Tag: animals

Do Your Words Mean What You Think They Mean?

File under: Signs of Failed Humanity

I’m confused. So many people say they are angered and horrified when they see posts showing how animals are brutalized and tortured from day one to day last in factory farms. They see the immoral suffering inflicted on these sentient, helpless-to-resist, agonized beings and express how disgusted it makes them.
And then they go right ahead, and continue to eat the mutilated bodies and produce of these animals and smacking their lips. Today. In a supposedly enlightened era. When good substitutes this meat are ever more available.


Today., every time I hear a meat eating friend express outrage at the torture and brutal murder of animals while posting pictures of their oh-so-delicious meat dishes, I’m prompted to say, like Inigo Montoya, you keep using these words. I do not think they mean what you think they mean.


One word does come to mind. Hypocrisy.


I was one of these people myself, into my seventies. But those of my generation lived in a vacuum of denial. We deluded ourselves with the idea that animals were treated well, and lived well, right up to the moment of their death. I finally LEARNED.

I wish my friends and acquaintances would learn. I wish everyone would learn.

There is, in the 21st century, no excuse for not knowing not learning, not being better. There is no excuse today. There is no longer any denying the horrors of the meat and dairy industry.

If we are decrying and condemning those horrors while using our next breath to express how delicious our ham and bacon, beef, chicken, and turkey dishes are, we should at least have the honesty to stop using words that don’t mean what they say.
It’s 2021. We can’t love eating that meat and also say we care about the suffering attached to it. Because we don’t mean it.


It’s called hypocrisy.

Reflecting on that holiday meal

My plea for this Thanksgiving. Please don’t have turkey, or ham, or pot roast, or any other meat. Please have a vegan substitute. Yes, I know that “No matter how good it just isn’t quite the same.”

You can save a turkey from dying and suffering along the way. Or a pig, or a cow. Oh, it won’t be saved this time, but others will be save as more people do what I’m asking you to do and the demand for the suffering of those animals diminishes.

I know, too, that a turkey, or cow, or pig, isn’t as cute and cuddly as your dog or cat, and that for those ‘pet’ animals you would do anything to keep them from suffering.

But you see, that turkey, or pig, or cow, has the same ability to fear, to feel pain, to love its offspring, as a dog or a cat. They bleed and scream and feel the terror just as dogs and cats do.

And here’s the thing. If you say you love animals, but you also say you just have to have your turkey and chicken and cow and ham, then you have to face that fact that when you say you love animals, you are lying. You are lying to me, you are lying to whoever reads this and whoever you talk to. Most of all, you’re lying to yourself, so that you will be able to shrug off the guilt of the pain and suffering and terror that YOU cause.

Please. Don’t be a liar.

Take a moment. Close your eyes. Now imagine as vividly as you can, these animals being caged and beaten and then forced down a narrow inescapable chute, pressed together with those in front of and behind them. Imagine the screaming they do and hear, the terror they feel and sense in the others. Smell the overpowering stench of the blood they are approaching. Terrified, Knowing what’s coming, helpless to escape.

Now imagine that’s your dog or cat. If you wouldn’t let that nightmare of terror and suffering death happen to them, then why do you think it’s all right to sponsor it happening to other? Hmm?

I spent my life living that hypocrisy because I was brought up in a fashion that simply didn’t let me think about it. I had this marvelous fantasy that made it okay. In this fantasy, you see, each animal was loved and treated well until the time of death, which came as a complete surprise and with such suddenness that they didn’t suffer. That made it okay to eat all of those hamburgers and roasts and chickens and turkeys. But it’s not at all like that. And in today’s world, you know that. You just have to face it.

What I wouldn’t give to have come to the awareness I finally found decades earlier. How much clearer would be my conscience and how much cleaner would my heart feel, if i had leaned the reality, and the lesson, forty, or fifty, or sixty or seventy years ago.

You have the opportunity, the marvelous chance, to face your reality much sooner than I did mine. But like the other side of the coin, this means you also have to face up to your own guilt, your own role in this awful, immoral, insane suffering meted out so that you can have your meat. You are responsible. You can’t deny it, you can’t avoid it. You cause these animals to suffer untold terror and agony on the way to an ugly, vicious death.

You cannot say you love animals, and respect animals, and still be a part of this. It’s not possible. No excuse makes it permissible. You had the courage to read all of this. Now it’s time for you to make a decision.

Please. Don’t be a liar.

And please, please, please, pass it on. Share. Help someone else find the truth.

We Are Killing Our Planet, Wildlife, and Ourselves With Plastic

SO WHAT ARE WE GOING TO DO ABOUT IT!

We ALL need to join the fight against single use plastics of all types, especially bags and bottles.
Starting today, I will endeavor to include a frightening fact about plastic, and a cautionary photo, in every post I make. I hope you will, too.
In my daily routine, most of the time I’ll just include a one or two sentence fact along with my regular post. And of course a picture.
But to kick things off, the entirety of this post is to open your eyes to the unthinkable damage our plastic is doing to our waters, our fish, our animals, our birds, and ourselves.
Here are the salient facts. You think the “Alien” movies are scary? The following is fact, not fiction, and the only heroes available to save the day are you and me.
Please join the anti plastic campaign, and recruit others to join, for the sake of…..everything and everyone that lives on this planet.

