the zoo Options

[capsule]

Those who know where I got this topic from...hush

So...what is your opinion on the zoo? Now...think about it for a sec. Is it right for animals to be penned up in a cage so people can oogle at them and throw them feed for that 25 cents? Everyone says its educational..but who doesn't know what a monkey looks like? Isn't an encyclopedia a better alternative source to knowing what certain animals look like and their background information? By having them shoved into cages, we are ruining their lifestyle...we feed them food and have them just stand around doing nothing...if that animal were to be sent out to the wild...it wouldn't survive. And let's not forget about the offspring...undergoing an artificial lifestyle, it would impact them heavily also. Is it worth ruining the lifestyles of various animals for the pure sake of "wanting to know what [so-and-so] looks like in real life?"...I don't think that really balances out.

[ApocalypseAelis]

Yes, it matters a lot. If someone makes you give them your money at gun point, it's THEIR fault that you gave them your money, not yours.

Similarly, if someone forces you to enforce the Fugitive Slave Law, then slavery was THEIR fault, not yours. The Supreme Court undemocratically ruled slavery legal, whereas the majority of people in a majority of States thought that they did not want slavery in their state. Therefore, it wasn't a law that "we" (we implies democratic) made. At least not in the North.


It does not matter. The Supreme Court made a wrong decision, which goes with my point of the law making mistakes at times. It does not matter whose fault it is, it matters on what the result of the actions are.


No there shouldn't. It's proven that animal rights and human rights go against each other. If you look at states with strict animal protection laws, like Maryland and Virginia, you'll also see that they have high taxes, less due process in their court systems, more crime, fewer guns, etc. Whereas states like New Hampshire with very little animal protection also tend to be "free states", where people's rights are best protected.


Ever heard of something called correlation without causality? Today, I opened my window, and someone else opened their window! Wow, I must have some special power that influences other people to open their windows when I open mine.

Please, enlighten us on how exactly human rights are harmed by animal rights.

I'm guessing you'll say that if we give animals more rights, the rights for humans will go down.

Well, I could say that the rights of other people bring down the value and meaning of my rights. Does this mean they shouldn't have rights?


That depends on the benefit they get from it.


I do not benefit from the homeless bum that sometimes passes by my house. I guess that means I should randomly strangle him while getting the mail.

You don't want them to just be treated as living things, you want them to have equal rights under civil law. If you want equal rights under civil law, you should have equal responsibilities, correct?


No, it would not be right for them to have equal rights. I never said that.

The right to a good life isn't limited to only humans, you know.


A human can't claim a dog as a dependent for tax reasons. Remember the widow in England who left all her property to her cat? The cat can't pay inheritance taxes.

The fact is, animals do not have the same responsibilities under civil law; so if you want to give them civil protection, they have to have civil responsiblities. Like, if a dog bites me, I can sue it and put it in jail/force it to pay me compensation.

I know it's ridiculous, but that's the natural conclusion of your argument.

No, it isn't, because my argument isn't about giving them the same rights as any human has. My argument is that they should be protected at least to the point that people give them suitable living conditions. (i.e. shelter, enough food and water, a large enough living space) YOUR argument is that we should have the right to use animals in whatever way we like because they aren't humans.


Yes I have. If they do not respond to human standards, they should not be treated as humans. Simple.

Please point out exactly where I have said that dogs should be treated as humans.


The law of the jungle is survival of the fittest--this applies to everyone. The law of civil society depends on the society, and applies to the members of that society--who agree to follow its rules in exchange for its protections.

No, it does not apply to everyone. Humans do not abide by the "law of the jungle", we abide by our own laws of our civil society-like you said. The "law of the jungle" has nothing to do with human traits and behaviorisms.


The government is giving it to them. They aren't taking it away (taking implies using force--I don't see an army of homeless converging on DC). Through a democratic process, homeless people agree to be bound by our laws, and recieve our protections.

