I have a date this week with a very sweet guy. He is a nice, attractive guy who seems like he would be a lot of fun. Then he mentions that he isn’t excited about the fact that I have 2 cats. He doesn’t believe anyone should have any pets at all because he thinks it is cruel to imprision animals. :dubious:
Right now both of my cats are sleeping on the couch looking quite satisfied with their lives. They get fed more than enough for their needs, they get regular medical care, and I scoop their litter every day. They sleep in bed with me at night and they get daily belly pettings. None of these things would be available to them if they were living in the wild. They would have a much shorter life span and be exposed to all sorts of injury and disease and wouldn’t get regular love and affection. I can’t see how anyone could think that having a household pet is cruel. I could understand if he just thought that it was expensive or unnecessary or whatever but cruel?
I will still go out with him at least once and see if we click. After all, if this is the only thing we disagree on and otherwise we are soul mates I bet we could work around the difference in opinion. Has anyone ever met someone who feels it is cruel to have pets? How did they explain the reasoning behind their opinion?
Crap, I hadn’t even considered that he might be associated with the insanity that is PETA. I wish he wasn’t so gorgeous and funny, that would make it easier to not go out with him.
Contrary, your boys look exactly like mine! Did you sneak into my apartment, switch couches, and take pictures of my cats?
Oh, c’mon, they’d be sooo much better off roaming the neighborhood scrounging, fighting, eating vermin and getting parasites. 'Cause it’s naaaaatural.
Of course, the ultimate would be to be put out of their misery by guess who, to “save” them from nasty predatory Man.
Folks, PETA (or what I hear of it) is a political pressure group, apparently in thrall to people who are willing to sacrifice animals to “educate” us toward the ultimate end of changing their status in society someday.
:rolleyes: Q.E.D., it’s cruel to imagine sackfuls of weasels and a badger. (Also, it’s hilarious.)
The guy has a hardline animal rights position and in my opinion it’s nuts. Many dogs and cats don’t get enough exercise, but compared to strays that have to scavenge for food, get no medical care and end up dying of a disease or getting hit by a car? We should all be victims of such cruelty as the average pet. Leaving PETA’s terrorist connections out of it - they’re real, but I believe your average PETA member is unaware of them - I’ve heard of PETA nutcases freeing chickens from farms. Because, you know, farm-raised chickens are well equipped to survive in the wild.
Oh boy, a PETA member or their associated terrorist wing, the Animal Liberation Front is massively bad news 1000 times over. Those are some seriously dangerous people and I mean that personally speaking. Our 15 year old Samoyed died while we were on vacation three weeks ago. The caretakers were our trusted neighbors who I felt terrible for because we paid their 13 year old daughter to take care of. It was certainly not their fault.
However, our new neighbors who we have never met are a veterinarian and some kind of veterinary tech who almost certainly hold these views. Little did we know that they were psycho. We had an overnight stay in Miami and the call from our trusted neighbor started coming in at 11pm that he was dying. That was sad but he was very old. Calls started coming in at 1 am, 2 am, and 3 am from our PETA type neighbors. My 1 year old a 5 year old were woken up by it every time.
They wanted permission to rush him to the nearest animal emergency room and put him on life support like ICU right away. We said no and they flipped out. Our dog was simply dying of old age and that was all there was to it. We knew that it would happen and we knew that it would happen within a year. He was the equivalent of a 100 year old person and had a good life.
Stay away from anyone like that. Drop them like a rock. It isn’t that they care so much about animals. That is fine. It is that their logic is FUBAR and they are truly psycho. They will apply that to other aspects of life and things can quickly become bizarre. They don’t think like normal people simply because they aren’t normal people and can’t be treated like a normal person. Something has gone horribly wrong in a brain circuit and you have to treat them the same way as a person that tries to sell pens from a trench coat on the street.
Tell him to join the SDMB, post his strongest positions, and see how that works out. You aren’t soul mates if there even is such a thing. It isn’t even possible to assess such a thing after a date or two. He is massively fucked up but you need to revise your definition of a soul mate after a meeting or two. Try explaining to him how the moon landings were a hoax and how George W. Bush orchestrated 9/11 and see how he reacts. I assume you don’t believe those things but the conversation afterwards could be telling.
Soul mates don’t determine that status within a couple of meetings and also don’t express psycho views that the other doesn’t entertain. That may be painful but it is obvious for even the most dense outside observer.
Post some pics of your kitties. Post a pic of your date. Then let’s have a poll for the Dopers to vote on who they would prefer to spend an evening with.
Or simplify things. Post some pics of your kitties, and forget about going on a date with the dummy.
