Animal cruelty is horrible and should certainly be stopped.
That said, taking animals from the wild and training them is HOW they became domesticated in the first place.
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Screw PETA. They are a bunch of hypocritical grifters, at best.
Not to mention that “shelter” they ran that euthanized the vast majority of animals brought there.
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Please, please, please stop posting anything involving PETA as a source of information. They are unreliable at best and downright evil and fraudulent at worse. Give them voice is like feeding an internet troll. Ignore them or you make them stronger.
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Back in a time when the wild was big and diverse instead of penned in and over-exploited by Homo sapiens interested in maximizing short term profits, yeah. Our relationship with it should be different now.
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I live in Thailand.
There are coconut trees in front of my house, and everywhere nearby, both farmed, or on residential land.
Every few months, a local team comes buy with a monkey on the back of their pick-up, and they spend a day harvesting the coconuts with a monkey on a long leash. For residential and hotel properties, the trees must be cleared regularly for safety, because falling coconuts are common, and no joke. The nuts of course find their way into the local supply chain.
I’ve never seen* a working monkey be deliberately mistreated or abused. They seem to go about their business quite pragmatically. I have more sympathy for the way the immigrant laborers (Myanmar, Laos etc) are exploited by their bosses.
I don’t see that working monkeys are any better or worse than our other working animals, like guide or guard dogs, race or show horses, water buffalo, or yes, even elephants. Bad conditions and mistreatment can occur anywhere, and is to be deplored. But normal working requirements make it in the owners best interests to keep their animals safe, comfortable and sane**.
The linked video, despite being their most emotive hidden camera “gotcha” exposé they could get, showed no mis-treatment that I haven’t seen much much worse applied to chained-up guard dogs around the world.
I’d have more concern about the clear misery of battery hens, caged pigs, the occupants of Chinese manufacturing plants, and immigrant labour workers in camps around the world. But not enough to stop eating bacon and eggs.
“Chained around the neck” = “Has a collar and leash” just like everybody’s dog.
“Day in and day out” = goes to work regularly, and works for less time than its handler does. They certainly take breaks. Pity the wage-slave in all walks of life if you want to, but this activity is hardly unique.
As this is PETA, then of course my whatabout-ism may be met with “Yes, those are all horrible too, we should ban guide dogs”. This is indeed suggested in one of the links in this post. And I can’t argue with that end of the spectrum.
I’m no animal psychologist, but I don’t think that many Wild vs Domesticated arguments go far when a baby has been hand-reared from birth. Is that argument distinct from keeping caged birds or aquarium fish?
Taking a baby from a wild mother to do so is probably the worst part of the hypothetical scenario, but I dunno if that’s a common scenario in the industry. But objectively worse fates happen to wild venison and salmon.
To be consistent in this sort of boycott, I think we would have to cease doing business with any company who had any properties guarded by chained or ill-treated dogs. I genuinely do feel that a manic guard dog chained up all day has a much worse life, and shows more suffering, behavioural problems and mental damage than the local tree-climbers do.
I’d actually endorse a campaign to phase out the use of dogs as attack animals in “ethical” businesses.
* Not that it may not happen somewhere else, of course
** Until market forces push them to over-do it in some direction
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I can’t believe you’re forcing me to choose between PETA and monkey slavers.
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I don’t think fine motor skills are a monkey’s forte. You’d be better off with face-ripping monkey infantry. I think a hawk in a skinner box might make a good sniper. They definitely have the eyesight and precision motor skills for it.
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“Yes sir, all the voles within a kilometer have been taken down.”
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In the mists of prehistory, yes. But it’s not really an ongoing process. Turns out that vanishingly few species are actually amenable to it.
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So you’re saying that the only advantage these delivery boxes have over regular meal prep — taking away the mental load of recipe choice — is also the one thing they give away for free? I have never used one of these boxes in my life, but I might try a few of the recipes. I’m sure they have excellent chefs in their test kitchen.
Buying and measuring ingredients is not something I would call a chore, so that doesn’t qualify as an advantage of meal boxes.
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I think most people do find washing / peeling / chopping tedious, and it is objectively a large part of the time and cleanup cost of everyday cooking. Not to mention that if you’re cooking for one or two people it’s hard to avoid waste (e.g. if you use half an onion).
So I don’t think meal kits are necessarily decadent – the problem is where they’re framed as an individual consumer luxury, and delivered by courier in expensive packaging. If I could pick up prepared ingredients within walking distance, I’d be all over that, and it could be more sustainable than the ways I currently feed myself.
That’s what’s vexing about Hello Fresh. I can’t think of anything more suited to being a bricks-and-mortar business, but apparently the only way you can start a business now is if it’s an app that serves the entire population of Earth from day one and aims for a market cap in the billions.
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Please accept this Gladiator gif as my thanks for that huge laugh.
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Hey, I’m open to suggestions. Send any leads if you’ve got them. 
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This is the height of synergy between comment and avatar.
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There was a time about 6/7 years ago when places where you could prep ingredients for a meal to heat at home were in business. There was one at the central metro train station in Chicago. The idea was you could assemble the stuff in a container to take home on the train I think it lasted a year. Of course you could also prep up a weeks worth of meals. No idea why the business failed and disappeared.
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At first I thought this story was from an Onion article, but then I saw that no, it’s directly linking to People Eating Tasty Animals…
Frankly, The Onion is a more reliable and honest source. PETA should not be cited for anything.
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Come to think of it, a lot of businesses use illegal primate labour.
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so, a monkey union? cool.
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