They Have Got to be Kidding Us (Amish Puppy Mills)

Or is it more like gaslighting us? Bill Smith of "Mainline Animal Rescue (MLAR)" is at it again beating up on the Amish. This was shown on ABC's Nightline news program on March 27, 2009. This link should take you directly to the story.

To really understand this news item, look at both what they say and what they don't say. They say that the Amish are hiding a "secret world", and also use the term "culture of secrecy." People are often either alarmed at the idea of such secret things or are fascinated, or both at the same time. "Secret" in this context is like a code word. They say "secret world" without saying explicitly that this is wrong, but they apparently hope that the viewer will catch the implication that there is indeed something wrong. There is a transparent pretense of journalistic neutrality.

They say that the dogs run on "chicken wire" but it's harder to catch the fact that this wire is coated to prevent harm to the dog's feet. This time, unlike when Bill Smith and MLAR were on Oprah, they don't claim that the dog's feet are torn up by the wire but that claim is implicit when they mention the coated wire. In the Oprah video I didn't see any torn up paws or claws and maybe that's why they're not making the claim in the Nightline video.

If you look carefully the stacked cages have catch trays to prevent feces and anything else from falling through to the cages underneath. I have yet to see a video of an alleged puppy mill where the cages lacked such trays but several of those videos included the claim that feces were falling through the wire onto other dogs. The Nightline video says outright that the cages are stacked so that feces fall into the cages below. You can see the trays that catch the feces and urine. In the Nightline video they're easier to see. Often when viewing these videos one has to hit the back button a few times to catch it.

They didn't show us the golden retriever in the ABC video trying to walk. They carried her everywhere. MLAR's claim was the only thing that it would have hurt. I just looked at some of the video from when they were on Oprah and I am not impressed. Ramming pipes down an animal's throat I do not believe because that would risk damaging valuable breeding animals. You also have the fact that there is a lot of barking in their footage at the puppy farms. I think that on Oprah the dog that they showed that didn't bark was a Basenji, which doesn't bark but uses other vocalizations. It's kind of like they don't want to get caught in a lie.

In the Oprah video Lisa Ling's voiceover said that the swollen teats of a mother dog were "sad testimony" to all the pups that she had bred. In nature often canids and other species live to reproduce because they have to, and there's nothing sad about that in and of itself, and why think so? And if some people are treating them like "agricultural products" that's their right. Animal rights activists don't like anyone to have "agricultural products" and I think they don't want us to eat at all. They do say no meat, no fur, no pets, and I say they need to move off the planet.

At least in the Nightline video the owner was allowed to speak in his own defense and I think he was right. He keeps them clean, he exercises them, and I think he's right to say that letting them run outside can be dangerous.

Proposed laws would among other things require solid floors and that would be less humane because the animals would be constantly walking in feces and urine. This law would force a breeder to maintain conditions that are inhumane to the animals. A cage that stays relatively clean is better than one that pools nastiness. A requirement for individual dishes means that less water will be available and it will not be as clean because water in dishes gets dirty.

The "secret society" stuff and the "they think of them as agricultural products" verbiage make appeals to bigotry. We can't prove them wrong about the Amish and the Mennonites quite as easily because they aren't nearly as much on the net as the rest of us. They get very little chance to tell their own side of the story.

Really, there are better ways to help animals.

An Animal Rights-ish Feeling

I have to admit that I like most animals better than I like most humans. When there is a quandary between saving an animal and a human, I don't always have a clear answer. Maybe I'd save the animal because I can eat the animal. Those questions don't answer the big question as well as how I live my life in real life.

Why would I want people to keep pets and livestock if I think that animals are better than humans? Part of the reason is because I don't think that better in some ways means better in all ways. Also, even if an animal or human is better in all ways, we can still associate and live and play together. They're really good at putting on their best to be with their humans and that's why they will always make us feel as if they are better people.

Love and happiness are resources. These are resources that humans provide for animals.Love is something that humans seem to be uniquely able to be good at in the company of an animal, largely because of something that I tried to explain earlier. A companion animal relationship is based on shared love, happiness, and pleasure. Farmers who keep livestock and draft animals also find that kind of relationship.

An animal that might have been doomed to a lonely search for the rare morsel of food, and that would have starved to death if it didn't, can find a precious resource in humans. Wild deer, bears, and raccoons routinely beg for food, or steal it, or scavenge it from humans because humans are good at getting food and often have a lot of it.