Dogs require less money and rights from the government than homeless people. If we can accept laws protecting the homeless, we can accept laws protecting animals.


No, if an 8-year-old goes into a store to buy some candy, he pays sales tax on his own.

Actually, 8-year-olds are incapable of earning their own money. An eight-year-old cannot pay the sales tax from the cash in his own pocket. He depends on his human family to support him, the same way a dog does. If you're talking about the child's ability to go to the store, well, some dogs can be trained to do that too.

If the guardian buys something FOR an 8-year-old, then they pay sales tax--but the thing they buy is technically their property.

If the guardian buys something FOR a dog, then they pay sales tax--but the thing they buy is technically their property.


Nope. We have a juvenile justice system alongside our normal one. Children don't have all the rights of adults (can't vote, can't bring a lawsuit, etc.), thus they dont have all the responsibilities. However, they still have SOME responsibilities (children are still expected to abide by laws like don't drink, can still get citations, and can still be thrown in jail or sued).

A dog, however, has NO responsibilites under civil law, and thus should have NO rights.


Under civil law.

Since when was kindness and reason part of only civil law?

If an animal attacks you, it will be euthanized. This has happened many times before. If it is not fit to live among humans, humans can and will kill it or get rid of it somehow.

Then people won't go to that zoo anymore and the zoo will be out of business. So?


You pointed out a way dogs do not adhere to the laws of our society. I pointed out that a dog owner would be responsible for his pet's actions. The zoo was an example.


You don't HAVE to eat meat to survive. And you don't HAVE to use Listerine--the right to life certainly overrides the right to be free from bad breath, does it not?


I have said before, the way we treat germs should be different from the way we treat animals, the same way how we treat animals should be different from the way we treat each other.


Exactly--the law of the jungle, which is the natural state of life.


We’re not talking about the “law of the jungle” right now. We’re talking about the behavior of the human society.


Most germs that Listerine kill cause nothing more than bad breath.

And most antibiotics kill ALL bacteria, not just the bad ones. That's why, when you take a strong antibiotic, you also have to take a probiotic, such as certain kinds of yogurt, that replenish the good bacteria with new ones from outside.


“I have said before, the way we treat germs should be different from the way we treat animals, the same way how we treat animals should be different from the way we treat each other.”


So what makes animals equal to humans?
And the way we treat a cat should be different from the way we treat a human, should it not?


When did I say that they were equal to humans, or that we should treat them exactly the same way?


So do ants.

And most animals, as a matter of fact.

The same goes for humans. But that doesn't mean our lives are worth less than a sparrow's life. We don't base the value of life on only the population of that creature.

Collectively, no, but individually, yes. The individual is more important than the collective--the Nazis didn't come close to wiping out the Jewish people, but we still remember them as evil people because they killed so many individual Jews.

A Jewish person is more important than a germ floating on a taste bud. You can't compare washing your mouth to a mass genocide. A germ's life is to be treated differently from a human's.

And cause allergies.

Cats cause allergies, too. And yet there are 60 million of them living in the US as pets.

Well, by the time you pay for all the allergy drugs you're going to need because of the small plants, they won't.

If someone has allergies, then the obvious solution would be to buy an air purifier. I didn't say it should be necessary for all people to grow a garden. Only about a tenth of all Americans have pollen allergies, and nobody's going to die because their neighbor has a rose in their living room.

And we've taught really smart chimpanzees to type. All animals with fingers can type--humans are just better at it.

Okay, say I agree with you that animals are equal to humans. So I guess they must be entitled to equal rights. Great job with that major contradiction.

Can a smart chimpanzee identify all the words he is typing? Can he type a formal letter to his friends and have conversations on this forum? You can also teach a bear to wear a tutu and dance with a parasol, but it doesn't make it equivalent to a human performer.



What makes it more advanced? Evolution is adaptation, not progress. If we were stuck in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, and so was a blue whale, guess who would have the better chance of surviving?

