the zoo Options

[zepfel]

Also, if we can get our hands on an endangered species and try to breed them out of endangeredness, is that not also helpful in anyway??

only if we did the damage in the first place. ive always thought that if an animal was going to die out naturally anyway, who are we to stop it? i can't think of any examples though

oh, and ive gotta say, SO WHAT if a kid doesnt know what an african tiger snake looks like? or a quilted eagle? or a tasmanian devil (whatever, i know theyre extinct).
it's not like theyre ever going to find one in their life anyway, and even if they do, a day at the zoo isnt going to give them the ninja skills to fend off a pack of wild demon antelope. or lions, whichever they find first.

[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.