Even if animals are better than humans, smell better, are more pleasant to the touch, are happier beings filled with more light, are somehow morally or ethically better, they have uses for us and they love us. Nature produces an animal that can do everything that requires technical expertise simply because nature accretes genetic and outside-world information and that's how to deal with it, to produce a brain that can process this information in practical ways. Of course the other animals that are part of nature want a part of this. They have curiosity, even a sort of intellectual curiosity. They helped make us. They definitely have a right to share.

IPCC Scientists Caught Faking Global Warming Data

Ingrid Newkirk's been milking the global warming myth for all it's worth lately. So have "real" environmentalists, the people who want to move millions of humans for the sake of a thousand tigers and who want massive die-offs of the human race. Never mind the fact that it is a million or more times as hard to move one human to a new home as it is to consider the idea from a perspective as removed as an American's is from a village in India.

I'm not sure what makes anyone think that there is any integrity in the environmental movement. It's too much against its own race to be particularly reliable. When it denies the validity of human judgment it undercuts itself. The rest of us have to hope for their integrity and reliability based on the logic that they are educated, they are scientists, and we depend on science. What we see in the news is them saying that human judgment is bad but the judgment of environmental scientists is good as long as they stick to the political party line.

Global warming would seem to be one of those absolute "end of the world" scenarios that should cut off all debate against measures designed to prevent it. It's emotional button-pushing of course, which you will see over and over again in environmental and animal rights presentations.

The global warming game is all over. The Goddard Institute at NASA has been caught lying. To make October of 2007 appear to be the hottest October on record, they carried over figures from September of 2007, which always has at least a few very hot days in the Northern Hemisphere. An article in the London Telegraph explains the anomaly of all of the record low temperatures and record high snowfalls in Russia during the hottest October on record:

So what explained the anomaly? GISS's computerised temperature maps seemed to show readings across a large part of Russia had been up to 10 degrees higher than normal. But when expert readers of the two leading warming-sceptic blogs, Watts Up With That and Climate Audit, began detailed analysis of the GISS data they made an astonishing discovery. The reason for the freak figures was that scores of temperature records from Russia and elsewhere were not based on October readings at all. Figures from the previous month had simply been carried over and repeated two months running.

The article from Alex Jones's Prison Planet is also worth reading. That's where I got the link to the article about the lying by the Goddard Institute.

As far as I am concerned the game is all over. Carbon dioxide is plant food. Plant cover is what we live on and it needs that carbon dioxide. Plants can even take in pollutants like carbon monoxide and sulfur and nitrogen compounds and make them into more plants. When industry emits carbon dioxide and some other compounds it feeds the environment. Consider the fact that carbon that is buried is anywhere from less available for plant growth to unavailable. Unchecked vegetation tends to sequester carbon in the soil under it, and up to a point this is actually very useful, but at some time it has to be replenished. A declining phase would be hazardous as we already need about as much biomass for food, fuel, and construction as we can get. Burn some coal and some underbrush and get that precious compound back in the air to feed useful plants.

Generalizations

The animal rights activists propose that animals are too dangerous to keep on the strength of single attacks, sometimes even when the attacks are not fatal. On what is this based, exactly? Just on the strength of the assertion. Proof by assertion is considered one of the basic logical fallacies, but somehow it works well with the human brain when repeated enough. Any evidence without evidence to counter it works as proof. A lot of people know better but it wears in with repetition. Repetition increases the weight of otherwise weightless evidence.

So they believe that one incident proves that people should have their animals taken away by force. They hammer on this as if singular incidents are all of the evidence in the world and all that is needed to justify everything that is done to hurt animal owners. One person starves an animal in Muskogee Oklahoma and everyone's starving their animals. They recommend lengthy jail sentences. I have also seen them advocate the torture and murder of other human beings, including specific humans beings, who have abused animals and who they have obviously falsely accused, such as Michael Sandlin with his "truck stop tiger" who I wish was still breeding tigers, and a man who was cleared of all charges of abuse, surprisingly, by his local humane society.

Apply their own logic to their own actions. Animal rights activists have beaten people and left them for dead. Just recently some ALF people burned a zoo and burned several animals to death. They have killed many animals as well as destroyed non-living property that represented a lot of time, money, energy, and physical research. There is a list of crimes that could fill several books, committed by animal rights activists. Many of these crimes constitute terrorism and conspiracy to commit. You can also count PETA's thousands killed and I count the millions that the SPCA claims that it has to kill.