The Great Pacific Garbage Patch is located in the North Pacific Gyre off the coast of California and is the largest ocean garbage site in the world. This floating mass of plastic is twice the size of Texas, with plastic pieces outnumbering sea life six to one.
Plastic constitutes approximately 90 percent of all trash floating on the ocean’s surface, with 46,000 pieces of plastic per square mile.

One million sea birds and 100,000 marine mammals are killed annually from plastic in our oceans.

44 percent of all seabird species, 22 percent of cetaceans, all sea turtle species and a growing list of fish species have been documented with plastic in or around their bodies.

In samples collected in Lake Erie, 85 percent of the plastic particles were smaller than two-tenths of an inch, and much of that was microscopic. Researchers found 1,500 and 1.7 million of these particles per square mile.

Virtually every piece of plastic that was ever made still exists in some shape or form (with the exception of the small amount that has been incinerated).

Plastic chemicals can be absorbed by the body—93 percent of Americans age six or older test positive for BPA (a plastic chemical).

Some of these compounds found in plastic have been found to alter hormones or have other potential human health effects.

The enemy is ourselves. Only we can save the day.  Are you in?

If You Don’t Like Something, Just Kill it

This post is the beginning of a regular series in which I will shine the spotlight on humans who show notable humane behavior toward animals, and those who can’t be bothered and would rather just kill them.

And guess what, folks! Our all-American wonderful citizen cities today are Twin Cities and Mondovi, Wisconsin. Hello, Wisconsin!  These folks fall into our second category. They are irritated by geese, so……it’s time to KILL THINGS! It’s GEESE EXTERMINATION TIME! G.E.T. it?

 
How dare these birds believe they have a right to, you know, exist. And make geese noises, and have bodily functions. Well, they sure picked the wrong cities to mess with this time.
 
The good humane folks of those cities have a message for these uppity birds. DIE GEESE, DIE!
 
And guess what. They’re going to do it in the time honored tradition of that famous humanitarian, Adolf Hitler himself, with gas chambers! Ooooooo it doesn’t get any better than that!
 
Let’s hear a good old fashion BOOOOOOO for Twin Cities and Mondovi, Wisconsin. They win today’s Flip of the Bird! Shame on you, Twin Cities and Mondovi!
 
Oh, and if you have been considering any travel that would include those cities, you might want to change your itinerary. I mean, you might be mistaken for a goose! And you know what happens then…hisssssssssss.
Now you may think I’m being a little harsh toward the people of those cities, but it really boils down to something very simple. We can either realize that humans share the world with animals, and find  ways of doing that in a humane and compatible fashion, or focus on killing animals or birds whenever there is an intersecting of them and us.  The direction we choose to go says a great deal about who we are.
These two cities in Wisconsin are flunking the humanity test. Boom.

The Wildlife is Almost Gone. We Will Be Next.

Date: 10-30-2016

 

 

Goodbye to Wildlife and Soon Thereafter to Humans

This is not something anyone will want to hear. I may get blasted for this post more than any other I have made. But the conversation has to begin. We cannot avoid it just because it makes us feel bad.

To the Millennials of the world, it is my very sincere belief that if you have not already had children, you should consider not having any. And certainly, any children still below child-rearing age should think very seriously about avoiding child birth. I make this suggestion because I don’t think you will want your children, or their children, to face life in the world we, as in ourselves, as in human beings, are about to leave them.

A new report from the World Wildlife Fund via CNN tells the story better than I could. By 2020, they tell us, two-thirds of the planet’s wildlife will be gone. This should not come as a surprise. If it does, then you just have not been paying attention. The full import of this is that human beings are in the process of destroying all other forms of life on the earth, except perhaps bacteria, viruses and amoeba. Instead of turning back or even stalling the process, we have accelerated it with every generation and continue to do so. And that means that we will drive ourselves to extinction within the foreseeable future.

The assault on the environment also continues We undermine and poison our land and our rivers and our air with massive amounts of pollution.  (Thanks to Republicans and sheer greed, the United States sponsors the attack and contributes to it massively.) Scientists tell us that the amount of carbon dioxide in our atmosphere is now at levels not seen since dinosaurs roamed the earth. In our own nation, profit motive and greed prohibits any meaningful movement toward restoring or even delaying the denigration of the environment and the assault on other species. It’s the same in other countries to only slightly lesser degrees.

The world’s nations, led by the United States and Russia, continue to expand ever deadlier nuclear arsenals and force all life on the planet to teeter daily on the very edge of a radioactive apocalypse that would not only kill all of us (take your choice, quickly from the blasts or slowly from radiation poisoning).

Animal murderers all over the world, from poachers in African nations to so-called “sport” hunters in America, continue to kill wildlife for fun and profit. I use the word murderer because there is no other name for people who enjoy killing animals because they would go to jail for killing humans.

