The Point System

It's one of those things that we always know is there and it is usually not written about. There is a point system and a scorecard and it can be made into a computer program or just totted up on a "sacred board" if that's what you want to call it. If there is such a thing as a "sacred board" it's simply a way of depicting the progress of a business or a religion or a swindle.

People on the side of ownership rights have voluntarily deprived themselves of ways to score points. You know what I'm talking about when you read this, don't you? Our consciences often inspire us to continue to lose points in the game because we think that it is for the sake of the dogs, or the children, or a higher morality to give up those points. We get nothing back for that because trading in that currency allows the animal activists to keep score. They cheat.

Trading good money for marijuana or cocaine, alcohol, or the chance to win millions of dollars are ways to trade money to feel good. We trade money, personal autonomy which means control over our lives, our worldly goods, and our say about the care of our animals to feel good about ourselves. What we actually trade them for is permission to feel slightly better than slime mold and that permission is granted to us at great cost to ourselves while it costs them little. That's a basic principle of business.

If a point system is established, as in gin rummy, golf, Dungeons and Dragons, and those of us who are human can access and understand this point system, we have a much better chance of winning the game. This is like having a bank account that we have to spend money from. We obviously have to keep track of what goes into and comes out of the account and we have to be able to see the books. We have to know what is in the account to know whether we are adding money or taking money out.

Part of the morality of subservience is that the subservient never audit the leadership's books.

Among other things, the deceivers have persuaded us that every pet lion, tiger, alligator, snake, and other exotic animal is a liability. At best we lose more slowly, using their point system, a system that we don't understand or realize that it exists. If we do just one thing and regard each pet, exotic or domestic, as an asset, the way that the shelters and scamtuaries do, then we start with a whole lot of points, not quite as many as we had ten years ago, but a lot. If we think of them as liabilities it's a bit easier to pry them from our warm living hands.

If one part of your mind sees things as assets and another part sees the same things as liabilities, or you just plain see assets as liabilities, then you don't know what you're investing in and what you're going to get out of it. Misdirected altruism lets dishonest charities take advantage of people and when exercising that altruism we don't allow ourselves to see our own balance sheet. We even disdain the idea of a balance sheet. At that we still expect something back, which is permission to feel slightly better about ourselves, with our worse enemies deciding what constitutes "better." This leads to outrageous behavior on the part of people who are struggling for scraps of God's favor.

We see people who want to pet our animals or live with them as potential liabilities, also. Yes, that's a bit self-serving, but someone has to say it. They might be plants from animal rights groups. The threshold for the label of "animal abuser" is ridiculously low these days and it's easy to see the label and not the person even when you know this. Various dirty tricks, rumors, and even laws are designed to set up barriers between private menageries and the public. The people who got the laws passed exempted themselves from those laws, too. They took our assets away from us. They're stealing our customers, from any of us who breed and sell animals or who keep menageries and want to display them. It's easier when we don't see them as assets.

The solution is obviously to keep our own books and our own history, along with our own morality. Our pets are assets. Our friends are assets. Our dreams are assets, and we have a better morality than they do.

Animal Cruelty Kills Us (Revised)

That's the trouble. Animal cruelty kills us. Have you thought about what that means? Someone else is cruel to an animal, we die inside. Accuse us of cruelty, we die inside. They use this thing as emotional button-pushing in books like The Lady and Her Tiger. It genuinely hurts us, a psychic injury that they can exploit.

The people who push the buttons live on and for animal cruelty. We see that they actually perform the deed, using their ill-gotten powers to cover it up. They live on the backs of the animals that are cruelly treated and on the backs of animals that they cruelly tear from the arms of people who love them. Finger-pointing literally transfers our power to them for them to use and we give it away and we give up potential friends and allies. The current crap about hoarding mentally prepares us to give up our friends and relatives.

Because they profit from it, the swindlers literally do not consider factual innocence to be proof that any of us should be exempt from penalties that they assess against us. They don't consider our good works to be an exemption. Good works actually incense them as we've seen proven by their attacks against breeders and well-run menageries. The incensing takes the form of stimulating their greed for our property and money. (They see value that can be stolen.)

When animal cruelty kills us it enriches them. When animal cruelty kills us it makes us vulnerable to manipulations by those who live on and for animal cruelty. We let them do what they want because we are weakened by the way that animal cruelty "kills" us. When they see someone who does not allow himself to be vulnerable like that they descend upon him, accuse him of being an "animal abuser" and do what they can to make him miserable, to mentally break him. This sometimes gets physical. This has obviously never happened to me (joke). They have to break that one person because he is the tiger who guards the pass such that a thousand deer cannot cross, or maybe the cat who guards the mouse-hole so that a thousand vermin cannot get in. When others follow his example the exploiters become powerless.

