Comments on: Animal Rights, Ecofeminism, and Rooster Rehab

By: veganimal

veganimal — Sat, 18 Jul 2009 20:26:51 +0000

Thanks for your compassionate work pattrice!
The mockery from people like Dawson here only shows how important it is to speak out against these dominant human supremacy ideas.

By: kalidas

kalidas — Thu, 11 Jun 2009 00:45:04 +0000

“In all the round world of Utopia there is no meat. There used to be. But now we cannot stand the thought of slaughterhouses. And, in a population that is all educated, and at about the same level of physical refinement, it is practically impossible to find anyone who will hew a dead ox or pig… I can still remember as a boy the rejoicings over the closing of the last slaughterhouse.” H. G. Wells, vision of the future in “A Modern Utopia”

By: Suthiano

Suthiano — Wed, 10 Jun 2009 19:13:40 +0000

“Killing a chicken by chopping its head off is certainly cruel to the chicken.”

If only!

Factory farms practice all sorts of perverse methods of “raising” and slaughtering animals for the sake of efficiency.

Go stand in a hog farm while the jerk pig after pig up by one hind leg and send them upside down and screaming along a conveyor belt of death, and then tell me something like the equivalent to a massacre isn’t taking place… but industrialized for the sake of capital, and so going on day after day after day………

Swine’s back on the menu! (http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5jTkkEKE5LtPih_5Jcc-3MpD0gOYQD98NVRIO0)

By: Barry99

Barry99 — Wed, 10 Jun 2009 18:54:58 +0000

Michael- As many birds have excellent memories, they surely can have a memory of oppression and who caused it. That’s pretty basic to survival.

And surely there must be some behavioral space between funerals for ants and intentionally stepping on them, no? You are not suggesting are you, that people who are against cruelty to non-mammals must want to hold prayer services for the dead? Can’t it be that those who are against cruelty to animals believe such cruelty reduces human sensitivity to suffering in general?

By: Michael Dawson

Michael Dawson — Wed, 10 Jun 2009 17:49:51 +0000

P.S. to Mary: There is also an immense difference between apes and chickens. Sentience has nothing to do with it, unless by sentient you mean emotional and cognitive, which then limits the term to mammals.

Ants are sentient. Do you have funerals for the ones you step on or drive over?

By: Michael Dawson

Michael Dawson — Wed, 10 Jun 2009 17:44:46 +0000

Mary, you are wrong. Strong belief is not evidence.

Personally, I’m a vegetarian, but for health and environmental reason, not some animal rights quackery.

Killing a chicken by chopping its head off is certainly cruel to the chicken. It has zero, nothing, nada to do with war crimes.

Grow up.

By: mary

mary — Wed, 10 Jun 2009 06:57:16 +0000

Any cruelty inflicted on a sentient creature whether bird or mammal leads to greater crimes and inhumanities. How could the torture take place in Abu Ghraib and now in Bagram? How can we allow the incineration of another human by the remote control of a drone? How can we allow animals to be penned in metal cages on concrete floors? The process is continual and one smaller crime leads to another greater one. My mother said ‘If you want to live and thrive, let a spoder run alive’

Read Thomas Paine’s Corner if you want more on animal experimentation and animal rights.

PS The use of the word ‘canard’ here is amusing me. The French for ‘duck’ of course.

By: Barry99

Barry99 — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 19:33:17 +0000

Michael – What canards, you ask? The canards I mention, that were part and parcel of science and popular culture for a score of decades or more.
I think it is sufficient that animals feel pain, I don’ ask that they also be emotive. Having said that, I know that anyone who has had a parrot knows what makes her parrot HAPPY – and the parrot shows it.

I hardly think this discussion is about saving the world.

By: Michael Dawson

Michael Dawson — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 18:49:22 +0000

Barry99, what canards? Animals, including birds feel pain. But only mammals have emotions. See the difference?

If you don’t think there’s a huge, huge gap between humans and poultry, you are simply an irrationalist.

Irrationalism is not going to save the world.

By: Michael Dawson

Michael Dawson — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 18:47:07 +0000

So, Mick, all activism is equal in your book?

Animal rights barely matters, is — at best — an extremely circuitous route toward learning about the world’s problems, and is a strategically stupid place to spend oppositional energy.

Poultry rights, meanwhile, don’t exist outside people using them as a substitute for psychotherapy.

None of this fits with your efforts to brand yourself as Mr. Activism, I realize. But the world is in real trouble, and what to do and what NOT to do next is a very serious question, if you’re doing more than playing ego games.

By: Sheila Velazquez

Sheila Velazquez — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 14:31:00 +0000

Does pattrice support a free-range lifestyle for her birds? Are hers free or confined? Does she think chickens and eggs should be organically raised? I have a flock of such birds, and believe me, with the cost of organic grains and all the materials necessary to care for and protect a free-range flock, I would be bankrupt (not just in the red) if I kept my roosters, or nonproductive hens for that matter, into retirement. While they are part of the flock, they live like queens with a few kings, but this project is so far removed from reality that it blows my mind.

