In his book The Mass Psychology of Fascism, in the last chapter which is titled On Natural Work-Democracy, Wilhelm Reich wrote a very good illustrative story of fair versus unfair criticism.
Here it is briefly: Imagine that an engineer has to repair a large engine that his factory needs by the next day. He's working well into the late evening. One person comes along and just smashes wires to be doing it because his wife nagged him earlier. The next one gives the engineer a pile of nonsense about how he's doing it wrong, tells him he's filthy (from working on the engine), and that he's immoral for abandoning his family that evening. Number two knows nothing about repairing engines. The third one had a hard time with his mother-in-law and spits in the engineer's face. Reich says that they are like highwaymen who disturb honest work. Does that sound familiar? This was written at the beginning of the establishment of the Third Reich in Germany, when a bunch of animal rights activists/ environmentalists took over a more or less democratic country and we know what they did with it.
The next person who comes along is another engineer who rolls up his sleeves and pitches in and helps. He knows the work and in the story he spots a mistake that he helps correct, and is POLITE, something that the activists are quite incapable of being.
Compare this to the kind of personal experiences that either teach a person when it is appropriate to be critical or prove that the would-be critic used his brains first. One example was when I was at a stable and a horse in a small round pipe enclosure without food and water begged me to give him some food. Using my brains and my own experience I realized that the horse was a valuable animal and if he was being "starved" it was for a reason. He might have gotten into the sacked feed and was being treated to prevent laminitis. He might have been due for a visit to the veterinarian and needed to be kept from food and water for a prescribed time. The most important thing to realize was that most likely the owner knew what he was doing and I didn't. The horse looked like he was in very good shape, too.
I've seen dirty houses and yards that had dogs that were reasonably clean, healthy, quite well-fed, and free of fleas and disease. This could be genuinely objectionable but it's a home and they're happy and cared for. On the balance it is still good and if I want better I should be willing to pitch in and help. I have done this before and if I were someone who would cry "cruelty" instead of cleaning Edward Taub's laboratory like I volunteered to do, I don't belong around the animals and I don't belong there because I'm either clueless or malicious. In other words, I should be like the engineer who goes in and helps to the best of his ability. Even if I didn't know much he might need another set of hands, maybe someone to bring in drinks and a snack and so on, but to me someone who helps does so by actually helping. A real helper has to be trustworthy, honest, and polite. He has to serve. He has to be truly tolerant. He has to be respectful.
Showing posts with label pets. Show all posts
Showing posts with label pets. Show all posts
Thursday, March 5, 2009
Sunday, February 22, 2009
Why Risk Your Life for a Chimpanzee or a Tiger?
Extremely few humans are killed by captive-bred exotics. It's reasonable to take some risks for a measurable gain. In some way or another these animals are worth a lot of risk to some humans. Environmentalists insist that tigers, lions, chimpanzees, and other animals that can kill humans be allowed to run free in their native habitat which also happens to be the native habitat of humans. That's a lot easier to sell to people who are willing to let Africans deal with lions and chimpanzees in their backyards, and East Indians and Chinese deal with tigers in their backyards. Any English-speaking culture tightly controls its predators, using lethal means, and calls that "conservation."
Myself, just in the interest of fairness, I believe that the risks that a person or group takes should be similar to those that we ask of others. The question of whether this kind of risk should be taken has already been settled in the minds of animal rights activists and environmentalists who advocate the sharp culling of the human race or its total extinction. That bit of information doesn't really process. It's hard to take in. Add in the contradiction when they scream at us that we just can't keep exotic animals as pets because it's "too dangerous." Sort of causes a brain seizure, doesn't it? That's why adults make their own decisions.
Everyone wants the animals to be saved and everyone wants someone to take some risks and spend some money to do it. Most people don't want it in their backyard and some of us find out the hard way that they think that my backyard is their backyard. Once the fear button is pushed they don't want it near them, they don't want to process it in their minds, but they still want someone else to do it and will pay them to do it. That's how we get "sanctuaries" that promise to keep the allegedly dangerous animals on small reservations. Just send them the money and they will put them on display and only breed what the government says that they can breed, and they can explain why it's best for the animals too, even if it contradicts established science and experience.
