Category Archives: animal rights

Wired Science has news on how mice show pain on their faces, just like humans… not really surprising. Here’s a quote from the article:

“It suits us to think that animals don’t have a real depth of feeling or emotion, so it’s OK to treat them badly,” Williams said. “Farming practices aren’t very sensitive to animals’ feelings. It’s convenient to just hope they aren’t feeling these things.”

Yes — “insensitive” is an understatement. However, conditions are far better for animals on small family farms than they are in industrial meat operations. If you’re going to eat meat, buy from a small supplier if you can.

A New Atlantis blogger, Charles Rubin, has chided me on my support of reprogramming predators.

I responded that eliminating predation begins at home with vegetarianism, and that the point is not to get there all at once, but to remove the worst instances of suffering in nature, like predators eating their prey alive.

It’s not about telling people a false “story” like Santa Claus, because I openly admit that we are nowhere near a pain-free world. All I am saying is that such a world would be a good thing.

Historically and contemporarily, our world contains so much suffering that it almost seems like a suffering-centered joke-world. I identify with a post-suffering world at the expense of my identification with the current world. I consider a post-suffering world to be a “natural” state and our present world to be “unnatural”.

Most Westerners do not really understand how terrible it is to live in many places around the world. There are concentration camps in North Korea where people are tortured and chemical weapons …

A few weeks ago Paul Raven at Futurismic picked up my link to David Pearce’s essay “Reprogramming Predators”, which throws out some ideas for preventing things like, oh, I don’t know, hyenas eating off the face and trunk of a living baby elephant stuck in a mud pond. I thought a couple comments on Futurismic were funny.

Chad said:

I couldn’t disagree with this guy more. In fact, I think it is rather ludicrous we could make a change this large and not see disastrous effects on every aspect these creatures lives and ours.

James said:

I couldn’t agree with this guy more. In fact, I think it ludicrous we don’t immediately start working for this change so that we can prevent the disastrous effects the status quo has on these creatures lives and ours.

Funny! The fact of the matter is that wildlife documentaries have brainwashed most of the planet into admiring the powerful grace of predators that Darwinian selection made into ruthless serial killers and torturers. Besides those documentaries, many …

David Pearce on reprogramming predators. Thanks to Franz Fuchs for the pointer.

New Harvest are the in vitro meat people, who got coverage in CNN and other major media outlets for their conference last year. I received these two recent updates from their mailing list.

Why in vitro meat is good for you (SEED Magazine)

From petri dish to dinner plate (New Scientist)

Everyone knows deep down that factory farming can only be justified if you put the value of animal life at zero (which many people do, remarkably), so they’re willing to accept alternatives, as long as it tastes the same. Thankfully, the flavor part is easy to emulate, so the main challenge of in vitro meat is giving it the appropriate texture.

As with all posts here on animal rights, commenting is forbidden, because I believe that 99% of people who eat meat are fundamentally unable to think clearly on the ethics of meat-eating, and their opinion is worthless. (Note how any mainstream, non-blogging journalist or even opinion column writer would be completely forbidden to ever say such a thing in a public forum, but …

Nice article on in vitro meat at CNN. Big congratulations to Jason Matheny. You’re a winner. Soon we will be able to stop eating animals, which everyone knows deep down might be conscious (though they like to underweight the probability due to their love of eating them).

First step: eliminate the killing of animals by humans for food. Step two: rearrange the entire ecosystem so that predators cannot harm conscious prey. A fairly modest proposal, if you ask me.