Sociopath

Some jackass shot this hawk in the head with a nail gun. Fortunately, it doesn't appear to be fatal and a vet will try and fix him up.

It would be okay with me if they found the guy.. tied him up naked, spread eagle, in a park and left a nail gun lying next to him with a big picture nearby of what he had done.

After all, I generally have more empathy for animals than I do human beings.

.....

Whenever I say or write something, I try not to sound, or be, hypocritical or inconsistent. Sometimes we're just hypocritical on something and we simply have to accept that.

I read Andrew Sullivan's blog pretty regularly.. for two reasons. One, it's a similar situation to why I read Doug's blog. It's always nice to be able to make a point by demonstrating how someone else is wrong. If you only read people you agree with, that doesn't do much good. The other is that Sullivan has a staff that is good at finding and linking other stories that are interesting and entertaining.

Anyway.. Sullivan has some new feature or other where readers submit a question and he picks one out to answer in a video. Don't ask me why they add a special effect to it to make it look cartoon-ish. That's pretty silly.

So the question was how some can reconcile having a pro-animal rights view point, and still eat meat. Sullivan's answer is that he really doesn't have a good answer. I feel the same way.

Animal abuse makes me absolutely insane, and the way that most meat in the world is harvested is barbaric. Sullivan is right that future generations will look back at the way our society treated animals with revulsion.

While the animal ends up dead and cut up into servable portions no matter how they are treated before they are killed, it does matter, from a moral sense, how they are treated before they are slaughtered.

We went out for dinner to a very high end restaurant last weekend, and had Kobe beef and an Australian lobster tail. The Kobe cows are the most expensive in the world and they are treated exceptionally well, and fed the best food. That has a lot to do with why they are Kobe. The Lobsters were trapped in Australia, and flown to the US in crowded buckets, and then boiled alive when we order it. I'm not sure how much awareness a lobster has to understand what is happening to it, or if it senses pain.

Still, chickens are often not treated well, and pork farming is disgusting.

We almost never eat pork, and our red meat consumption has dropped off dramatically over the last year. We do eat some chicken and sushi though, even as we're trying to add more veggies and fruits.

Ultimately, I don't have a very good excuse for continuing to eat meat. I just do. I will, however, go out of my way or pay more for meat that is harvested in more humane ways, such as free range chickens and such, and definitely want to avoid meat that is riddled with antibiotics.

....

Speaking of animals.. Riley's coat is growing out nicely. I'm spending a lot of time combing him out pretty much every day now to keep it untangled. Token seems to not be developing any mats, which is odd because he's typically prone to it.

We went to the dog park last weekend, and there was a young dog there that was a bit bigger than Riley, and it was just hyper and over aggressive. It got Riley into a corner and the other dog's owner was standing right by me and I told him to get control of his dog. He said the dog was just a puppy and was only playing. I looked at him with my "I'm not fucking around with you look" and said "I'm going to start doing that to you in 5 seconds if you don't get control of your dog".. which he did.

I really was going to start wailing on this guy because of his dog. It's not the dog's fault. It clearly hasn't had any training and you can't just take a dog to a dog park without it having some training. Dogs are always a reflection of it's owner. This guy was a dick.

The vast majority of the time we have no problems at all at the dog park, but it's not uncommon for there to be at least one jackass there.

Riley doesn't have any aggression in him at all. I think it's part personality and that we had him socialized in a training environment when he was a puppy. He definitely is all about the running around and having fun. He doesn't do well with a dog that is aggressive.

/adding

I sent in a question to the "Ask Sully" address;

"How does it feel to be a knee jerk advocate for a war in Iraq that was based on deception and lies, and resulted in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of innocent men, women and children, all typed from your cottage on the beach in Province-town?"

Needless to say, he did not reply.