How come every time hot naked women are brought up, somebody jumps in and says stuff like this?
I dislike feral cats, but I wouldn’t want to nuke them from orbit.
OK, maybe a little.
But I am apalled at the old ladies who put cat food outside of the backdoor for “the poor homeless kitties”.
Conversely, is there a term for someone’s feeling threatened and defensive when other people express concern for animals instead of chanting “Humans are #1! Humans are #1!”?
I don’t feel threatened or defensive when those express concern for animals. I do find myself moderately annoyed by persons who equate their love for a dog or cat with my love for my actual, human child.
Dogs & cats, and some other animals, are of moral value in my opinion; their suffering is not meaningless, and it is possible to feel genuine love for them. But they’re not worth as much to me as the average human, and they are not our children.
Concern for animals is perfectly fine (whether or not it is in practice restricted, as is commonly the case, to the cute ones).
Elevating concern for animals above concern for humans is a sign of real, and quite possibly deep and even dangerous, moral malaise.
Statements like this:
truly scare me, and strike me as deeply cynical. This way nihilism and the end of the world. I am not saying Claverhouse would set off the doomsday machine, but the person who did would be someone who shares that opinion.
Yes, humans are better and more valuable than animals, not because they are “our team”, but because humans are the only animals (that we know about - I am prepared to concede that we might discover others some day, though probably not on Earth) capable of even beginning to understand what is in question here.
I suspect that Claverhouse was being deliberatively provocative to make a point.
In any case, yeah, a lot of people, me included, tend to see children-like characteristics in pets, and that will sometimes trigger paternal instincts. Not surprising, since animals like cats or dogs have been specifically bred for centuries to somewhat resemble toddlers.
And people expressing stronger distress in front of a suffering perceived child than in front of a grown human, that’s called “being normal”
So many of our fellow man are assholes. Statistically, I mean. Do the math.
ETA: Yikes! That post was typed out by Kali, one of our dogs.
Further ETA: not that I disagree.
I don’t have children. I call my pets “my kids” because they are like children TO ME. I realize they are not children TO YOU. There’s nothing wrong with me for thinking or saying that my pets are like my babies. Don’t expect other people to love and value your children like you do. They’re your kids, not mine.
The relationship parallel is only as far as the child is dependent till age of 18. The dog is always dependent. This is why I feel the death of a pet always hits harder, because we know the relationship will always be finite, and the poignancy of that is just too hard to bear somehow. When my collie died at age 9, I was totally unprepared, and i grieved for far longer and far harder than for my father who was 88 when he died.
Oh I have that. Had it for years.
I couldn’t agree more.
I’ll take it one step further… I think having an emotional attachment to an animal – any animal – is bizarre and unhealthy. Only humans, IMO, can and should be loved.
We have two barn cats. Their job is to kill rodents. We also have three children. It has always been a fear of mine that one of our children will develop an emotional attachment to the cats. So at an early age I taught them to hunt. I’ve also encouraged them to shoot feral cats. I’m happy to report none have developed an emotional attachment to our barn cats.
I feel sorry for your kids. :mad: they deserve better parents
I grew up hunting and fishing, slaughtering goats, chickens etc, I have always had dogs and have lost many over my life. I was always sad when I lost a good dog but only one time did it seem to really rip me apart and then linger for a long long time. It was my first dog after I married, the first dog that was just mine. We hunted, hiked, worked, trained and just did everything together. It was never a matter of getting him to do something, as long as I could get him to understand what I wanted he simply did it with joy, every time. I was as happy to see him everyday as he was to see me. Looking back on it even 40 years ago I still feel it. We can’t always control what we love.
I care more about *my *dog than I do about other peoples’ kids. I think that’s pretty normal.
But in general, I think you have to be a wacko to think animals overall are more deserving of love, sympathy, and respect than people are. Otherwise, there would be far more vegetarians and far more cannibals in the world.
Is there a psychiatric term for humans who get all bent out of shape at the idea that some people are more interested in the welfare of animals?
I can’t find “Laughably Foolish Jealousy” in the DSM-V index.
Would Dian Fossey be considered a sufferer or victim of this “condition?” It sounds like her seemingly crazier and crazier defense of gorillas and alienation of local humans went a long way towards getting her killed.
That is way, way more than one step.
I once had a really interesting in retrospect argument with a friend who had a similar opinion. Essentially he thought that love, itself, was a finite thing and you shouldn’t waste your allotment on a mere animal.
I fervently disagreed then (35 years ago). I am not so sure now. Love is NOT finite. But human beings are.They have limited energy, limited focus. So, I can see the other side of the argument that way.
But I find animals easier to love than people, and it’s better to love something than to love nothing. So that’s another side.
I don’t particularly like people or animals but tend to have more sympathy for animals simply because I don’t tend to think of them as being complicit in their own mass destruction. I also think of them as being basically guileless - at least once you have some basic understanding of them. If you’re consistent and predictable with them, they tend to return the favor. People . . . not so much.
Well, yes. Just because there is not a one-to-one correlation does not mean that named syndromes are not more likely to be understood than unnamed syndromes. The latter are almost certainly not understood, while the former are just possibly not understood.
Yes, there is. Because they aren’t (unless you really do have a mental/moral problem) and shouldn’t be. They are only like your children in the very superficial sense that you take care of them and love them and would feel sad when they die.
There is definitely something wrong with valuing the lives of your animals over the lives of someone else’s children. We are so sure about this as a society that this is enshrined in law. An animal that attacks humans will get put down. The human may not even be seriously hurt. If that human is a child, it’s generally even worse.
Human beings who undervalue the lives of other human beings are punished by society once they reach a certain threshold. That is why crimes such as murder, rape, or even assault are criminal at a level way beyond harming an animal. If your cats got off your property and started damaging my property, I could legally end their lives. The most a human can get is a fine or jail time. And, with young enough children, they won’t get anything.
I know you love your cats, and they are the closest thing you have to children. But you do not love them the same way a parent loves their own children, and I sincerely hope you do not value their lives more than that of other human beings in general. Insisting you do is in fact a problem.
No, this doesn’t mean you can’t call them your children, as it can merely be an exaggeration. But to get upset when points out that they aren’t really as valuable as children is to say that that you are not exaggerating, and that is a problem. Your pets are not your kids. They may feel like your kids in a limited sense, but that does not make them worth more than someone else’s children.
If you do really value them more than other people’s children, you either value your pets too much or other people too little. People whose children get legally killed for something they can’t control tend to become quite revolutionary.