Just a shadow. A ghost. Looking, observing, unblinking, an occasional attempt to emulate, failing.
for the infinitesimal number of people who read this, hello
this is a place for my thoughts/writings
I like drawing, writing, cooking, sleeping
I am mostly alone, therefore my social skills are terrible. I'm also a slow thinker
☆~
The worldview she was brought up into believing seemed so fragile now. The intricate blinders forced over her eyes began to chip away. They fall and break, splintering apart into gossamer threads. The threads shatter into nanoparticles, imperceptible. It fell apart so easily, as if it was made to be broken.
All that she was forced into believing seemed so much like delusion now. How was she able to go her whole life without a single meaningful thought? It was as if all her essence—no, the whole world was a monolith being meaninglessly regurgitated, over and over, never to cease.
What will she do now? There was no unseeing it, nor could she look past it. But what could be done, other than stare blankly at the ceiling, at the walls, thinking of nothing, of everything, of the inevitabilities, of the what-ifs, and what will be? It was over.
i find it weird when I see 'vegans' making a case for hunting, killing fish, free range, like basically just hating factory farms for cruel treatment but being fine with everything else...I saw factory farm footage too, but I logically applied it to all animals and went crazy doing a lot of research (but that's probably my obsessive personality). I thought that the act of killing someone was the problem, not how they were treated...the last time I ate flesh from a poor chicken was a free range one my parents killed themselves, and my mom told me that this one ran around in the grass and whatever, but like that was when it clicked. like that's a dead body I was eating someone's dead body and I couldn't do it anymore it's wrong
and traditionally my ancestors (fuck ancestor worship) farmed and ate animals they killed themselves...0 factory farming. but it's still wrong because it involves seeing individuals as objects to use and consume as a means to an end...disregarding their personhood... everyone in my family is also stupid as fuck, like genuinely unintelligent and are also racist, homophobic, etc
i also hate qurbani, why are you killing this animal and calling it a sacrifice, kill yourself. I don't get it. my dad went to kill a goat or sheep I don't remember, and his friends son got butted by him and he went to the hospital (he didn't get seriously injured unfortunately). like he was defending himself by crazies going to murder him....
im only depending on my parents because I need money and my dad will provide me everything, like he will pay for college in full so no loans (which is kind of useless because I ended up going to community college and I don't think I will make it to university honestly, maybe in the future? I'm so done with school...) he will buy a car for me, gives me his card to use and doesn't admonish me for it, but I hardly spend anything anyways. I know I'm more privileged than 99% of humans (especially girls and women) and I'm grateful for it...but I still want to get out of here and I need money for that, I have to do evil investing just to afford a house because it's very expensive. I just started a month ago and i've already made over 7% !!!!! wtf. my only life goal is to be independent, if it can't work out I will kill myself because it's the only thing i'm living for, or maybe it's a cope since survival instinct will stop me anyways.
maybe it is all a dream since I am a very dependent person, since the day I was born I slept next to my mom and for the next 13 years, only when I couldn't anymore. I crave to be independent and basically live like a monk but I'm scared I won't be able to do it alone...i'm not very smart and naturally anxious all the time (irrational). I don't even like my mom but I don't have anyone else...but I don't know. even if I found a soulmate I probably would be too obsessive and clingy like a parasite, and very annoying. idk.
i have this ambitious goal and yet I struggle with taking 2 community college classes at a time, like my cousin has to take 10 classes minimum and he's 14....
i also made a google doc called 'why' and i'm using it to explain and justify my beliefs for what I believe in and why because I think it's very important to have a strong grounding
i hate having to act 'normal' around my parents, when I can rely on myself I will be honest, but for now I have to keep up the facade because I don't know what could happen...realistically my dad won't take me out of the will but i'm anxious...I wish I was more brave and had a stronger urge to stand up for myself and others...I'm such a doormat and when I get angry I cry it's so pathetic. like I can't stand the sound of my voice, it's so feminine and has no conviction even when I genuinely feel seething rage. it brings me back to reality and I feel like a girl which is the worst feeling. and would it even do anything? change has to come from within, you can't force people to have morals and no one cares about anything. idk what I'm blabbing about. I pity whoever reads this to the end
self neutrality. ignore self positivity stuff. neutrality neutrality neutrality. you are a machine that you are trying to use to reduce harm. nothing more nothing less.
also having a clear understanding of negative utilitarianism. causing harm is bad. nothing else is. all value revolves around suffering and the reduction of suffering. if you are not causing harm, you are neutral, which is the best thing. if you are causing harm, you are negative, and should correct the behavior. you dont need to care if you look ugly. you dont need to care if someone didnt like you. not being pleasing to others and ugly looks are not causing harm. embarrassed yourself by missing a social cue? not causing harm, so who gives a single fuck.
Maybe my most deranged post yet. Grab the popcorn.
I'm going fucking insane.
Why prolong the end of the world?
No, seriously, can someone tell me what is the point of all this?
People cry about the declining insect populations and how sad it is that they don't hear thousands of flies exploding to death against their car windshields anymore.
Why do they cry? What is so sad about extinction?
Is extinction sad for the animals? Certainly not. I doubt bug angels are weeping in bug purgatory that they never got to be splattered.
Did you know spiders inject their prey with enzymes that break down the tissues and then slurp up the dissolved innards? Do you have any idea how much it sucks to be a bug? To be digested alive? Have you ever even given it a thought?
Do bugs suffer? Of course they do. The very notion that they have no subjective experience of pain, because they have different brain structures from us, is suspect because - as stated by Asher A. Soryl, Andrew J. Moore, Philip J. Seddon & Mike R. King - accepting that sentience is an evolved trait resulting from the same selective pressures that drive the evolution of other trait within an organism, it is not clear that multiple configurations of neurons could not perform the same functions in relation to mental states in other animals. Mikhalevich & Powell (2020) state: The assumption that small brains are unlikely to support cognition or sentience likewise persists, despite growing evidence that arthropods have converged on cognitive functions comparable to those found in vertebrates. Exclusion of invertebrates with central nervous systems from bioethics and science policy is not justified by the current state of the evidence. Moral consistency dictates that the same standards of evidence and risk management that justify policy protections for vertebrates also support extending moral consideration to certain invertebrates. Invertebrate brains comprise upwards of 99% of the brains that exist on Earth. Cognitive theorists have begun to appreciate the intellectual rewards of studying invertebrate cognition and sentience. It is time that ethicists and policy makers do the same. According to Asher Soryl - Ph.D candidate researching the proposed discipline Welfare Biology at the University of Otago Bioethics Centre - even if we assume that there is only a 0.01 likelihood that terrestrial arthropods have a mental welfare, and if they do, that their moral standing is only 0.01 compared to the full moral standing of a regular mammal or bird the case for considering terrestrial arthropods is upwards of ten thousand times more than the case for considering mammals and birds. Snoozing on the pressing questions regarding their welfare is a recipe for moral catastrophe.
