by lateralus » Mon 09 Apr 2007, 03:33:14
$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('BlisteredWhippet', '')$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('lateralus', 'P')eople that don't like animals are usually cold hearted and self-absorbed.
Sound familiar BW?
Yes, was this catchphrase in fact inserted at another point in the thread?
This is just stupidity. I never indicated a dislike for animals. I am advancing a theory and philosophy quite different from the conventional and most people will attempt to distill rather than understand. Therefore I will distill it for you:
1. I like animals (lets get this out of the way).
2. I like people.
3. The relationship between animals and humans is problematic.
4. The "special" relationship or "pet/owner" relationship between animals and humans is dysfunctional and bad for both that individual and that animal, and by extension, ALL animals and humans, AND the environment.
I can prove all tenets of the theory by anecdote, which I will relate to you THUSLY:
I work on a farm. (Plant farm). A new worker was hired and came monday. She was reserved, quiet, a bit
antisocial. She did not interact much with the other people. She did not express much friendliness. The impression was somewhat cold, and distant. These are simply observations.
The second day, she brought her dog, some kind of golden lab. The novelty of the dog's presence was enjoyable to people. But the dog was easily bored and interrupted work to try and play with people. This was not a real problem. From time to time the new worker snapped at the dog, occasionally having to chase after and retrieve the dog, to keep him under her command, to keep him from barking at something or being under foot.
The distraction to everyone was negligible. The dog's novelty was still enjoyable. The new worker was generally a little less reserved than the day before, relatively calm in a morose sort of way, occassionally punctuated by the staccato bursts of commands, shouting, etc., expressing anger, frustration, etc. Physically this was represented by grabbing, jerking the collar, dragging the animal, and at one point, miming a striking motion. She "broke the ice" with people discussing the dog and their relationship. These are observations.
The third day the dog's novelty was enjoyable. However, it was obvious the environment was loaded with potential problems. One, the energetic movement of people and material. Two, the use of heavy equipment like forklifts and electric loading machines as well as heavy carried loads, not to mention double-axle diesel trucks and passenger vehicles. There were all kinds of distraction, and more doggie-owner talk was discussed. I talked to her about her life. She moved to the area because she hated her old job, and probably some other things she wasn't mentioning. She expressed a cynical demeanor. She engaged in sarcasm.
She was opening up more and more and she did express certain emotions about the dog. One was exhaustion. The other was regret.
"I wish I could feed my dog vegetables," alluding to the fact that her dog was expensive to feed. "I'm trying to sell my car but every day he gets in it and messes it up again. Its a pain in the ass".
"At least you can bring your dog to work."
"Yeah," she said. "Thats mostly why I took the job."
"Wow. The dog really kind of defines your life, huh?"
"Yeah," she said, looking at the dog. "But I'm an all or nothing kind of girl."
"Would you like to have my dog?" She asked me at one point.
"No, thanks." I said. "I fucking hate dogs." Actually, I didn't say that.
The anecdote is sadly all too common a story. It illustrates several problems, problems that have nothing to do with dogs or my personal feelings about dogs. First of all, for the dog, the situation is negative because it is
dangerous. Literally, its a disaster waiting to happen for the dog. Second, the relationship with a single, morose woman is not nearly equivalent to being in a pack of wild dogs. To my perception, the dog's constantly being berated, corralled, subdued, and dominated. The dog is confused, caught between instinct, its own nature, and the demands of the artifice of a fully humanized environment. I will go out on a limb and say this is not natural, let alone ideal, if I were to go so far and try and speculate on what was fulfilling for a dog's state of mind.
As for her, the impression I got was that she got the dog at a low point in her life, seeing as how she has a young dog (1.5 years) and alluded to a dissatisfaction with her recent history. She also expressed a lot of negative, stressful-type emotional states. Her investment in the dog was significant to the point where she was arranging her life around it, and was struggling to support it.
There was the additional problem of meeting new people (namely myself) whose friendship and/or intimate relations would be fulfilling and enjoyable, but prevented from occurring by her preoccupation with a pet animal. Sad but true.
Finally, there is the time and energy spent mastering something that has no lasting or practical value. As I've said before, the pet is something you sink time, energy and emotion into. What you get back is not really that much compared to the alternative (time, energy and emotion spent developing relationships with the self and other human beings or other stuff.) Pet ownership is a
choice, kind of like the choice to strap an anvil to your leg. The difference is that it is easy to see how the anvil is a problem and there is no emotional or cognitive difficulty in
divesting yourself of that relationship.
Her personal philosophy was completely empty and uncompromising, resulting in and compounding her unhappiness by clouding her judgment and rationale. "All or nothing" simply means that the relationship is defining
her rather than the other way around.