Why take the risks at all? It is because there is an ethical sense that most people have that says that we don't have to make extinct the creatures that sometimes inconvenience us and even kill us. We think that fair is fair. We also like the creatures and benefit from their company even when we don't use their physical carcasses for food and useful materials. For their benefit, humans can farm tigers and just about anything else so that their numbers remain stable or even grow. On at least some of China's farms the tigers die of old age before they are used for materials. The market for tiger parts is just going to have to do without wild-caught tigers. Not that the wild is going to exist much further. Americans seem to demand a buffer zone between us and the wild animals that's larger than some countries, so you can't even count most of what's outside of city limits. Other countries are growing even faster. We either find a way to breed in captivity or we lose them as resources and we lose their ability to live for their own sakes.
One side of this controversy produces large numbers of new animals who are quite fit to carry on the species. The other side, the animal rights/conservation side, does what it can to gather up those captive-breds and eliminate them. Which side do you think has the greater ability to preserve non-human life?
Myself, just in the interest of fairness, I believe that the risks that a person or group takes should be similar to those that we ask of others. The question of whether this kind of risk should be taken has already been settled in the minds of animal rights activists and environmentalists who advocate the sharp culling of the human race or its total extinction. That bit of information doesn't really process. It's hard to take in. Add in the contradiction when they scream at us that we just can't keep exotic animals as pets because it's "too dangerous." Sort of causes a brain seizure, doesn't it? That's why adults make their own decisions.
Everyone wants the animals to be saved and everyone wants someone to take some risks and spend some money to do it. Most people don't want it in their backyard and some of us find out the hard way that they think that my backyard is their backyard. Once the fear button is pushed they don't want it near them, they don't want to process it in their minds, but they still want someone else to do it and will pay them to do it. That's how we get "sanctuaries" that promise to keep the allegedly dangerous animals on small reservations. Just send them the money and they will put them on display and only breed what the government says that they can breed, and they can explain why it's best for the animals too, even if it contradicts established science and experience.
Why take the risks at all? It is because there is an ethical sense that most people have that says that we don't have to make extinct the creatures that sometimes inconvenience us and even kill us. We think that fair is fair. We also like the creatures and benefit from their company even when we don't use their physical carcasses for food and useful materials. For their benefit, humans can farm tigers and just about anything else so that their numbers remain stable or even grow. On at least some of China's farms the tigers die of old age before they are used for materials. The market for tiger parts is just going to have to do without wild-caught tigers. Not that the wild is going to exist much further. Americans seem to demand a buffer zone between us and the wild animals that's larger than some countries, so you can't even count most of what's outside of city limits. Other countries are growing even faster. We either find a way to breed in captivity or we lose them as resources and we lose their ability to live for their own sakes.
One side of this controversy produces large numbers of new animals who are quite fit to carry on the species. The other side, the animal rights/conservation side, does what it can to gather up those captive-breds and eliminate them. Which side do you think has the greater ability to preserve non-human life?
Sunday, February 8, 2009
Animal Culture, First Thoughts
Animal culture is better than animal rights or animal liberation. It is little more than what humans have already been doing for thousands of years as animal agriculture and pet ownership. Calling it “animal culture” puts a short name to it that says that we culture animals. In doing so we also culture ourselves, so here we are, a total philosophy of animal culture that includes human and non-human animals. The philosophy is all but invisible because it grew naturally. We are already used to it. We never thought that it had to be codified and given a name. “Agriculture” would be another good word for it, but we’re used to thinking of agriculture as a business that charges too much money for food.