By: Barry99

Barry99 — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 00:54:43 +0000

Animals don’t feel pain! Only humans use tools! Only humans are capable of rationale thought, counting, and have an awareness of past and future.

Old canards die hard.

By: Mickey Z.

Mickey Z. — Mon, 08 Jun 2009 18:44:37 +0000

Dawson, I don’t know you but this line speaks volumes:
I’ll be happy to debate you, any time, any place, on this topic.

Sounds like you’ve got it all figured out…right down to the order of priorities.

By: Danny Ray

Danny Ray — Mon, 08 Jun 2009 18:28:40 +0000

Great God Almighty, those are chickens for the love of mike. They do not make a break for freedom from the trucks, some dumbass leaves a cage open and they fly off. End of story. Don’t make it seem like the great escape.

By: kalidas

kalidas — Mon, 08 Jun 2009 18:14:19 +0000

Dear Lord, I’ve been asked, nay commanded, to thank Thee for the Christmas turkey before us… a turkey which was no doubt a lively, intelligent bird… a social being… capable of actual affection… nuzzling its young with almost human-like compassion. Anyway, it’s dead and we’re gonna eat it. Please give our respects to its family. ~Berke Breathed

By: Michael Dawson

Michael Dawson — Mon, 08 Jun 2009 17:50:07 +0000

Lisamarie, I’ll be happy to debate you, any time, any place, on this topic.

Brain structure is absolutely related to emotional and intellectual capacities and meanings. Mammals have emotional lives. Birds do not, except in the most minimal sense or in the fantasies of anthropomorphizing animal lovers.

Notice another thing about Mickey’s report? I doesn’t say that roosters stop fighting. That’s because they don’t. Roosters are hard wired to fight, and lack the higher brain matter to stop. They may stop fighting to the death (which, in an honest accounting, would mention the use of metal spurs as a human-imposed tool). They do not stop fighting.

But poultry and homo sapiens are miles and miles and miles apart in brain and behavioral capabilities. That’s just a fact of life.

None of which means that all animals are fair game for any treatment you can think of.

P.S. Nobody would deny that mammals have feelings. They have limbic brains. So the term “farm animals” is not the proper category, no matter how much you wish it were.

This kind of stuff about poultry is just a huge embarrassment to those really interested in making a better world. How many poultry liberators are FBI agents? In a country doing 100-plus reports a year on Cuba alone, you have to wonder.

Even for mammals, animal rights is about priority #77, if that. Not all “activism” is a good idea.

Have you heard what Gordon Gecko said to Bud Fox in the steam room about WASPS? Think about it.

By: Lisamarie

Lisamarie — Mon, 08 Jun 2009 16:35:13 +0000

First off Mike, animal issuse ARE human issues, as what we do to them affects us ALL whether we choose to acknowledge and understand that or not.
Second, chickens have been found to be VERY intelligent and can count and solve geometric problems that some humans can not.
Who are WE to say they can’t experience emotions? Because they don’t talk? Well going by that theory we could say the same thing about some people too then, as there are some humans who also can’t talk and do certain things that others can. Just because a being, human or otherwise, can’t tell us what they think or how they feel is not grounds for dismissing the ability to feel as being non-existent in them.
I’m sure there is research out there to support this, and there is a new book out called “The Emotional World of Farm Animals” by Amy Hatkoff, which as accounts of scientific proof that animals feel emotions as well as experiences from those who have lived and worked around farm animals.
Therefore, before your sense of human “holier than thou” chauvanism takes over your ability to open up your heart and mind to the possibility that there ARE things about animals that we may have never stopped to think about that are worth learning, perhaps you should look into these things first and educate yourself!

By: Lisamarie

Lisamarie — Mon, 08 Jun 2009 16:22:19 +0000

I live near Houston and the vegan organization that I’m part of, Society of Peace, already has a vegan potluck planned for next month. Therefore what I could do is, first I’ll post this article on Facebook and MySpace, and at the picnic I’ll collect donations and send them in.

By: Michael Dawson

Michael Dawson — Mon, 08 Jun 2009 16:08:25 +0000

Is this a spoof? Birds do not have limbic brains, Mickey. So, the claim that birds can experience emotions is a very, very big stretch, to say nothing of how long they could possibly remember their “oppression,” let alone feel it as a passing flash. Memory of oppression requires not only a limbic brain, but a neo-cortex, too.

“Activism” is no substitute for the truth.

And telling people you’re hosting a chicken-liberation party is as ridiculous as it is stupidly wasteful of time and energy that might be spent to some meaningful effect in a world of war and exploitation and ecotastrophe.