Animal Rights Disproving Itself
 

I agree that in many ways this doesn't make much sense, but your average person is eating a steak because they are hungry. This scum was just practicing sadism. If he had gone as far in trying to cause serious injury to a person, with the same mindset, then **** yes he'd be going to jail, as that would be a serious case of assault. We make distinctions between regular assault and a hate crime, so it's not unreasonable to make distinctions between eating a steak and kicking a cat like you would a football.

I don't think it's disproving itself so much as trying to find a balance between protecting animals used for their products and pets/wildlife. The subject has been around for a long time but it's really only now becoming a main topic for debate; similar to homosexuality.

I like how the newscaster and professor saying it's just "a kick" as if the damage it can cause to the cat versus an adult is even comparable. Do that sh*t to a baby or little kid and then tell me the police wouldn't do anything.

And whatever the legal inconsistencies, I'd still be perfectly fine if I found out that he'd had his legs broken with a piece of rebar.

video wouldn't play all the way through but there's no way a 2 and a half minute discussion can result in all of animal rights activism being in some way self-disproving. Larehip fails again, what a surprise.

:laughing:

I think they should ban him from getting animals again if they want to make a reasonable punishment.

Maybe if he combined it with swastikas it would convince all of us.

:laughing:

Guys I'm supposed to be studying, you're distracting me!

but animals think swastikas are ok why don't you??

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.

...

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

Pretty much where I'm at.

This is a good point; anyone who has ever eaten a breakfast of bacon and eggs is on very shakey moral ground if they condemn the cat kicker.


I suppose a distinction can be drawn -and presumably is drawn, legally- between cruelty to animals that serves some purpose and gratuitous cruelty, but morally that´s a rather blurred distinction and probably does little to console the battery hens.

^ Quite right! There are plenty of worse evils in society that should be attended to. If I were an American tax payer, I would be upset that my hard-earned tax payments were funding such a frivolous use of the legal system.

^ Sorry, Batlord, but are you seriously speculating about a guy having both his legs broken? IMO that is ghastly thing to consider and far more cruel than the guy´s original offence. He has been shamed on national tv and in a Musicbanter thread - isn´t that punishment enough?

No.

This is a weird thread.

Animals that are specifically raised for food consumption being compared to house pets.

I imagine it doesn't, but that doesn't mean that somebody willing to assault another being for no other reason than sadism is standing on the same ground as I am.

Punishing mindless sadism is a pretty good use of our tax dollars as far as I'm concerned. Much more useful than locking up nonviolent drug offenders.


I'm sorry, I'm supposed to care about this person's well-being? **** him. Why should I feel bad for him just because karma comes to collect?

I didn´t really want to cross swords with the legendary Batlord, but I would like to say this:-

I don´t think I meant to say that we´re all on the same moral ground as the cat kicker, just that the moral divide is not that clear cut.
Also, I associate sadism with the deliberate infliction of pain, often applied, if the movies are to be believed, with slow relish, so I don´t think it´s the right word for what this guy did.
"Mindless" on the other hand is a perfect description. What I saw reminded me of the kind of unthinking cruelty that is not uncommon in small children.

I wouldn´t suggest that locking up nonviolent drug offenders was a useful way to spend tax dollars either, but I still feel that snarling up the law enforcement system over a couple of seconds of stupid behaviour (in which no person was hurt) is a waste of resources.
^ I guess you don´t have to worry about this guy´s well-being if you don´t want to, Batlord, but your idea of justice is what? A kind of vigilante escalationism? Luckily it´s all hypothetical, but what should we do to a person who goes around breaking the legs of people who are cruel to animals? Perhaps the person who breaks the legs of the person who kicked the cat should have his tongue ripped out or something ...

See that's the thing. It shouldn't have to be a person for behavior like this to be considered punishable by jail time. You think he's really gonna think twice about this behavior if he just has to pay a fine and do community service? It's my opinion that applying as much stigmatism as you reasonably can to this behavior is the only way to prevent it.

I don´t know, WhateverDude, I´m still not really convinced. Maybe I have less sympathy for cats than other people here, but my impression of the video was that this was a one-off childish misdemeanor, not necessarily some perverse repeat offender, or a scourge sweeping the US that needs to be stopped.