“Animal culture” is simply breeding and caring for animals for use by humans. We have the more traditional uses as pets, service animals, and for food, fiber, and other materials including pharmaceutical use. Don’t kid yourself about captive breeding for the preservation of a species; this is still a human use. It’s just one that shows how much humans care about responsible care of the Earth. Don’t try to get away from it or deny it. Be proud of it. One human purpose is to preserve human and non-human life. Instead of bringing together angry people, I want to bring kind and caring people to love the Earth into life.
Unfortunately, as anyone who reads the first few pages of “Animal Liberation” finds out immediately, what Peter Singer connected with, and I am sure that this was deliberate, was human rage. His book was published in 1975 and that was when issues of racial discrimination, gender discrimination, reproductive rights, and gay rights were very hot topics at the same time, and oppressed groups were really angry. He equated the use of animals with the oppression of humans and today angry feminists and gays and lesbians appear to be overrepresented among animal rights activists, their anger driving the general anger against humanity itself. I guess that blacks generally had more sense (I am white, BTW), but animal rights activists equate slavery in the 19th century with the use of animals. They are also not above equating the use of animals, as in the humane use of animals in agriculture and even as pets, with wife-beating and child abuse. You also might notice that there isn’t much Jewish participation in animal rights activism, not as such, and that might be because they know the difference between broiler chickens and themselves, to reference a favorite Ingrid Newkirk statement. Six billion broiler chickens are not six million humans. Also, Jewish people already have a good system for humane treatment of animals.
Peter Singer and other activists claim that it is wasteful to use animals for food, that without animals eating our food agriculture could produce a bountiful harvest of good vegan products for us to eat. Is he kidding us? If Africans could feed themselves by planting seeds they would plant seeds. It takes modern agricultural methods, modern equipment, and a lot of fuel and irrigation to produce plant-based foods, and at that, we need uses for agricultural waste products that are currently fed to animals, essentially free biomass to convert to meat. In many climates it is impossible to do much if any cultivation of grain or vegetables outside of greenhouses, but the sparse grass, lichens, and other plants that grow there provide an adequate diet for animals like reindeer and caribou, which humans can eat. It’s not a situation in which the bulk of the meat is produced from food that people would or could eat. Even where grain is given to fatten cattle up the animal is fed first, thus the food first supports the food animal species, then it supports humans. That’s extra economy. Food is used well when it is used to support the prosperity of an animal species other than human.
The use of a species for agriculture makes it necessary for humans to assist in the propagation of that species. Those animals can also be made into pets. Agriculture is a fair exchange. Humans get the meat that would go to predators and control predation so that large families of the prey animals can grow, relatively undisturbed. We can even control the predators to the extent that we can feed them from other populations and species of prey animals to keep them going while a given species is allowed to restore its population.
There may be problems with a meat-based diet but there are also problems with vegetarian diets, including the greater chance of allergies like allergies to peanuts, soy, and potatoes that occur because those plants have small amounts of toxins in their seeds and fruit. Human babies need cholesterol to form good brains, and cholesterol comes from meat. There is no open-and-shut case that meat-based diets cause cancer, diabetes, or increases in the rate of heart attacks. [In fact sugar, a food that is made from plants, is implicated in these things.]
Pet ownership is almost nothing but service to the animals. We pamper them, attend to their medical and emotional needs, give them a place to live and the best food that we can afford, and even then we wonder if we’re doing enough. Most pets that I have met have been mightily pleased with our efforts and our company, including tigers and lions. Pet ownership makes humans emotionally dependent on the continued propagation of other animal species, for all practical purposes their willing servants.
I unabashedly support the use of animals to support the human race. Predation is a necessary part of the cycle of life. Even plant life has to be consumed so that new plants will grow in their place, thus herbivores are necessary. Humans or at least fire are needed to manage deciduous forests so that there will be clear grassy areas for herbivores to graze and live, and we can control other natural predators so that the dynamic balance of life can stay at more optimum levels without population crashes. Some of the means that we use are really sophisticated, making our brains huge assets in the fight to maintain animal life of all kinds. Humans can even potentially deflect asteroids from impacting the Earth, thus preventing extinction events. This is a real potential considering the fact that we have several kinds of working rockets and nuclear weapons that can be used for this purpose.