Our Government, and virtually all others, allows the killing and polluting and assault on the planet, and ultimately ourselves, to continue unabated, because they are owned by the profiteers, the richest and greediest among them. The largest, most organized civic groups capable of raising their voices with sufficient strength to possibly make a difference, the religions, stay quiet. Christians in America who believe their religion is so special, stay quiet. They say things like, “Well it’s God’s will,” a convenient way of blaming the Almighty for their own catastrophic lack of responsible behavior.

Worst of all, by far, today’s adults, like the adults of all previous generations, make big, grand, and empty talk of preserving the world, from the water and the skies to the wildlife with which we share it. We pronounce that we must save it for our children and their children. We declare it with our mouth, and prove we don’t mean it with our actions.

In short, homo sapiens, which I have for a long time referred to as an extinction level event on a worldwide scale, are destroying virtually all other life forms, and will invariably pronounce extinction upon itself in the process. You don’t want to hear it. It may ruin your day. You’d rather have your fun and your comfort, your license to kill and pollute, today, and those children you speak of so grandly and sanctimoniously can damn well worry about themselves.

I believe the latter half of the 21st century will further speed this process because the human species is incapable of behaving in any other way than it does. We are speeding the destruction of the world’s life forms as never before. I think we will be seeing the beginning of the final agonizing slide of our end during the last half of this century. Any children produced between now and then, your children, my children, and certainly their children, will know little but suffering. So much for preserving the world for them, eh?

Mankind was placed here on a marvelous world full of teeming, magnificent life. A world of incredible beauty and variety. A world capable of supporting almost infinite life. I believe we were to be, could have been, caretakers and benefactors of all that is here. Christians like to brag that God gave mankind dominion over this wonderland. And we take that word, ‘dominion,’ to mean license instead of responsibility, freedom to abuse and destroy rather than responsibility to nurture. We keep insisting, so many of us, that we have the only such amazing world as this in the universe, even as we continue to do everything we can to destroy it. Yay, us. We have done nothing but abuse this world and eliminate its other life forms, not to mention our fellow man, since our first breath of life as a species. We do it for profit, and for fun. Even as we see clear and undeniable evidence that we are destroying all that is around us, everything including the very things we need to live ourselves, we continue to do it. Our motto, the real one, not the good sound bite version, is ‘live for today and the hell with tomorrow.’ So much for our children and their children. We claim intelligence. We prove daily that we are the most ignorant and selfish and unintelligent and detestable life form on the planet.

Take a very hard look without your rose colored glasses. The writing on the wall is telling us we will have reached the endgame by the end of this century. At the rate we are going, we humans, our motto by the time the next century arrives will have changed to “try to get through today for tomorrow will be worse.’

I’m not spouting biblical predictions. I’m talking about scientific reality that scientists have warned us about for decades. God, whichever one you believe in, is not coming for us, and will not bother to save us. We have earned the finality we are bringing upon ourselves. We have no one to blame but ourselves. We are the villains. Pray to God if you want. I think you’ll get an answering machine message. We like to boast that we were made in God’s own image. If you were God, would you bother to answer a phone call from people like us in the twenty-first century?

And so I’m suggesting you do not pass on the terminal stages of our existence to children, for them to live and suffer through the death throes of the species. I would not choose to subject the children of the future to the world that will be theirs as our species spirals into oblivion.

Oh, I know the adage, the one that says hope springs eternal, hope for some miraculous redeeming actions or discoveries. But that can only happen if our species, as an entirety, can suddenly, and I mean within the next decade, become something that we have never been, and that is a responsible and conscientious people.

And you say, oh, but what can I do?  The answer is to revolt. I don’t mean grab your gun. I mean revolt with your presence. The only thing that has a chance of saving our species for our children and grandchildren is a chorus of raised voices. A gathering, growing, staggering collection of voices, a coming together of people and religions joining the activist voices that are already out there. I’m talking about the raising of a chorus of voices to stand against the destruction of wildlife and the environment for fun and profit, a wall of voices with the will of all the people behind it, saying ENOUGH!

ENOUGH willful killing. ENOUGH willful assault on the air and the oceans and the rivers. ENOUGH with  fuels and conveniences and entertainments and easy comforts at the expense of the very air and water that sustains us.  ENOUGH destruction.

We can accomplish amazing things, we homo sapiens, when we really want to. We are  capable of discoveries, and some have been made recently, that go a long way to treating, if not fully curing, the environment. We are capable of technologies that can clean our waters, our air. We have it within us. But it can only happen under one condition.  We have to really want to, for our children and their children. We have face the fact that if we don’t follow through, the future is bleak, for our children and their children. We have to accept, to truly UNDERSTAND, that this is the most important thing in our lives more important than our next gas guzzling car or land destroying all terrain vehicle or ocean cruise oil pipeline, if this wondrous Earth is to remain one that will nurture humans, and other species, in the future, for our children and their children. We have to get it through our thick, selfish, grasshopper heads that ‘dominion’ is a responsibility, not a license.

And if we can’t….or won’t….do that, then we have to quit pretending that we give a damn about the future of our children, and their children, and just not have any, because the earth of the near future won’t be a fit place for them.