Rescue Journal

repeating myself for them.

Carol · Jun. 10, 2008

hot bath tonight...my brain cells were cooking....i am not done with the plot to remove entire species of domesticated animals from this planet based solely on another abuse by man. if we don't own them then we don't have a right to manipulate their ultimate demise.
has it occured to anyone that it is impossible to wipe slates clean? the slates are forever dirty with the blood of millions upon billions of animals domesticated by man. so what now? ooops, sorry you all suffered, sorry you all died...we can fix this, we can make you no longer exist, we can hide forever from our guilt..now we are enlightend and noble.... if we just make you go away that is.... nice.

excuse me but this makes me angry...it is just another stupid ploy to play god and further destroy. these animals are here, they are to be respected, they are to be cherished for the wonder that they are. they are not some garbage that man created and then decided to commit benevolent genocide against because we changed our minds.

i hate to tell the abolitionists something that they should already know...but guess what...?
there can be a world where animals are not owned and they still get to live side by side with man if they choose. i don't happen to own my children or my ex spouse, i can't abuse them, i can't eat them, i can't give them away, i can't breed them, i can't sell them, i can't even make them hang out with me if they don't want to. but i can share my life with them, i can love them and they can love me...if that is what we both want..that folks is actually equality of rights across the species....not forcing them to conform to your views of right by engineering their extinction.
who the heck are the humans that say animals don't deserve to have the same rights as any species to live their life in a way that they choose? their protectors? their advocates? the ones who know damn well they are promoting a future world where companion and domesticated animals do not ever exist. just because a dog decides he would like to have a human companion to play ball with and to sleep next to at night..he now has no value? he doesn't deserve to exist. give me a break here.

if the human slavery abolitionists promoted ending african slavery by not letting them breed and reproduce until they all died off naturally and no more africans lived in the united states...someone really thinks this is right? someone thinks this would have been a good idea? for who? the african slaves or the white gotta be god and get me more power race?

i have 28 dogs here...not a freaking one will go and run around in the fields and be a dog if i am in the house. they converge on the gate and they scream for me to join them...why? i don't know why...ask them...i am assuming it is because they like to be with a human. this makes them bad? this makes them wrong? this makes them something unnatural to be wiped out?

how nice to pay back all of their suffering and all of the blood and sorrow they endured for more than 100,000 years..we will pay them back by making them not even exist anymore instead of treating them with dignity and respect for who and what these animals are.
we are so freaking noble and honor their suffering so well that i hang my head before them in shame.

Comments

Marisa

Sorry...should have included the source for the quote lest you all think I am too brilliant for words. :-)
It is one of my all-time favourites...from naturalist Henry Beston's book, "The Outermost House".

Lindsay

Marisa, great quote. Do you know who it is? "In a world older and more complete than ours..." Oh, great quote. Thanks!

Carol

lol marisa...never unpopular for speaking with integrity.

great posts both of you....even worms in cans are thought provoking.

Marisa

I think if we are going to accuse PETA and other organizations of hypocrisy we need to look at our own hypocrisy. At the risk of becoming highly unpopular on this blog 90% of animal RESCUE people I meet "kill innocent animals out of one side of their mouths (actually to go INSIDE their mouths) while shouting "murderer!" out of the other, as an excuse to accept their own uses and exploitations of animals and not challenge themselves any further." Dogs and cats deserve life. Pigs and Cows do not.

I have heard people EXCORIATE a person for leaving a dog in an overheated truck in the middle of the day with no air flow but see nothing wrong with the fact that they eat eggs from chickens who spend miserable lives in cages no larger than a piece of paper. Why should they not be excoriated in turn?

If we are going to talk about truly liberating animals and "equality of rights across the species" then we need to start looking at how we ourselves are failing on that count. Perhaps we are very respectful of dogs and cats and guinea pigs but eat cows, pigs and goats. Perhaps we leave cows and goats to their own destinies but enslave elephants or eat gorillas. I don't believe we can scream at the rest of the world if we ourselves are participating in the very oppression which angers us.

This doesn't mean there won't be inconsistencies because none of us have all the answers and we're all trying to sound out relationships with other beings on the planet but it does mean we should THINK about these issues. If we truly believe in the right of other creatures to make their own way in the world, whether that way involves humans or not, then we need to look at how our own everyday actions may be contributing to their misery.

I know this isn't really a popular topic for Animal Welfare/Animal Rescue sites but I blame Carol for opening the can of worms!!! :-)

"We need another and a wiser and perhaps a more mystical concept of animals. Remote from universal nature, and living by complicated artifice, man in civilization surveys the creature through the glass of his knowledge and sees thereby a feather magnified and the whole image in distortion. We patronize them for their incompleteness, for their tragic fate of having taken form so far below ourselves. And therein we err, and greatly err. For the animal shall not be measured by man. In a world older and more complete than ours they move finished and complete, gifted with extensions of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear. They are not brethren, they are not underlings; they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendour and travail of the earth."

Tracey

I donâ€™t think most abolitionists are suggesting we spay and neuter every animal until certain species die off (Which species? Why? Who chooses? Pretty damn arrogant is right!). I believe most are opposed to the breeding of animals under human control, for human purposes. A dog living its life "free" and having puppies is fine. A cow roaming the open plains of Alberta who happens upon a bull that she finds charming, is welcome to procreate... at least that is my understanding of the general abolitionist position.

While I want every animal to live his/her life the way they would choose to do so without having to give up their lives or skins or freedoms to humans, I struggle with many specifics and logistics and details and questions as to how we get from "here" to "there" and still remain humane.

I also struggle with the sheer arrogance of we humans thinking we know whatâ€™s best for them... we know what they want... we know what they like... we know what they donâ€™t like.

I find it sad that so many will use the hypocrisy of certain high-profile organizations (ahem... PETA) who kill innocent animals out of one side of their mouths while shouting "murderer!" out of the other, as an excuse to accept their own uses and exploitations of animals and not challenge themselves any further.
However, one of my biggest fears is that all these questions and contradictions and hypocrisies will paralyze us into accepting where we are, as as far as we can go. Beleaguered and baffled and beaten into exhausted and confused stagnationâ€¦ that would be a tragedy in every sense of the word.

I agree Carol, we can never wipe the slate clean.

"Nature" is constantly evolving and who knows if part her plan wasnâ€™t to for the lives of humans and animals to intertwine and be shared? I will agree that humans have, in almost every imaginable way, twisted nature to suit ourselves, and while we may never be able to "go back", we owe it to every other living creature, ourselves included, to go somewhere other than where we allowed ourselves to get to today.