In case you've forgotten, adaptation=progress.


I'm saying only humans should be treated with respect and kindness by other humans because it's an agreement within humans. I'm not saying that other species are not free to make the same civil agreement within themselves. Like prides of lions and packs of chimpanzees treat other members of their prides/packs with respect and kindness--because they have entered into a civil society, of sorts, where each member agrees to act a certain way to others in exchange that others act a certain way towards him.

We do NOT have that same social contract with animals.


By "respect and kindness" I don't mean the kind where if you see a lion, you greet it nicely and make room for it to eat and pat it on the back. By "respect and kindness" I mean not killing a lion for sport or capturing it and torturing it, but leaving it alone. In that sense, then yes, we do have a sort of social contract with animals. Except it's not a social contract, it's common sense. A lion's not going to spot a human and purposely scratch it to death to ensure pain. A lion will spot food, hunt it down, and eat it, the same way some tribes in Africa might hunt down some animal to cook for dinner. It doesn't have anything to do with respect and kindness if an animal eats another animal.


And Chimpanzees are different from all other animals. And Zebras. And Horses. And Cats. And Ants. And Snakes. And the list goes on and on...

Of course we're different, I'm not saying we aren't, but you can't also say that we're somehow objectively more "advanced". Every animal is different in some way from every other animal. We've just adapted better to a technological society.


Okay, so now you're saying we are equal to animals, yet we should still have the right to abuse and torture them. Hm. Something doesn't add up here.

Most of the world would disagree.

This has nothing to do with the topic of the way we treat animals!

So if animals don't have personalities or consciousnesses, why does it matter how they are treated? They can't think or feel or know how they are being treated.

Correction-they don't know WHY they are being treated that way. However, they do have a nervous system that allows them to feel pain. They do have organs that can be damaged. They do have a life.

Although their consciousness/personalities are less complex than ours, they will respond differently to a person who treats them with love and kindness and to a person who brutally beats and starves them. Trust me, any animal would run straight away from someone like you.


If they aren't going to abide by our laws that say respect each other, then they cannot enjoy the protection of said laws. Simple. A pride of tigers might very well attack and eat a human being, even though they wouldn't attack and eat each other, because a human doesn't belong to their society, isn't bound by its [informal] laws, and thus isn't protected by them.

Murderers are ruthless, evil things that cause much more harm than the common house cat. Yet we still give them rights and we still give them a court case for them to speak for themselves. Why? Because we are a civil society. We have progressed from the time of the Aztecs, where almost every crime resulted in bodily mutilation, instant death, or severe corporal punishment. We know how to seperate the right from the wrong.

I didn't say that was a good idea; I just brought it up to show how ridiculous your argument that people were responsible for "tipping the scale" was.

It's not ridiculous at all; I just typed out why a cycle with animal flatulence and plants would work and not a cycle with CO2 factory emissions wouldn't. People are responsible, anyway. Animals release the right amount of CO2 into the atmosphere; when we put in factory emissions several million years later, we can't say it's not OUR fault for disrupting a natural cycle in which the CO2 emissions has already been taken care of.

Animals cause problems, that's a given. Bears can attack people and dogs can have aggression issues. We can deal with these problems. If an animal can't survive with our society, we will solve it with no difficulty. But we need to maintain our humanity. We can't senselessly slaughter living things with no reason.


Or she just has so many of them that it doesn't matter that most of them die. There are different evolutionary survival methods. Turtles, for example, might lay dozens or hundreds of eggs, so even though most die off, a few survive.


And all of those different evolutionary survival methods work better than cagefights.

Is this not what I have been saying?

You have been saying that it is right for us to abuse animals.

Animals should not have the laws and rights we have. Their lives should, however, be respected.


Yet you support Listerine, which kills trillions of harmless bacteria, just so we can impress girls more.


I have already said this at least three times before.

Different forms of life should be treated with varying levels of respect.