To many people, a pet is like the proverbial "Thing that you own which ends up owning you", but the worse aspect is the way it entangles reason with emotion, making dispassionate judgment difficult. Her mind, having been disarmed by the social propaganda of the pet-owning fetishists and her own lack of self-discipline, self-esteem, and a distorted value system in terms of humans, animals, and nature, is unable to extricate itself.
This is a human being lost in the wilderness of her own mind. I can sense the cloudiness of her perspective and powerlessness of her situation. I could try arming her with logic but such tactics would be useless for she is already lost. She will grow like a tree does around cancer, and deal with her compromised situation. She will be a member of society and all that entails. She will sell her car, get another one. Get some schlepp job and try to trap a man into being the doggiesitter and sperm donor. She will resign herself to daily walks, will scoop poop, will tolerate the barking and clogged vacuum bags and spend thousands annually on dissected remains of other animals. She will invest all that time and energy on the pet relationship, in guilt, frustration, the amiable fatalism of her situation, all that
shit. What is unlikely to occur is a realization of her situation in nature, a realization of the wrongness of her choice and the empowerment of self-esteem and comfort of being (alone), or growing emotionally strong without the crutch of the pet. And her actions specifically regarding the care and feeding of the pet will have telegraphed far, far from her and her pet, from the factory that makes the meat to the pesticides made out of its collars to the fleas in the carpet biting the next occupant of the apartment.
A millstone around her neck. A yoke. An albatross.
Recently the Animal Police (or whatever) busted some guy who had amassed 110 parakeets in his apartment. The TV news alerted the zombie public who quickly adopted all 110 birds. One individual's sickness instantly spread to 110 other people. What is their aesthetic reason, their spiritual reason, for wanting a tropical bird, to sit in a cage, hopping about in its own shit, for the rest of its short, miserable life? There is no deep answer to that question, and that is precisely the problem.
My thesis is that nature is not here for our simple self-indulgence. Our minds are misused by setting itself to this task and the exercise of it destroys the teleological reality that civilized, domesticated people are divorced from, and the consequences of that are clear in the deeply negative impact we are having on the environment, a negative impact that denigrates both people and animals.
You can go tit for tat, wallow in details, specifics, this or that scenario, but to me, that is the unavoidable essence. Our relationship to animals is troubled to the very foundations of our concept of animal and man.
These concepts are
sold to us,
taught to us,
inherited and
programmed. Many people don't have the insight to realize that it is simply the poisoned progeny of a cultural idea passed down directly from Anglo-Saxon empiricists, and before that all the way back to the first domesticators of animal and plant life. The origin of pets is a habit, not a reasoned exercise of any natural philosophy. A culture that would destroy animal habitat and push species to extinction, failing and flailing to protect these, and establish factory farming and Zoos can be expected to produce perverse practices like pet-owner paradigms. Anyone who comes by and questions the sacred institutions of the culture, is going to be assaulted with "When did you stop beating your wife" questions like, "Why do you hate animals?" in the exact same way war detractors in 2001 were assaulted with "Why do you hate America?"
The similarity is that each position directly questions the assumptions upon which these behaviors and choices rely even if they were based on uninformed vapors. Unfortunately, choices, beliefs, behaviors- all these have real consequences, and therefore are of a category of things which are moral questions.
I think that unsubstantiated beliefs and prejudices require a kind of willful ignorance if one is not completely desensitized or idiotic. Egos require self-deceit if necessary to preserve itself. But crack ain't nutritious even if the addict looks in the mirror and sees a beauty queen and feels strong enough to lift a minivan. Pets feed a need for companionship, a communion with nature, but is more than a poor substitute, it is poison which plunges people into a vicious cycle of alienation, habit, and routine. In short, it kinda makes you retarded, and keeps you retarded.
I almost forgot that I had even posted in this thread and was half expecting to be reading some happy pet stories from people, yet I find that it's the same old same old.
You are obviously a thinker and intelligent BW. I will give you that, but in all honesty, I think that there is so much methane coming out of your mouth that you could blow up four square city blocks.
Before I go to town on this post would you like to clarify this for me.
$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Blistered Whippet', 'I') am advancing a theory and philosophy quite different from the conventional and most people will attempt to distill rather than understand. Therefore I will distill it for you:
1. I like animals (lets get this out of the way).
2. I like people.
3. The relationship between animals and humans is problematic.
4. The "special" relationship or "pet/owner" relationship between animals and humans is dysfunctional and bad for both that individual and that animal, and by extension, ALL animals and humans, AND the environment.
I can prove all tenets of the theory...
![[smilie=grommit.gif]](https://udev.peakoil.com/forums/images/smilies/grommit.gif "grommit")
![[smilie=new_popcornsmiley.gif]](https://udev.peakoil.com/forums/images/smilies/new_popcornsmiley.gif "new_popcornsmiley")
