Monday - December 03, 2007
Do Birds Get Cold?
There was a frost the other day. People were
snug in their homes and mostly
unaffected.
But the birds have to put
up with it. There they sit on the power lines, their feet tucked close. That's
about all they can do. No matter the weather, they still have to find food.
Every day, the need to eat doesn't stop.
Do the cows know they're miserable
when they stand outside in the sleet? Some animals have dens or burrows. They
get some reprieve from the weather, but anyone who's slept in a tent in the
winter knows that this is only a slight improvement.
My dog is, to be blunt, not very smart. She has
a doggy door and she uses it frequently to go in and out of the house at will at
all times of the day. It doesn't occur to her, though, to use the door to go
outside to pee. For that, she requires my permission and presence to escort her
outside. I don't know why.
What she
lacks in sense, she makes up for in emotion. I've never seen an animal possess
such a range of emotion before. Last night at around 1am, as usual, she woke me
up. Grumbling I tried to escort her outside, but she wouldn't go. It was as
though she had a nightmare and needed comforting. She wanted me to pet her, to
snuggle with her, to reassure her. This is not normal for
her.
Did she have a nightmare, did she
have a stroke, did she have a seizure? Perhaps, but I can't read her mind to
know for sure. What I know is that after comforting her for about 20 minutes I
discovered her "accident" on the floor. She saw that I noticed it. I could see
that she felt shame.
For thousands of
years, men have taught that animals can't think. That animals haven't the power
to reason. That animals are little more than unthinking machines made by a god
for no purpose of their own except for us to eat or yoke. I don't know how
anyone who owns a dog could come to such a
conclusion.
On Thanksgiving day my
nephew shot some feral pigs on his grandmother's ranch. I helped lift them onto
the truck and watched them get skinned. Pigs and other animals have been
slaughtered for ages for food, and I've no objection to the practice, bacon
tastes good. I don't pretend that these animals didn't have thoughts and
feelings ... or confusion and fear as 30-30 bullets cut into them.
Did we claim that animals have no
feelings in the past to justify eating them? Can we justify eating them knowing
that they have feelings? Well, yes. We can. I'm sorry for them, but I like to
eat and I come first.
How are we
different than animals? What makes us better than them? Why do we have a right
to kill them? Do they have the ability to know right and wrong, shame, or
ethics? My dog does. I don't think she's that
unusual.
It is the way of the world.
All animals must eat, as must we, and we eat them. The math is pretty
straightforward.
Here is where it gets
tricky. If animals can think and emote just like we do, although not as well,
how can we justify killing them but not each other? If we take away the excuse
that animals are incapable of feeling or thinking, why can we condone our
policies towards them?
Some say we
can't. They're called vegetarians and are innocuous enough.
Some form clownish activist groups
such as PETA and try to stop us from killing animals for food and by products,
and some even want to give them legal rights. Some think animals should be free
to enter into contracts, be protected by due process and allowed to own
property. These people are morons.
At
the same time there are people who think that they have a right to slaughter
people as though they were animals. Most of these today are called Muslims.
They can know right and wrong, shame, ethics, but they also can conceive of
something they use to justify perverting right and wrong: a deity.
Whether a diety exists or not is an
issue that I won't address here. There is a deity or there isn't, but there is
no deity that can justify murdering thousands of people living peacefully and
posing no risk to others. There is no deity that can justify cutting other
peoples' heads off in an effort to terrorize their neighbors. There is no deity
that can condone forcing people to live in
oppression.
Animals feel emotions.
Animals feel pain. Animals know right and wrong. Animals feel shame.
People have intelligence far
surpassing animals, yet some use their intelligence to ignore emotions, confuse
right and wrong, suppress shame, inflict pain.
Birds feel cold, but don't know what
to do about it. We feel cold and build fires, central heating, and fur coats.
Birds peck each other to establish a
heirarchy. We established a system of laws to protect ourselves and our
society. This is how we differ from animals. We create rules, and by
communication, make these rules known among all men. Birds can enforce their
pecking order only as far as their beak will reach. Our laws reach to wherever
men will go and are held by all men as tools used by each of us in the same
way.
Our laws forbid what Islam has
been doing to others. Our laws reach to where we will go. We must go to where
these murderous muslims are and use that which separate us from the animals, our
laws, and inflict justice and retribution on them, and put an end to their
oppression and visions of conquest. If we don't do that, then we are no
different than the birds.
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