When we are kind and caring owners, we do not deserve to be vulnerable to verbal attacks by the usual suspects who act like jerks and expect us to give them goods and services as a reward. We deserve to be able to hold up our kindness, our caring, and our innocence as a shield against false accusations, malicious accusations, and exaggerated claims based on a twisted morality. We also deserve to keep these as the basis of what we do with animals. We have earned it. We must defend our minds and our properties from these swindlers.

Letting go of things too easily

I've sometimes accused people of being "AR Lite" and a lot of times the problem isn't that we're "AR Lite." We're "Freedom Lite." We give over a little bit of our freedom for a "good reason." The only people who suggest "good reasons" are hostile to the cause of freedom and in fact they are hostile to humanity's eating, drinking, excreting, and living. The vine that a fruit comes from does not get more poisonous than that.

"Freedom Lite" means that we want freedom for everyone except drug users, perverts, hoarders, and people who cut you off in traffic and talk in the movies. We all have "good reasons" why a marijuana user can't be allowed to stock groceries at Walmart, why anyone who ever had sex for any reason other than procreation must not be allowed near any civilized company, and why smokers must endanger their health by smoking outside in below zero weather. Breeders are necessary for the perpetuation of any non-human species that has trouble surviving in what's left of the wild, and guess what. We have "good reasons" why anyone who breeds animals outside of a carefully managed program is "irresponsible" at the same time that the AZA wants to manage their "generic" tigers to extinction and their program is too complicated to allow for breeding of the animals that they do value.

"Freedom Lite" also means that we easily cave in to restrictions on our freedom for something like the Endangered Species Act, which is much more punishing for breeders than poachers. An act that has caused a lot more harm than good, if we can't make more than a faint protest against this act, we need to pull it together here. Just one of the ideas that I like is the idea that if anything, government should subsidize the breeding of endangered animals, and forget "genetic purity." Most likely the buffalo have benefited from being crossbred with the common cow, proves they're the same species anyway. It would be like being forced to only have purebred dogs, and in fact the AR people are yanking us both directions. They say no purebred dogs and only purebred big cats. We know what's up with that. They hate us. They say so in their rantings.

If we want to ask good and decent people for anything, we have to ask for something that has substance. "Freedom" is a good thing to ask for, and put something behind it. It's better to be more explicit, as in "we want the freedom to breed tigers, lions, leopards, ocelots, cheetahs, and other exotic animals." Then when our Congress people sent back boilerplate, write them again and again and again. We will be a lot better able to pull together when we all know that we are pulling for the same thing, not just for a privileged few to have essentially the same thing they would have without a big tea party.

How important are we to ourselves? By use of shame, shame that we haven't earned but is like a magical tarball that some people seem to be able to paste on our souls, a lot of us have become convinced that what we want is not important. At the same time the same people tell us what we should want. Huh? They tell us that our animals have rights that matter more than our own then they come and take those animals away and kill them, using excuses and "good reasons." Gee, I think I'll order a bunch of select literature from the library, including Aristotle's Rhetoric and Noam Chomsky's "Manufacturing Consent" and see if I can figure out the message. Gentlemen, we are saved, a linguist has arrived.

Even this crap about "hoarders" is geared to make a lot of us more eager to part with our worldly treasures. We've got a modern bonfire of the vanities. So while they sell the idea of rescuing a lot of animals and keeping them in comfort for the rest of their lives, they have a label and a power and limits to our freedom and somehow anyone who doesn't work for the HSUS becomes a "hoarder" and local sheriffs can treat them the way that they do suspected pedophiles, or worse.

I know it's discouraging. The only way that we can feel better is to work with each other, comfort and console each other, and let each other be who we are.

To a Generic Animal Rights Twit:

When you have a problem, you seem to be unable to stay away from inflammatory and disrespectful rhetoric which tests the bounds of civility. This throws your alleged empathy for the animals in people's faces and you seem to believe that you have license to hurt people if they don't measure up to what you think of as standards, using that "empathy" as an excuse.

My caring is genuine and it is a real part of me, deserving of respect. I look at people funny when they declare that I must not care if I do not do things as they believe that I should. If I go along with them then they have control, as if they own my animals and I do not. I would not say that they actually have any standards outside of "he's always wrong." The argument shifts to keep whoever they target in the wrong. They just move the goalposts and the crosshairs. You're still targeted.

Were I to make no concessions to practicality I would be a poor caretaker of animals. If I decide that I can take care of four animals and I do not intervene to keep a fifth from dying because I am conserving resources to take care of the four that I already have, I don't want to hear it. If I put their needs ahead of my own too much that can become abusive of myself and frankly, those people who ask me to do so hate me and want me dead. If I have five animals and I am overextended, if I kill one and eat it (or any variation thereof) that is because I have to. Human needs and appetites have validity and are at least as valid of those of non-humans. I will not keep four animals that I do not want just to prevent myself from receiving verbal abuse from any given person. That would also be a bad reason to keep the animals. It is more respectable to keep them to for my personal satisfaction than it is to keep them to feed the political monster that "humane" has become or to avoid criticisms from people who usually have less than no standing in my life. This would include but not be limited to fighting them for entertainment, and it is through no virtue of yours that I detest animal fighting and will avoid it.

