Animal Rights Activists - Page 3

My, how so many of you are spitting mad that someone who doesn't share your views happens to love working his german shepherds.  Would you restrict this sport to only those who sign a statement agreeing to all your politics?  Is that what this forum is supposed to be -- a chilling board for promoting a single-minded view of the world and shouting down all other views?

Is it not possible that your position, and mine, could be improved by listening carefully to the issues at a volume somewhat lower than that of a shouting brawl?  What possible gain is there if all you do is surround yourself with people who agree with you?  Do you actually come to eventually believe that you are right, because the "majority" you surround yourself with pats you on the back every time you utter your gut level response to an issue?

Some of you have asked (and apparently answered, clueless as to the actual facts) a wide range of rhetorical questions.  Not aimed at my position (that giving over rights to all sentient beings is not inconsistent with loving german shepherds -- a position I cannot personally find objectionable, and which I honestly think some of you would find reasonable, too, if you cared to think about it), but aimed at me ad hominem, because I dare suggest that ethical vegetarians can actually help support the cause of responsible breeding and caretaking of dogs.   Do you not see how petty and misguided this forum becomes if this flurry of inchaote and fearful ranting is the product of any disagreement?  Do you not see that this is precisely what the founding fathers sought so hard to avoid?  See Madison on factions in politics (Federalist Papers). 

For the record, I am not trying to take the hamburgers out of your mouths.  2000 years ago, men would as quickly kill a stranger as greet him as a fellow human in most parts of the world.  Two hundred years ago, blacks and women were considered chattel without rights, and the "majority" would as easily laugh at giving them rights as to consider the issue seriously.  In the mid nineteenth century, african-americans were finally freed -- although their fight for equality continues.  In the early 20th century, women were finally granted suffrage, and someday their wages will be equal to men for equal work, but not just yet.  I am an educated man with a Ph.D.  I am not naive.  Humanity takes its time, but as it progresses, the net of consideration swings more widely.  Someday, long after you and I are dead, people will look back at the way we treat animals and cringe, just as most of us today cringe when we look back on slavery.  Only time will heal this division; nothing I say here really matters in a large sense. 

But in a small sense what I say does matter.  Your smug, self-congratulatory, aggressive view that somehow time is standing still for you and that unlike anyone who has ever come before you in human history, you can be sure that your position is somehow correct and immutable, is naive.

It appears that my purpose of opening this dialogue to something more subtle and discerning than fanatical ravings may be for naught.  
A thinking person must decide for him or herself where to take a stand.  Politics being what it is, we cannot always have policy or candidates or legislation exactly as we would like them.  Accomodation is necessary.   I don't like everything PETA does (and I do give to the ASPCA) but I think society needs a fire under it to help it change for the better.  If I thought PETA would get everything it wants, I'd worry, but with folks like you all on the planet, there is little to worry about in the camp.

To Louise:

I agree we need education.  I am a college professor (although I am responsible enough to not teach ethics in the classroom, as that is not my field of scholarship).  If politics only followed education, wouldn't that be great?

MVF: "...Not aimed at my position (that giving over rights to all sentient beings is not inconsistent with loving german shepherds -- a position I cannot personally find objectionable, and which I honestly think some of you would find reasonable, too, if you cared to think about it)..."

What a scary thought, giving over rights to all sentient beings.  I am not willing to fall into the trap that all animals deserve rights as sentient beings, equal to human beings.   This is a way to end all "ownership" of animals as you cannot "own" a sentient being.    I am all for keeping animals healthy and well care for.  I am not willing to put them on equal footings as humans.

For the record, I'd be as hard on anyone who poisoned dogs as the rest of you. Does anyone actually have any evidence that PETA poisoned dogs? 

I also fail to see how fanatical ravings on this forum convince you that someone else is a fanatic?  That logic just doesn't work for me.

ANIMULES:

"I am not willing to fall into the trap that all animals deserve rights as sentient beings, equal to human beings."

I agree -- I did not say EQUAL rights, and would not argue for such rights.

