The Washington County Animal Shelter is peeking over the Southern Utah horizon. Blueprints have been drawn up, and a budget for construction in St. George has been proposed. And there is a price tag of $2 million.
Ahem, that’s two million bucks. Quite the wealthy philanthropists, aren’t we?
For the record, I think building the Washington County Animal Shelter is a great idea, and I totally support it! But that’s not my point at all.
I think it’s totally bizarre … no, “totally bizarre” doesn’t even begin to fully encapsulate the “WTF” element here. How can I put this?
What the hell is wrong with a populace that directly funds the wholesale torture and slaughter of countless thousands of animals on a daily basis — at an additional and incalculable auxiliary cost medically and environmentally — but wants to turn around and drop a whopping $2 million to “save” a handful of them?
I get it, this is a population whose daily bread is cognitive dissonance. Irrational, self-defeating behavior is to be expected, to an extent.
We ran a piece written by Cora Hamer on the Yulin Dog Meat Festival earlier this year. The outrage was palpable — and rightly so. However, have any of the people who are pointing a finger at the Chinese thought to look in the mirror? Have they examined the effect of their own personal choices? Not to minimize it, but this macabre bloodfest is responsible for 10,000 to 15,000 animal deaths. But how many animals are meeting as grisly an end — if not more so — just so little Johnny Poopypants can have a double-decker corpse sandwich for lunch today? (It’s about 56 billion, or 3,000 per second, by the way. So as many or more animals were slain while you read that statistic than die at the Yulin Dog Meat Festival.)
And isn’t the distinction between companion animals and farm animals killed for meat totally arbitrary? Your food is someone else’s pet. Your pet is someone else’s food.
Then there was the uproar over the BLM killing wild horses. Let me summarize: the BLM is killing wild horses. Here’s the worst part. Are you ready? They are turning them into meat. Wow! Killing an animal and turning it into meat! Barbaric! Who would do such a thing?
By the way, our labeling laws have been watered down to such an extent that you really can’t prove what processed meats are made of anymore. So enjoy your horse burgers and your actual hot dogs.
And then there’s Fur De Leash. What did they do? Something about making money from breeding animals? For slaughter? Nay, for snuggles.
Wanna save a zillion animals for free? Stop fucking eating them. There you go, Washington County Commission! I just saved you two million bucks. How much money did you save the county this year? I can has salary and benefits?
Here’s the first uncomfortable question: Which animals are we interested in saving? Babe or Lassie? I know, I know … all animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others. It only applies to society because we apply it to animals first.
Here’s the second uncomfortable question: Do we want to save animals, or would we prefer to drop a ton of cash to feel good about saving animals? Are we just going to buy our way to a better world?
(Oh, and I’m just gonna leave this right here: D&C 89 11–15. Yeah. Just gonna leave that right there and slowly back away.)
Again, don’t misunderstand my message, friends. Let’s build this shelter. But let’s examine our intentions first.
By simply not eating them, we could each save an average of 100 living, breathing, thinking, feeling animals each year. That’s an average of 7,000 animals over the course of a single human lifetime. How many animals will the Washington County Animal Shelter save?
Real change starts with personal accountability, not government spending.
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Oh Jason, for God sake, oh, forgive me for bringing God into this, but give it a rest. Putting a guilt trip on everyone who eats a hamburger will do nothing to help change the way animals are treated in the factory farms. Legislation & the lack of common decency & moral responsibility are only 2 of the culprits…continuing to allow and turning a blind eye to the conditions in these farms, as well as the slaughter houses, signing legislation to make it a felony to document it on video is a sad indictment against those very same politicians who fight so hard to cover up the ongoing systematic torture, butchering, poisoning, mutilation and selling of body parts of the unborn human babies. I personally fight to end both of these atrocities, do you? Isn’t it about “choice”…oh, but that only applies to killing unborn human babies, but not animals, who were created for human consumption and sustenance,from the beginning of human life, humans were not created to live off of plants…so, stop the guilt trip, change legislation and if you are subjecting your dog to a vegan diet, you should be charged with animal abuse. Just as you will say, abortion and eating animals are 2 different subjects, then I say, the killing and eating of animals and building this shelter to protect and save animals are 2 different subjects…lets get it built and let people eat what they “choose”….
Thanks for another weird pile of words, Mary. Stand back and watch as I eviscerate it with my own.
— “continuing to allow and turning a blind eye to the conditions in these farms, as well as the slaughter houses, signing legislation to make it a felony to document it on video is a sad indictment against those very same politicians who fight so hard to cover up the ongoing systematic torture, butchering, poisoning, mutilation and selling of body parts of the unborn human babies.”
I can only imagine that you are under the mistaken belief that the Planned Parenthood video debacle wasn’t a steaming pile of horse shit. Here’s the group behind the video: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Center_for_Medical_Progress Here’s Snopes take on the whole thing: http://www.snopes.com/pp-baby-parts-sale/ And here’s more from FactCheck.org: http://www.factcheck.org/2015/07/unspinning-the-planned-parenthood-video/
Pure politics.