And it's not just bugs; It's the rodents and the fowl and the fish and the amphibians and the reptiles. The overwhelming majority of the animals of the overwhelming majority of species appear to have significant suffering but little (or no) happiness in their lives. They live painful lives and die painful deaths. Atlantic cod can lay from a few thousand to several million eggs. It entails that each time these animals reproduce, 6337.7529 years consisting of nothing but suffering is experienced. If this continues over an average human lifespan, the number of years of pure suffering generated would be 380,265.174. All this for a very specific species in a very specific area. And the rest of animal kind ain't much better. All animals reproduce in excess of the carrying capacity of their environments. Even the 'luckiest one', let's say, a wildebeest - who wasn't spawn camped by a cackle of hyenas while still inside the amniotic sac - doesn't have much to celebrate. Did you know predators often start to eat their prey from genital and anal regions? Like yea he got eaten alive balls first (maybe don't click this one), but at least he got to like. eat grass. yippee.
It's a fucking Ragnarök out there.
Life is mostly dying. Torturous dying. Why should such lives be lived? They should not. If a human baby would know such a short and painful life, we would abort the thing before they draw their first breath. Flush the slink down the toilet and say "it is only merciful". I'm telling you all, the whole animal kingdom is deserving of mercy. Why should anyone be condemned to live a life of absurd torment? Because it's the life they are expected to have? But what justification is there in thinking, that the life a creature is expected to have is therefore good by default? Could it not be, that a creature kind has been cursed with life that is wholly wretched? Nature is nothing but a mechanism that pushes genes into the future; there is no reason to believe that the lives a blind and mindless mechanism produces are automatically worth living.
People claim that reducing wild animal suffering is not possible, but plausible estimate is that the average person on Earth prevents ~1.4 * 10^7 insect-years by their environmental impact each year. So we already have. By accident.
Is nature good? If a system isn't good for those who live within it, then who is it good for? Who are you fighting for?
Yes no shit we need nature to maintain mankind. But doesn't it seem absurd to anyone, that quintillion sentient creatures should live in perpetual cloning-shredding-machine, for the sake of these ridiculous apes, who good portion of the time, use those natural resources only to spread further misery amongst themselves? There are approximately 1.4 billion insects for every person on Earth. And the average human lumbering about isn't even all that happy. I wake up 6:30 and prepare myself for servitude for our bourgeois overlords. I take a shower and wash away the sweat and bacterial gunk culminated all over my decaying body, thinking thoughts that lead to nowhere. And when I brush my teeth in front of the bathroom mirror and see pair of dead eyes staring, how could I seriously think that my vapid existence is worth all the torture it takes to maintain it? How could anyone? I already talked about how life itself is the Omelas, except way worse; billions of children tortured to death in filth and in darkness for every fuckass Bob.
Is anyone else disturbed by this? No? Just me? Ok.
What is the solution? IS there a solution?
Tumblrinas out here hallucinating the revolution is happening soon - that people will overthrow capitalism and establish some solarpunk hippie commune where people live "in harmony with nature" aww! Reblogging some shit like "maybe a system where for some thrive, many have to suffer is a bad system". What do you girlies think nature IS? Mother nature is a cruel bitch that feeds itself by cannibalizing its weakest babies. I can't stand this pseudo-spiritual hippie wankerism. If even the best world people can come up with (already propaganda by the Big Cheery) only benefits 0.0000001% of it's inhabitants, then a better world is not possible.
Quality of the experiences of sentient creatures is the only coherent reason to care about life, Earth or anything at all. "Nature lovers" say they care about earthlings. If you really cared about earthlings, you'd nuke the world and then nuke it some more.
Suffering is the one subject where the more personal experience you have and the more qualified you are to speak on it, the less seriously people take you. "You're only an antinatalist because you've had a miserable life surrounded by miserable people!" Um, yeah. That's exactly right. How exactly does my being intimately aware of how horrible suffering can be and how severely it can impact people make my perspective on it less legitimate? Would you tell a disabled person, or somone who worked with disabled people, who was advocating for better community support for disabled people, that their views were irrationally skewed because they themselves were disabled, or because they were too involved with others who were disabled? Would you tell someone who was critical of capitalism, because of all of the poverty they've witnessed as a result of it, that they're too biased by their concern for the poor to have a reasonable take on the issue? Would you tell someone who went through the foster care system, and felt that we should improve it, that they only felt that way because they personally were a victim of it, implying that their victimhood did not itself constitute legitimate evidence towards the foster care system's failures?
"You only think the way you do about X because you're a personal victim of X/you've witnessed so much harm caused by X, and your thoughts on X are therefore invalid" is the most blatantly unempathetic and moronic take possible on anything, but this is the exact "argument" I get from people whenever the X in question is suffering itself. It's the same "argument" that is used to shut down criticism of ideologies ("you only hate religion because it harmed you and/or other people"), political beliefs ("you only disagree with X policy because it harms you and/or other people"), and unjust systems of all kinds ("you only want things to be different because the status quo harms you and/or other people"). Like, yeah, you're right, I do only have the perspective I do because harm is being caused and harm is wrong and bad. That's called having empathy. If I can go through something so awful that it makes my life not worth living, then I don't even need to see firsthand how others might suffer, I just know already that other people can suffer that much, because I am human and other people are human, too, and that knowledge would be enough to go off of on its own. But I'm not just relying on my personal experience, I'm also taking into account the suffering I have seen others endure, both firsthand and indirectly, and again it's called having empathy. I understand that other people's pain is just as significant as, and is equally as unjust as, my own pain. Every person who endures decades of torment is just as much a victim as I would be if I went through the same thing. They are just as underserving of their fates as I would be if I were them.