Do you then agree with my actual position that animals deserve rights as sentient beings, that include the right to have their pain and suffering protected?  Of course, how that gets interpreted in practice makes everyone nervous.  Some would worry that pain and suffering will be ignored with a bribe to an inspector.  Some on the other side worry that a happy dog kept in an outdoor kennel on a cold day will be seized.  (Both would be horrible in my view.) That's why I, unlike PETA, think that TIME is the key -- time for society to come to a meeting of the minds about what we really mean.  In that society, the pain and suffering of feeling creatures will be respected because minorities and majorities will generally agree on what it means, and legislation can be enforced according to those evolving, social norms.

Gandhi said that the character of a people is seen in the way they treat their animals.  The funny thing that I can't seem to convey well to animal rights activists about dog people (they are as stubborn as you guys are) is that in your own way you treat animals vastly better than do most.  It's just that you put dogs in one box, and, say chimps or rhesus monkeys or cows in another box.  In your good box, you set the gold standard.  In your other box, you are not prepared to give the consideration I think those creatures deserve.  Chimps share 98.3% of our DNA and have an IQ akin to a 60-75 (some people we know), yet most Americans are willing to have a chimp injected with HIV and then locked in a crate for fifty years.  Would you do that with your developmentally challenged sister?

And none of you would do that to a dog.

But I never said rights EQUALtoa

Got cut off, but I am basically done.

I agree with animules: keep animals safe but don't give them rights EQUAL to humans.  Just give them the right to be kept safe from the Michael Vick's of the world, and the rest of those who would harm the innocent for their gratification or amusement.

We will surely not agree about something that I do believe that most of you will probably find inflammatory: fighting dogs for amusement is not that much worse than stringing them up, suffocating them, and eating them in China.  And that's only a few steps away from the way many animals are treated in slaughter houses in other places.  And what is a steak but a dead animal, killed for our gratification?  Meat is not necessary for health.  I am a vegetarian for 25 years, I am 54 years old, and I weigh 224 pounds, with only 12% body fat.  When I stopped eating meat, I was playing rugby for the US, and was worried about losing muscle, but that never materialized. I bench almost 300 lbs.  I run the 100 meter in the high 12s, which ranks me about 25th in the US in my age group.  I throw the discus almost 140 feet, which ranks me even higher.  On a recent medical evaluation, my doctor said I am biologically a 44 year old -- my lifestyle, including vegetarianism, has taken ten years off my chronological age.   This is not important, in fact I risk people misunderstanding me and attacking me personally again, but my point is that we don't have to kill creatures. I am a muscular and healthy athlete without it.  Further, the enviroment and world starvation could both be helped with a vast reduction in meat eating.

But I would never try to legislate against meat eating.  I do believe that time will lead to the changes that are right. 

What I would like to know, if anyone is calm enough to say so with a level head, is why people get so angry at people like me who are trying to do the right thing?  What is so threatening about people like me that raises such a firestorm when these issues get raised?

I am from a ranching family, you will not like my thoughts on animals being sentient and what PETA and HSUS consider animal rights.  Animals are not sentient beings, period.  I am so anti PETA and HSUS it makes my head spin.  What other countires chose to eat is their business and part of their culture.   The First Americans also ate dog,  it was a protien source that could be relied on when needed.  I am not saying I agree or would sell to a culture that thought dog was an acceptable food source, I wouldn't. 

A few years ago PETA and HSUS managed to sway a bare majority of the voters in Washington state to ban trapping, they accomplished this by showing horror video clips of traps that were already illegal to use in the state.  Trapping was our one and only method we could protect our livestock from coyotes.  We lost between 40 and 50 animals, mostly turkeys, ducks, geese, and chickens last year alone to coyote depravation.  PETA protected the coyotes and we had to go clean up the mess they would leave with no recourse.  Do you have any idea of what it feels like to go out and have to gather pieces of pets the coyotes had torn apart?  And yes, many of these birds were pets with names they would come to.  Funny though, PETA realized they had goofed and body gripping mole traps were also illegal.  Now they couldn't have the city folk that supported them mad because they couldn't trap the moles that left mounds of dirt in their yards and golf courses.  PETA has been saying "oh we didn't mean mole traps, they are okay".  So, it's okay to body grip kill moles that harm no one just mess yards but it's not okay for us to protect our animals from a horrid death.   Give me a friggin break.

