We have this stupid taboo about even allowing the terminally ill to take themselves out.
People in a hospital are expected to recover. No one expects him to take the deer to a vet and nurse it back to health.
Agreed. As a previous poster said. “Kicking a man when he is down”. It’s worse than bad form. It’s being an ass.
While I agree that **CP **was off base comparing this situation to a human suffering similarly, the fact of the matter is there are lots of people in hospitals who are not expected to recover.
I agree completely. You are 100% correct. I can’t state definitively what I would have done and hypothesizing on the subject would be nothing more than idle speculation.
However.
I can state with absolute certainty what I would NOT have done, to wit, grabbing my digital camera, going back down to the dying animal, snapping off a couple of shots and then posting the pix online. Pictures I didn’t click on and had no desire to see.
I find those actions to be grotesque.
Fuck that. If someone commits an inhumane act but “feels bad about it” we can’t tell him he’s an inhumane bastard? Again, fuck that. I AM going to kick a douchebag who deserves regardless of how he feels about it. Philosophr is an inhumane bastard.
Philosopher has a gun, but wants to kill the thing some other non-humane way. He watches a dying animal suffer for hours. He takes pictures of the poor thing. The bastard went out there and took pictures. Who does that? He writes about it, and all the hand wringing is nothing more than wallowing in the suffering of another animal. I’m surprised he didn’t poke it with a stick.
The Budhism thing is bullshit. If he didn’t want to kill it, why did he ask how to kill it? The inhumane bastard took time and effort to document the fact that he spent hours watching an animal die and taking pictures of its suffering. He had the means, but did nothing. Just stood there snapping photos and drinking it all in. I don’t care if he “feels bad about it”, because that is not an excuse. I am going to kick that inhumane bastard if I fucking feel like it.
I daresay that Boulder County has/is surrounded by bigger, taller mountains than those in Nashville. The sun probably has to get higher in the sky than you’re used to before it unleashes full force.
I don’t find the fact of his taking/posting photos disturbing. Before I saw them, I was on the side of “man up already”, but afterwards, I understood what was giving him pause. There are plenty of people on this board who love to wallow in RO, especially child abuse and animal abuse. Why is it suddenly over the line that someone posts a photo of an injured animal that wasn’t even abused, much less by him?
I think the general idea is that he either knew or should have known what he needed to do, and any time spent doing useless shit like taking and posting pictures was needlessly prolonging the deer’s suffering.
Am I the only one who thinks it signifies that Phlosphr didn’t actually know if the deer was dying or not? Bet you’d all have felt really fucking stupid if he’d shot it in the head and it turns out it would have recovered. Of course, you’d never have known.
Good. You didn’t see them, then.
Well, all right. Just, I’m firmly on the side of “Shooting the deer would have been the humane thing to do,” but seeing those pictures, whether they were posted honorably or not, keeps me from thinking he’s quite the asshole others seem to think he is. We all know what we should do, but when the rubber hits the road, some of us have a hard time doing it.
It’s not so much that it was disturbing as much as it illustrates how much of a douchebag the guy is. He hints that he is too squeamish to do the right thing, and the he taknes pictures. “I can’t bear to look… let me get my camera.” And what the hell is and “a la carte Budhist”? To me that says that he is not a Budhist, but likes to use the word as an excuse for his behavior. He did the worst possible thing here. He neither put the animal out of it’s misery, nor did he leave it alone to die in peace. Nope, the asshole kept bugging it every twenty minutes to “check on it” for hours until it finally died. After all this, the guy says that he “is glad we didn’t have to use the gun”. That’s like watching somebody’s house burn down for hours, waiting till the smoldering ashes finally burn out, and saying “at least we didn’t have to call the fire department.”
“Can’t” is a very interesting chjoice of words here. Phlsphr appears to be physically capable of it. What we are left with is that he very much wanted not to do so. Well, tough. There are a lot of things I don’t want to do. I do them anyway if theya re the right thing to do.
I didn’t see the original thread by Phl as it was happening. If I had, with experience in wildlife rehab, and, as a Buddhist, I would have advised ending the deer’s pain with the gun. With painful regrets. That comes from experience with seeing lengthy drawn out death and suffering, and understanding what the outcome is. Before experiencing that, my nature would have been to try to find a less violent means of ending suffering. With experience of seeing drawn out suffering in death of animals, I would choose to be the means of death by making that hard decision at an abrupt end, and it would be traumatic in taking a life.
