and it isn’t just the Chicago Tribune who do it. Most of them also block Iceland, Norway and Switzerland which have never been in the EU.
Did you force your son to play soccer? Or maybe the dog volunteered to join the police?
I know about professional football training and what it involves. I used to work at Carlisle United, and their training ground was next door to my secondary school. One of my friends who helped me realise that not everyone at my school was bullying me was in the youth team and eventually made it into the first team.
Natural order of things, food chain, and all of that logic be damned. That fucker is a creep and may well have fed more than a puppy to a turtle…he may have fed permission in some young impressionable mind giving a green light to committing harm in the natural order of things. Fuck him. In my view he’s sick and here along the Amazon river there are a lot of hungry creatures. Caiman are always looking for a snack.
When I was a kid my dad picked up a pet rabbit for free in the want ads, probably because my sister wanted one so badly. Anyway, it somehow got an infected wound that was crawling with maggots by the time we discovered it (I’m euphemizing here, the actual issue was something I’d rather not describe, and something one couldn’t just ‘clean’, particularly on a squirming animal), other than going to the vet and paying more money than we could afford we didn’t know what else to do but put it down. My dad, being an old school farm boy who grew up during the Great Depression, put it in a box, cut a hole in the box, and attached it to the car’s exhaust pipe.
I was shocked and disgusted by this method almost as much as I was by the infected wound, but in retrospect I understand why he did it.
So. . . feeding a dying puppy to another animal, while it makes me feel pretty ill, I also understand the cruel logic behind it.
So your stance is that because the dog does not have free-will/independent thought - or more specifically because the dog does not have the higher conscious decision making ability of a human being - that going through rigorous training is therefore cruel? What happens when a child is not given a choice for something they do not want to do - say going to school? For some kids that is stressful and traumatic…is it cruel to put your kid through school? My teenagers would cite cruel and inhuman behavior every time I force them to clean up their rooms.
What about other animals we put through rigorous training? Shepherding dogs, seeing eye dogs, are all service animals of any kind being subjected to inhumane treatment and cruelty simply because they did not have higher level cognitive choice?
Probably off-topic, but I’ve read about that story, and I agree that she (not a trained scientist, but a volunteer) believed she was doing a helpful thing.
Still, it had the opposite effect, as it perpetuated the dolphins’ behavior and complicated the situation, where she could have simply stopped trying to train while he was unresponsive to training and resumed at another time.
After the project lost funding, the dolphin died as the conditions in his enclosure were poor.
And that justifies feeding it to a snapping turtle how? Because RURAL AMURICA? Call animal control, take it to a local vet, have it euthanized humanely. There was literally no reason NOT to do that instead of this. None whatsoever.
yeah, but just think about how much money getting sick the dog saved him on dog food.
the dog was clearly trying to do him a favor - economically speaking - and this man was clearly unable to do the math.
if we really need to reduce emotional considerations to economic ones, we really need to look at the overall picture.
( of course, treating the sick puppy and making it well again would have stimulated the local economy over the long haul - if anything we probably should just feed the teacher to the snapping turtle to resolve his short sightedness. )
Kids have scheduled classes. As a teacher, his first job is to teach those classes, and then fit in all the other administrative stuff like grading and tidying up, and in this particular case, feeding the animals kept in the classroom. So, the teacher attempted to feed the python before classes, and if you know how snakes are fed, they may eat immediately, they may wait a while, either way, it seems that he ran out of time before classes, so rather than have a mewling sickly puppy in a tank that may or may not be eaten through the day, he took the puppy out of class until the next appropriate time. After classes, he attempted to feed the python again, but it wasn’t eating (again, entirely normal for snakes to assume irregular feeding during seasonal torpor or shedding cycles, they generally feed at will), so he fed the dog to the other classroom animal that would prey on it.
The children who witnessed the act of feeding were there extracurricularly, and by every account, had no problems with the decision after discussing the palliative options that were available to the abandoned animal. Were this a squeaking rat, nobody would have a problem with those decisions, but for some reason, we have carved out an exception for certain pets that seems pretty incoherent in light of how we treat larger, smarter animals like pigs and cows.
Really? Where exactly have you been in the last 10 years of free range and ethical/humane methods of farm to table. This lady wants to have a talk with you…
we forcibly breed them and kill them before their natural lifespan, and while we have sanded some of the rougher edges off the process, it’s still not defensible if you assume a certain threshold of agency for these animals
Here’s the thing: we have an undeniable symbiosis with dogs. In many ways, they domesticated us as much as we did them. And that is why it upsets us, this tale, because we feel a kinship with dogs. And it’s part of why we don’t feel the same about, say, mice.
This is not unnatural, it is vary natural. What is unnatural is the way this teacher was able to overcome this hardwired affinity, to justify feeding what feels like a family member to a stranger.
I feel like you are hung up on the idea that the only possible reason anyone could find this story disturbing or worry about what happened is because of emotional reactions you deem to be irrelevant. There is not one correct way of categorizing things. The way dog lovers think of dogs is not rendered incoherent by the way they may think of cows and pigs.
And why is that? There are people who keep pigs as pets, you think they are incapable of also eating pork?
I have kids. I love my kids. That does not mean I love or want someone else’s kids.
You seem to have a serious block when it comes to the logic here. Just because I eat one type of animal, domesticate and love another type of animal, DOES NOT mean I think it’s ok to treat eaither of them in the manner this man did to the puppy.
Additionally…since I am a person, I would ask you not to call me some slang term. You can address me with proper terms or use my name.
I know you’re being cheeky and I take your point, but your concept of an overall picture is flawed. It wasn’t an emotional consideration for the teacher-- it was a practical one. Others would view the situation through a different lens and act based on their emotional response to a sick pup. Both views are okay but neither is objectively wrong.
Which is why cats are only kind of half domesticated and only sometimes like us… now dogs ALWAYS will like you (with the exception of dogs that have suffered various forms of abuse). A puppers in it’s natural state will generally love beyond compare their humans.
