(duplicate)
You’re missing the point. I’m not arguing that people have properly given dogs their due and this guy is aberrant. People have always been and plainly still are assholes, that’s hardly news.
Human assholery doesn’t undermine the truth about dogs, which is that they have always been and continue to be extraordinarily valuable as living beings in partnership with us, nothing remotely mystical about it. And they are exceptional in ways that makes acts like these particularly grotesque and offensive.
What amuses me is how the same minds that easily think of dogs as “things to be used” tend to also contain the idea “Me Human. Me super special. Me use, eat, destroy, kill anything me want to because me have big brain and opposable thumb. Grunt.” Completely failing to see, of course, how such an attitude completely fails up to live up to any idea that human beings are in fact remotely special: Nothing could be less evolved than viewing everything through the prism of how much use you can extract from it by whatever means, before you indifferently destroy or discard what remains.
or as dinner meat
Yes, you are.
Why do y’all keep killing the tofu?? It’s a living thing!!
Your hamburger used to be a cow!!
[/sarcasm] I love dogs - I’ve had several (and they all received euthanasia so that they wouldn’t suffer during their waning days). This “executioner,” or whatever moniker you care to apply, probably is suffering already for what he did - and rightly so. In my opinion, the burden of guilt should be on the management - they viewed the dogs as assets (a reasonable thought - that was what they were); however, a proactive effort to place the dogs is also a management responsibility.
The story makes me tear up. But I think the blame is misplaced. Obviously, this guy wasn’t skilled in the art of animal execution, and it sounds like he did a shitty job of it.
Perhaps that means he isn’t the devil - hell, if he’d killed 100 creatures in the past, he would have learned to be more efficient, right?
My problem with this set of claims is that it conflates an undeniable historical factual claim with a more amorphous, undefined assertion of Truth, with the latter crafted to gain credibility from the former.
Yes, dogs have long been and continue to be extraordinarily valuable as living beings in partnership with humans. No question there.
But since that same partnership has, throughout the bulk of human history, included acts of slaughter as bloody and brutal as this one was, I do not agree with your claim that “they are exceptional in ways that makes acts like these particularly grotesque and offensive.” That view is rebutted by the very existence of the partnership you lauded a moment ago, when the partnership is considered in its gross and actual details.
Finally, I am aware of no particular level or standard of evolution that encompasses the behavior you urge on us. Humans are distinct, evolutionary-wise, for our species achievements, and those include acts of brutality very much like this one. The idea that humans should be more noble is a good aspirational one, I agree; it’s not Truth, handed down from on high.
Pretty much, although my idea uses personal pronouns correctly.
Sections 445 through 446 of the Criminal Code of Canada. Link.
Is that the right link? I’m seeing an update page but nothing about animal cruelty.
Cruelty to hamsters.
It’s working for me. You could try this, and scroll down a bit.
Hmm, that’s odd - the first link is showing a completely different page now. Okay, never mind. 