Because I am extending myself to help maintain the lives of several other creatures, oh yes it does mean that I have rights to what I want and need. I have earned a greater right through my work, exactly the way that a worker earns wages. I rarely push the "they're socialists" button but animal rights twits seem to universally hate the capable wage-earner who earns their money by actually working for it. This goes hand in hand with hating the meaning that another human gains from his or her life, the intangible profit. Threatening people into "good" behavior takes away that meaning. It robs them of that meaning and gives it to those who are making the threats. There is no meaning to an act of kindness to an animal if I do it because someone threatened me. Taking that meaning away from me takes away one good reason that I have to be kind to animals.

The one valid measure of whether I should keep an animal is if I want that animal or have a use for it. I do not alter my choices to try to gain left or right-handed compliments from you. What you "find disturbing" is a rhetorical device. Perhaps you need more experience in the real world. Perhaps you just need to shut up.

A Response I Left On Petlaw:

(This was a reply to a post on Petlaw)

The same people advocate laws to prohibit bark softening. Bark softening causes a tiny bit of damage to a very small piece of tissue and is pretty much non-invasive. Early spay/neuter causes significant damage to the development of a dog and it's not just the skeleton. Then they say that it doesn't matter, you should spay and neuter anyway. If I wanted to physically damage a dog for my convenience or because of my belief system, without their prior approval, they would tell me that I should be taken out and shot. Ear cropping and tail docking is much less damaging than spaying or neutering and they condemn those practices. It's always about getting over on people.

They want us to be "bleeding hearts" about what they want and actually, leaving the animals intact should be one of those things that a "bleeding heart" is reluctant to do because it "denatures" the animal. That's sure changed not that they're talking about using poisons to sterilize wild animals so that there "won't be any killing." Why do I support killing and believe that "no kill" is a McGuffin? It's because nature's model is to produce many species individuals. Most of them become food for other animals. Humans have been part of that for longer than many of these "ecosystems" have existed.

I like the fact that the killing of pets is way less than five percent now. At worst it was never as often as would occur in unaided nature. However, when do they have the most power over us? When we want to "stop the killing." We have to think very hard before we try to "stop the killing." We can easily wind up with deer populations that disappear altogether as whackos surreptitiously dope them with contraceptives. I could wind up being labeled AR myself if I voice what I think should be done with a laboratory that produces an oral contraceptive or sterilant that can be surreptitiously administered to animals. Let's just say that it should not be in operation. This stuff is likely not to be good for humans, either, and while the avian version might not hurt predatory birds directly, those birds need to eat.

Preventing a hundred births to try to prevent less than five premature deaths in shelters is not beneficial to a species. Doing this completely destroys the thesis that humans are supposed to give up a little in order to keep other species safe. Many of their other tenets also do this. I harp on pet tigers. That's giving a little to keep the species safe and we gain a lot. To me it is an unequivocal and massive benefit to exotics to be kept as pets.

Telling us that humans should not benefit from the use of animals is a way to turn humans off to using our resources to keep animals. It also jacks up the price so that instead of five to ten thousand dollars a year to keep a generic tiger it can cost ten to a hundred times as much, and someone gets that money. We don't know the people who make millions from animal care efforts, from hospitals, from local news outlets, or grocery stores, or anything, and they're pretty much in the gray. The bureaucracies of so-called cruelty prevention or humane societies are also pretty much in the gray.

I will say that we need to breed without being too sensitive to how many are sent to their final destination by shelters. The shelter people mess with us when we try to give the animals forever homes. They mess with us when we try to stop them from killing, using the deaths of the animals as extortion. Going along with their uninformed, unprofessional, and just plain cruel dictates causes us much worse problems, like all these illegal and wrongful takings of private property. The solutions are worse than the problems.

You know, people get the most wired and anxious about preventing a given problem for a reason. They're trying to get a non-result. They're trying to make something "not happen" and the vigilance and effort against that loss has to be extended forever or what they fear will happen. Working for a positive result, like a new tiger cub, has a clear endpoint. Working for a negative result invests a whole lot of effort, energy, and anger, and it always cuts too broad a swath, but when you set out to make a litter of puppies, your focus is tight, you only involve the people and resources that it takes to make a litter of puppies, and you only have to work on the one project instead of seeing that you have to change the whole world to get what you want. This is why I like making things a lot better than I like trying to stop other people's lives.

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.