Yes:
Never said that shelters were perfect but they do a lot more to directly help animals. PETA’s adoption rate is so low you can just assume an animal surrendered to them will soon be dead.
Yep.
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‘Never watch a pig having sex in an art gallery. You’ll feel dirty, and the pig will enjoy it’
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My guess is that people just didn’t notice the eel in there - I think that is what the artist was betting on. Maybe their point was that we destroy the environment because we overlook it at every opportunity? Maybe they were trying to make a statement about the sustainability of bottled water? It just looked like a regular old water cooler and if you were really thirsty or lost in conversation you might not notice.
Anyone who can find pleasure in watching animals in distress needs professional help. The museum was right to pull the plug. There’s nothing intellectually provocative about any of these cheap spectacles.
Welcome to Boing Boing.
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There’s lots of other organizations, both government and private that have made it clear that PETA is not interested in helping animals as pets. I trust PETA’s own website about as much as I trust their hamburger recipes.
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But not cowherds.
The last thing we need is art propelling animal cruelty and dog fighting. I’m glad the Guggenheim decided to pull this inhumane exhibit.
You are obviously a poor judge both of others’ behavior, and of the term “baiting”. From Webster’s Revised Unabridged 1913+1828:
To provoke and harass; esp., to harass or torment for sport; as, to bait a bear with dogs; to bait a bull.
The dogs in the exhibit were provoked and harassed by the placement of a strange dog in a confrontational position (directly ahead), for the entertainment of museum visitors. The fact that the dogs were restrained means they were kept from fights they were provoked toward.
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Exactly. If only PETA is upset about something, it’s a non issue to me.
I think the insects want a word with you…
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They do get to participate sometimes.
Far more detail than you could ever want here:
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The dogs were not being aggressive. They were obviously trained to run on the treadmills. You have no basis for your claim that the dogs didn’t know each other. They didn’t act as though they didn’t know each other. The oppositional placement of the treadmill effected the viewers such as yourself more than it was effecting the dogs. You should try volunteering for a fighting dog rehab. My neighbor works at a shelter and rehabs pitbulls like that. Those dogs were calm and placid compared to real fighting dogs.
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Insects and arachnids occasionally eat smaller reptiles. It’s how life works. Life feeds on life feeds on life…
Of course they do. You just argued that the art pieces were fine because the behaviours were natural and wouldn’t harm the animals.
Leaving out the insects being eaten.
I could make a whole spiel about how that’s always what people do when talking about how their chosen activity really does no harm - except for the harm it does, but that doesn’t count for some reason or another.
But in some cases a bug is just a bug.
Leaving aside the question of whether PETA are rabid psycho animal lovers/killers (which is it? I get confused), I think there are legitimate points to be made about whether art of this sort is something that should be made or displayed once it is made.
Even if you leave aside the ‘is it cruel’ debates, for me it’s a question of whether we as human beings should intervene in other creatures’ lives in this way.
At bottom, these animals have absolutely no say in whether they are involved in this or not. We as human beings put them in those situations. Whether that is cruel or not, it is a capricious and arbitrary exercise of the power we have over animals.
Effectively, the artist is God messing with Job or telling Moses that he’s not going to get to the Promised Land without even the scanty justification of “I was just testing you for a bet with my buddy” or “You done wrong, so no Promised Land for you”.
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Whoops, I guess technically insects are in the Animalia kingdom. For some reason I forgot my high school taxonomy.
Bugs are neat, but they are more or less simple biological computers, fulfilling their simple programming before dying, making room for the next generation to repeat.
Just like I forgot insects are technically animals, humans are also animals and part of nature. Other creatures fuck with other creatures all the time, including things from harassment to death.
Like I said, I don’t really find any of this compelling, but two examples, pigs fucking, and insects and lizards eating, is what happens every day in nature, whether man put the two together or random chance did. If you have a pet lizard you feed them meal worms and crickets. If you own pigs, and they aren’t fixed, they screw with weird corkscrew dicks.
The dog presentation is a little different, because they are in some contraption arranged in a certain way. But as others pointed out, these look to be dogs trained to run on a tread mill. I didn’t view anything seen as aggression. I have seen aggressive dogs and dog fights, and they look much different.
Dogs are people pleasers, and honestly many breeds need a lot more exercise than they get. I know people who think that something like this or dog sleds or horses pulling carts or even dog dancing is some how subjecting animals to tasks against their will. But with that logic then one would never train their dog to sit, stay, fetch, or anything else because it is some sort of conditioning, vs free will.
I think people assign too much humanity to animals that isn’t there. Now, that isn’t to say that we should have free reign to abuse animals, not that animals don’t feel pain or suffer or have some base emotions, but for example dogs looking guilty are actually just reacting to your reaction. If you don’t correct a behavior as it happens, they have no idea why you are mad if it is after the fact.
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As I say the bit in bold is where I think the difference lies. If you put the animals in the pen together, you are responsible for what happens.
I agree - we do that a lot and personally I’m fine with all sorts of things we do to animals.
But I’m not going to fool myself that it has anything to do with ‘nature’.
It’s us.
In my view that comes with a moral responsibility not to fuck with animals more than we consider necessary or appropriate.
I don’t think these were either necessary or appropriate.
That has nothing to do with assigning humanity to animals. It is a question of assigning humanity to ourselves.
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