mvf, there's a good book out there called "the hijacking of the humane movement". you can find copies on amazon, i believe. there was footage not too long ago showing peta members dumping the bodies of dogs they had "rescued". i'm sure there are many who feel that animals should be treated humanely, but decent treatment and rights are not the same thing. there are better causes to contribute to than peta - ones who spend the majority of their monies helping animals instead of on lawyers for their members. check them out more thoroughly. peta is really not what they say.

I share your frustrations.  Angusmom: anyone who hides behind animal rights activism and then ends up dumping bodies of dogs is hardly worth protecting -- and I don't.  (I have angrily called shelter people humaniacs for denying adoptions of dogs to people because they had some controlling thing going on -- and the pup would have been surely better off in an imperfect home than in none.) Further, policies often backfire and I believe animules' story of backfiring of such policies in Washington State.  In that case, I don't condemn the effort -- but I do condemn the rush to action before they saw through the consequences.  But rushing to judgment happens on both sides of this debate, as our brief flurry here shows. 

The odd thing with respect to animules story is this: if you reread his (her?) last missive, you will see that s/he SAYS she doesn't believe that animals do not feel pain or emotion (that is, they are not sentient) -- yet animules appears to have been palpably pained by the death of the animals at the hands of the unregulated coyotes.  I respect animules for sending that conflicted message -- and I must say that this is just what I have been saying to "the other side" -- you guys may be hard boiled, and you may SAY animals have no rights, feel no pain, etc., but you are not actually cold hearted. A dead bird in the past still conjures up feelings for animules, despite denials that animals are feeling -- and I commend that.  My voice in this wilderness is to try to get folks to harness that caring to do the things we can to protect the innocent, while not giving in to activist nuts who would go overboard.

Again, I don't agree with PETA or ALF in all their particulars.  But you have to admit that ALF (like the Black Panthers in the 60s) are and were brave people taking grave chances for something they believe or believed in.  The world is better for having had the Black Panthers, although you probably don't agree with everything they did.  You surely don't agree with animal liberation, but you have to admit that someone risking a 20 year jail sentence under the RICO statues, in order to save some animals in a laboratory, is not selfish.  And, in the end, although we don't want to go that far, political systems have not in history often turned over rights without first facing great risks through political challenges from extremists.  Abolitionists say, (little ladies in Massachusetts in the 1830s) were considered extremists once, as were Suffragettes more recently.  My point is that if PETA has gone too far, and I suspect that I am in agreement with most folks here about that, it may still be a good thing in the long run, because extremes do move societies in the right direction sometimes.

But I will take up angusmom's suggestion and check out the hijacking film.  I am open to changing my mind.

But if dog breeders were not afraid of nuts going too far and restricting their ability to breed good dogs -- would you really not want to make some changes to protect animals in labs, for example, or poor dogs tied to trees in the winter, or egg laying chickens in tiny cages, or pit bull figting gamblers?  I bet we agree on most of these things.  All I am saying is that the right political action to get there may require giving voice to extremists who are willing to risk themselves to push the agenda harder than "good citizens" can do themselves.  Like me, as I hate breaking the law myself!

Sorry to belabor the point -- I really do apologize for going on -- but if animal rights folks and good breeders (not puppy mills) could only communicate better, animal rights activism could shift its attention AWAY from restrictions on breeding or dog ownership and see that breeders are animal lovers who are setting the gold standard for how ALL animals should be treated.  Don't stop dog people from caring for dogs they way they do, get people to care for all creatures half that well and the world would be a better place.  That's what breeders should be communicating to animal rights activists.  The big wall between the two worlds is doing everyone harm.

That was my original point, before we wandered off in this painful discourse.  Thanks.  I'll shut up now.