce little radioactive waste, are self-regulating, and are already tested and proven by the laboratories at Los Alamos.

Progress has always been like that. It takes energy to move nutrients from one place to another, and the next time that the soil will be really naturally refreshed in the United States is when Yellowstone's volcanic caldera blows its top and covers most of the continent with volcanic ash. Mining this caldera may eventually be a practical solution when someone develops the machinery for it and invests the money, but there are many easily available deposits of volcanic ash and other sources of suitable nutrients including silt from the ocean floor. Farming practices have already brought soil nutrients to depleted regions in the form of fertilizer. Kansas was pretty close to being scrub desert until the settlers brought in cedar, elm, and walnut trees, which did so well that they threatened to overwhelm the prairie completely, but which also performed the vital service of bringing nutrients and water to the surface, and the service of conserving water. Hot soil can literally burn away organic matter and leave only sand. Tree cover lowers soil temperatures and allows the soil to hold more moisture and support more life like earthworms and bacteria. It's working in Israel. It worked in Kansas and we weren't even aiming for that effect.

More animals can live on an acreage, with less infant mortality, less disease, and fewer population crashes due to modern technology. Building shelters, fences, and providing clean water is cheap and a lot of us don't even know how much more advanced that is over medieval methods and technology. Humans can and do selectively breed for animals that can survive in the wild because we still have to in order to have a productive farm. We can maintain a larger population overall than nature does because of advances in medicine, food production, and methods of keeping animals. It's ironic to see animal rights activists complain about the way that farmers use modern medical methods to keep animals alive at the same time that they use advanced medicine to keep animals going that have lost body parts and mobility, to use in their sideshows.

In the wild large bison-type animals, buffalo and the common cow and bull, have a really rough time and they become really aggressive as a result. Five or six people are killed each year by buffalo in national parks in the USA. They're not much tamer when socialized to humans and used as food, which is all to the good because they can defend themselves from wolves and coyotes. Most production cattle are kept on open fields with barbed-wire to keep them in. It's as natural an environment as it gets, and when managed well, it's better than the wild because trees are not allowed to overgrow the pastures, which would happen without human intervention, and they would choke out most of the graze that cattle depend on.

Deer also benefit because the plants that do them the most good grow best at the edges of cleared areas and in areas of new growth of trees. Deciduous forests choke out most other plants and decrease available vegetation for herbivores. Fire and logging make room for new vegetation. Fire control is an added benefit. Too many humans have died in wildfires lately. Environmentalists want us not to manage the underbrush and don't seem to care how many homes, jobs, and human lives are lost, which is pretty sick. Australia just lost Marysville in Victoria to a wildfire. About one hundred out of the original five hundred residents died. Almost every building in town was destroyed. Think of them when an environmentalists wants to save dead underbrush over human beings. Wildfires are managed in advance by clearing flammable materials and making fire roads. I am crying right now because I read about a man and his dog who were burned to death in Marysville. This was preventable. Fire management techniques have been used effectively for over a century.

Humans actually assist in the maintenance of life already. We protect animals, sometimes as livestock, sometimes as pets and service animals, and sometimes as exhibits in menageries. We deserve a lot of credit for this and we should give ourselves that credit. The "chilling effect" that animal terrorists try to create should just be more incentive, even a challenge.