Humans - out
Dogs- out
Cats - out
But how about mice? Or a spiders? Ants? Birds?
Plants - In
Bacteria - In
Andrew Birds can be tortured with no legal reprecussions.
As far as I know, in my jurisdiction, it’s illegal to torture any living creature. That said, there is a huge industry–albeit illegal and unregulated as the laws against animal cruelty aren’t enforced regarding those restaurants–that profits dearly from incredible torture of dogs and cats, all in the name of making “health stew” aka “dog soup.”
Torture or kill?
I did once see a show, here in Japan, where they had a live fish that they were dressing up in dolls clothes and slapping and such. “Ah damn people, just kill the poor fish!”
But in general, I would tend to think that people just kill their food, without toying with it.
Perhaps they were just figuring out how hard to slap it in order to kill it?
I think a lot of whats legal depends on your definition of torture. Scientists still experiment on Animals for a lot of thing. And sometimes that causes suffering, but is it torture? The law says no, but it’s a fine-line.
Smurfs.
And they deserve it.
Since insects can’t feel pain, you can’t torture them.
You can torture me if you want, but only in the nipple region.
In South Korea, the dogs and cats are tortured and then killed. The widely-held and, of course, baseless belief is that the torturing does something to the meat of the animal that will give the person who consumes it more stamina for sex.
Husbands slowly and painfully.
my idiot father gave me and my brother each a bb gun when i was around 4. the guy said "don’t shoot robins (because it was/is the state bird) and so me and my brother looked at each other and inferred that it was okay to shoot other birds. so when my brother (who was older than me) shot one, we both ran over to it and saw it hanging up sidedown and bleeding while trying to flap its wings. we looked at each other and – to my everlasting sorrow! – went about shooting every bird that we could!
i know it makes no sense to hear me say this, BUT, to this day i hate my own guts and my father’s maybe even more on account of those first 20-years of my life in which i shot many, many birds and other small animals. i was waaaaay to young to process the horrer of having seen what my brother had done in that event in which the first bird was killed. it suffered and i was really leaning on my brother in those days because i was VERY insecure because of being so young in such a strange world and because of the fact that my f-ing scumbag “parents” were about the worst things in the world due to having zero parenting skills. (stupid fools should NOT be allowed to procreate!)
to assuage “some” of my guilt, about a year ago i donated to a lady that nurses back to health injured birds an amount of money that was a lot for me. just the same, i know that no amount will ever undo any of the agony that i caused those animals to suffer. to this day it just makes me sick that i went down that road! that shithead of a father could have tought me and my brother to love birds … if only he’d taken us to a library to learn about them and/or introduced us to the world of painting so that we could learn a skill while showing others that these animals are dear and that God did not put them on earth to be used as targets!
for me, no matter what i say or do for the rest of eternity, i’ll always carry this pain and anger in my soul for what i did. people that excuse this kind of crap by saying that “it’s just a bird” or “it’s just an animal” in order to make themselves or others believe that harming them is okay, make me sick.
I remember standing at the edge of a field with a pellet gun aiming at a bird. I could not bring myself to pull the trigger. I pretended that I couldn’t get a good aim. My friend didn’t seem to have the same issues and he shot the bird. We ran up to see the wings flapping like crazy and all I could think about was baby birds starving in a nest. I know I didn’t shoot the bird but I didn’t stop my friend from doing it either. That was a lifetime ago.
From what I read, your father didn’t shoot any birds nor did he give you permission to. Why blame him? And you were too young to know the difference.
Why blame yourself? It’s Ok to forgive yourself.
Apparently, its OK to torture lobsters by boiling them alive.
It’s also OK to keep a calf penned up in a very small cage for about a year so that we can eat veal.
Many dogs I see are confined to very small cages or chained up while their owners are at work.
We keep a cat locked in the house with very little stimulation for the whole day while we are at work. I often wonder if he feels tortured.
solkoe –
My father was an adult. He could have had a talk with us about the sanctity of life and how it’s okay to shoot a tin can but not a living creature. It wouldn’t have cost the cheapskate 2 cents.
I admire you for not shooting the bird. And what you say is true about the lobsters and calfs. I never eat veal for that reason though it is tough to avoid lobster (because it tastes so darn good) when I’m at a buffet. Guess from now on I should, or rather will.
Benny, old pall, chill out. There is nothing inherently morally wrong with killing creatures.
Your body kills over a million bacterial creatures every day just to keep you alive & relatively disease-free.
Even if you live as simply / primitively as possible & eat nothing but uncooked veggies you pull from the gound by hand, you’re still gonna kill a vast number of mites & other critters too small to see every day. And this “you” is the conscious, moral one, not merely a bodily process you can neither sense nor control.
Going farther up the chain, if you consume any farmed plant products, either food or fiber, you are directly complicit in the killing of vast numbers of macroscopic insects, not to mention large numbers of birds, rodents, and other agricultural “pests”.
Continuing, what if you eat flesh of any kind? Kinda hard to do without killing the flesh’es former owner. Fish, shellfish, bird, or mammal.
It is morally repugnant to hold that an action is bad, while blythly engaging in activities which directly, or indirectly but ineveitably, cause said action but merely out of your sight.
If killing is unacceptable to you, then causing killing ought to be equally unacceptable to you. At a minimum, for yuor morals to make any kind of sense you must immediately cease eating flesh, and probably all mechanically modern-farmed plant matter. How you will atone for your moral failings to date I have no advice.
I readily grant that there is a distinction between killing to eat & killing for entertainment. But if your issue is killing per se, or the so-called “sanctity of life”, then they are both equally killing. If your issue is eating versus entertainement, then what you really mean is you disapprove of certain forms of entertainment.
LSLGuy –
The birds were singing their hearts out for the life that God gave them when some misguided idiot from a dysfunctional family came along and put a bb through them. I take it you never saw a bird hang upside down bleeding through its smashed beak while bubbles of blood formed as it tried to breath. Lucky you.
I respectfully don’t wish to discuss this matter anymore, my friend.
- Lobsters do not have the capacity to feel pain.
- They are dead within a few seconds of being dropped in the boiling water.
However, I am unsure how I feel about veal. Yes, to us it seems cruel, but we have to remember we can ]*never[.i] apply human characteristics to animals, but in that same vein, we do know that mammals do feel pain, have capacity for emotion, and so forth.
And while I think, in general, having an indoor only cat is ok, I do wonder if it really wants to see what’s beyond it’s walls.
But I also hate when dogs have only a small pen/cage to be in and never get to go on walks/runs, play catch, etc…
This surprises me, since it seems that pain would be one of the most basic drives necessary for survival.
OTOH, I know that it was only recently shown that fish feel pain, and I can certainly imagine similar experiments giving a negative result for lobsters, which would be pretty fair evidence that lobsters don’t feel pain–so I don’t think it is a fundamental unknowable. Also,I read recently in Temple Grandin’s book Animals in Translation (which mentioned the fish experiments) that insects don’t feel pain, and lobsters are basically big underwater bugs, right? So you could be correct.
In summary, um–cite?
Define torture please.
Older Brothers. My Little Sister got away with it for years.