Tuesday, July 21

Something I wish I could stop thinking

"a culture that treats animals this badly deserves whatever it gets"

5 comments:

  1. ChrisJuly 23, 2009

    A culture that treats animals better than people deserves whatever it gets.

    ReplyDelete
  2. *July 23, 2009

    would be a fascinating social experiment to see what it WOULD get.

    ...but no such culture exists, so we'll have to stick to social modelling for that one.

    ReplyDelete
  3. ChrisJuly 24, 2009

    Locally, truth. Globally, well, my family's dog eats pretty well, probably because the crumbs from our table are quite richer than your neck of the woods.

    I've never quite known what to do with that, and I continue to agree that the neglect and abuse of animals is inhumane.

    India and (democracy) cows?

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  4. *July 24, 2009

    but is your dog typical of the average american canine??

    i'm taking a gamble that you don't *actually* know the answer to that one. i do. one in seven dogs in the united states will ever find a home (with accompanying table scraps). many of the others will live in shelters or be picked up and put out by pounds seeking to control the stray population.

    i am also willing to bet, though i do not have the exact stats for this, that a greater proportion than 6/7 (86%) of africans - even including the poor - live a vastly better life than your average american dog. aka, stray.

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  5. *July 24, 2009

    and actually i did come up with one way that animals are treated better than people. but this is something that is common to most cultures, and is generally a hallmark of mercy and not a distortion of priorities - most societies euthanize, albeit sometimes in crude ways, terminally ill farm animals or pets. this is an option occasionally forbidden by those same societies to their human members. so that is an example of animals being treated better than humans.

    but i really think you'd have a difficult time persuading many people that we should take that humane-ness ('humanity' is misleading) out of a society forbidding assisted suicide in order to re-order priorities.

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