You insane lying cretin, where have I said anything like this?
This is the reason why I try not to bother with you in Great Debates: you’re a lying, incoherent loser.
Daniel
While it is true that geese are force-fed to produce a delicate, fatty liver, I have my doubts about the “cruelty” of the practice, photos at the link you provide notwithstanding. I’ve seen it actually being done, and the geese really don’t seem to mind. In fact, they quite eagerly crowd around awaiting “their turn” to be fed.
Now, veal crating is another matter altogether. At one time, veal was a seasonal thing. Surplus milk-fed calves were slaughtered just before weaning in the late spring/early summer, trimming dairy herds (their mothers would continue producing milk, and that is often the intent of having a dairy cow calve to begin with - to start her milk production.) There isn’t anything cruel about that. I don’t like the idea of keeping veal calves anemic and closely penned to prevent exercise, though. that isn’t natural, and goes against the natural seasonal cycle that had worked just fine for generations.
Your experience is 180 degrees counter to generally accepted wisdom concerning canine behavior.
Sentient Meat,
I agree that crate rearing is a horrible practice.
Just why it’s bullshit. Please expand the argument, because my understanding is that Schlosser is very careful with his cites and if you have cites that contradict him, I’m interested. That’s all.
Unregistered Bull has a history of shitting in my threads (read the context links), Jimpatro does not. Second, Jimpatro’s post wasn’t hostile toward anyone. Yes, he was just voicing his opinion in agreeing with some of the premises, but it wasn’t an inflammatory post. Third, concluding that I’m inconsistent from one example of pitting someone and not pitting every other possible offender is the sort of poor reasoning that got this pitting started in the first place (which probably explains your desire to defend UB).
Maybe you’re projecting? In any case, Clothahump, as long as I’m giving out free advice, your apologetics need some work (even though you’ve apparently had plenty of practice).
You know, I agree with UB on a lot of points. I don’t really care about animal rights. I think human welfare always always always trumps animal “rights.” I think rights in general are a purely human concept that do not really apply to animals in the first place. I’m a big supporter of many cultural practices that involve cruelty to animals, such as rodeos and bullfighting. I’ve even argued that beastiality should be de-criminalized, because it is patently absurd to be concerned about animals giving “consent” in a culture that routinely kills them, eats their flesh, and wears their skin as a hat.
And despite that, I still think he’s a fucking loon. Bull, you’d be hard pressed to find a poster on the SDMB who’s more predisposed to agreeing with you. And yet, you’ve completely lost me in this thread. P’raps you’re going a tad far in your rhetoric? For example, comparing animal rights advocates to Nazis and Klansmen doesn’t make them look evil, it just makes you look stupid.
Hmm?..who?..what? :o
One thing that undermines your debating, Bull, is that you ascribe unlikely motives to others.
Let’s imagine a hypothetical poster AnimalRightsPoster, and pretend s/he wants to ban certain types of rodeo sports and trapping practices.
Your contention, from earlier in the thread, is that AnimalRightsPoster does this not because of any concern for reducing suffering, but because s/he hates you or people like you. Any random poster walking into the thread then thinks “I wonder what AnimalRightsPoster has to gain from destroying Bull’s way of life.” The answer is not much.
It’s always a tricky business ascribing motives to others. When you jump to the conclusion that others’ motives are to hurt people they’ve never met and probably will never meet, and they won’t gain anything from that hurt*, it calls into question your logic and critical thinking skills.
Toning down the paranoia a little, and asking questions to find out if the proposed policy or legislation has room for compromise that will protect your interest makes this look a lot less like a hatefest arguement, and more like a rational debate.
*Yes, I know Klansmen and Nazis want to destroy people they’ve never met, but they will gain from it the realization of an ideology that’s expressed quite clearly. It is unclear to me that animal rights activists have expressed an ideology that advocates the destruction of people or certain groups of people, so I would need to see evidence to support this.
Actually, it may surprise you to know that a subset of animals are considered humans.