What other animal can take nuisance animals and turn them into friends and companions? Lions and tigers are somewhat dangerous to humans in the wild, and when their food supplies run short some of them turn to humans for food. By that I don’t mean scratching at the back door and begging for scraps, not usually. When they are kept as pets they may be a little bit dangerous, but the human death rate is minuscule and they provide much joy for their humans, whom they dote on. As long as there are a few thousand or a few tens of thousand big cats kept as pets around the world, those species are fairly secure, and the more in captivity the better, as we have the means to keep them going. Wolves are the large carnivore species that has succeeded the best in human hands. That species is very alive and healthy, has wide genetic variety, and it numbers over a hundred million. Yes, they’ve “changed” but feral dog packs are always very successful survivors. Maybe they’ve learned a trick or two from humans.
If we are worried about diseases, there is a lot of reason to believe that being exposed to animals reduces the incidence of allergies and diseases. It’s possible to be allergic to cats and horses and get used to it, I’ve done it myself. The root word for vaccination is “vacca”, the Latin word for cow, and that comes from the well-known historical use of cowpox virus to immunize people against the much more virulent smallpox. Exposure to microbes carried by animals helps train the immune system to fight a wide variety of disease-carrying microbes.
Everything about the human-animal bond is in favor of animal culture. The more humans expand our domain, the more the other animals come with us. We need them as resources and we need their company, which is a lot like the nature that we came from, give or take some technicalities. When we modernize and human birthrate drops, then there is a little more room for other animals. It is healthy to use animals as substitute children and as friends for people of all ages. Kindness and compassion are best practiced with creatures that you can actually touch and hold. This is where it gets real. Others only know the creatures in the abstract, which literally means not real. Humans need this kind of reality.
“Animal culture” is simply breeding and caring for animals for use by humans. We have the more traditional uses as pets, service animals, and for food, fiber, and other materials including pharmaceutical use. Don’t kid yourself about captive breeding for the preservation of a species; this is still a human use. It’s just one that shows how much humans care about responsible care of the Earth. Don’t try to get away from it or deny it. Be proud of it. One human purpose is to preserve human and non-human life. Instead of bringing together angry people, I want to bring kind and caring people to love the Earth into life.
Unfortunately, as anyone who reads the first few pages of “Animal Liberation” finds out immediately, what Peter Singer connected with, and I am sure that this was deliberate, was human rage. His book was published in 1975 and that was when issues of racial discrimination, gender discrimination, reproductive rights, and gay rights were very hot topics at the same time, and oppressed groups were really angry. He equated the use of animals with the oppression of humans and today angry feminists and gays and lesbians appear to be overrepresented among animal rights activists, their anger driving the general anger against humanity itself. I guess that blacks generally had more sense (I am white, BTW), but animal rights activists equate slavery in the 19th century with the use of animals. They are also not above equating the use of animals, as in the humane use of animals in agriculture and even as pets, with wife-beating and child abuse. You also might notice that there isn’t much Jewish participation in animal rights activism, not as such, and that might be because they know the difference between broiler chickens and themselves, to reference a favorite Ingrid Newkirk statement. Six billion broiler chickens are not six million humans. Also, Jewish people already have a good system for humane treatment of animals.
Peter Singer and other activists claim that it is wasteful to use animals for food, that without animals eating our food agriculture could produce a bountiful harvest of good vegan products for us to eat. Is he kidding us? If Africans could feed themselves by planting seeds they would plant seeds. It takes modern agricultural methods, modern equipment, and a lot of fuel and irrigation to produce plant-based foods, and at that, we need uses for agricultural waste products that are currently fed to animals, essentially free biomass to convert to meat. In many climates it is impossible to do much if any cultivation of grain or vegetables outside of greenhouses, but the sparse grass, lichens, and other plants that grow there provide an adequate diet for animals like reindeer and caribou, which humans can eat. It’s not a situation in which the bulk of the meat is produced from food that people would or could eat. Even where grain is given to fatten cattle up the animal is fed first, thus the food first supports the food animal species, then it supports humans. That’s extra economy. Food is used well when it is used to support the prosperity of an animal species other than human.
