Oooh, oooh, I remember seeing that comedian, too, and his name is juuuust off the tip of my tongue. He kind of had a tough-talking delivery, if I recall.
I guess I should also add that, if people do judge the worth of animals according to a cuteness standard, I’m not wagging a finger because I’m better or something. Judging according to physical attributes is something most everyone is guilty of sometimes.
Yes, he did. IIRC he had an Italian name. DiPota or something. That doesn’t sound right though.
Just fixing my link from the earlier post.
Carry on, everyone.
It’s despicable to abuse a living, breathing, feeling creature that cannot defend itself against you until it dies a painful death, even it’s a “just” a puppy, kitten, rabbit, etc.
If the guy could not handle a 5-month-old puppy making a mess on his carpet, he should not have agreed to watch it, whether it was his girlfriend’s or not. In fact, he should not have even allowed it in his house. PUPPIES MAKE MESSES, only morons don’t know that.
Some details may be a little shaky in this story, but it’s fundamentally true…
I have a cousin who lives in Boulder, Colorado. Last time I saw her she told me that several years ago a mountain lion killed a woman with two children outside of town. The lion was subsequently hunted down and destroyed, and two of it’s kittens were found. Total contributions to the “welfare” fund for the two kittens: $10,000. Total contributions to the scholarship fund for the HUMAN woman’s two orphaned children: $2,000.
My thoughts are that some people care more about animals than they do about people, especially people of different creeds, ideology, beliefs or social class. I think the animal rights movement and to a lesser extent the environmental movement is flush with such people, and that they make me SICK.
Not that any of the above has much, if anything to do with this thread in general. It still doesn’t make what that guy did to that dog okay. He’s a sick bastard.
obfusciantrist- you belied your nick with that long, well-argued post. Are you a philosophy or logic professor? But seriously, I agree with 99% of what you said, even though I am emphatically NOT an atheist. But from where do you derive your argument that human life is inherently of more value than that of any other animal, if not from religion? This is a moral judgement that is bound up in Judeo-Christian doctrine, among others. To seperate it from that doctrine is to make it just an arbitrary moral stance.
Whew, and I thought I was wordy… that was quite a post, Obfus. I’d like to weigh in on the side of Crunchy Frog and Obfus, if it isn’t too late. It is stupid and mean to torture an animal for no reason, regardless of that animal’s beauty in the eye of the beholder or relative “superiority” or intelligence. But I suspect that I’d have a lower threshold for sufficient reason than most folks. When feral and semi-feral housecats choose my property as their hunting ground, they are quickly and efficiently relocated to the happy (and final) hunting ground. (Did you know that, after habitat destruction, house cats are the second highest cause of the decline of our migratory songbirds?) I see that they suffer as little as possible during the transition. I would say that pulling the wings off flies would normally be a sign of a sick mind (although not punishable by being drawn and quartered or even incarceration), but I have damaged the wings on flies captured in my house so that I could feed them to my son’s pet frog (they fly out of the aquarium, otherwise). By the same token, if pulling the leg off a puppy was the only way to feed an individual of some injured highly-endangered species (or a human, although I can’t see how this would apply in this case), I’d regret the pain to the canine, but I’d get the job done.
So how can you tell a “semi-feral cat” from my pet?
Here is my theory on why this is such a touchy issue -
Many people have become desensitized to the uneccessary slaughter and abuse of innocent people. There are murders depicted in television and movies all the time. When was the last time
you saw the torture or abuse of an animal on film? Fatal Attraction? We rarely see it and when we do, we are horrified. I remember my stupid ex b/f in high school rented ‘Faces of Death’ and for the most part I was able to watch it. What I couldn’t watch were the parts where a soldier rip the head of a rabbit off with his mouth, clubing baby seals to death and eating the brains of a live monkey. I made him turn the video off.
I don’t know who posted it, but someone mentioned that people don’t depend on dogs to live. Hmmm, guess we better tell those blind people that we’re on to them. And the parapalegics (i cannot spell, sorry) and the hearing impaired and epileptics (told ya I couldn’t spell) who depend on dogs to warn them of an oncoming seziure.
Getting off the soapbox now, but I was a vet tech and its hard to hear this kind of shit. And this includes all creatures, dogs, cats, cows, horses, pigs, iquanas, snakes…
Here’s what I -meant- to say.