I will leave it to you as an excercise to figure out which species of animal I might be referring to.
The word certainly has multiple meanings, but using the word in a sense that doesn’t include humans is common and acceptable usage. You may want to look the word up in a dictionary if you don’t understand this.
Yup.
Just poking a little fun at the bolded portion of the statement.
I love this guy. He keeps mentioning “cultural practices” like that was some sort of fucken right to do whatever you want. Newsflash CULTURAL PRACTICE means dick in a society of law. Take for instance the Arabic practice of parents killing a daughter who has unsanctioned sex. This is a “cultural practice” but can you do it here in America? No.
Another thing, tell me what cultural value rodeo serves? I have horses but I don’t think that the society should revolve around my riding. Should cars have to yield to a horse on the road? Nope. It’s not cultural, it’s a outdated means of transportation. If you believe rodeo is cultural I guess you would believe that a New Englander is a good ol boy from Texas. I don’t have a problem with rodeo; it’s almost as ridiculous as NASCAR or wrestling. Keep doing it for all I care. Go ahead and hunt, I don’t see a problem with it. But trying to equate people who believe in animal rights to NAZIS is fucken out of control. When have these people set up concentration camps? I know one thing for sure, people like you seem to invent a great deal of imagined persecution for yourselves. Is it the big bad Hillary and the Liberals or the animal rights people? It used to be the government but now that your buddies have control you need someone else to blame.
You might think that animals are below humans but I happen to think that they are better in many ways. This might insult your redneck (I myself am of redneck stock) sensibilities but an animal lives in harmony with nature. Mankind does not. Animals do not make poison or bombs or torture chambers or child porn or war or on and on and on. Did the Bible tell you different? Well the Bible tells us a lot of things that we don’t do. Like love your enemy as yourself. Or do you think that we love the Iraqi civilians by bombing them? Do you think Jesus is going to be able to stop us from using nuclear bombs?
You people think that your bullshit “down to earth” homespun claptrap is without flaws but in reality you are just as fucken tainted as the rest of us. So let me clue you in on something. God, the big guy in the sky, created this world. Humanity and animals (from the latin word animus meaning “soul”) are part of that creation. If you think that we are above any form of life you insure that lifeforms which are superior to us (God, aliens, or whatever) will continue to treat us the same way. All life is precious and all is worth exactly the same. The sooner we realize this the sooner we begin to evolve.
I only snipped off a bit of your post – and only due to common courtesy to the SDMB’s unwritten etiquette rules. But damn, man, that was just beautiful and worth reading more than once.
Have never run into your posts before, likely due to the sparcity of same due to your recent sign-up date and/or different posting patterns – as long as I’ve been here, I probably “know” 40-50 members at most for the latter reason – but far as much as I’m not wont to dispense praise that was a great effort for any number of reasons which, I fully admit, I am too lazy to list. Besides if others can’t figure them out, doubt they belong here in the first place. Anyhoo…welcome aboard, trust I didn’t embarrass you too much – not like I have some sort of gage for that kind of thing for I can’t seem to remember the last time I blushed.
~Red: proud Dobigirl owner – neutered at that.
PS-BTW, Bull, too bad you’re registered bull. Even your moniker’s full of it.
Unregistered Bull, at first I thought you were batshit insane. Now I can see we’re all confused and it’s all a big mess of ideas and definitions.
Ok, here goes:
Leaving dogs in cars with the windows rolled up in the heat of summer is unnecesarily cruel, as you have stated. Well, then, we could say dogs have the right not to be left in cars with the windows rolled up in the heat of summer, can we? That would be Animal Right #1
Leaving dogs crated all day long as their masters leave, according to you, is wrong (in a sense, the way you see it). This is another case of unnecesary cruelty. Animal neglect. Therefore, animals shouldn’t be neglected and they have the right to be properly taken care of. Animal Right #2
And so on…
You see, you do agree and believe in animal rights. Animal rights are there to avoid cruel treatments to what are defenseless beings. What you don’t agree with is the people who want to take your hunting privileges (a human right, let us say), scientific testing (which is for the well being of humans and, hell, another right), and for sporting events (which, let’s be honest, has been part of human history one way or the other). You don’t agree with that.