I truly think that the thing that separates antinatalists from pronatalists at the end of the day is their capacity for empathy. Even pronatalists who are dedicated to making the world a better place are unwilling to earnestly acknowledge how wretched the world they are trying to improve really is, and the true human cost of that wretchedness being perpetuated, even if only indirectly. They see nothing wrong with new people being subjected to the very evils they have dedicated themselves to fighting. And they see nothing wrong with saddling their own children with the burden of at once being victim to, and participating in, that battle. They whine and rant about how awful the things they and others are subjected to are, they are profusely vocal about the horrors and evils that they have dedicated themselves to exposing and combating, and yet, in their minds, even the most vile manifestations of those evils are not so evil that they warrant preventing others from being able to fall victim to them in the first place. In their minds, there simply is no amount of suffering so severe, or kind of suffering so heinous, that it is not excused or justified or balanced out when the scale is zoomed out and it is considered as part of the larger whole. Life is hell, they'll say, right up until you insist that hell is no place for a child, and then, suddenly, life is a gift. Their empathy, no matter how fervent it may seem, is ultimately shallow and superficial, easily overpowered by their desire to deny the true horror and weight of suffering.
May i ask why youre anti furry/therian? Im not either of those things, just curious lol
Glad you asked, i have a lot to say about it, skip to the end for a tldr
Viewing animals as concepts and visuals that you can make a persona out of contributes to the perception of animals (and others in general) being commodities. It derealizes animals and anthropomorphizes them, it is not a way to respect or portray animals, its the opposite.
I dislike therians for the same reasons and also because its a delusion like any other, and no different from religion, gender ideology, or trans race believers. Its furry taken even further into full blown delusion.
They both also often buy leather and real fur and shit for their stupid costumes, especially if they go to ren fairs.
i hate that theres more art of anthropomorphized endangered species than there are members of those endangered species. i hate that cows are sexually exploited while people are making "strawberry milk cowsonas uwu" with giant boobs and straw hats and shirts that say "milk!"
Need i even mention all the zoophilia coded art. Ive worked as a freelance artist for over a decade, the massive number of furries that request zoophilia porn (art of getting penetrated by or raping animals), sometimes of their real pets which they would send me (normal) images of, made me no longer care that supposedly most furries "only like sfw furry art" (i call absolute bullshit and even if true idc) or "only like anthro furry porn" (thats still zoophilia in my eyes, no im not sorry, it literally is, especially if you cant get off without the animal imagery or you prefer it over human imagery). everytime someone requested a "sfw full body nude ref" they never gave their character human genitals. Always animal genitals. like bruh you literally want animal penis/vagina, you just (supposedly) wouldnt touch a real animal on principle.
Buuuut youll also totally kill and eat animals daily, and youre fine with sticking instruments up their cervixes to force impregnate them and shocking their anuses to collect their semen? and you really think everyone is just like "yeah rape for profit is a-okay but raping them for pleasure is unthinkable"? you really think no people ever are like "yeah raping them for pleasure is fine too"? as an animal rescuer let me tell you- youre dead fucking wrong. animal prostitution and bestiality is a real issue, an estimate 2 percent of the population (and thats just whats reported, we all know animals cannot communicate their abuse) are offenders. from cases i myself have seen personally, the offenders were young men, autistic, and guess what else...ding ding ding. again this is of course not the majority of furries but my point is that i dont trust anybodies morals when it comes to the perception and treatment of others, especially those weaker and unable to speak. i have known a shocking amount of "normal" men who admitted to attempting or successfully raping an animal as a teen.
The sfw art often is extremely self indulgent and very objectifying of animals, drawing them like toys and little fairies that exist solely to bring them joy. i just never liked that kind of thing. i dont like that so many companies even get away with turning that shit into full on dopamine farm gambling addictions for kids. think like, webkins.
My parents used to give me animals like they were toys when i was young. They did not care what happened to them. All the media i was surrounded with as a kid reinforced this idea that animals are toys, toys that exist for self indulgent dopamine farming, even if i never would have said that, even if i would have gotten mad at anyone who outright said it. even if i thought this media made me an animal lover. it did not. and as a result, i saw many animals terribly die. yes, huge blame on my parents of course, but we dont live in a world that respects or cares about animals as it is and this type of content just doesnt help like people think it does. it doesnt teach you respect for animals. it teaches you to love animals the way you love candy. something you play with, and consume. its bad.
I want people to create sonas without using animal body parts as a way to convey tropes and archetypes that harmfully or just incorrectly skew peoples perception of real animals.
i want to see animal characters that are neither anthro nor "feral" (toony animal body but anthro behaviors and thoughts) but are instead just written and portrayed like real animals and respected.
i am not opposed to anime because while most of it is creepy, depicting toddler faced girls on childrens sexualized bodies, this disturbing objectification element isnt inherent to the style or subject matter and there are plenty of anime that depict people more normally. furry on the other hand is inherently objectifying and i wish drawing furry art was not so socially acceptable. its not like i think everyone should only draw animals exactly the way they look in reality, but you can stylize them in countless ways that arent anthropomorphizing.
i also hate fiction where theres a race of animal people and still a subclass of non anthro animals that are being exploited. it just furthers this idea that real animals dont matter, you can even pretend to be them while you kill and eat them if you want. i just really hate all of it. ive never seen any piece of furry media that doesnt disrespect animals and i think it inherently cannot be respectful to them.
mythical animal characters are a bit of a gray area. if they are depicted like real animals, just different (like a dragon that is clearly cat coded) that doesnt bother me really. the ones that are human coded with no animal parts based on real animals are usually fine too. its the grody and often sexualized blending of human and nonhuman animal that i dont like.
