Too little, too late
PETA wants a vegetarian diet for a cannibalism suspect incarcerated in Texas. It's hard to tell who makes more sense in this suspect? The cannibalism suspect, PETA or the sherriff with his deadpan (pardon the pun) answer? PETA said: "Only in a culture where people routinely kill and eat living, feeling beings would anyone even think to kill and eat a human loved one". And the sherriff answered that "in all of his years as sheriff there has not been one case of cannibalism in his jail, much less cannibalism caused by serving meat to the prisoners."
Nothing follows.
posted by wretchardthecat at 1/11/2008 02:29:00 PM
9 Comments:
Several years back a friend told me he had saw a show on TV that said "Only humans, among all of creatures of the Earth, milk other animals for food."
Is that on the short list of "Things only humans do?" They need a new list.
RWE
BS, you can tell him that that's not even true -- point him to "mutualism" between ants and aphids, the former more or less having domesticated the latter.
Anyway, WTF, like that's worse than being eaten alive as happens so many places in nature?
Just remember: Hitler was a Vegetarian.
For my part, I'm quite certain that even little teeny yogurt critters have some "spark of the divine."
I nonetheless consume yogurt with great relish.
Well, seriously, if cows and deer and cute lil rabbits got'em, so do microbes. Who's to say otherwise, eh? The worms will frolic with my corpse in their turn.
Even plants have been shown in extremely precise highly scientific experiments, to react to aggression with almost instantaneous responses, seemingly purposeful and measured --- pheromones, increased internal pressures, increased sap flow, et cetera.
There are wonderful time-lapse films of plants showing them battling with each other in extreme slow motion, grappling & wrassling over turf, access to sunlight, and water.
Anyway, the folks in PETA are about the craziest of all the crazoids of the left, and really should have to wait in line behind the undocumented aliens for drivers licenses. After some of the crap PETA personnel have pulled in Hampton Roads --- several were convicted of doing some "freelance" euthanasia on critters, after which they disposed of the carcasses in shopping center skips--- I wouldn't trust them do properly flush a dead goldfish.
mad fiddler: I nonetheless consume yogurt with great relish.
Yogurt? With relish? Yerg!
What I want to know is if we're not supposed to eat animals, why are they made out of meat? I mean, after all, sacred cows make the tastiest hamburgers.
What I want to know is if I'm the only one who wishes that the parents of PETA's founding members had been travelling with the Donner Party.
I have an idea. Considering that PETA is a Left Wing group, why don't we form our own organization called People for the Situational Ethical Treatment of Animals?
PSETA's basic principle would be that you could only imprison, mistreat, kill, and consume members of animal groups that are part of a large majority rather than a minority group.
For example, in Oklahoma there are far more cattle than people. (I have flown around that place a fair amount and I can assure you that is true). So you could eat beef but not people.
Anybody with me on this? I need to know how many T-shirts and bumper stickers to order.
And we need to figure out where to hold our first demonstration.
An enterprising jailer could hav a little fun with this so-called cannibal. Why not get a nice leg of baby goat, rub it down with olive oil, garlic and chapped rosemary and roast it over an open fire. Then serve it to the suspect while mentioning how noble it was that the parents of the five-year old girl had donated her body to science, and how fortunate it is that the driver diverted the unwanted parts of her corpse to the prison kitchen. Of course the choice of goat could prove problematic in the case of an apparent confession of cannibalism where the suspect complements the guards on the taste and texture of the kid and asks for the poor little guy’s other leg the next night.
As far as vegetarians go, I have nothing against them but I do find the whole faux-meat thing a bit peculiar. I mean if meat is murder what does that make tofu burgers? Gratuitous TV violence? Given the bounty of authentic vegetarian dishes coming from the Mediterranean area alone, why would any real vegetarian bother with quorn dogs?
There are some serious aspects to this conversation.
Trust me, I'm not going to dwell on'em.
But I think it's possible and permissible to have a concern for animal welfare and treatment while at the same time continuing to include animal protein in your diet.
Eating meat does NOT have to be part of a hideously vicious lifestyle of tormenting and torturing animals gratutitously. You *CAN* treat the animals well while they're alive, and dispatch'em without undue pain & suffering. I was married briefly to a lady who raised sheep, and she and her kids had no problem treating them as pets and buddies until they got to be old enough to be either sold or slaughtered.
(Come to think of it, maybe that's why it was so easy for her to change her feelings for me so abruptly... Must needs think on that...)
Seriously, there's a lot of sense to some of the criticisms vegetarians make --- wasteful and extravagant use of farmland and water resources needed per pound of edible animal protein, and the amount of resulting pollution by animal wastes and fertilizer run-off. These deserve serious consideration, but a reasonable response would be to eat less meat, not necessarily eliminate it entirely.
We could just tend herds of critters, feed 'em a rich diet that no PETA member could fault us for, and harvest the bodies ONLY when they keel over dead from clogged arteries or a stroke.
Hey, if a bison steps into a gopher hole and breaks its leg, could we shoot that one and eat it? Can we punish the pesky prairie dogs for causing the premature death of the Bison?
I mind a time when a certain Delbert Dunmire wanted to donate to the Kansas City Zoo the extended family of prairie dogs he'd been keeping as pets. As I recall the unfolding of events (back in the 1980's) he met resistance from the zoo's biologists, and took matters into his own hands. He sneaked into the zoo in the dead of night and released *his* prairie dogs into the zoo's prairie dog compound.
Sounds like a scene out of a Disney movie with some guy in a Beagle Boys mask carrying a burlap sack full of writhing critters.
But the two families of prairie dogs weren't amused, and proceeded to fight to the death.
I guess the biologists knew best.
We have such a bizarre view of the world. Seems like PETA and a lot of animal rights activists are just as blind to reality as are the folks who think the Muslims are trying to blow up all creation just because they don't like Bush.
Flesh feeds on flesh. It has always been thus. I remember the tiger and the gazelle. Is the tiger mean? Is the gazelle helpless? Tigers generally don't kill gratuitiously, but they do leave lots around for the scavengers.
So do we.
We need to stop blaming ourselves for everything that we do - for what has and keeps as successful species is actually wired into us - and that wiring may actually be faulty in the PETA crowd. THEY would be the ones to not survive in the world of yesteryear.
The Perp in this case will be tortured enough without his human cuisine. Something tells he his tastebuds are peculiar and he won't exactly find the prison chicken croquettes appetizing.
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