I see these threads and see both camps get pissed off for the same reasons all over again when dealing with different situations. They’re different, yet they show remarkably similar results and share a relationship. I’m thinking of the Christian-bashing threads. That a group of Christians led by the wacko of the week condemns gays and tells them they’re all going to hell doesn’t mean all Christians are like this (or that this is the Christian ideal or purpose). This is similar to your thinking on the 9/11 profiling issue. Why should all muslims get screened for what a few nutjobs did?
Generalizations, people. Let’s avoid them. In this case, let’s say there animals do have rights (isn’t it in the Bible, of all places?), but that there are a few nutjobs who are ruining it for everyone.
Also, remember: humans are animals too. 
We trained our dog without any sort of confinement. More than a type of cruelty, crate training is lack of ingenuity.
See, I wonder about this. I know folks who think that declawing should be treated as criminal animal cruelty, who think it’s irresponsible not to get your animal microchipped, who believe that pinatas at parties teach children to abuse animals. And yet these people endorse crate training.
I’m no dog expert, but it seems to me to be unlikely that this causes significant emotional anguish in a dog: if it did, the people I know who are very, very pro-animal-rights would almost certainly oppose it.
Daniel
I wasn’t defending UB. I was simply commenting on an glaring inconsistancy in your post. No apologetics of any kind, amigo.
I can only speak for myself, but if someone comes into an animal rights thread proclaiming that hunters are mentally disturbed criminals, I’ll support their pitting just as fully as I support the pitting of Bull. I just don’t like it when pathetic imbeciles try to interrupt the grownups with their nasty nattering.
Daniel
Oh you weren’t defending him? So you think a partisan, inconsistent attack is a legitimate one? You were obviously defending him, and now you’re withdrawing because I showed you how you were wrong. For once, I’d like to see someone just say: “Hey, that’s a good point, I withdraw my unfounded criticism.”
Animals live in harmony with nature? Not by half, they don’t. Unchecked by other species, animals will consume and consume until the ecology is completely devastated. Just like humans. You think a locust swarm cares about the harmony of nature? The entire idea is pure human sentimentality. More accurate to say, the “equilibrium of nature.” Animals destroy the enviroment until it can no longer support them. Animals die back down to a maintainable level until the ecology recovers or a larger predator shows up to keep the population down. Rinse and repeat, rinse and repeat, for however many tens of thousands of years it takes until humans show up to blather about the harmony of nature and how horrible man is for being a better animal than any other animal.
What about rattlesnakes?
Fair enough, although bombs, like all weapons of war, are merely extensions of the inherent violence of the natural world. Again, we’re just better at it than any other species on Earth.
Spiderwebs seem fairly similar.
On the other hand, humans are the only animals on the planet to have conceived of age of consent laws, which I think speaks well of us. Also, we have far fewer instances of eating our own young than most other species.
Ants.
And so forth and so on. There’s really very little that humans do that doesn’t have its analogue in the animal kingdom. We’re just better at… well, just about everything. Including possessing enough self-awareness to at least attempt to limit our enviromental impact and correct natural behaviors we have recognized as destructive. I think that speaks very well for us as a species. When you find a badger that’s written the equivalent of the Code of Hammurabi, then we can talk. Until then, we’re the best thing this planet’s got going for it.
So it’s perfectly OK for you if the leaving of the dog in a car on a hot day is based on tradition? If it’s tradition then it’s necessarily cruel? How long does a cruel activity have to be repeated in order to be placed into the ‘traditional’ category anyway? (i.e. supposing starting this year members of a community wish to hold a competition to see which dog can survive in a car on a hot day for the longest period of time. They then repeat this every year.)