this is a very long and rambly rant but tldr:
-sexual furry art is zoophilia
-sfw furry art is still gratification based in objectification of others (and sfw art still can arouse people which is why its important to be mindful of subject matter no matter how youre drawing it)
-therians are the same + delusion (and i oppose all delusions)
-i want to see respectful art/stories that portrays nonhuman animals as the complicated individuals they are, not as a humans costume, sidekick/toy, or human allegory
-im sick of artists having 0 accountability in general and im sick of their actually braindead apologist fans (looking at you made in abyss season 2 enjoyers) and i have 0 tolerance for iffy material anymore, we need to start opposing fictional content with more intensity, the world of art has become like 50 percent soft cp and soft zoophilia and i for one hate that
and yeah i drew kemonomimi art a lot as a kid, i didnt even think anything of it because i was so used to seeing characters with horns and cat ears and shit, but one day i saw a cosplayer of a horned character wearing real horns from some hunted deer and a real mink tail belt keychain, and it disturbed me deeply, and i just started thinking about furry/kemonomimi art in general and realizing how wrong it felt. i thought about how i wouldnt want my horned characters to become popular enough that people wore real dead animal body parts to cosplay them, so i changed all their designs and never used animal body parts on my human designs again.
its better to be a great example of yourself than to pretend you are something else to feel cooler. all that does is fuel self loathing and envious objectification of others.
Killing Animals That Don’t Fit In: Moral Dimensions of Habitat Restoration.
By Jo-Ann Shelton, University of California Santa Barbara
The purpose of this paper is to discuss justifications for the violent destruction of feral animals during habitat restoration projects. Habitat restoration is the process of changing a landscape, which has been altered by human activities, back to an approximation of its former appearance. This process of reversal requires a high degree of human intervention and management. These are, of course, the same human behaviors that produced the initial alterations, the ones which now seem regrettable. I will argue that proponents of the eradication of feral species continue to adhere to an age-old paradigm that assigns value to animals in accordance with human interests. And when they are unwilling to take into consideration the animal distress that their projects cause, they exhibit the same desire to manipulate Nature that has motivated humans from the beginning of our existence as a species.
One goal of restoration is to insure the survival of flora and fauna which existed in a region before the arrival of humans (especially Europeans) and their biological baggage. Killing species which were introduced by humans and which now threaten the survival of species which have inhabited an area for a much longer period seems like a simple, quick and relatively inexpensive remedy. And therefore killing is widely condoned by restorationists, even when the methods -- for example, poisoning, snare trapping, or shooting -- cause considerable pain to the animals. But the infliction of pain by humans raises ethical issues because human, unlike other species, are well aware of the impact of our actions; it is, moreover, an aspect of human nature to have sympathetic impulses and to believe that causing harm is a matter of moral concern. Although animals do, of course, cause one another pain and distress, we humans are not therefore absolved of moral responsibility for the pain and distress that we cause.
When restorationists defend their methods of killing, they assert that they are fulfilling another moral responsibility -- a moral responsibility to preserve biological diversity and to undo ecological damage done by people who had a very different opinion about the natural world. There are several problems with this defense, perhaps the most obvious being that it depends on an internally contradictory definition of Nature, a definition that presumes that Nature is, on the one hand, something separate, autonomous and undisturbed by humans, but also that Nature is, on the other hand, something able to be (re)constructed and managed by humans. Correlative to the first definition, that Nature is an entity free of human interference, is the belief that feral animals (or their domesticated ancestors) have been constructed by humans, are therefore unnatural, and do not belong in a natural landscape. However this disdain for "constructed" animals seems to conflict with the belief expressed in the second definition, that it is appropriate for humans to (re)construct Nature. Also problematic are the assumptions that recreating an archaic landscape is both a feasible goal and a laudable display of human ingenuity.
I want especially to challenge two suppositions: that the killing of feral animals to protect wild species demonstrates a fundamental shift in attitudes toward the natural world, and that we cannot promote the interests of some species without ignoring humane considerations about others. I will argue that the violent destruction of animals perpetuates a philosophy that humans have the right to destroy elements of nature whenever and why ever they choose. To illustrate my argument, I will discuss two examples of mass shootings of grazing animals. In each case, shooters justified the killing on the grounds that the targeted species "did not fit" in the region any more. The first example is the shooting of bison in 19th century America. The second example is the shooting of feral sheep in the final decades of the 20th century in the area of California where I live.
People of European descent killed bison for several reasons: to clear the land for agriculture and herding, to profit from the sale of hides, to reduce the population of native Americans by eliminating their food source, and to have fun. The procurement of food was only one, and frequently not the primary reason for hunting bison.In fact, very often the skinned carcasses were left where the animals had fallen. And sometimes they were not even skinned because they had been shot only for sport (Roe 1970, p, 429; Fleharty 1995, pp. 29 and 255; Danz 1997, pp. 92-114). The hunting of bison for sport became even more popular as railroad lines across the continent were constructed. Consider these accounts from the years 1867 and 1872. (Fleharty, pp. 73-75).
"Few lines of railway in the world offer such facilities for the sportsman and hunter as the Kansas Pacific. Where else in the world can a man recline in the luxuriously cushioned seats of a Pullman Palace car, gliding over the smoothest of tracks, and look out on the immense herds of that Monarch of the Plains -- the Buffalo -- some clumsily cantering along within one hundred yards of the train, and others still further off, watching it with a sort of lazy stupid wonder."
"Nearly every railroad train which leaves or arrives at Fort Hays on the Kansas Pacific Railroad has its race with these herds of buffalo; and a most interesting and exciting scene is the result. The train is ‘slowed’ to a rate of speed about equal to that of the herd: the passengers get out fire-arms which are provided for the defense of the train against the Indians, and open from the windows of the cars a fire that resembles a brisk skirmish. Frequently a young bull will turn at bay for a moment. His exhibition of courage is generally his death-warrant, for the whole fire of the train is turned upon him or some member of the herd in his immediate vicinity".
Hunters were not deterred by sympathetic impulses, as this 1879 account reveals (Collison 1963, p. 56). "I have killed, and seen killed, thousands of buffalo cows. They were skinned and their calves were left to starve to death or be eaten by the wolves and coyotes….These little calves were lying by the dead cows. We had to keep driving them away while skinning the cows. I saw some of them trying to suck the cows. After the mothers were skinned and the hides were in the wagon, the calves would follow. They could smell the hides and would follow them to the hide yard. They were gone the next morning -- back to where they had sucked the last time, either to starve to death or be killed by the wolves."