For this OP, though, I don’t see how calling out Phil is doing any good here. He was trying to find a less violent way, with the knowledge he had of the deer’s dying process. Obviously, he hadn’t experienced that, now he has, and, I figure he will make a different call in the future after seeing what happened.
This is what I was trying to say.
Right, and I looked back on the thread to see what you said. Still, I don’t see the point of being angry at Phil for something he didn’t have the heart to do at the time. To kill is a a huge decision for many of us, and the grace of that decision doesn’t come easy. If you see it as mercy, have mercy on your fellow humans as well who falter with decisions.
I’m not angry with him. I think he made an extremely poor decision. He’ll know better next time.
You think it was a huge decision for the guy? Something he was agonizing over? This is one of the things that irked me:
That sounds a touch flippant for a budhist claiming he can’t kill. Why should I show him mercy when he showed none? The guy prolonged the animals suffering, took pictures (honestly, why?) and is now laughing. He’s a self centered coward who is only using his “a la carte budhism” to excuse his reprehensible behavior. Screw that guy.
Thank you for confirming that the sun does indeed rise in Colorado. Sorry that you had to sacrifice your copy of the Eagles’ Greatest Hits in order to make that determination.
As far as the time conversion goes, be sure to let us know when Colorado’s time is ahead of Nashville’s. New York is an hour ahead of us, but I’m sure that they will be interested in knowing if they have had it mixed up all these years. By your theory, the sun rises over the Pacific and San Francisco is an hour ahead of you guys. Sounds like fun to me! I’ll go for it!
The posting time that shows up on each post is different for each Doper and will depend on if you have set you SDMB clock according to the time zone that you are living in. There is no requirement that you do so. I believe that I have this information correct.
Now that makes some sense. It probably wouldn’t get light quite as early even though the official time for sunrise in Boulder County was 5:36 am. But it also wouldn’t be hot very quickly either. (You win on the light!)
BTW, the Surb, I didn’t base the sunrise time in Colorado on what time it rose in Nashville. The internet had the time of the sunrise for Boulder County on June 25. Marvelous invention, these computing machines!
Grown men and women who choose to live in wilderness areas owe it to the creatures that surround them to know how to “take care of business” when such emergencies arise. It seems apparent that the deer was hit by a man made object and man (in the broadest sense of the term) should know how to deal with it quickly. The first thing is to plan ahead for just such situations.
I get to work at 8:00, his post was at the top. So it was 7:55 (or whatever the date stamp was) so it wasn’t 8:55. You were wrong. Check your conversion.
And the sun is really intense here. More intense than I have experienced elsewhere. Does your newspaper turn yellow from being in the sun for an hour? Have you been to Colorado? Do you realize that not only are we at least 5,000’ above sea level but there is little to no cloud cover here?
So does this mean you are going to start following me around too? You’re going to have a long wait for my next post. But you obviously have nothing else to do.
Also, some people here are little sanctimonious, not being in the same situation. I’m sure it was a really crappy thing to see in real life, so why not pile on him here on the board too? When you are in the same situation, please let us know what you did.
I have seen deer get up and run from accidents that should have outright killed them. I could see someone getting concerned about killing an animal that may get up and live. I have seen animals struggle and live, I have seen them struggle and die. I would hate to kill something that will live the same as I would hate to see an animal suffer.
I didn’t realize so many people here had the training and obvious judgment to decide. But some people here are just full of judgment.
Yes but what about the pictures?
If Phil didn’t have the guts/heart/stomach etc. to pull the trigger, that’s fine. I’ll cut him all the slack in the world. Faced with an identical situation, I think I would have followed through but can’t be 100% certain. But taking pictures??? Yeesh.
I’m not exactly comparing the two point by point but if the dipshits of Abu Ghraib have taught us anything, it’s that not everything in life represents a Kodak moment.
So I went back to the original post with the photos. I clicked, I saw, I shrugged. (Not gruesome in any way despite the title add-on.)
I stand by my earlier post and have yet to hear a lucid justification for that course of action.
Exactly. Heck, my OP was about as mild as could possibly be and still take a stand against what he did(n’t). I don’t hate him. I’m simply very unhappy about his choice of (in)action.
OK, I have to admit, this made me laugh. The p[oint is serious, but the way you said is pretty funny. But I do have a black streak to my sense of humor.