WILD ELEPHANTS MOURN HUMAN FRIENDS DEATH

 cc_rider wrote: 
Only if you can get them to stay and to use the paper.

EDIT: Otherwise, what Manbird said.

 cc_rider wrote: 
Eww, gross. I'd rather have a pig.

 Umberdog wrote: 
Someday they'll make great pets.

Humans are pretty amazing animals. Best not let it go to their heads, though.

 Manbird wrote: 

...probably not since those halcyon days at Paul Bunyan's, finger-painting workshops...or was it his vineyard?

 Proclivities wrote: 
Neither do I but you don't see me riding around on some purple dude's finger. Or am I?

 Manbird wrote: 
Well, for one thing, he doesn't sound anything like Mumford & Sons.

 Proclivities wrote: 
what's so amazing about that

 kysmet wrote: 

No, no no. There is no climate change, they were doing it because they thought each other were sexy.

 Umberdog wrote:
 
Ecclesiastes, William Burroughs, what's the difference?

Thanks for the correction...

First-ever hybrid shark discovered off Australia

 Manbird wrote: 
Desert Bighorn in Sonora, $60k, The Safari Club Foundation for North American Wild Sheep auctions off bighorn sheep hunts that usually get a quarter of a million (it's a fundraiser but still...). Tanzanian Lions are $60k easy. 

 onlylynne wrote:  My son-in-law has a parrot named bobby.He feeds it well,sometimes lets it fly around the house for half an hour and then its back to its large cage.Funny thing is,when he gets company or the boys are around the bird wont even come out of his cage. Wont go near anyone! But for some strange reason when I go over for a visit,and please dont get me wrong,I'm only bragging a little,but the darn bird goes nuts and wants out so it can come directly to me.He sits on my shoulder or on my head,and the bugger sometimes wants to perch on my schnozola which is a no no.It nibbles my ears and can whistle the first few notes of "Danny Boy". Needless to say I want to take him home forever but I'm away to much and besides my wife would kill me.

 Manbird wrote: 
oh, okay...

 cc_rider wrote: 
Wow... and here I thought that was Ecclesiastes. Just close, I guess.

 oldslabsides wrote: 
I'll send you this book if I can find it. The author doesn't get everything right, IMO but it's a pretty good book. 

Dominion by Matthew Scully

"And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness; and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth."—Genesis 1:24-26

In this crucial passage from the Old Testament, God grants mankind power over animals. But with this privilege comes the grave responsibility to respect life, to treat animals with simple dignity and compassion.

Somewhere along the way, something has gone wrong.

In Dominion, we witness the annual convention of Safari Club International, an organization whose wealthier members will pay up to $20,000 to hunt an elephant, a lion or another animal, either abroad or in American "safari ranches," where the animals are fenced in pens. We attend the annual International Whaling Commission conference, where the skewed politics of the whaling industry come to light, and the focus is on developing more lethal, but not more merciful, methods of harvesting "living marine resources." And we visit a gargantuan American "factory farm," where animals are treated as mere product and raised in conditions of mass confinement, bred for passivity and bulk, inseminated and fed with machines, kept in tightly confined stalls for the entirety of their lives, and slaughtered in a way that maximizes profits and minimizes decency.

Throughout Dominion, Scully counters the hypocritical arguments that attempt to excuse animal abuse: from those who argue that the Bible's message permits mankind to use animals as it pleases, to the hunter's argument that through hunting animal populations are controlled, to the popular and "scientifically proven" notions that animals cannot feel pain, experience no emotions, and are not conscious of their own lives.

The result is eye opening, painful and infuriating, insightful and rewarding. Dominion is a plea for human benevolence and mercy, a scathing attack on those who would dismiss animal activists as mere sentimentalists, and a demand for reform from the government down to the individual. Matthew Scully has created a groundbreaking work, a book of lasting power and importance for all of us.
 
email me your addy (again)

 oldslabsides wrote:
  I think William Burroughs may have said it best. "Man lives, man dies. And it's all vanity."

And when some idiot falls out of the boat and drowns they'll probably kill the whales for not showing sufficient fear of humans.