The relentless slaughter of millions of bison prompted no moral concern because their killers were eradicating a species that impeded human interests in exploiting the land. Buffalo occupied areas which could be grazed by domesticated animals or cultivated for crops. Consider this justification by Frank Mayer, one of the last professional buffalo hunters (Mayer and Roth 1958, p. 27). "The buffalo served his mission, fulfilled his destiny in the history of the Indian, by furnishing him everything he needed-- food, clothing, a home, traditions, even a theology. But the buffalo didn't fit in so well with the white man's encroaching civilization -- he didn't fit in at all, in fact. He could not be controlled or domesticated. He couldn't be corralled behind wire fences. He was a misfit. So he had to go."
In an era when wilderness was a region waiting to cultivated, grazed, mined, logged, or otherwise utilized for human economic benefit, bison had few defenders. Let me now turn to a contemporary situation: the shooting of sheep on Santa Cruz Island, which lies off the southern California coast, about 26 miles from Santa Barbara. The island's long isolation from the mainland allowed the evolution of several species and sub-species of plants and animals. The earliest human immigrants to the Island were Chumash Indians who settled there about 10,000 years ago. Europeans reached the Island in the 18th century and subsequently introduced domesticated plants and animals, particularly sheep, cattle, pigs and horses (as well as, inadvertently, alien wild species). Activities that have altered the landscape over the last two centuries include the grazing and rooting of the introduced animals, the clearing of native vegetation to make room for cultivated plants, the cutting of trees for timber, and the construction of roads and buildings. Even the suppression by humans of periodic wildfires, which play an important role in maintaining the health of southern California ecosystems, has contributed to modifying the landscape. In response to these various changes, populations of indigenous plants have been reduced. Conversely, introduced plants, particularly fennel and thistle, are thriving (Brumbaugh 1980; National Park Service 1985, pp. 6-10 and 40). By 1980, when ranching operations had become unprofitable for the several private owners of Santa Cruz Island, opportunities arose for the acquisition of the land by groups interested in restoration and conservation (Gherini 1994). In 1978, The Nature Conservancy purchased an interest in the western 90% of the Island, about 54,500 acres, over which it assumed full control in 1987. In 1997, the National Park Service acquired the eastern 10%, about 6200 acres, and incorporated it into the Channel Islands National Park which had been created in 1980.In 2000, The Nature Conservancy transferred 8500 of its acres to the Park Service (Burns 2000). In both areas, cattle had been removed by their owners to the mainland for slaughter, but large numbers of sheep and pigs, and a small number of horses had been abandoned to free-roam and thus become feral. Despite its name, The Nature Conservancy planned not simply to conserve populations of pre-Columbian plants and animals, but to restore a pre-Columbian landscape. The two goals are similar, but not identical. Conservation allows for a possible co-existence of species; restoration is a type of biological cleansing, an "exorcism of the exotics" (Holloway 31) that requires that all European elements be removed in order to recreate an archaic scene. The Nature Conservancy considered it necessary to eliminate the sheep as quickly as possible, and, in December, 1981, it instituted a program of shooting them (Schuyler 1993). By June of 1989, over 37,000 sheep had been killed. The success of the restoration program has been compromised by some of its consequences. The extermination of grazing animals has, for example, encouraged the unwanted expansion of the introduced fennel, which now dominates 10% of the Nature Conservancy property and is spreading more rapidly than other species.
One study notes that "the most important factor contributing to the recent expansion of fennel was the rapid removal of cattle and feral sheep from Santa Cruz Island" (Brenton and Klinger 1994; also Beatty and Licari 1992; Klinger, Schuyler and Sterner 1994). In the ecosystem which evolved in the 20th century, grazing activities had served a beneficial role in restricting the spread of introduced plants and thus in maintaining a diversified biotic community on the Island. It was unlimited grazing, rather than simply grazing, which was so destructive. The Nature Conservancy acknowledges that its removal of grazing animals may have precipitated the unwelcome explosion of fennel and it is now trying to eliminate the fennel by a combination of controlled burns and herbicides, which kill native as well as non-native plants (Dash and Gliessman 1994; Burns 1997a, 1997b and 1998; Hamm 1998; Aschehoug 2001). Another unanticipated result of the shooting of the sheep has been an increase in the population of feral pigs, which has grown from several hundred to several thousand (Pearl, Patton and Lohr 1994). In addition, golden eagles that have been attracted to the Island by the abundant supply of piglets are hunting to extinction the indigenous Santa Cruz Island fox (Van De Kamp 2000; Davison 2003; Schoch 2003). The fox population plummeted from about 1500 in 1994 to fewer than 100 in 2003. Against the pigs, the National Park Service and The Nature Conservancy are planning “an all-out assault, including the use of rifle squads" (Polakovic 1999). Former Park Superintendent, Tim Setnicka, called the planned assault “the last big roundup”, even though the pigs will be shot, rather than removed from the Island alive (Polakovic 1999; Kelly 2002). The grim determination to eradicate the pigs is described by one reporter thus: "Like the Pentagon facing an entrenched army, the Park Service is girding for an all-out war on pigs on Santa Cruz Island. There will be no prisoners taken in this campaign" (Burns 2001). Militaristic metaphors figure prominently in discussions about eradicating feral animals, and they have the effect of framing the issue as a moral one, in which the forces of "good" (humans) are engaged in a contest with the forces of "evil" (feral animals). To save the few remaining foxes, bald eagles are being brought in to drive out the golden eagles (Polakovic 1999; Todd 2004). These experiments in restoration reveal the problems inherent in suddenly removing elements from a biotic community on a species by species basis. They should instruct us of the complex interactions of the various elements of the present day Island ecology and the need to take into account the contributions of the introduced animals. They should certainly lead us to question whether restoration, as distinct from conservation, is a feasible goal, and, if not, why animals are being shot in pursuit of it.
