Risks and Sacrifices

I would put a human at risk to save the lives of an animal species or even one animal, but what does "risk" even mean? Too often we truncate phrases like "unacceptable risk" or "irresponsible risk." Then they become zero-tolerance, one-drop-rule memes. They become the kind of meme that makes a child afraid to cross the street when there is no traffic coming, or even according to established safety rules.

Kim Carlton walked his pet tigers to the mall and let people pet them. I think that was a very good thing that taught people to be comfortable around animals that we live with. Were the children at risk? It was a good kind of risk. Saying that it's a bad risk is saying that the experience with the animals is worthless. Ask the autistic child who comes out of his shell to hug a cheetah what that experience is worth. It's worth a lot. That makes it a productive risk, a good risk. The sacrifice of a tiny bit of our safety is well worth it. This is just saying that we take a millionth of a chance that someone will die, or maybe a thousandth of a millionth of a chance, to live an extraordinarily good moment.

The pursuit of life, liberty, and happiness are not just enumerated in the Constitution. They are in the body of the Constitution and they are the primary focus of the Constitution. This is the point by which I justify my next statements.

It is right to allow an animal to die to protect the rights of its owner. That got some knee-jerk emotional reactions, didn't it? But think about it. Our human rights are considered so important that even when protecting them in another nation many people can justify the use of death on a large scale. The case can be pretty vaguely connected to our own personal rights, but it would look like the defense of our own rights would be far more vigorous. I read about the child who was bitten in the face by a rescued dog. He pulled the dog off his daughter and the dog attacked her again. If I faced the same situation and were mentally prepared by having read his, the dog would die in my hands. I would twist its collar or I would crush its throat until it was thoroughly and unmistakably dead. Immediately. I am speaking as someone who has actually slept in the same bed with a dog the same day that it bit me, accidentally of course. I understand the difference between an accidental nip and tearing someone's face off. There are a few people out there who seem to need a little education in that area.

If we're not thinking clearly we do find ourselves killing the pet tiger just in case, although no pet tigers have ever broken loose and harmed someone off the property that they live on. Just like dogs they would be more likely to either stay away from people or make new friends and some of them are as easy to handle as dogs, not all but some, and the risk is very minimal. On the other hand, in a schizophrenic split, we might try to preserve the life of a dog that is actually in the midst of a deadly attack instead of killing it when we get the upper hand. In the case I mentioned, killing the dog would have prevented further injury to the girl. If we somehow "can't sacrifice the life of an animal" to protect a human, we are so very very sick. This is upside down, too, because the animal that actually causes harm might be protected over one that has never so much as scratched anyone.

Then we have confiscations of animals without due process of the law based on the idea that the animals might be unhealthy, might be dying or starving, might be about to die, and so on. So an inspector from the USDA can just write up a confiscation order. What if the owner's own judgment and that of his veterinarian is that he's doing the right thing, perhaps feeding less because his animal has a long-term illness that requires the animal's movements to be restricted? I've seen a medically dependent human die because a "federal inspector" ordered an increase in that human's feedings, and I am willing to testify to this.

All that controversy matters little because the issue of due process under the law overrides. Yes, it trumps the risk that an animal will die. We're talking about animals that under other circumstances the exact same authorities order killed for no reason besides breed and species. See how it gets to be schizoid?

Due process of the law is necessary because with it we have a justice system. Without it, we don't. It is the weapon with which we defend our rights. We are not only allowed but obligated to protect our human rights from any agency, governmental or otherwise. It is a higher obligation than saving the life of an animal. Giving up our right to ownership, voluntarily, on a case by case basis, without coercion, exercises our right to make our own choices, so that's OK, but those who coerce should be read the Riot Act. We should also demand money.

It should be all too easy. Roy Cooper's tigers should only have been taken, if then, after he had his day in court without a rush to judgment and their lives should have been left at what little risk there was in order to preserve his human rights. The person who violated his rights should have to be an assistant manager at a fast food restaurant for five years, or better yet, have to perform manual labor on a cattle farm. Too many other people have experienced arbitrary confiscations and this contradictory use of concepts, practices that nullify, in real terms, the very existence of the law and the justice system.

Way too much has been sacrificed of our justice system and of essential due process using the alleged safety of animals as an excuse. Even the lives of animals have been sacrificed, and their safety is in question when the number of homes available for those animals keeps shrinking. Humans can all sacrifice a little bit of our safety to give homes or allow homes to exist, to respect the rights of people who want to keep those animals, and it's a very tiny bit, and at the same time we are preserving our own rights in general, which are worth more than the lives of the tigers or dogs or whatever.