Also, the more laws you have, the more law breakers. Does America really need more people with criminal records? What´s going to come next - jail time for having over-due library books?

If I was an American taxpayer, I'd much rather have my money go into stopping human trafficking (for example) than prosecuting a man for kicking a cat. I like animals, but sometimes we give them too much importance and let things get out of perspective.

I don't think it matters if it's just a one-off incident. What he did was stupid, cruel, and for good reason culturally unacceptable. It might not be a widely repeated act but it's still the same abusive behavior that deserves punishment. You don't get to get a get out of jail free card because it's the first time you kicked a cat. **** that. That's ****ing stupid.

They wouldn't have criminal records if they didn't engage in criminal behavior. What he did is already illegal as it should be. Making the jump from (yes,) a one-time act of animal cruelty to criminalizing something as small fry, comparatively harmless, and unrelated as overdue fees is a folly device for discrediting an argument.

It's not like it's A or B. These kinds of statements are a little ridiculous. I'd be hard pressed to believe sending this man to prison would cost individual tax payers more than a hundred thousandth of a cent each.

No, but if you send him to prison, then you also have to send every single other guy who's kicked an animal, and the end result is a bunch of judges and policemen dealing with cases in which no human being was adversely affected, when they could be dealing with far more important matters.

Having said that, I don't condone violence to animals and feel sorry (and sore) for the cat. It's just that this has been blown way out of proportion.

Sadism is just deriving pleasure from someone/something else's pain. And I'd describe calling a cat over and petting it to lull it into a false sense of security as "slow relish".

Simple. You lock up the vigilante, cause in real life someone like that is probably an unstable sociopath or other kind of mental defective, and then you turn around and knock over the cat kicker's wheelchair.

I think you're making it out to be far more burdensome than it actually is. A case like this would probably be over in like an hour. The really bad guys are still gonna get theirs too.

Edit: also, I'm adversely affected. Plenty of other people are too. I may not be harmed physically or mentally but I'm pissed that someone hurt a defenseless animal. I don't like being pissed. I'd consider that an adverse affect.

AND, QUIET IMPORTANTLY!
An animal was hurt/adversely affected. Maybe you disagree but I feel as a society we owe it to our dependent and independent critter friends to keep them safe from bullsht like what happened in the video. I'd also go as far as to say we owe them the decency and respect to not raise them by the billions, give them ****ty lives, and kill them for something as pointless as meat but that's another discussion.

By more or less pardoning this act you are in a way condoning it. And outside of MB this particular case has probably been forgotten by most people who've seen the video.

How best to change a culture so that people are more likely to treat animals kindly is an issue that interests me, since I'd like the most successful method to be used.

Some animal rights groups focus on shaming people. Others focus on educating only, in the hope that people will naturally feel some sadness about hurting animals and, if giving education and alternatives, will tend to choose those alternatives.

I support the non-shaming efforts (but I understand feeling angry when people hurt animals).

I'm glad that animal cruelty laws exist to protect animals not raised for human consumption (and I wish the welfare laws would be extended to protect animals raised as commodities), and I feel that jail time for animal cruelty is reasonable.

But I feel the best way to prevent animal cruelty isn't to stigmatize those who perpetrate it, but rather to try to raise their awareness of reasons not to harm animals.

I believe that being compassionate toward people, even toward perpetrators of cruelty, is most likely to encourage their compassion. I suspect that people who go out of their way to mistreat an animal probably have some personal issues (people who were hurt themselves may be more likely to hurt others) or were raised to feel animals lack inherent value.

In the case of Mr. Robinson who kicked that cat, I think that the actual impact on the cat should be important in determining what sort of repercussion happens if Mr. Robinson is found guilty. I feel a year in jail would be too long if the cat was not seriously injured. Also, the repercussions of hurting a non-human animal should be no greater than those of hurting a human. It doesn't sound like the cat, a stray named King, was seriously hurt, but I'm not sure.

I'm glad that Mr. Robinson didn't do what a fellow Brooklyn man did recently: set a cat on fire, for which he was sentenced to a year in jail. (http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/30/ny...sult.html?_r=0)

In the U.S., farm animals are definitely afforded fewer protections than non-farm animals, and people can do pretty much anything they want to poultry and fish raised for meat, but I wish that weren't so.