No it's not. The vast majority of people who torture animals as a kid grow up to be well-adjusted people.

If these well adjusted people still view killing living things as amusing and acceptable, they're not really that well-adjusted.


Actually, most people view "animal lover" organizations like PETA as paramilitary thugs. If you don't believe me, check this out. Would a "kindhearted person" write that?

I don't view PETA as a exemplary animal rights organization. Although their intentions may be good, they're way too extreme, and are wrong on many subjects. Even though the link you provided doesn't work for me, I'm pretty sure it leads to a very biased article.

If you want to see better organization with clearer heads, try the WWF.

Billy the Kid would disagree.

Billy the Kid also shot people.

...remind me what this has to do with animal rights again…


Well, I've proved that those causes of cancer are mostly results from living too close to nature, so you just torpedoed your own argument there.

(Also I think they meant low Thyroxin, the hormone secreted by teh Thyroid; but low Thyroxin would just give you a lower metabolism, I don't see the connection to cancer. Whatever.)

How did I just kill my own argument? We just agreed the information was unreliable.

No, beacuse I didn't see what relevance that had. We can 'interact with' and 'learn from' animals all the time--as we are doing in zoos, and as we would do from watching them cagefight.

If you read back a few posts, you'll see that I already agreed with you on that and the point I was making has nothing to do with interaction with zoos.

[ComradeRed]

It does not matter. The Supreme Court made a wrong decision, which goes with my point of the law making mistakes at times. It does not matter whose fault it is, it matters on what the result of the actions are.

Yes it does. You can't blame the American people for an action if the Supreme Court (which is supposed to be immune to popular pressure) is what brought it about.

If someone breaks your leg, it matters who did it--you can't just go around and sue the next person you see on the street.

Ever heard of something called correlation without causality? Today, I opened my window, and someone else opened their window! Wow, I must have some special power that influences other people to open their windows when I open mine.

Please, enlighten us on how exactly human rights are harmed by animal rights.

I'm guessing you'll say that if we give animals more rights, the rights for humans will go down.

Well, I could say that the rights of other people bring down the value and meaning of my rights. Does this mean they shouldn't have rights?

Enforcing the rights of animals REQUIRES a state to take away the rights of people that would otherwise be protected by law (such as the right to do what you want on your own property, etc.) This causes a decrease in respect for human rights among the state and its citizens.

Most notably is the right to privacy and private property. If PETA's methods of raiding laboratories and setting animals free were adopted by a state government, how long until you think that same state government wouldn't find some rationalization to banning all trespass laws and allowing anyone to break-and-enter someone's home?

I do not benefit from the homeless bum that sometimes passes by my house. I guess that means I should randomly strangle him while getting the mail.

The homeless person is a member of civil society and as such has the same civil legal rights as you do. Animals aren't.


The right to a good life isn't limited to only humans, you know.

Nobody has the right to a "good life". Not even humans. The state of nature is one of poverty--you have the right to try to make your life good; but no one guarantees it will be. Hence, pursuit of happiness, not happiness.

No, it isn't, because my argument isn't about giving them the same rights as any human has. My argument is that they should be protected at least to the point that people give them suitable living conditions. (i.e. shelter, enough food and water, a large enough living space) YOUR argument is that we should have the right to use animals in whatever way we like because they aren't humans.

30,000 human children starve to death each day. Billions live in squalid conditions. Clearly, the right to "shelter, enough food and water, a large enough living space" isn't a natural right; it has to be created by someone else.

And if you force that someone else to create things for your animals, you render that person a slave.

Please point out exactly where I have said that dogs should be treated as humans.

Your argument treats them above humans. The only humans that are entitled to food, clothing, and shelter are dependents and the ones in jail--and that's at the cost of their freedom. Because the natural state of everything is poverty, it is logically impossible to claim a natural right to material well-being.


No, it does not apply to everyone. Humans do not abide by the "law of the jungle", we abide by our own laws of our civil society-like you said. The "law of the jungle" has nothing to do with human traits and behaviorisms.

Hunters? A person living outside of civil society abides by the law of the jungle, just like any other creature.

Dogs require less money and rights from the government than homeless people. If we can accept laws protecting the homeless, we can accept laws protecting animals.

The thing is; the laws that protect the homeless protect the rest of us too. We don't have homeless-specific laws. To create a special class of laws protecting animals would be a separate class of laws only for them.


Actually, 8-year-olds are incapable of earning their own money. An eight-year-old cannot pay the sales tax from the cash in his own pocket. He depends on his human family to support him, the same way a dog does. If you're talking about the child's ability to go to the store, well, some dogs can be trained to do that too.[/quote]

Babysitting? Every dollar you have is "given" to you by someone else--when the human family gives money to the eight year old, that money becomes the eight year old's; the same way if a boss gives you money, the money becomes yours.

The first law of economics is that one man's expenses are another man's income.

[color=red]If the guardian buys something FOR a dog, then they pay sales tax--but the thing they buy is technically their property.

Exactly--the law is completely on the side of the guardian. The dog has no responsibilities and therefore no rights.

A dog can't buy something for himself.

Under civil law.

Since when was kindness and reason part of only civil law?[/quote]

Reason? Why is it reasonable to give animals something that a lot of humans don't even have? How is it "reasonable" to claim a natural right to something which doesn't exist in nature?

[color=red]You pointed out a way dogs do not adhere to the laws of our society. I pointed out that a dog owner would be responsible for his pet's actions. The zoo was an example.

If a dog owner should have all the responsibility for his pet, he should also have all the rights of his pet, no?

I have said before, the way we treat germs should be different from the way we treat animals, the same way how we treat animals should be different from the way we treat each other.

Who makes the standards? Why is it morally right to kill off nonthreatening bacteria by the billions but not animals? Clearly, you have to draw the line somewhere, and that line is the line between the state of nature and the state of society.

We’re not talking about the “law of the jungle” right now. We’re talking about the behavior of the human society.

Which is only for members of that society.

A Jewish person is more important than a germ floating on a taste bud. You can't compare washing your mouth to a mass genocide. A germ's life is to be treated differently from a human's.

Once again, where do you draw the line if it's not between natural and civil society?

Okay, say I agree with you that animals are equal to humans. So I guess they must be entitled to equal rights. Great job with that major contradiction.

I said they aren't comparable. They are like comparing apples and oranges.

And as I've said many times before, the fact of a right comes from the corresponding fact of a civil responsibility, NOT an innate state of being. A wild person who claims no nationality, goes around killing indiscriminately and refuses to be bound by any law isn't entitled to legal rights, even though he is innately equal to a person.

Can a smart chimpanzee identify all the words he is typing? Can he type a formal letter to his friends and have conversations on this forum? You can also teach a bear to wear a tutu and dance with a parasol, but it doesn't make it equivalent to a human performer.[/quote]

It doesn't make him equivalent, but you can't say it makes him worse or better. He's different, that's all.

[color=red]In case you've forgotten, adaptation=progress.[/quote]

No.

Adaptation means becoming more suited to your environment. Progress means being better overall. Progress implies a straight line; adaptation does not.

A modern man who wants to study primitive people will have to change his habits to go live with them--in this case, he is "adapting" but he is actually de-progressing, or regressing.

Adaptation also changes from time to time. If evolution were progress, you would think humans would be more suited in every environment than chimpanzees, and that chimpanzees would be more suited in every environment than lemurs, etc. But this simply isn't the case--evolution is a web, not a straight line. A web means adapting to specific environments, not progressing to a single goal.