Like the Nature Conservancy, the National Park Service wishes to recreate a pre-Columbian scene. However its mandate, as stated in the General Management Plan, is not simply to restore wilderness, but to open it for the pleasure of human visitors (National Park Service 1985, pp. 81 and 82). This mandate is flawed by an internal contradiction, because humans of European descent are, of course, as much an anachronism as sheep and pigs in a pre-Columbian landscape. Nonetheless, the Park Service, in accordance with its charge, has constructed camp grounds and hiking trails and encourages people to enjoy the experience of placing themselves in a scene which approximates the pristine wilderness of an earlier period. Ironically it has also left standing structures built by the ranchers, in order to retain the "historic scene" of the ranching era, but without the ranch animals (National Park Service 1985, pp. 36, 37, 41, 44 and 45). The projected increase in annual human visitors to the Island will contribute to the degradation of the land and adjacent ocean water. The Park Service has no tolerance, however, for other non-native species, and had planned to shoot the feral sheep, pigs and horses once it took possession of the east end. In fact, in the days surrounding the Park Service takeover on February 10, 1997, about 1000 sheep were shot near the boundary between the National Park and The Nature Conservancy properties (Burns 1997a). The Nature Conservancy, as mentioned above, had been shooting sheep since 1981, but in relative secrecy because access to the property was very restricted. However the shootings in the early part of 1997, which coincided with the opening of the Park property, received considerable media attention. The public responded with outrage to newspaper reports and television film of wounded sheep trying to crawl to safety, of lambs starving by their dead mothers, and of rotting carcasses strewn on the hillsides. Yielding to public pressure, but not admitting wrong-doing, the Park Service rounded up the sheep and send them to the mainland for sale at a livestock auction (Burns 1997a; MacGregor 1997; Schultz 1997; Polakovic 1999). (The horses were moved off the island to a horse sanctuary.) Public disapproval of the shooting was prompted by two considerations: that it was wasteful, because the carcasses were left to rot or be eaten by carrion birds, and that it was cruel, because wounded sheep and nursing lambs were left to suffer. People thus reacted in the same way that most of us do to the accounts of bison hunts -- and with the same moral concern, that is, that the reasons for killing the animals did not justify the cruelty and wantonness of the process. However proponents of the sheep killing dismissed the criticisms as sentiments expressed by people ignorant of the goals of habitat restoration. The issue I want to explore here is whether there is, in fact, a similarity between the reasons for shooting sheep and the reasons for shooting bison. Restorationists will argue that bison were killed by people whose interests were selfishly anthropocentric, whereas feral sheep and pigs are killed by people whose interest is the repair of damage done to the environment by previous generations of thoughtless humans. The goals certainly seem distinct, but there is a common denominator here: it is we humans who make the determination that a species does not "fit in", that it has "to go", and we make this determination on the basis of whether the existence of that species conflicts with our own interests -- our interests at one time being economic expansion, at another time being the pleasure of visiting restored landscapes. Eric Aschehoug, a Nature Conservancy biologist, has said about the slaughter of pigs on Santa Cruz Island: "We are interested in restoring an island. Unfortunately, the pigs are in the way" (Kelly 2002).
Our interest in turning back the ecological clock and recreating a landscape which existed before the introduction of European species is controversial. Consider the comments of William Cronon, arguing for the need for a critical reassessment of our ideas about nature and wilderness (Cronon 1996, p. 24). "Recent scholarship has clearly demonstrated that the natural world is far more dynamic, far more changeable, and far more entangled with human history than popular beliefs about ‘the balance of nature’ have typically acknowledged. Many popular beliefs about the environment are premised on the conviction that nature is a stable, holistic, homeostatic community capable of preserving its balance more or less indefinitely if only humans can avoid ‘disturbing’ it. This is in fact a deeply problematic assumption. ’”Similarly Mark Sagoff, arguing against "all-out battles" against exotic species, comments that "ecosystems lack order, purpose, and design; they have no balance to disrupt" (2000). Species introductions and environmental change take place without anthropogenic influences. Had Santa Cruz Island remained until this day entirely free of any European human invasion, it would still not be the same as it was in 1400 AD. And even if we were able now to restore its 1400 AD scene, its proximity to the mainland will produce repeated introductions of “exotic” plants and animals through the actions of winds, currents, and human visitors. Therefore restoration will be an on-going process, managed by humans, and requiring constant intervention. The result -- the conservation of native species -- is arguably desirable, but the process of achieving and maintaining a pre European scene will be only as “natural” an activity as is landscape architecture. It is human will and technology that convert wilderness to garden, and garden to wilderness. And it is a paradox that the ideology of nature and wilderness which abhors anthropogenic changes must also depend on anthropogenic changes to reconstruct landscapes.
Restorationists contrast their assignment of intrinsic value to the natural world with the view that nature is valuable only for human exploitation. Kate Faulkner, chief of natural resources for the Channel Islands National Park, says "we used to value the islands for commodity production and now we're in a new era of restoration and environmental protection of natural plants and removal of animals that are causing lots of destruction" (Polakovic 1999). Restoration requires the disruption of an existing ecosystem which is deemed to be "unnatural". Consider the polarization expressed in the comment that "introduced animals represent a deadly threat to the natural ecosystem of the islands" (Schoenherr, Feldmeth and Emerson 1999). Justification for restoration relies, first, on the construction of conceptual distinctions between "native" and "introduced", “indigenous” and “exotic”, “wild” and “feral” -- distinctions which may not be tenable in situations where the so-called “exotic” species are actually “native” elements of the present biotic community -- and, second, on the construction of preferences for “indigenous”, “native” and “wild”. However restorationists do not simply prefer one group over another; they dismiss the other group as having no value at all and no claim for moral consideration. Having been deprived of their commodity value, the feral animals that "are causing lots of destruction" are granted no intrinsic value.
