16: MISCELLANEOUS.
1)Question/Attack: "Native hunters/whalers regard the animals they hunt as their brothers."
Response: a)"Ah yes, "I love you brother. That is why I am going to harpoon and club you to death."
Response: b)The Makah whalers say the whales they slaughter are their "brothers"--yet the Makah word for Grey whale translates as "devilfish" (since their "brothers" often defended themselves when attacked--apparently that makes them evil). Quite the endearment to call your sibling.
2)Question/attack:
"It's necessary to make a qualitative distinction between
Response: a) While I would agree that commercial whaling is more ethically problematic than Inuit whaling, the real issue is whether whaling itself is justified. Assuming that a community's survival is "completely" dependent upon whaling, the real question becomes: does it need to be?
Response: b) . If the "civilized" nations of the world, including the Inuit representatives, can travel by 21st century technology to meet in Japan for an IWC meeting then alternatives to whaling for survival do exist. The apologists for whaling would have us believe that we can put a man on the Moon, and design a computer that can play chess, but when it comes to providing daily sustenance for all humans, only a harpoon can accomplish the task—or in other words, that we must approach a 21st century problem with 1st century solutions.
Response:
c) while I would agree
that a man who mugs people and shoots them dead is not as nasty as another man
who mugs people then douses them with gasoline and lets them burn to death, this
qualitative distinction on my part does not mean I endorse the actions of either
man. The distinction becomes trivial in light of the greater issue: whether
either man needs to engage in such behavior, and whether I should be assisting
either of them in committing such acts.
3)Question/attack: "to ask First nations hunters to give up their hunting and fishing and rely on international food aid would be to rob them of their independence."
Response: a) No man is an island, and one cannot go back in time to 1000 CE. If they are able to stomach the concept of using non Inuit technology for some aspects of their lives (guns and ammunition for hunting, air travel to whaling summits etc), then why can they not stomach it for other possibilities? A fair and ethical treatment of others should trump lifestyle choices and tradition—if one wants to have a more consistent ethical philosophy.
Response:
b) none
of us are truly independent from our societies, or national governments. While I
believe that people should have choices in how they live their lives, the
choices become a matter of ethics where the lives of others are involved. A man
who wants independence cannot have his cake and eat it too. If he wants others
to respect his right to independence, he has to be fair and just in the
implementation of that independence.
4)Question/Attack: "Since the end of the seal hunt Inuit trappers and hunters have succumbed to bad health from eating junk food, alcohol abuse, poverty, even suicide. Helping animals hurt First Nations people."
Response: a) Negro slave traders also suffered when the slave trade was stopped. Does that mean that it was wrong to abolish the slave trade? If it is okay to put slave traders out of work to liberate others, then it is okay to do the same for seals or other species.
Response: b) Alcohol and junk food is bad for everyone. The answer is not reinstating the seal fur trade, but dealing with those problems among the Inuit community. I suppose the government would much rather return to killing seals and making profits from fur, then adopting wholesome and compassionate methods for solving these problems.
Response: c) It is unfortunate that they have had bad times--but it wasn't as bad as a seal being orphaned or getting shot or his/her head bashed in.
Response: d) If Inuit people cannot live normal happy lives without going out and killing an animal then they really have problems. I suppose one would like to believe the myth that it is some natural instinct for northern human societies to hunt, trap and fish. Yet polar bears and wolves and other species are born to survive by these methods-humans on the other hand, choose to live in harsh climates. They don't have to. Seals, wolves, bears---they are meant to live in the Arctic--but humans are not physically equipped for it. Perhaps what the depressed Inuit hunter needs is a change of scenery--and coming to realize that there is more to life than killing when one does not need to.
Response: e) There was a time when seal hunters in the North did not have markets to sell their "wares." Somehow they managed to live okay without an international fur trade. Is it the loss of a tradition that is the culprit for their woes or is it rather, the loss of money?
5)Question/attack: "Native trappers and hunters etc are living on the planet the way we are supposed to."
Response: a) Hey! Can you lend me your copy of "HOW TO LIVE" by Supreme Deity? I want to check the section on what to do with arrogant humans.
Response: b) Ignoring your apparent claim of access to the divine scheme for human existence, some tribal societies had been known to sacrifice humans and keep them as slaves(such as the Makah whaling tribe). Tribal peoples are humans too--meaning they are just as capable of being cruel, greedy or deceitful as any other ethnic division of the human species. By your argument how do we know that butchering each other and other species is not the way we are supposed to live--so why bother having police to curb our violent tendencies? If it is wrong for Makah whalers to enslave and exploit other humans, than its wrong for Northern trappers to enslave and exploit other animals.