[color=red]By "respect and kindness" I don't mean the kind where if you see a lion, you greet it nicely and make room for it to eat and pat it on the back. By "respect and kindness" I mean not killing a lion for sport or capturing it and torturing it, but leaving it alone. In that sense, then yes, we do have a sort of social contract with animals. Except it's not a social contract, it's common sense. A lion's not going to spot a human and purposely scratch it to death to ensure pain. A lion will spot food, hunt it down, and eat it, the same way some tribes in Africa might hunt down some animal to cook for dinner. It doesn't have anything to do with respect and kindness if an animal eats another animal.

Humans need clothes. So if a lion is justified in eating another animal to ensure its survival, why isn't a human justified in shooting a lion and using its skin to make clothes?

Okay, so now you're saying we are equal to animals, yet we should still have the right to abuse and torture them. Hm. Something doesn't add up here.

Can you read? I said very clearly that we are different. If two things are different, they can't be equal. The definition of equal is that they are the same.

But just because you are different, doesn't mean you are better or worse, or equal. It's just a matter of personal preference, in this case the personal preference of the environment.

Correction-they don't know WHY they are being treated that way. However, they do have a nervous system that allows them to feel pain. They do have organs that can be damaged. They do have a life.

A lot of humans from Nazi Germany didn't know why they were being rounded up into cattle cars and shot either.

Murderers are ruthless, evil things that cause much more harm than the common house cat. Yet we still give them rights and we still give them a court case for them to speak for themselves. Why? Because we are a civil society.

They are part of civil society. A murderer, if he surrenders to police and submits to his trial, becomes a member of civil society again and is thus bound by its laws.

Now, if a murderer refuses to surrender to police and fights to teh death, most times death is what, in fact, happens.

We have progressed from the time of the Aztecs, where almost every crime resulted in bodily mutilation, instant death, or severe corporal punishment. We know how to seperate the right from the wrong.

Because the standards of our society favor non-physical punishment. But throwing someone in jail for a few years, and when he comes out, to find that his life and record has been so destroyed that he can't find a job and hsa to live on the dole for the rest of his life, often for things as petty as smoking a joint, is pretty cruel too.


It's not ridiculous at all; I just typed out why a cycle with animal flatulence and plants would work and not a cycle with CO2 factory emissions wouldn't. People are responsible, anyway. Animals release the right amount of CO2 into the atmosphere; when we put in factory emissions several million years later, we can't say it's not OUR fault for disrupting a natural cycle in which the CO2 emissions has already been taken care of.

The population of animals changes, does it not? An increase an animal population could therefore tip the scales with more flatulence, could it not?

Animals today are just as dynamic as humans are. It's a double standard to claim that human activity is responsible, when in reality, it is miniscule compared to animal activity.

And all of those different evolutionary survival methods work better than cagefights.

But then they aren't adapted to life in a cage. If a cage were the natural environment of an animal, then clearly the offspring of a good cagefighter stand a greater chance of survival, and are more "progressed", to use your word.

Different forms of life should be treated with varying levels of respect.[/quote]

Who determines how much respect? Who draws the line? And how many lines? And where? Etc.

[color=red]If these well adjusted people still view killing living things as amusing and acceptable, they're not really that well-adjusted.

Most pharmaceutical researchers do that.

I don't view PETA as a exemplary animal rights organization. Although their intentions may be good, they're way too extreme, and are wrong on many subjects. Even though the link you provided doesn't work for me, I'm pretty sure it leads to a very biased article.[/quote]

It doesn't work. That's the point... Read some of the things it said in the Error 404 page.

[color=red]If you want to see better organization with clearer heads, try the WWF.

They are most famous for suing the World Wrestling Federation because they had the same acronym. I see their priorities are very good.

Billy the Kid also shot people.

...remind me what this has to do with animal rights again…

I forget, actually, but he was shot in the back of the head while playing poker.

How did I just kill my own argument? We just agreed the information was unreliable.

You said the causes of cancer were things like inadequate vitamins, etc., which are all things that are caused from living too close to nature. So going into the rainforest and living closer to nature, we are likely to find much more stuff that will cause cancer than treat it.