The only purpose for cruelty to livestock animals seems to be that it saves people time, money, and effort.

I agree with you about owing animals decency and respect to protect them from being kicked like in the video and to protect them from being raised for slaughter.

I feel the issues of how we can legally treat non-food animals vs. food animals are very much entwined, since raising critter friends to eat them is legal for some "pet" animals like horses and rabbits, and livestock animals often face unnecessarily cruel treatment much worse than a kick.

For example, currently you can have your pet horse killed by a stun bolt to the head followed by cutting the horse's throat: "The American Veterinary Medical Association, AVMA, has defined the method used by slaughterhouses to slaughter large animals as humane euthanasia. In other words, the use of the captive bolt to knock a horse unconcious and then cut the horse's throat is defined by the AVMA as 'humane euthanasia.'" Equine Protection Network - Horse Slaughter is Not for Pet Food!

So in the U.S. you can legally bang a horse's head with a bolt before slitting her or his throat, but you can't kick a cat.

Quick answer because I should really be getting ready for work:-

^ That´s a fair comment, WhateverDude. I was indulging in "reductio ad absurdum", taking an arguement to a ridiculous extreme, which, I accept, can be pretty annoying!
^ I agree with Pet Sounds, and here´s a relevant statistic from Wikipedia to back him up :-

If you don´t want to do the math, that´s like $66,600 per inmate per year back in 2009. Add on inflation to bring it up to date and that´s an even bigger number. I say let the cat-kicker go and use that money to plug some gap in the welfare system.

^ Good answer, and a welcome breath of humour!

@Vegangelica:
It´s a real pleasure to see you post again, Vegangelica. As so often, you bring a more enlightened attitude to the discussion and I´m much happier with your suggestions about compassion and education than Batlord´s approach of breaking legs! :laughing:

few points, reading over the posts in this thread:

1. if dude punched another person in the face i doubt he'd be looking at a year in jail. this isn't a useful example of criminal justice. putting him in jail for a year only makes it more likely that he will come out an even worse person than he was before. there really isn't anything being accomplished here besides vicarious revenge.
2. karma is bull****.
3. property is not a synonym for inanimate. animals can be property, plants can be property, fungus can be property, bacteria can be property. the only form of life than can't be property (in civilized countries) is human, and even that is a rather recent innovation.
4. people are still unwilling to look themselves in the mirror for the morally bankrupt hypocrites we truly are.

Having an internally consistent moral code does not make you moral, it just makes you logical. I don't care how hypocritical my own morality may be. I am satisfied with it. I can eat a hamburger and still look myself in the mirror, but not if I kicked a cat. Whether or not this makes sense doesn't particularly concern me, as the contradiction obviously isn't making me lose any sleep, and I'd rather worry over things that I don't have to convince myself to worry over.

so hypocrisy is apparently irrelevant to morality. who knew? i mean i'm not trying to to convince you to lose sleep. but you speak about morality as if its sole purpose is to make you feel better about yourself.

A year? Probably not. Depends on criminal record and context. I knew someone who did I think 3 or 4 months for assaulting a bouncer so it definitely varies. He did the same thing again and got 6mo. I'm not sure how extremely you mean your statement but as a society we certainly can't have people just walking around punching people in the face and getting away with it... ideally.

The hell? Who brought up karma? It's legal consequence. He kicked a cat and for the reasons I've already stated his actions deserve repercussions.

Perhaps not but that still doesn't mean animate property should be treated exactly the same as inanimate.

****ing what? Again, what does this have to do with anything? What point are you trying to make about what's being discussed here? We're talking about the ethical treatment and legal rights of animals, not some vague boring existentialist woe is me bull****.

As far as morality on a personal level goes, that's kind of all that it is. Does stealing make you feel like ****? Then don't steal. Does punching your mother in the face make you feel like an *******? Then don't punch your mother in the face. Does it make you feel good to work toward the betterment of society by living up to a moral code that you hope will rub off on the rest of the world and leave it a better place? Then do that. But, that doesn't particularly concern me, so I restrict myself to worrying about the moral questions that cause me actual worry, regardless of how my conclusions might affect the world if others were to adopt them.

TLDR: The Batlord is not a role model.

I f*cking hate how similar we think about things sometimes. :D

@sshole :beer: