I think you really need to read my post again. You are arguing some counter point to me that I did not make.
I am entitled to my opinion that I feel feeding a sickly puppy to his turtle in this environment and under these conditions is unnecessary and cruel. I agreed that it does not deserve criminal charges, but I would not want him teaching my kids. I also conceded the nature of the food chain, but feel there were better options available to him that the one he took.
If you cannot accept my viewpoint…then sincerely, fuck off.
Because puppies are pets who have a rather strong connection to human beings. Sure, mice and rats can be pets as well, but it’s pretty clear if you’ve spent any time in the company of both critters that dogs are very much more connected to us emotionally than mice are.
Where is the line then? A sick baby orangutan? A sick baby?
So your position is that people who are not universally polemical about animal utility should have no opinion about specific instances of animal utility?
It is illuminating to see the woman who originally made a big stink about this. She is interviewed in the video embedded in this article. Just listen to how she talks:
She is cut from the same cloth as those who try to ban Harry Potter in school libraries or call the police on black children running lemonade stands.
If people actually paid attention to stories like this, they’d know that the puppy was sickly and likely not to survive, so he euthanized it by drowning* as has been done on farms for millennia. And since the class had a pet snapping turtle, why waste the food? It was not alive when eaten. It was not done in front of the class, but after school.
Edit: According to the court testimony reported in the latest article, he gave it to the turtle while alive, and the turtle waited for it to drown.
I dunno… Feeding a sick puppy to a snapping turtle… that seems like a pragmatic solution even if I can understand it upsetting some people. If it was a mouse or a rat, it wouldn’t be a big deal to most people, because dogs are pets. But at the same time we euthanize thousands of dogs and puppies every day across the US. So how is this much different? It’s a little different, but I don’t see it as animal cruelty.
Cops shooting dogs happen so much it’s a trope now. Most of the time it isn’t because the dogs were actual threats. At the very least it is unlawful destruction of property in most cases.
Here’s the thing, a lot of people feel the law should see a distinction. Apparently our lawmakers have’t gotten the message. That can and should be changed.
Sure, but that doesn’t necessarily have any bearing on the cases at hand. Shit like this could have happened, has happened, at any time. In fact, as such incidents go, they’re not even close to the worst.
So how fucking hard is it to take it to a vet to have it put down humanely? I mean, dude could not make a fucking phone call or put the poor thing in his truck/car to drive it down to the local vet to be euthanized?
The story also details how he left the sick puppy in his car for the whole working day, presumably suffering - denying it medical care/being euthanized humanely. Which is pretty reprehensible and would probably carry a criminal charge where I am from under The 2006 Animal Welfare Acts.
Probably pretty off topic: I was just discussing internet commenting with a friend the other day and we ended up talking about Baudrillard and hyperreality. The idea that we increasingly are unable to distinguish reality from simulacrum. One example Baudrillard used was Disneyworld - a place that is literally a simulacrum of reality. Another was pornography as “hypersex” - amplifying the signifiers of sex to our brains without us actually participating in it.
I feel like we often discuss things in an analogous “hyper-reason” where all of the form of reason is there, but there is never any reference back to reality. The only distinctions that matter are distinctions between categories of things, not actual things.
I can’t argue that there is some great and fundamental difference between mice and dogs without referring back to our lived (and therefore arbitrary and cultural) experience. But, as you rightly point out, we can’t distinguish humans from mice in any other way either. This “arbitrary cultural distinctions” aren’t there to mess up our thinking, they are the content of our lives.
Agreed. I have had rodents as pets and dogs as pets, and I would feed most rodents to a reptile any day of the week (and have on occasion, when I had pet reptiles). Never a dog. That is fucked up.
I would tend to agree that the letter of the law does not make a legal distinction between dogs and mice in this regard. This is similar to what I thought of the Trayvon Martin shooting: legal according to the letter of the law, but morally indefensible. Both rulings are a terribly bitter pill.
