John Wilkes Booth

i thought the video brought up some solid points. most notably that animals are really just property at the end of the day and yet our treatment of them is sometimes inconsistent with this idea.

...

GuD

To say something is property is objectifying... animals aren't inanimate objects.

__________________
I spit bullets in my feet
Every time I speak
So I write instead
And still people want me dead
~msc

John Wilkes Booth

this assumes property must be an inanimate object.... the law disagrees.

Lord Larehip

The guy that said animal rights can't be disproven in 2 and a half minutes just did it in one sentence.

The law says pets are property. Here's why: If my pit bull gets out and mauls your kid to death, whose fault is that? If my pit bull has rights, it's not my fault. I'm not the owner. That a dog can have rights and still be owned is a contradiction. The dog may live on my property but it is an autonomous being capable of making its own choices. It chose to maul your kid so don't sue me, sue the dog.

That doesn't mean I'm not concerned about animal abuse. I think anyone convicted of abusing animal should suffer exactly the same consequences as a convicted child-molester--they go to prison and when they get out they must register as an animal-abuser and cannot live within 1000 feet of an animal or they must move or go back to prison.

But to equate eating animals to be the same as abusing them is absurd. Animals eat one another, they don't care about rights. Humans evolved to eat meat because we always have and always will. If animals have no value but what we give them--as one of these guys in the clip said--then there is no contradiction in assigning one the value of being food and another as the value of being a companion. No one keeps a cow as a pet for a reason. So those guys contradicted themselves as all animal rights believers inevitably do. It is the same basic argument used by anti-abortionists and just as unworkable and the guys in that clip demonstrated why.

Just because somebody doesn't believe in animal rights doesn't make you more enlightened than them, it just makes you less intelligent.

John Wilkes Booth

as for eating animals... to me it is really quite simple. if you believe that kicking a cat is cruel and should be punished yet you buy meat that was raised on factory farms which cause 1000x as much suffering in animals then you are a hypocrite. there is no ethical principle being defended if you arbitrarily decide which animals can legally suffer and the circumstances under which this can happen.

14232949

Christ, american prisons are already overcrowded, you want to jail someone for kicking a cat?!

My god, give him community service, anybody who seriously believes this crime is punishable by jail sentence needs to reevaluate their stance on life.

Sparky

On an individual level though, you don't have really have a choice as far as US farming practices. Animal cruelty is specific deliberate harm on a per case basis.

John Wilkes Booth

you do have a choice. either you can financially support a system that abuses animals or you can choose not to.

GuD

Okay so animals might legally be considered property but... they're not inanimate. By all means, have sex with a lamp. Abuse it. It's inanimate and has no capacity for physical or mental anguish. But animals? Not at all. They might be property but they still deserve to be protected.

I don't think his mentality towards animals abuse should be taken lightly. He kicked a cat like 15 feet in the air and laughed about it with his friends. He deserves every ounce of his punishment. When he gets kicked 15 feet in the air in prison maybe he'll reevaluate his 'comedy' routine.

__________________
I spit bullets in my feet
Every time I speak
So I write instead
And still people want me dead
~msc

Chula Vista

Pretty much where I'm at.

__________________

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on the surface of a gas covered planet going around a nuclear fireball 90 million miles away
and think this to be normal is obviously some indication of how skewed our perspective tends to be.”