Comments on: Animal rights

By: Kate

Kate — Sat, 17 Jun 2006 02:43:00 +0000

Hi Kirsten,

Great post.

Temple Grandin, the autistic woman who has designed cattle chutes etc for slaughterhouse facilities has a great book about how she/autistic people think. She feels it foreign to how normal people think and speculates that it is similar to how animals think. She feels this is why she can so well design systems to keep animals calm. She is a very high functioning autistic. The way she describes how she thinks certainly is foreign to me, and I can well imagine it being some sort of transitional evolutionary stage between human and animal.

By: Kirsten

Kirsten — Wed, 07 Jun 2006 01:37:49 +0000

I don’t know if this is still true, but at one point Monroe County, where my current residence of Rochester, New York is located, had the highest density of deer of any county in the state. They overbrowse our parks — forget growing anything they’ll eat in your yard — and many end up being mown down by cars, which doesn’t do the deer or the cars any good. Really, I think we should import some mountain lions . . . I hear there’s one in Colorado they’d like to tranquilize and move :-D

By: An Average American

An Average American — Wed, 07 Jun 2006 00:58:00 +0000

Great piece! A big question is, what will be the impact on suburbia and exurbia as the “eat-or-be-eaten” forest impinges on mainstream America? The decline of the family farm is certainly a factor in both the increase in wildlife in suburban settings and the perspective of those subject to the wildlife. How many suburban hunters do _you_ know? I work with a group of people who shoot skeet but didn’t know that Cocker Spaniels were bred specifically to hunt Woodcock. I’m not a hunter, ’cause I couldn’t “Hit the broadside of the barn”, but I’m sick of the PETA types making a big deal out of anyone having the temerity to injure, or “gasp”, kill an animal. I reside in a “posh” southern CT town and in the not too distant past deer have crashed through the plate glass windows of some _very_ exclusive women’s clothiers. Oh my! wrestling deer wasn’t in the job description!

By: Kirsten

Kirsten — Tue, 06 Jun 2006 21:02:49 +0000

Oh dear, be nice!

By: Jacknut

Jacknut — Tue, 06 Jun 2006 20:57:27 +0000

Can’t we just thank these animals for killing the occasional stupid person and reminding the other stupid people that nature is impersonal and not some divine “Gaia” force that is only good and wholesome?

Either that or serve them up in a marsala sauce with some broccoli and garlic scapes on the side.

By: Kirsten

Kirsten — Tue, 06 Jun 2006 17:10:32 +0000

Thank you, Emily. Your points about dogs are right on, also. We do dogs a huge disservice by not recognizing that they are predators, and that although breeding may have softened the edges of their predatory behaviors they are still very much in place. Ray Coppinger’s book “Dogs” is a really good resource on that topic . . .

By: EmilyS

EmilyS — Tue, 06 Jun 2006 16:31:50 +0000

excellent, thoughtful article. We are losing, if we haven’t already lost, the understanding of animals as predators. It’s gotten to the point where dogs are seized and euthanized as “dangerous” if they attack (or even kill) another dog.. or a cat… or even a rabbit. No surprise then that people freak out when otters kill “their” ducks.. probably the same people who thrill at nature programs showing lions taking down a wildebeest…

I’m sure you know that your aproach is exactly OPPOSITE of some strains of the animal rights movement.. especially the PETA variety. These folks don’t want ANY killing; they expect predators to become vegetarians somehow.

I think your definition of animal rights is much more realistic.. and actually totally inline with mainstream environmental thinking.

By: Mel

Mel — Tue, 06 Jun 2006 04:05:00 +0000

You are right on, Kirsten. And we don’t help by leaving out more food than our pets can eat for the bears & coyotes to munch on and then screaming for the wildlife resource officers to do “whatever it takes” to get rid of them.
I’ve not seen any bears in my own neighborhood, which is practically in the middle of town, but I know that they’ve been sighted in my town this spring which is highly unusual because we just aren’t that far up into their mountain habitat.
I value nature and take every opportunity to teach my kids to do the same. I won’t even let the boys in my Cub Scout den kill a spider when we’re in the woods. I tell them that we’re the visitors here and owe the natives our respect, no matter how small they are. If you kill the spiders that eat the insects that spread disease to or eat the plants that feed the smaller animals which in turn feed the larger animals (or sometimes the plants feed the larger animals themselves), then you have made it more likely that the larger predators are going to come looking closer to your yard for a meal.
Visit nature. Enjoy it. But for the love of heaven, learn about it and respect it.

By: Kirsten

Kirsten — Tue, 06 Jun 2006 02:41:59 +0000

Yeah, except that the abstract cogitation etc. is just huge. It makes for a tremendous gulf.

We can infer a lot about animals by observing them, and goodness knows we can come to love them, but to become one we’d literally have to pare away sections of our human brains. There’s no getting around that.

I do agree with what you say about the “wild human” experience, but what’s troubling is that we’ve moved away from it while at the same time becoming oddly possessive about nature and wildlife. It’s as if the less we come in contact with nature, the more we value it as an abstraction, but that just doesn’t give us a solid basis for making sound decisions about it.

By: Julian Morrison

Julian Morrison — Tue, 06 Jun 2006 02:28:05 +0000

I’d say the experience of animals isn’t so very foreign. I’d guess it’s much the same as that of a wild human, minus the abstract cogitation, projective planning, and ethics. It’s just that the whole “wild human” thing is awfully far from the experience of a modern suburbanite.