I find it ironic that people like you will freak out over about a glob of tissue that is as self-aware and capable of suffering as a portobello mushroom but don’t give a shit about a living being that has a family, a face, and feelings. Bringing this up at all is a red herring, Mary, and a really weak one at that. People resort to logical fallacies in arguments when they are desperate and don’t really have anything substantial or compelling to say.
— “Isn’t it about ‘choice’”
Ah. Unless you are a child or a prisoner who eats what she is given, it’s precisely about choice. Thanks for clarifying!
Unborn babies are animals. I learned that humans are animals before elementary school. But better late than never.
— “animals, who were created for human consumption and sustenance”
Prove it. You just made an allegation based on pure fantasy. If you can’t prove that animals were created for human consumption, the rest of your argument completely falls apart. Better to leave your delusions at the door when entering a conversation.
— “from the beginning of human life, humans were not created to live off of plants”
Holy cow, Mary. What a colossally ignorant thing to claim.
At this point, I’m realizing that I don’t actually know how old you are. I might be speaking with a 12-year-old who doesn’t know much about the world. But news flash: Humans do best on balanced plant-based diets. Humans most certainly do poorly on animal-centric diets.
http://www.pcrm.org/health/diets/pplate/why-power-plate
http://www.thepermanentejournal.org/issues/2013/spring/5117-nutrition.html
Even the USDA recommends it. https://health.gov/dietaryguidelines/2015-scientific-report/02-executive-summary.asp
Also, the onus of proving that humans were “created” is again upon you, and your failure to prove that your assertion is true is the utter demise of the position you attempted to support with it. Don’t bring your imaginary friends to a debate, Mary.
— “change legislation”
Yes, let me just retrieve my handy legislation wand and wave it over the country. It’s great! It gives me full control over legislation. That was a very helpful suggestion.
— “if you are subjecting your dog to a vegan diet, you should be charged with animal abuse.”
Ho! So it’s okay for you to pay a man to take a knife and slit an animal’s throat because you like the way it’s corpse tastes, but if I were to feed an omnivore a vegan diet, I should be charged with animal abuse.
If you ever want to be taken seriously, you’re going to need someone to proofread what you type in the future so that you don’t completely destroy your credibility with insane statements like that whopper. Of course, you’ve permanently destroyed your credibility here, but you can start fresh somewhere else.
Dogs are omnivores, and like humans, they do well on balanced vegan diets. (Again, if you are 12, you will learn what omnivores are in school.) I do not own a dog, but if I did, I would feed it a vegan diet and laugh out loud at your ridiculous suggestion every time I did so. Maybe you can call the FBI and have them put me on the terrorist watch list or something.
“—Just as you will say, abortion and eating animals are 2 different subjects, then I say, the killing and eating of animals and building this shelter to protect and save animals are 2 different subjects…lets get it built and let people eat what they “choose”….”
You seem to have missed the entire point of the piece. I am fully in support of building the shelter. The point of the piece was to draw attention to the fact that this society would rather come up with expensive feel-good band-aids rather than engaging in true self-examination with the intention of instigating real social change that will better the animals and society collectively. Society would happily bend over backwards to save an animal that it doesn’t perceive as food, pat itself on the back, and then go out to lunch at Burger Bitch and fund the wholesale slaughter of animals it doesn’t perceive as food. Society doesn’t want to change. It wants to find easy solutions to problems that enable it to continue forward with whatever destructive, callous, and gluttonous behaviors it desires.
Abortion and eating animals are similar subjects. There are several differences, obviously, but one big one is that in 2016 America, killing animals for food is something that done purely for gustatory pleasure, not survival or health. Humans do not need meat to survive, and we would have far more food and water overall if we dedicated the same resources to growing plant foods rather than livestock. And for the record, I personally am generally pro-life while also recognizing the rights of mothers as well as the complexity of the issue and the myriad differing potential circumstances that make it impossible to make a sensible generalized hard-line stance of purely pro-life versus purely pro-choice. I am, however, entirely against late abortions, and while I recognize the sovereignty of a woman’s body — or any sentient being’s body (part of why I’m vegan, wink wink) — I think that the life of a child should be preserved in almost any situation. Weird (although at least consistently weird) that you would assume the opposite.
People have the right to eat what they choose as well as the right to kill themselves. As heart disease is the No. 1 cause of death in the U.S. and Cancer is No. 2, and as the consumption of animal foods greatly contributes to both causes of death, people have the right to kill themselves by eating whatever they want. However, having the right to do something makes it neither ethical nor moral.
And if they want to eat what they choose, let’s let them cannibalize the dead and eat the aborted fetuses of unborn babies. There’s a can of worms for you to open.
Mary, you are painfully misinformed, and your pedantic, ill-conceived rants and inflammatory suggestions are tiresome and embarrassing. I can’t wait to read your next one! But you might want to email me privately next time so that you don’t receive yet another public spanking. Unless you get off on this.