6)Question/Attack: "there are more (enter animal species) in the wild than before the white man arrived."
Response: a) Unless you have access to a time machine, that statement is a little hard to verify with Stats Canada in the year 1600.
7)Question/attack: "Animals that we trap and hunt die from disease and starvation in the wild."
Response: a) Wow! Imagine that, things get sick and die! And here i thought Nature worked like a Disney cartoon!
Response: b) humans also die from the same causes--do you suggest we hunt and trap those poor unfortunates and turn them into coats (with fur designers and hunters getting the profits)?
Response: c) "James Boswell, trying to refute the arguments of abolitionists, writes in his Life of Johnson that, "...To abolish a status which in all ages GOD has sanctioned, and man has continued, would not only be robbery to an innumerable class of our fellow-subjects; but it would be extreme cruelty to the African Savages, a portion of whom it saves from massacre, or intolerable bondage in their own country, and introduces into a much happier state of life; especially now when their passage to the West Indies and their treatment there is humanely regulated. To abolish that trade would be to shut the gates of mercy on mankind." Boswell, J., Life of Johnson (N.Y.: Modern Library Edition, 1965) p. 365. http://www.al-islam.org/slavery/6.htm
8)Question/attack: a) "a Northern trapper sees himself as the "caretaker of the land."
Response: a) How utterly arrogant. Nature does not need managing, humans do. Other species were taking care of themselves long before humans arrived on the scene and they will get along just as well when humans go the way of the Dodo bird (exterminated I might add, by "caretaker" humans).
Response: b) And white slave traders saw themselves as caretakers for the non-white non-christian races--so should we then forgive anyone for practicing human slavery?
9)Question/attack: "Northern tribal societies like the Inuit are as well adapted to their "indigenous" environment, as the polar bears or seals or whales that share it."
Response: a) A naked polar bear, Arctic wolf, seal, or whale is born with all the equipment he or she needs to survive. But a human, even of Inuit extraction, would perish in mere minutes if left naked on the ice flows of his or her so-called native habitat. If an Inuit is naturally meant to hunt whales, as is frequently claimed by defenders of exploitation industries that use First Nations communities for supplies or propaganda (i.e. whaling, sealing and trapping), then its factual validity can be tested by simply having one courageous Inuit hunter jump naked into the Arctic sea and try to bite a whale to death with only his teeth and bare hands. The result is easily predicted. Because the Inuit need tools to survive, and those tools are now chiefly provided by outside communities (i.e. the government of Canada, Smith & Wesson), then it would be hypocritical to suggest that the best long term, ethical solution to First Nations subsistence needs cannot be based on more compassionate aid from those very same communities, whether it be food aid or subsidized relocation to climates more suited to human beings.
Response: b)When they are born with fur and blubber and claws instead of having to take it from other Arctic natives, then i will believe that are indigenous to the climate.
10)Question/attack: "They cant move anywhere else! The Arctic is their home!"
Response: a) But not in the same way it is for seals, whales, bears or wolves.
Response:
b) Why is it that of
all the native inhabitants of the Arctic, only the Inuit are not born with all
the physical tools they need to survive? Until they are born with a thick hide
of blubber and fur from their backs, I will say that a sub-zero temperature is
not their natural environment.
11)Question/attack: "the trappers use all the scraps of the animal, nothing is wasted."
Response: a) Hitler also used all the scraps of his victims--is that a defense for what he did?
12)Question/attack: "To criticize First Nations people(or Japanese Whalers or Bali turtle hunters) for hunting and fishing and trapping and whaling is just cultural imperialism (aka identity imperialism, racism etc.). You are trying to impose your beliefs on others." [note: this is a form of the Moral relativism argument--which states that one cannot judge the actions of one culture (or person) by the ethical standards of another).
Response: a) If one applied this moral relativistic belief consistently and fairly it would mean one could not condemn someone else for discrimination against other humans based upon their own cultural and ethical beliefs. People who practice bride burning or honor killings or child labor could say it is "cultural imperialism" for outsiders to criticize their actions.
Response: b) Activities from spousal abuse to ritual murder to cannibalism have also been defended by bogus claims of racism or "Imperialism," and this hasn't nullified the ethical arguments against these practices;
Response: c) Other species can also be said to suffer under unjust, discriminatory treatment, and every human ethnic group, including First nation ones, are capable of being the oppressors.
Response: d) We are talking about life, not a lifestyle. When the issue involves the very real harm caused to others, ethical beliefs do apply, and it is certainly within reason to make judgments based upon those beliefs. Since no human society on Earth lives in a vacuum, and all have at least some connection to other cultures, and they all expect at least some moral consideration from each other, the charge of discrimination may be leveled against any one of them. The only way an Inuit hunter or Japanese whaler (or Michigan deer hunter for that matter) could use moral relativism as a defense, is if he holds no ethical belief (such as his own right to life) that he expects should be honored by anyone else (whether Inuit or not). That possibility is very very remote.
Response:
e) Actually the true cultural imperialism is when the Inuit or the Japanese or
anyone else tries to impose their culture on whales or other animals by killing
them when they do not need to.
13)Question/Attack: "Do you eat bread? Nutritional yeast is alive. You are killing bacteria."
Response: a) Thanks! I will switch to flatbreads tomorrow, but
regardless, it doesn't excuse you from supporting meat eating, the fur industry, animal research etc etc. How does that justify you supporting the meat industry, animal research, hunting etc? By your logic, any act of killing, necessary or not(right down to the microscopic level), negates any effort to to curb it. Therefore, since we cannot avoid killing microbes just by the act of living, we
shouldn't worry about muggings, murders, wars etc. If you say yes we can worry about them, then we can also worry about meat eating, hunting, and any other practice it is possible to stop.
Response: b) Just because I am trying to live more ethically does not mean that I am perfect. One cannot avoid all killing in life. That is not to say that animal rights and veg*anism are pointless. If I accidentally kill a bug by stepping on it, that does not mean that I should give up the whole compassionate living thing altogether. Everyone should just do as much as they can manage to aspire towards a moral life. Eating meat, buying products tested on animals, etc, these are things that can be easily avoided and are direct links to mass cruelty.
Response: c) I think I killed about a million microbes just from gasping at the stupidity of your argument. Man, I am worse than Hitler.
Response: d) Yeast isn't a sentient lifeform--unless you worry about bacteria. So I take it you
don't bath because you don't want to kill millions of them?
14)Question/attack: "If we don't consider ourselves better than animals we will treat each other terribly."
Response: a) So does that mean that if whites consider themselves superior to blacks then they would naturally treat whites better?
Response: b) Tell that to Stalin and Hitler.
15)Question/attack: "Wasn't Hitler a vegetarian?"
Response: a) And Al Capone started the first soup kitchens in Chicago. I guess anyone who supports helping the homeless is a gangster?
Response: b) the testimony of Hitler's personal cook in Hamburg during the late 1930s - Dione Lucas. In her "Gourmet Cooking School
Cookbook," she records that his favorite dish - the one that he customarily requested - was stuffed squab
(pigeon). "I do not mean to spoil your appetite for stuffed squab, but you might be interested to know that it
was a great favorite with Mr. Hitler, who dined in the hotel often." (http://www.ivu.org/history/europe20a/hitler.html)
Response: c) So was Gandhi--does that make him a war monger and mass murderer?
Response: d) They say Osama Bin Laden liked hunting. So did Timothy McVeigh. So by your logic, every hunter is a terrorist!
Response: e) "Otto D. Tolischus in 1937 in The New York Times pointed out that the Führer was a vegetarian who 'does not drink or smoke' but who also 'occasionally relishes a slice of ham' along with delicacies such as caviar and chocolates." (Ibid.) Robert Proctor calls Hitler a vegetarian "of sorts" (The Nazi War on Cancer, p. 134) and is content to state that Hitler was a vegetarian who "occasionally would allow himself a dish of meat," (p. 135) and quotes The New York Times as stating that in addition to ham and caviar Hitler also occasionally ate squab." (http://www.micahbooks.com/readingroom/Hitlerveg.html)
Response: f)His cook, an enormously fat man named Willy Kannenberg, produced exquisite meals and acted as court jester. Although Hitler had no fondness for meat except in the form of sausages and never ate fish, he enjoyed caviar....(The Life and Death of Adolph Hitler (Praeger, 1973)(p. 346) (http://www.micahbooks.com/readingroom/Hitlerveg.html)
Response: g) Hitler's reputation for being a vegetarian seems to consist solely of his not having eaten red meat. The effort to describe Hitler's eating habits as vegetarian requires changing the definition of "vegetarian" to exclude liver, ham, and sausages from the list of meats, and changing the definition of "animal" to exclude pigs. Hitler did exhibit a sympathy with a vegetarian diet, but paradoxically, vegetarians and the vegetarian movement in Nazi Germany were persecuted. Vegetarian societies were restrained, subject to raids, and "books that contained vegetarian recipes were confiscated by the Gestapo." Janet Barkas has a good account of this period in German history in her book, The Vegetable Passion. German vegetarian societies were forced to leave the International Vegetarian Union; they were prohibited from organizing and from publishing material, but individuals were not molested and "could exchange their credit notes for meat for dairy products. About 83,000 vegetarians participated in this program." (http://www.micahbooks.com/readingroom/Hitlerveg.html)
Response: h) Hitler and Animals Like many of his fellow human beings, Adolf Hitler used
animal epithets to vilify other people. He often called his
opponents "swine" and "dirty dogs." The Bolsheviks were "animals," and the Russians a "bestial people" and Slavic
"rabbit-family" whom Stalin had molded into a totalitarian state. After Hitler conquered Russia, he wanted "the
ridiculous hundred million Slavs" to live in "pig-pens." He called British diplomats "little worms," and, as for the
"half-Judaized, half-Negrified" people of America, they "have the brains of a hen." Hitler had contempt for his own people,
referring to them as "the great stupid mutton-herd of our sheep-like people," and when the defeats mounted late in the
war, he blamed them for not having risen to the challenge. Hitler called his own sisters "stupid geese."
Whatever deficiencies members of the Germanic Volk might
possess, however, Hitler believed the Aryan/Nordic race was
infinitely superior to the surrounding sea of sub-human "monstrosities between man and ape," as he made clear in a
speech in Munich in 1927:
"We see before us the Aryan race which is manifestly the bearer of all culture, the true representative of
all humanity....Our entire industrial science is without exception the work of Nordics. All great composers from
Beethoven to Richard Wagner are Aryans....Man owes everything that is of any importance to the principle
of struggle and to one race which has carried itself forward successfully. Take away the Nordic Germans and
nothing remains but the dance of apes." Charles Patterson
(http://www.powerfulbook.com/excerpts.html)
Response i) Hitler was fond of dogs, especially German shepherds (he considered boxers "degenerate"), whom he liked to control and
dominate. At the front during World War I, he befriended a white terrier, Fuchsl (Foxl), who had strayed across enemy
lines. Later, when his unit had to move on and Fuchsl could not be found, Hitler became distraught. "I liked him so much,"
he recalled. "He only obeyed me." Hitler often carried a dog-
whip and sometimes used it to beat his dog the same way he had
seen his father beat his own dog. In the Fuhrer headquarters during World War II, Hitler's
German shepherd,
Blondi, offered him the closest thing he had to friendship. "But with his dogs, as with every human being he came into contact
with," writes his biographer Ian Kershaw, "any relationship was based upon subordination to his mastery."
http://www.powerfulbook.com/excerpts.html
Response: j) The reputed fondness of Hitler and other top Nazis for
animals, especially their dogs, has been put into perspective by Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno. For certain
authoritarian personalities, they write, their "love of animals" is part of the way they intimidate others. When
industrial magnates and Fascist leaders want to have pets
around them, Horkheimer and Adorno maintain, their choice falls on intimidating animals such as Great Danes and lion
cubs, which are intended to add to their power through the terror they inspire. "The murderous Fascist colossus stands so blindly before
nature that he sees animals only as a means of humiliating men," they write. "The Fascist's passionate interest in
animals, nature, and children is rooted in the lust to persecute." While with their hand they might negligently
stroke a child's head, or an animal's back, that same hand
could just as easily destroy them. "The petting demonstrates
that all are equal in the presence of power, that none is a being in its own right. A creature is merely material for the
master's bloody purposes." (http://www.powerfulbook.com/excerpts.html)
16)Question/Attack: "Other animals are sadistic too. They will torture a mouse and know they are torturing it."
