I’m actually being more abrasive than I should be, and I take it back. I just get really frustrated over the premise that humans are trash and animals are innocent and perfect.
Again, you are not reading what I am posting. I HAVE a pet. I ENJOY my pet. I imagine that my life is ENRICHED from having a pet. Most of my friends have pets. I respect them. Pets are cool. Pets rock. Pets are the bee’s knees.
Please, I beg you, just read my posts. Read them slowly. Try and understand just what it is I am railing against, because repeating myself doesn’t seem to be working.
Right, because I’ve said that so often.
Your abrasiveness isn’t hurting me. I think it’s funny to see someone say the equivalent of “People are better than animals because people can show compassion, you LOSER!”
Euth, my friend trapped a feral barn cat to have her spayed, and found these kittens. I have been trying to find a home for them, but if you can use them to cure cancer, or spread them thin enough to feed starving children, you can have them. If it is okay with you, I’ll just play with them and keep them fat and happy until you are ready to use them for a medical breakthrough or a Difference For All Mankind.
Pop quiz, hotshot: A runaway train full of orphans is headed straight for a switch. On one track, a cute fuzzy little kitten. On the other track, baby Hitler.
Which one do you save? Which one do you save?
I’m trying, I just disagree with your premise so strongly that it is difficult to find a concise response.
Last try: keeping pets is a preference, like favorite food or favorite color. Human relationships can be very demanding, with power struggles, misunderstandings, and different life experiences. Pets require food, water, a dry place to sleep, and sometimes, a cuddle or a warm lap. So much easier to get your warm fuzzies from something with such simple needs. Does that help at all or are we at a hopeless impasse?
We are reading what you’re posting.
People who disagree with you are fucking stupid, socially inept assholes, who were treated badly as children, have imaginary friends, and own eight cats who shit and piss all over their apartments.
We get it.
And this, Dopers, is precisely the sort of situation you’ll end up in if dolphins keep getting artificial tails. Mark my words.
I had to turn that off 90 seconds in. The screams of the massacred were getting to me.
Finally! Someone gets it.
Can’t it be neither?
How are the orphans endangered in this scenario? I can’t see why they’re relevant.
I hate goofy hypotheticals with unresolved implications.
More mass on the train, therefore harder to stop. Like this thread!
Euthaniasiast, I think you should do what the rest of us are probably doing with the extreme outliers here; just ignore them. Arguing about who is better, humans or animals, is awfully pointless.
Hmmm…good point. In fact, thinking about it, the orphans are clearly screwed no matter which choice you make, since the Train of Death will eventually but inevitably derail. So the correct choice is clearly to derail the train and kill all the orphans before it even reaches the switch, thus saving both the kitten and Baby Hitler.
Jesus Christ talk about a trainwreck of a thread! As far as I can tell it is going like t his:
Pro-kitty: They are sweet and make me feel better than company with humans and need less
Anti-kitty: So? How does that make them better? Animals don’t have emplathy.
So anyway, it’s a side-effect of something. Humans have a built-in ability to humanize most mammals. Hell, even mammals do it. Ever see cross-species adoption?
I think the OP is angry because people don’t realize this before giving money to charity. Animals aren’t innocent, they’re nothing. They’re there. They run on instinct. If you love them cuz they make you feel better, fine…
Ever notice, though, the WSPA mainly shows pictures of mammals? They totally use this instinct against us. If they were to show a picture of a crocodile and snakes in a metal cage, not as many would care, but when you see a furry mammal in there you get upset.
I was playing poker with dolphins so you do have a point. On the other hand, they said they were trying to raise money for prosthetic research.
As for me, I’m with the OP.
I’m generally not a person who’s outraged or offended often at all, but I was hoppin’ mad when I started hearing of all these animal rescue efforts post-Katrina.
Animal rescue’s all fine and good, but absolutely inappropriate when those resources and the people’s effort would have been much better spent trying to rescue humans, or otherwise helping alleviate the boondoggle that was the State of LA and FEMA response.
It’s just not right for some soft-headed twits to go worrying about poor Fluffy when there are people sitting on their roofs with no place to go and nothing to eat or drink. If there were enough resources to go around, and everything was being taken care of, then it would have been fine, but that wasn’t the case.
But there actually were enough resources to go around. America is big enough and rich enough to quite easily cope with the sort of immediate rescue and supply problems left by Katrina, if the will and the organizational aptitude is there. And there are federal agencies specifically designed to deal with such problems.
But rather than blame the people and the organizations that so monumentally fucked up the rescue and relief effort, you lay the responsibility at the door of a few concerned people who rescued animals.
Your critique might make some sense if all the people who rescued animals also had the resources and the ability to rescue people trapped on roofs. I don’t know about you, but i don’t have a handy helicopter parked out the back, just waiting for that sort of opportunity. Nor do i have a large boat sitting in the driveway ready to act as a rescue vehicle at a moment’s notice. Not only that, but even people who made explicit attempts to help with the (human) rescue effort were sometimes turned back by officious and overbearing bureaucrats and gung-ho police.
Your argument might be persuasive if you could show me a single person who specifically turned away from rescuing a human in order to rescue an animal. Otherwise you’re just pissing into the hurricane.
Maybe they’re just helping the dolphin because it’s an all around good experience.
I don’t have any pets. I’m not a big fan of sharing a house with an animal. I’m not a huge animal lover or nature-huggin hippy. I dont think pets are little people.
But for a year I volunteered at a Dolphin and Whale Hospital helping fix the injured animals. It was fun. The animals were great, it was a good cause. People pay a lot of money to play with dolphins, and I got to do it for free. And help make a little difference. Just because I was helping dolphins doesn’t mean I’d ignore an injured human on my way to the aquarium.