The use of a species for agriculture makes it necessary for humans to assist in the propagation of that species. Those animals can also be made into pets. Agriculture is a fair exchange. Humans get the meat that would go to predators and control predation so that large families of the prey animals can grow, relatively undisturbed. We can even control the predators to the extent that we can feed them from other populations and species of prey animals to keep them going while a given species is allowed to restore its population.
There may be problems with a meat-based diet but there are also problems with vegetarian diets, including the greater chance of allergies like allergies to peanuts, soy, and potatoes that occur because those plants have small amounts of toxins in their seeds and fruit. Human babies need cholesterol to form good brains, and cholesterol comes from meat. There is no open-and-shut case that meat-based diets cause cancer, diabetes, or increases in the rate of heart attacks. [In fact sugar, a food that is made from plants, is implicated in these things.]
Pet ownership is almost nothing but service to the animals. We pamper them, attend to their medical and emotional needs, give them a place to live and the best food that we can afford, and even then we wonder if we’re doing enough. Most pets that I have met have been mightily pleased with our efforts and our company, including tigers and lions. Pet ownership makes humans emotionally dependent on the continued propagation of other animal species, for all practical purposes their willing servants.
I unabashedly support the use of animals to support the human race. Predation is a necessary part of the cycle of life. Even plant life has to be consumed so that new plants will grow in their place, thus herbivores are necessary. Humans or at least fire are needed to manage deciduous forests so that there will be clear grassy areas for herbivores to graze and live, and we can control other natural predators so that the dynamic balance of life can stay at more optimum levels without population crashes. Some of the means that we use are really sophisticated, making our brains huge assets in the fight to maintain animal life of all kinds. Humans can even potentially deflect asteroids from impacting the Earth, thus preventing extinction events. This is a real potential considering the fact that we have several kinds of working rockets and nuclear weapons that can be used for this purpose.
What other animal can take nuisance animals and turn them into friends and companions? Lions and tigers are somewhat dangerous to humans in the wild, and when their food supplies run short some of them turn to humans for food. By that I don’t mean scratching at the back door and begging for scraps, not usually. When they are kept as pets they may be a little bit dangerous, but the human death rate is minuscule and they provide much joy for their humans, whom they dote on. As long as there are a few thousand or a few tens of thousand big cats kept as pets around the world, those species are fairly secure, and the more in captivity the better, as we have the means to keep them going. Wolves are the large carnivore species that has succeeded the best in human hands. That species is very alive and healthy, has wide genetic variety, and it numbers over a hundred million. Yes, they’ve “changed” but feral dog packs are always very successful survivors. Maybe they’ve learned a trick or two from humans.
If we are worried about diseases, there is a lot of reason to believe that being exposed to animals reduces the incidence of allergies and diseases. It’s possible to be allergic to cats and horses and get used to it, I’ve done it myself. The root word for vaccination is “vacca”, the Latin word for cow, and that comes from the well-known historical use of cowpox virus to immunize people against the much more virulent smallpox. Exposure to microbes carried by animals helps train the immune system to fight a wide variety of disease-carrying microbes.
Everything about the human-animal bond is in favor of animal culture. The more humans expand our domain, the more the other animals come with us. We need them as resources and we need their company, which is a lot like the nature that we came from, give or take some technicalities. When we modernize and human birthrate drops, then there is a little more room for other animals. It is healthy to use animals as substitute children and as friends for people of all ages. Kindness and compassion are best practiced with creatures that you can actually touch and hold. This is where it gets real. Others only know the creatures in the abstract, which literally means not real. Humans need this kind of reality.
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