By their own logic a lot of human beings should be tortured and killed for their crimes against animals. There is no severability in their logic, such that if one owner or organization does badly, the others are innocent, so by their own logic the Friends of Animals are just as guilty as the ALF, and you won't find an animal rights organization that allows this necessary severability for their own enemies, or fails to use singular incidents against an entire industry.

By the logic that they use against animal owners, all animal rights activists should be taken out and shot. They should be tortured first. Those that survive being shot should spend the rest of their lives in jail and eat porridge and rat droppings.

How much damage do they have to do to us for us to even be tempted to think such things? They know that they're targeting good people who are harmless and don't think that way. It's the way of bullies. They're always after good people. The miscreants do them a lot of good and are more like them anyway. You and I would never harm anyone on purpose. We're useless to them.

Canada's "Regulations"

Here's what I wrote about the new bans on exotic animals in British Columbia, Canada:

Thank you for the links, Lianne. I've been looking over the regulations on the different sites and I still don't see where it's written into any legally citable regulations. I haven't found a reference to something in writing that says what conditions a person has to meet to keep their animal, either. If it's up to the SPCA whether they keep their animals or not, everyone's toast and the regulations are in bad faith.

There may be some way to characterize the regulations as "reasonable" but I have always thought that keeping lions and tigers is worth some risk. Maybe Canada doesn't care about equal protection under the law, but Barry Penner's thing about animals that present a risk to human life, which is totally slaved to the SPCA's propaganda, applies to just about every species of animal that you can name. So what are you seeing that is so "reasonable"?

This one person, who so blatantly works for the SPCA, should not have been given this power. If the Assembly is unable to do this in a more fair and reasonable manner they should not have fobbed it off on a person who essentially works for the animal rights activists, which is a conflict of interest with his duty as a Minister of the government of B.C. He and the SPCA have been jonesing for this kind of power over pet owners. And many of the species in question have been defined as "domestic" for over 25 years. Redefining them as wildlife is a betrayal. Such a basic change in the status of personal pets, by species, should not be in the hands of one man even if you don't like their teeth and claws.

Then you have the permit applications. People will submit these applications in good faith and whether those applications will be accepted may not be in good faith. Submitting the applications in good faith will be giving up their right to privacy, not that Canada, the SPCA, or the U.S. any of them has given a fig for privacy, and that will make them targets for abuse.

I consider the new regulations to be an unnecessary abuse of power and a giving of quasi-governmental powers to special interests of the animal rights activist type.

How could this not be legislating the exotic animal industry out of business? The regulation clearly excludes almost everything.

The way that I see it the pet industry is at least as valid as zoological parks and recreation. Personal property is the basis of personal freedom. A regulation that says that scientists can own something and humans can't makes everyone a second-class citizen under the scientists, and the animals don't benefit all that much. Animals like being raised with families better than they like being raised in institutions.

Hyperbole on the High Seas

I was just looking at Charlie Moore's presentation about the alleged "Great Pacific Garbage Patch." The concept sounds really nasty until you look at the Wikipedia entry that contains the information that they go on about. It tends to prove that the ocean is really big and environmentalists are really nitpicky. The high concentration of garbage is about 3.34 pieces per "square meter" with an average weight of 5.1 milligrams per square meter. My calculator says that's 17.034 milligrams per square meter. I'm presuming that this is floating garbage and that there is little or nothing in between the surface and the depths. It either sinks or it floats.

One manufacturer of molds for bottle-caps says that their plastic bottlecaps weight 2.35 grams. The average mass figure is satisfied by a floating bottle-cap in every 138 square meters, one bottle-cap in a square about 33 feet on a side. If we actually do have this 17 milligrams per square meter, that's 17,000 kilograms per square kilometer, about 37,400 pounds. That sounds impressive except that a cubic meter of sea water weighs 1000 kilograms and a square kilometer of ocean, to a depth of a meter, weights 1,000,000,000 kilograms or 2.2 billion pounds. 17 milligrams of plastic in one billion milligrams (one cubic meter) of seawater equals 17 parts per billion plastic versus seawater in the notorious "garbage path" of the Pacific, and that's just going to a depth of one meter.

There is a lot of doom and gloom in the predictions but this has been going on for more than 20 years and there are still millions of albatrosses out there, the bird that seems most affected by the garbage. Perhaps we're just making a smarter albatross by weeding out those that can't tell food from garbage.

We're never really sure how thin the justifications are for a new "measure" proposed by the environmentalists until we actually run the numbers. This sounds thin to me.

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.