Feral animals are animals that were once domesticated, or whose ancestors were once domesticated, but have escaped or been released from their interdependence with human beings. Although self-sufficient and free-roaming, they differ from animals that we term “wild” because they belong to those species, very small in number, which have been domesticated and they can, if captured, become domesticated. There is a difference, for example, between a horse and a zebra, the former belonging to a species whose members can be trained to work with and for humans, the latter to a species whose members remain intractable, even if the occasional zebra can be taught a trick. Feral animals have undoubtedly been a phenomenon since the time that humans first began to utilize animals, but the separation of feral animals into a category distinct from wild animals is a recent development. We are generally not interested in making the distinction unless the feral animals are frustrating our attempts to conserve other species or to recreate a landscape. For example, free-ranging horses and pigs in other parts of California are referred to simply as “wild horses” and “wild pigs”. Farmers and ranchers, for example, include free-roaming horses and pigs in the category of wild animals such as deer, and target them for extermination when they destroy cultivated areas, compete with domesticated animals for resources, and endanger human economic well- being. Restorationists, however, call the free-roaming pigs of Santa Cruz Island “feral” in order to deny them any claim to be part of the wild (i.e. "natural") landscape. During the millennia that humans have been herders and cultivators, we have prospered, both by establishing a co-dependent relationship with a few tractable species (Diamond 1997), and by ruthlessly eliminating any species which threatened our food supply by occupying land we wanted to farm, or by eating crops we planted, or by preying on our livestock. Our ancestors constructed both physical and mental boundaries between domesticated space, which was predictable and safe because humans had imposed order, and wilderness, which seemed chaotic and unsafe because it was beyond our control. In the traditions of Classical art and literature, it was not trackless forests and rugged mountains that inspired artists, but rather landscapes of orchards and pastures. The pastoral scene demonstrated an ideal situation where elements of nature lived together peacefully, controlled, but also protected by the pastor, which is the Latin word for "shepherd", "the man who ensures a safe pasture for his flocks". The use of the image of the "good shepherd" as a religious metaphor for the benevolent deity indicates that the imperative to secure pastoral regions was given an ethical as well as an economic dimension.
Only recently have we begun to reconsider our place in nature and to admit that our promotion of our own species has been achieved at the expense of most other species. As we calculate the damage done by our exploitative practices, we have developed an appreciation for the scientific, aesthetic, and spiritual values of uncivilized areas. It is not coincidental, of course, that American society is now overwhelmingly urban, which means that we can cherish wild-ness without experiencing its threats directly. Today fewer than 5% of the American people make their living directly from agriculture. Most of us never see, much less touch, care for or worry about protecting, the animals whose flesh we eat or whose skins and wool we wear. They no longer share our lives of domestic security and, hidden from view in factory farms and feed lots, they are seldom objects of our moral concern. On the other hand, we now rarely feel threatened by wild animals. Comfortably ensconced in our urban jungles, we no longer perceive deer as pests who devour our grain fields, or wolves as predators who kill our sheep and cattle. In fact, we now romanticize wild species. The wolf, for example, once hunted to near extinction, has been converted from a frightening icon of unrestrained violence to a cherished icon of unrestrained freedom. And, as we assign a high value to wild species, we also develop an interest in conserving their habitat. In most cases, this new system of valuation has produced positive results and encouraged us to consider the interests of animal and plant species which we have never domesticated. Bison, for example, are no longer seen as our competitors for land use. The animals described by the Pullman car hunters as clumsy and stupid have now become symbols of American strength and independence. In reality, of course, bison could no longer exist independent of human management plans. Having reduced their population from millions to thousands, we restrict their movement to designated areas, and we control and protect them within the boundaries we have established. The very process of managing wild species and defining preserves for them blurs the traditional distinctions between wild and domesticated space. Thus, in our modern post-pastoral world, we have ironically become the shepherds of wild species. Sometimes we even bring them into our urban spaces to care for them. For example, indigenous foxes from Santa Cruz Island have been removed to a mainland zoo for protection.
At the same time, however, that we are willing to endorse human management of wild species, we continue to cherish the illusion that wild and civilized spaces, or natural and human activities, are mutually-exclusive realms. We have retained the conceptual dichotomy developed by our ancestors, but with two modifications important to this discussion: we now assign an intrinsic value to wild species, but we have removed feral animals from the category of “wild”. On Santa Cruz Island, the alternative to shooting the sheep was to assign them to the category of domesticated animals and ship them to a livestock market, that is, to assign them value only as commodities. For the biologists and managers of the National Park Service and The Nature Conservancy, the process of the sheep’s adaptation to their environment is of no interest to the study of natural processes.
In areas that we choose to “re-wild” -- a term used by some proponents of restoration (Soule and Noss 1998) -- the presence of feral animals like sheep and pigs offends us because we associate these species with cultivated landscapes.We therefore label the animals as “misfits” and refuse to accept them as a natural element of the landscape into which they were born and are therefore native. Frank Mayer noted that “the buffalo didn’t fit in with the white man’s encroaching civilization … so he had to go.” Today, feral sheep and pigs don’t fit in with restoration plans or with our changing vision of how the non-urban environment should look, so they have to go. The words “introduced” and “exotic” have replaced “predator” and “pest” as terms which destine an animal for extermination.
The restoration experiments on Santa Cruz Island have indicated that the rapid and total removal of sheep produces new ecological problems, and that limited grazing may be a better strategy if the goal is to insure the survival of a pre-Columbian species. Nonetheless, many restorationists argue for the total removal of feral animals. Their goal is not simply the protection of some species, which can be achieved
without the violent removal of others, but also the re-creation of a landscape from the days of yesteryear, a scene which humans can visit, but where feral animals are unwelcome because they remind us of our exploitative practices and shatter our illusion that we have constructed a pristine wilderness. Our ancestors took pride in their ability to convert wilderness into civilization; we take pride in our efforts to turn a few cultivated areas into a semblance of their former appearance, and we do not want the presence of feral animals to ruin the picture that we have created.