Many of us humans consistently use our rights to serve the needs of animals, so it's a win for them and a win for us. That is a central theory of animal culture.

On the one hand...

On the one hand, "they" demand that we alter our dogs to prevent the possibility of reproduction, a surgical mutilation that affects future health and skeletal development adversely and causes significant structural alteration. On the other hand, they denounce bark softening as a horrible mutilation, even though bark softening involves a little bit of cutting on very small pieces of tissue, which has very little effect on the dog as a whole. That's just yanking us back and forth.

On the one hand, "they" claim that owning exotic animals is dangerous. On the other hand they demand that people in developing nations with growing human populations allow tigers and lions to run around as nuisance animals with no protection for the humans.

In reference to the previous paragraph, another "one hand, other hand": They complain that humans destroy habitat then they work to deny habitat that humans freely offer to the animals.

On the one hand, they say that we must "adopt." Then they dictate how many we can keep, which also has the effect of reducing the number of homes for animals.

They tell us that the population of humans should be reduced by any means necessary. Then they warn us of the dangers of keeping animals as pets.

They want to write laws for us to obey but they disobey any laws that are inconvenient to them, such as open meetings laws, laws against arson and vandalism, and laws against cruelty to animals.

They demand that we "register" our animals yet the entire state of Missouri can tell you that they will use the registries as lists for shopping for targets.

They prosecute owners and breeders over the slightest nitpicky excuse and at the same time they pack dogs into crates that are too small for them and let them rot in their own shit in their "humane" shelters. They're real good at taking animals from any situation and making that situation worse.

They pick on people for having animal bodies in freezers. PETA keeps a walk-in freezer for animal bodies and that's a standard for shelters. That one is simply good hygiene.

The hypocrisy of the movement is most evident when they claim that they're about saving the animals and they destroy so many.

Pets Are Luxuries?

You could just as well say that a feeling of well-being is not "necessary", nor are any of the proven benefits of keeping a pet. I could show you where the studies have been mentioned that prove that keeping at least one pet tremendously increases the chance that a human will survive having a heart attack. I could also show you stories about how people have died shortly after losing pets or after having them forcibly removed. When a pet helps us keep ourselves up, that is a necessity, not a luxury. A shortened lifespan and poorer health are the result of the loss of a necessity.

The propaganda also tells us to open our homes but they soft-peddle the fact that they're going to pick those homes to pieces.

I'm not real hip on the idea that poor people shouldn't have luxuries, either.

I am quite willing to risk my own life, however, to opt out of a system where the people who want me to bring them money and take their living liabilities off their hands want to control so much of what I do with what I am allegedly doing them a favor by taking. If it isn't my property when I pay for it or when it is given to me, I don't want it. One way or the other I'm investing time, energy, and money in something that is not mine. I am also inviting scrutiny by people who I do not know, have every reason to distrust, and ridiculous penalties and ridiculous harsh treatment if I am seen as somehow out of line.

So, I am going to make a point of either accepting a free puppy from an individual, or going to a breeder, or even just allow that if I have a heart attack my chances of long-term survival won't be as good. Any of those options are better.

I have learned that pets are a necessity for several reasons, including a longer lifespan. Unfortunately I have also learned that sometimes for the sake of one's own personal integrity it is better to do without some necessities.

The Social Dynamic

The social dynamic is simple. The animal rights activists persuaded owners of traditional pets to fight each other and fight against owners of exotic animals. This took power away from owners of traditional pets, who seem to be blissfully unaware that this war has been fought back and forth for at least fifty years.

They got this "adopt, don't buy" garbage going in which they got way too many people to believe that dogs should not be bred, else the species will be irreparably harmed. In doing so they also gained a measure of control over the use of the term "extinction" that is frightening.

Some dog owners, perhaps a loud minority, were persuaded of a false and damaging paradigm. "Rescuing" somehow helps the species, but reproduction, the only way to replace animals that have died of old age, is now villified. There are people who believe that surgical sterilization saves lives when that actually prevents lives, kills their chances before they are even conceived. It's like death, only pre-emptive.

Attacking the owners of tigers and other exotics further wastes the power of traditional pet owners. Most owners of tigers and other exotics, except for a few bastards, are one hundred percent behind pet ownership rights, the right to own cats and dogs. As owners of exotics they have some pull. When they were forcibly disenfranchised they became much less able to help dog and cat owners.

I've lost count of the ways that owners of so-called traditional pets have hurt themselves at the behest of the animal rights activists. They got dog and cat owners to fight against ownership of big cats and primates, wasting the power that dog and cat owners have and empowering the activists. The punishment for this is being administered to dog and cat owners by the activists. When deaths of dogs in shelters hit an all-time low, the activists became more demanding, more dictatorial, more punitive, and more destructive. They are also corrupt.

It has happened before and the bad laws have been repealed before. Pennsylvania repealed most of their dog laws in 1965. Other states have done the same. Several states have laws against "animal control" in unincorporated areas because of previous bad experiences with activists, who can pop up out of nowhere, lie about how you're taking care of your dogs and horses, and make off with them.

The way in is the way out. We will not regain our right to choose our so-called traditional pets until people who want tigers, lions, chimpanzees, and so on regain their rights.

No One Under the Bus

Owners of so-called traditional pets have always been able to count on owners of exotic animals to support the right to own those so-called traditional pets. Owners of exotics have not always received the same courtesy. A lot of owners of dogs and horses say "Why would you want to own a snake? Why would you want to own a tiger?" Don't you know those animals can kill you?!" As if horses and dogs can't and don't.

There is poetic justice in the fact that owners of traditional pets are suffering in the hands of the people that they have empowered to attack the owners of so-called exotics like lions and tigers. Some really infamous stories are coming from Florida about the mistreatment of dog breeders and owners by animal control there. Florida is a state where a small board is allowed to decide that people may no longer own their pet lions, snakes, or anything else, even though that board is commissioned to protect native wildlife, not people's pets.

Iowa is going through some really hard times for the same reason. The activists got the power when they went after exotic animal owners. Now they are the ones punishing people who own dogs and horses, which is what they intended to do in the first place. Anyone who has any familiarity with them at all knows about the Wayne Pacelle quotes like "one generation and out." There are other famous quotes from activists including the one about not wanting to see another dog or cat born and Bruce Friederich's wanting McDonald's to explode because they serve meat.

It is poetic justice. Poetic justice is the kind of retribution that people bring on themselves, arrange for themselves, and provide the power and money for. Owners of traditional pets in several places around the world have arranged the loss of their own rights by what they think of as a circuitous route. They gave up the opportunity to stop the activists. They took away a lot of the motivation that owners of foxes, bears, lions, and tigers had and practically all of their power. They stripped themselves of their allies and of a buffer between them and the activists. They took away from good people animals that were very special to them. In every way they made the actions of the activists appear to be justifiable. I am not sure why I still think that it's wrong, except that it's wrong to swindle people.

This is something that a lot of pet owners have done to themselves and still do to themselves. I just want everyone to go back to taking care of each other like we used to instead of this crap.

Someone Pushes Some Emotional Buttons

And then it becomes verboten to say bad things about the death of Daniel Shaull, who set himself on fire and then tried to use his flaming body to set fire to a business, Nicholas Ungar Furs.

Someone actually asked me to "prove it" about, I guess, a statement that I made that a lot of people could have died or that he intended to catch the business on fire when he attempted to run inside, or maybe I was supposed to prove that he attempted to go through a locked door. I don't know why.

Fascinating is how many newspapers shut down the comments on this case. What, does not every terrorist have family? The people who own the businesses that the animal rights activists destroy, don't they have family? What about the people who might have been seriously injured or died in that attack?

Victoria Taft says that the demonstrators egged Shaull on to do this. I would like to see more evidence but I'm not skeptical. If he was not "political" and not "religious" like his father says, how did it occur to him to do this? Someone had to put him up to it. I think that a very careful investigation needs to be made here. A local businessman said that Shaull had protested at the store "regularly" which implies having been in Portland more than the five days that his father claimed. There should also be some witnesses who saw who egged him on and who provided the gasoline and matches.

If you read "Free the Animals!" you can learn that for over thirty years there have been training camps for animal rights terrorists. They learn to form terrorist cells and conduct disciplined attacks against targeted installations like mink farms, a Bureau of Land Management horse barn, slaughterhouses (they burned two slaughterhouses that processed horses) and medical researchers. They demonize their targets, often lying, then go after them with fire, vandalism, and animal releases that often result in dead animals. Their more respectable fronts include by now almost countless "SPCAs" and "humane societies" that prey on anyone who has a breeding or rescue and lie about them to get them into trouble.

Are the legislators who pass laws that are pushed by the animal rights activists any better than the activists themselves? When they passed the laws against exotic animals they were serving the same animal rights terrorists. When they passed the "puppy mill" bills they were doing the same thing. I would guess that about 95 percent of Americans are not sympathetic animal rights terrorists and are not being served by what amounts to morality laws that come from extremists who would bait a man into killing himself to protest against animal use. We have to understand that any time that we support part of the animal rights agenda by "regulating" animal use the way that they want, we strengthen their entire agenda: No meat, no fur, no leather, no pets, no nothing.

Unfortunately some major newspapers seem to have clamped down on news and opinions about this, but the fact is that we have to get totally sick of this sometime. Why not when someone dies doing the same thing that has been so destructive to everyone in the animal businesses? I don't know that Daniel Shaull was entirely an innocent. He did in fact set himself on fire and try to burn down a business, like a suicide bomber, and he had enough of his faculties to travel around the U.S. on a bus, find employment as a "youth counselor" at least until they decided his screws were too loose, then find this store in a strange city.

I would have to say that someone might get burned for not cooperating with the AR terrorists. It looks like if you do cooperate with them you will, sooner or later, get burned a lot worse.

So a Terrorist Runs Into a Locked Door...

http://www.oregonlive.com/news/index.ssf/2010/01/father_of_man_who_set_himself.html or http://tinyurl.com/yl6dz6w

Daniel Shaull left Dodge City for Oregon five days ago. He somehow had the money to take a bus from Dodge City, Kansas to Portland, Oregon, after he had called his family for assistance because he was broke. He attacked a very specific store that had been the site of animal rights demonstrations before. He set himself on fire and would have set the store on fire had he not run into a locked door. Mentally ill or not, there is both purposeful behavior which requires a good amount of mental effort and the possibility of a third party providing him with the money and the address to go to. At the end he was a suicide (fire) bomber, the first one I've heard of in the United States.

It is distasteful to attack the mentally ill dead, but the fact is that he tried to set someone's store on fire. This is a heinous crime without counting the number of firefighters who would have been put at risk. I remember when a firefighter died in Omaha because an acoustical ceiling collapsed from the weight of the water that had been poured into the building, crushing him to death. Like I have to explain to anyone that firefighters risk death every time that they put out a fire.

Terrorist acts deserve contempt and ridicule. It's politically correct to withhold some of that from a person who committed such an act when he seems to be mentally compromised, but he attempted a terrorist act. He targeted a store that was 1800 miles from where he had been living on the streets, and rode a bus those 1800 miles (plus all the transfers and roaming around). How did he even find the place?

The article doesn't say what kind of mental problems the man had.

If a somewhat mentally ill person robs a convenience store at gunpoint I have no sympathy for him if someone pots him on the spot. Daniel Shaull had the mental faculties to call for money, collect it from wherever (if you've done it you know that this task requires mental faculties), and conduct himself unaided from Dodge City, Kansas to Portland, Oregon. He was probably sane enough to assist in his own defense.

My conclusion is that this was a terrorist act conducted by a person who was sane enough to be held responsible for his own actions. It's a tragedy for his family, yes, but he did commit a terrorist act. He was as able as any of us to tell right from wrong.

Also, many citizens have suffered arson attacks, thefts, property destruction, deaths of their animals, and death threats against humans. Being politically correct in this case and "making allowances" or "having sympathy for the family" dodges the question of just how much contempt to have for a domestic terrorist. We're all sick of it. I am really disgusted with the idea that I might be denied a forum to express my contempt for these acts. The one terrorist who acts on behalf of the animal rights groups, we should be nice to because he's dead and mentally ill. No sir, not this time.

The best weapon against terror attacks is utter and complete contempt of the attack, the attacker, and particularly the ideas and organizations behind the attacks. I have mentioned before, also, that the terrorists just get worse when they get anything. In spite of the misdirection I'm pretty sure that the same people who got the bad laws passed in Oregon are somehow behind this.

Daniel Shaull is outside the pale, totally undeserving of sympathy, and yes it's funny that after all that effort, after all of the windup, our would-be suicide (fire)bomber runs into a locked door. The act deserves no more respect than that. I can't believe that anyone's heart bleeds for him.