First here’s the thread in which he has vexed me. It began as a discussion of the woman in Germany who was mauled by polar bears in a zoo after going into their enclosure in what may have been a suicide attempt.
But it didn’t stay there (which is not to say that it’s been hijacked; it hasn’t been). First mutantmoose made the ridiculous assertion that non-human animals are more noble and honorable than humans, an assertion plausible only to someone who does not know what the words “nobility” or "honor’ mean. From there it has become a discussion about hunting. I explained why I hunt thus:
[QUOTE=me]
what hunters do is admit the truth that you are perversely refusing to acknowledge. Humans are animals. Like all animals, we live at the expense of other life. Moreover, we are predators, as attested to by our eyes and teeth. Our intelligence has allowed us to craft a society in which we are insulated from this truth, in which the cost of our lives is hidden from most of us, in which death is sanitized, in which most persons can pretend that their comfort is not bought with much labor and suffering.
But life isn’t like that. Animals on factory farms live miserable lives in "unnatural’ conditions. (I put unnatural in quotes because slaughterhouses are artifacts of man and have as much claim to being natural as beaver dams and bee hives.) They cannot run free. They cannot attempt to escape their fate, or defend themselves. Frequently they die in misery.
Now don’t misunderstand me. I don’t mean to get on a moral pedastal because I hunt; I eat meat from the supermarket too. But when my cousins and i go out with our bows, when my cousin Sam butchers the deer we have killed and we divide it up to put in our freezers, we are at least being HONEST with ourselves about what we’re doing, about what it means to be a meat-eater. If you eat meat from a butcher or store and think that makes you somehow morally superior to a man who hunts for food, you are not being honest with yourself.
When she was about 10 or 12, one of my nieces was watching a nature show about the African savannah. She was quite enchanted by the lion cubs, and equally so by the young gazelles; but she was dismayed and angered by the adult lions’ hunting gazelles, saying angrily that they were “mean” to kill gazelles as they were doing. She was being foolish, of course, but she had the excuse of being a child. What’s your excuse?
[/QUOTE]
The above passage prompted this:
Until mutantmoose called me a murderer I was willing to slough off his awesome stupidity and self-delusion as the rantings of a diseased mind. But I don’t care to be insulted that way.
Killing an animal is not murder, mutantmoose, because murder is the unjustified killing of a human being. But that’s not really what vexes me. What vexes me is your smug, supercilous, self-righteous tone, your refusal to see the logical consequences of your frankly stupid argument. For, if killing an animal is murder, then you yourself are a murderer, one too cowardly to commit the act yourself. You PAY someone for meat. You PAY to contribute to a system that involves killing animals for your nutrition and culinary pleasure. You have no moral basis to criticize anyone who hunts only for food. Sadly, you are too dense and delusional to see that.
Of course, there is one way that you may not be guilty of murder, MM. Given your obvious lack of ratiocinative ability, it’s likely that a court would judge you not fit to stand trial. Certainly you’d fail the M’Naughten test.
Twit.