The disdain for feral animals is linked to the contempt for domesticated animals which many environmentalists express, even as they enjoy the products of the environmentally damaging and bio-uniform meat and wool industries. For example, deep ecologists have argued that the development of agriculture initiated a regrettable separation of humans from "nature" and that domesticated animals, being both a process and product of agriculture, can therefore never be accepted as a part of "wilderness" (Foreman 1991, p. 69). Defending their practices against criticism that restored areas are human artifacts (Elliot 84, Katz 85), restorationists argue that they facilitate, not fake nature." Any restoration is an artifact at the moment that it is deliberately arranged, but it gradually ceases to be so as spontaneous nature returns -- if humans back off and let nature takes its course" (Rolston 91). Restorationists deplore, however, the natural processes which occur when humans "back off" and abandon their domesticated species (their artifacts), and when spontaneous nature takes it course and these species survive and thrive. Many environmentalists agree with J. Baird Callicott's derisive comment that farm animals "have been bred to docility, tractability, stupidity and dependency." They could not, he believes, exist in a wild state. If abandoned, they could not cope with freedom and would "hang around farm outbuildings waiting forlornly to be sheltered and fed… Most would starve" (Callicott 1980). It is curious that environmentalists frequently define our obligations to animal species on the basis of assumptions about whether an animal would or would not take pleasure in being free of our control. We are encouraged to consider the interests of roaming bison and soaring eagles; cattle and chickens, however, warrant only disdain. In fact, in our modern factory farms, we confine chickens in crowded, windowless buildings, prevent them from fulfilling natural functions, and then despise them for not being free. As Karen Davis, writing about factory farmed chickens, notes, we victimize our victims, and justify our abuse of them by maintaining that they don’t deserve moral consideration because they are the stupid, fragile creatures we have turned them into (Davis 1995). They relinquished their claim to moral consideration when they allowed themselves to be exploited and to be robbed by us of their “wild” and “natural” characteristics (Budiansky 1992).
Environmentalists disparage domesticated species for their presumed dependence and weakness (once a source of comfort to us), and cherish the wild species which, until quite recently, we killed because they were "misfits" and, as Frank Mayer said, "could not be controlled or domesticated. "And, even as the buffalo hunters described their prey as stupid, lazy and clumsy, perhaps to rationalize their slaughter, environmentalists like Callicott use similar terms to defend their violence and deprive animals of moral concern.
We are responsible for putting domesticated species into an alien environment, but now we despise them for being there because their presence does not correspond with the concept of wilderness and nature which we have recently come to cherish. And yet, the sheep and pigs abandoned on Santa Cruz Island have proved wrong Callicott’s comments about stupidity and dependence. They have demonstrated an impressive capacity to survive even if their ancestors were "ruined" by millennia of human husbandry, and they deserve our respect if we are sincere in our professions of regard for natural processes. If, moreover, it can be proved that we cannot protect the interests of pre-Columbian species or promote bio-diversity unless we restrict or phase out the grazing of feral animals (Simberloff 1994, on the fragility of island ecosystems), there are less violent methods of reducing sheep and pig populations, such as chemical sterilization (Kirkpatrick, Turner, Liu, and Fayrer-Hosken 1996). Not only would non-violent methods of animal control address the moral issues of causing painful deaths, but a gradual reduction may also address the practical issue of managing the imported plants which had earlier been suppressed by grazing (Brenton and Klinger 1994). I am not suggesting that we abandon our desire to conserve other species, but rather that we develop a system of values which would accommodate the interests of all animals, not just those to which we choose to give preference in our own particular decade or century.
The reasons for shooting bison and shooting feral sheep are similar in that both species were targeted for eradication because they violated our idea of what a particular landscape should look like, and our preference for how the land should be used. Thus, although we may believe that our attitudes toward the natural world have undergone a fundamental conversion, and that we are now more sensitive to the interests of other species, we are actually following a very old paradigm: we exterminate, without moral reservation, any species we determine to be a "misfit".
i will not pretend or lie. Nonvegans are FUCKING STUPID. I genuinely have not met one who isnt an absolutely CLUELESS ass scratching MORON. I say this as someone who is not all that smart myself and who doesn't value iq very much (eq matters more imo. like ok you can build a computer, but have you ever thought about your emotions beyond what youre feeling in the immediate moment?)
They don't know ANYTHING about the food system that supplies them. They don't know ANYTHING about animal welfare laws. They don't know ANYTHINGGGGG ABOUT ENVIRONMENTALISM. They don't know ANYTHING about how their state manages resources. They have 0 experience in activism or voting (outside of presidential elections) and have never gotten active in their communities in any way. They don't know how to effectively fight for any cause they care about. They don't know ANYTHING about food or nutrition in general. They don't even read food labels or know how to pronounce half the ingredients in anything they buy. They don't know what or where anything they buy is sourced from. They don't know how their purchases are affecting anything. They don't know what poverty is like and even if they do they still dont know what foods are cheaper. They don't know how to feed themselves without relying on industry propaganda and spending more than they need to. They don't know what materials are more durable quality or how to even test. They blindly trust all authority with 0 skepticism. They believe a massive slew of superstitious pseudoscience GARBAGE when it comes to food. They can't even make the connection that dairy is whats causing them to constantly have a phlegm filled sinus. They don't know what ANY words mean. They don't know what any definition of any philosophy is. They don't have a healthy understanding of any concept surrounding accountability. They don't understand what a religion is. They have no common sense or dot connecting capabilities at all. They have no pattern recognition. They are completely inflexible thinkers. They don't know about anything, whether on the scale of their immediate surroundings or globally. They don't know anything about veganism or how it's even defined. Whatever they know about any of these things, is unbelievably infantile. Like "stop using plastic straws!" or "look for the okeo tex sticker when buying online!"
BUT THEY WILL SIT THERE FULLY BELIEVING THEY ARE THE EXPERT IN ANY/ALL OF THESE THINGS AND SIT WITH THE SMUG UNAWARENESS OF A TODDLER CLAIMING TO HAVE CARVED MOUNT RUSHMORE. They think they are the cleverest being ever born and the worst part is its often partly true because the well of stupidity in society is infinitely deep and they are probably smarter than most of the people around them if they have even 1 independent thought ever.
Get me the FUCK OUT OF HEREEEE
No I won't care about any comments saying "im not a vegan and i know how to do one of these things i listed" i dont care. stop paying an industry that kills children and exploits countries, fucking idiot. that includes the hunting industry WHICH IS SUPPLIED BY FACTORY FARMS WITH ANIMALS RAISED IN FACTORY FARMS YOU STUPID MORONS, if youve already done that but still get meat/dairy other ways, stop fucking finding excuses to brain animals, it upsets anyone with an ethical conscience and i hate you.
my 13 year old cousin got really mad at me for not calling back my aunt for my birthday because I didn't care. maybe I shouldn't be so mask off but those relatives don't mean anything to me and don't provide anything for me, I try to keep basic propriety to my parents for financial incentive but otherwise I don't care about them