I know I’m about to come off looking like the bad guy here… but Im gonna have to agree with the “Its just a dog” argument. That might seem a bit heartless, but I cant, in good conscience, condemn a man in his 70’s to prison for abusing an animal when I’m sitting here with a glass of milk, two eggs and some bacon. If you think that puppy was abused, you ought to see how the cows, pigs and chickens are treated prior to being slaughtered and/or raped of their eggs and milk. That probably doesnt make you quite as queasy because, well, they’re not as cute as a little puppy. Its a sad fact that we spare animals based on aesthetics.
Dolphin safe, but no one cares what happens to the poor tuna.
In any case, two years imprisonment for kicking/choking a dog that dies as a result is not only a little bloodthirsty, its unconstitutional. We have laws that dictate the punishment should fit the crime. If this is worth 2 years in prison, Id hate to see what you guys would do to the Meat and Dairy people. shudder
Where I live it is easy to tell, because the number of neighbors are few. However, many pets are semi-feral, by my definition, which is that they hunt my property. In Wyoming and many other western states, it is expressly legal(and encouraged) to shoot any housecat more than 100 yards from a building. This is because of the damage they do to game animals. Unfortunately, it takes a game animal (like pheasants, in this case) to generate that kind of support. Songbirds are not generally so well protected.
I am glad we are not neighbors.
CP, you are thinking of Jesuslynch
Crunchy and Snooooopy, this line was delivered by Dennis Miller in reference to finding a cure for AIDS. It remains one of my favorite when it comes to putting animal testing into perspective.
Obfus, my term “shot and hung after torture” is used to convey the magnitude of my distasteand is not presented as a solution. The outright unconstitutionality of such an act should instantaneously make that clear.
May I preface my reply with a statement?
I think the man involved in the cited case is awful. I hope his girlfriend dumps him, and he is convicted. As previously stated, there is a big difference between death and torture.
That said, I know and love someone who has killed many dogs, puppies, and kittens. The same man who nursed my sweet kitten back to health with home-baked cubes of chicken also dispatched many dogs with a swift kick to the liver. No dog was allowed to bite a child in his presence. Yes, he killed his friends’ and relatives’ dogs. No, they did not get mad, it was a different time.
He drowned unwanted stray kittens and puppies.
As a dog breeder, he killed puppies with undesirable traits, which no breeder I’ve met recently seems willing to do, causing all kinds of genetic disease and poorly tempered pets. (I realize sterilization is a possibility now).
He also turned in our neighbor for kicking his dog.
What am I trying to say? Ethical decisions are not black and white. As some before me have pointed out (Dennis Miller) that certain things are right in certain situations. I can’t imagine going through life with a knee-jerk response that anyone who does “X” is evil. There is an appropriate time for anything. Even kicking a dog to death.
Apricot
As much as I love animals (especially dogs and guinea pigs), and I completely agree what the man did was sick, but I have to agree with obfusciatrist that some of the comments made seemed extremely harsh (tortured or let the man rot in an old folks home?). I thought that the people on the board are around to fight ignorance - but the comments made seemed otherwise. An eye-for-an-eye was a punishment abandoned just not-too-long ago and there’s enough sociological proof that it doesn’t work. But yes, a fine and jail sentence is certainly appropriate, but not torture or humiliation.
BTW, I think it’s bad to feed wild animals (e.g. ducks) with domesticated human food? Something to do with messing up their digestive system and natural habit of foraging…
Cheers,
jov
*** ATTENTION ***
Sorry, the above two posts were not made by rjk but it was I, Jovius, who made them. We use the same computer in the office and I forgot to delete his name/password and use mine instead.
Cheers,
jov
Damn students!
Even though I do agree, in my more rational moments, that torture is a little extreme, even for this guy.
I stand corrected.
I’m an emergency vet tech who has dedicated her life to saving animals.
I think people who abuse animals are sick fuckers who deserve to go to jail.
I think people who abuse other people are sick fuckers who deserve to go to jail.
I eat meat.
I don’t support animal testing for things like cosmetics. I don’t like animal testing for medical purposes, but until there is a viable alternative…
If people raise 10,000 bucks to save some wildlife, while others only raise 2,000 to save some orphans, maybe you shouldn’t be annoyed at the animal lovers who chose to contribute to their cause as much as you should be annoyed at the “people” lovers who didn’t contribute to the orphans.
Michi
Bravo.
I wish I could’ve said it half as well.