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.