Response a) Not according to Mark Twain: "Of all the creatures that were made, man is the most detestable. Of the entire brood he is the only one--the solitary one--that possesses malice. That is the basest of all instincts, passions, vices--the most hateful. He is the only creature that has pain for sport, knowing it to be pain. Also--in all the list he is the only creature that has a nasty mind.- Mark Twain's Autobiography; and: "Of all the animals, man is the only one that is cruel. He is the only one that inflicts pain for the pleasure of doing it. It is a trait that is not known to the higher animals." (The Lowest Animal)
Response: b) You say a cat knows that a mouse feels pain,
that a cat knows what a mouse is feeling, and then deliberately tortures the
mouse--just as we know for fact, humans--such as researchers, are capable of
doing(the fact that researchers will name lab animals "goner" or three
animals with broken spines "snap, crackle and pop" demonstrates this..
When you see cats or weasals do the same, or gather to watch other cats torture mice as a spectator sport--just as humans
do in bullrings and rodeos, and in the Roman Coliseum--then you will convince
me. Until then--keep fantasizing.
Response: c) You are trying to project all the negative qualities of humans onto non humans..but you miss something. Only humans are capable of slander. Only a human can accuse an innocent of doing that which it does itself.
Response: d) Humans are also capable of torturing others via language. Insults, lies etc. Can other species do that?
Response: e) There is zero evidence that other species, unlike humans, are aware that they are causing members of other species to suffer. Do cats or weasals set up arenas or stadiums in the wild or back alleys where they sit around as other cats and weasals torture mice? Do they roll on their backs in apparent glee as they watch a mouse screaming--as humans have been known to find pleasure and amusement from watching others--human or not--suffer? For a cat to be aware that a mouse suffers, and then to derive pleasure from its suffering, would be to project very human characteristics onto the cat. And remember that there is one advantage that humans have over non humans in their capacity for cruelty. Only humans are capable of mental torment. Using language to tease and torture others.
17)Question/attack: "Do you eat meat?/What are your shoes made of?"
Response: a) The issue of meat eating and/or animal by-products is a valid and important issue in animal rights, but it does not have anything to do with the moral and ethical problems of animal research. The fact that an animal activist making a pro-animal rights/compassion argument may be inconsistent in those ways does not in any way detract or invalidate the argument on animal research. It is a separate issue.
Response:
b) If South
Africa was being criticized by the
18)Question/attack:
Well you are entitled to your opinion but I am entitled to mine and I
say---FILL IN BLANK
Response: a) Everyone is entitled to an opinion (although some are more able
to express one publicly than others) but if the opinion involves causing harm to
others--there is usually a generally accepted restriction on ACTING upon such opinions.
I.e. "I think Christians like me are superior to non-christians, therefore
we should be able to enslave non believers." If it is wrong for white
supremacists, christian supremacists, anti-gays, male chauvinists, etc to act
upon their opinion, thus it should be the same for ALL forms of unfair
discrimination--including willful discrimination against animals.
19)Question/attack: "Mind your own business."
Response: a) I'll mind my own business when you let other species mind their own business.
Response: b) If "mind your own business" wasn't an acceptable defense from a negro slave trader or a Nazi camp guard it isn't an acceptable defense from you either.
20)Question/attack: "Who says you have a right to tell us what to do?"
Response: a) Who says you have a right to tell other species what to do?
Response: b) Because, if we have a right to tell a wife beater, child abuser, Nazi or negro slave trader what to do then we have a right to tell you what to do also.
21)Question/Attack: "You are never going to stop (insert animal-environmental cause)/convince people that (insert action) is wrong."
Response: a) We are never going to eradicate homicide, child abuse, spousal abuse, theft, etc. so I guess by your logic we shouldn't even try.
22)Question/attack: "Why are you Vegan?"
Response:
b) Everything is! Just some foods have animal products added
Response:
c) I was training my dog not to beg and got used to the diet
Response:
d) Because god told me.
Response:
e) Because I ate part of my best friend once and that kind of put me
Response: g) because I find it terrible to have thoughts of eating muscles cut from my friends' dead bodies, and disgusting to stuff one's face with decaying animal remains.
Response: h) Because you aren't.
Response: i) Socrates, Pythagoros, Leonardo Da Vinci, H.G. Wells, Dr. Spock, Mister Spock, Einstein...either they were ones or endorsed the concept--since genius and vegetarianism seem to go together so well, I thought somebody better keep the tradition alive!
Response:
j) I don't feel like its in my nature to kill animals for food because I know that I couldn't kill an animal and eat it. It doesn't seem fair
to pay a corporation to take care of if for me.