"Animal activists have been attacking our family, our company, and our employees for decades because they oppose animals in circuses."

"These defendants attempted to destroy our family-owned business with a hired plaintiff who made statements that the court did not believe.... This settlement is a vindication not just for the company but also for the dedicated men and women who spend their lives working and caring for all the animals with Ringling Bros. in the face of such targeted, malicious rhetoric."

The ASPCA pays $9.3 million to get out of this case, which continues against the other defendants, the Humane Society of the United States, the Fund for Animals, Animal Welfare Institute, Animal Protection Institute United with Born Free USA, various lawyers, and a former Ringling employee named Tom Rider.

"A rising tide of outrage is forming after pictures emerged of a 20-year-old diver who dragged a giant Pacific octopus from its watery home..."

"... and then killed and ate it for his friends art project."

[Dylan Mayer] now is in the position of having to justify to the diving community why he hunted the gentle and intelligent animal....

'I eat it for meat. It's no different than fishing. It's just a different animal,' said Mayer...

So what is it — meat or art? Let's not overdo the denunciations. Portraying him as an artist....

ADDED: Octopus art should relate to "The Dream of the Fisherman's Wife."

"Two men who say they’re Berkeley, Calif., law school students have been arrested after police say they killed and decapitated an exotic bird..."

"... that was part of a Las Vegas resort attraction."

... Police say the two men were seen Friday laughing and throwing around the body of a dead, 14-year-old helmeted guineafowl at the Flamingo resort-casino. The large bird was part of the Flamingo’s Wildlife Habitat, a garden area with ponds and streams that houses many types of birds.

Really? These were Berkeley law students? Quite aside from the evil of animal cruelty, this is unfathomably stupid career suicide.

"With plenty of warning to viewers, the film shows what happens at an animal shelter’s last stop..."

"... a fate met by a couple of million dogs each year in the United States. A half-dozen dogs are set into a large metal box. They seem eerily resigned to this moment; no snapping, no squirming, no escape attempts. The lid is shut and sealed, and a worker twists the gas valve. The screams from inside the box are ghastly."

A description of what are probably the most harrowing minutes of the new HBO documentary "One Nation Under Dog." I say probably, because there are also scenes of dogs serving their presumably last days in cages in the shelter — with one dog frantically trying to dig his way under the gate, his paws scraping over the blood-stained concrete. And, in the first segment, covering the law of dangerous dogs, we see a young girl's detached ear and the surgery-prepped site on the side of her head where it will be reattached. By the way, the dog's owner was himself a surgeon, a man who devoted a disturbing amount of time and money to defending his various Rhodesian Ridgebacks from the neighbors they terrorized.

This is an excellent documentary that rolls out the information (and the ultimate message) in a dramatic and compelling way. Simply put, people need to be responsible with their dogs. The ending strongly promotes rescue dogs, and I learned something about where rescue dogs come from. I had thought that it was mostly sick or elderly people getting in touch with the rescue folks and sorrowfully surrendering their beloved pets. Apparently not!

"Foie-mageddon: California in one last foie gras binge before statewide ban."

"... There have been protests, warnings of future black market bootlegging, and even death threats against non-compliant chefs."

... California's only foie gras producer is Sonoma Artisan Foie Gras, which is going out of business, despite business booming with clients placing bumper orders at $60 a pound in the weeks before the ban starts.

Owner Guillermo Gonzalez told The Daily Telegraph: "Our farm is being forced to shut down at the end of June, and the most unfortunate fact is that science has not been given a chance to play a role in this debate.

"Ultimately, chefs' and consumers' freedom of choice is being taken away. Who knows what food product is next?"

"The Myth of Sustainable Meat."

A NYT op-ed, prepping you for the slaughter... of your carnivoraciousness.

Opponents of industrialized agriculture have been declaring for over a decade that how humans produce animal products is one of the most important environmental questions we face. We need a bolder declaration. After all, it’s not how we produce animal products that ultimately matters. It’s whether we produce them at all.

It's noted in the piece that "It is doubtful you can build a genuinely sustainable agriculture without animals to cycle nutrients," which leads to the suggestion that "Farmers could avoid this waste by exploiting animals only for their manure, allowing them to live out the entirety of their lives on the farm...."

Exploiting animals only for their manure.... I don't know about that, but it got me thinking about op-ed writers. You know, they are animals. We could exploit them for their (metaphorical) manure.

Bad "Luck."

A third horse dies, and the HBO show is canceled.

"The bull’s horn pierced the fighter’s lower jaw and came out through his left eye socket."

But 5 months later, Juan José Padilla is back in the ring.

Padilla says "I’m here to promote bullfighting and not to get involved in politics," but it's a big political fight in Spain:

Since 2007 and the start of the financial crisis, bullfighting has come under pressure in Spain because of public subsidy cuts, slashing the number of fights by more than a third. Catalonia stopped bullfighting in September, after its regional Parliament voted to ban it.

But in November, the conservative Popular Party, led by Mariano Rajoy, returned to power after almost eight years of Socialist government. Mr. Rajoy is himself an aficionado of the sport and his party has long spearheaded efforts to enshrine bullfighting in the national cultural patrimony.

How do you feel about bullfighting in Spain?
	It's barbaric and should be banned.
	People can disagree, but at least don't subsidize it, especially during a financial crisis.
	It's fine: part of the culture, it irks Socialists, and the bull has a fighting chance.
pollcode.com free polls

"The cat is a living human animal and doesn't deserve to be basically murdered...."

So said Circuit Judge David Hansher, according to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.

The cat is a living human animal!?

Anyway, the judge sent a man to jail for 6 months for killing a stray cat who was damaging his property. When people kill feral animals on their property, it's inflammatory to call it "murder." The method of killing the cat sound horrible — swinging it by the tail and cracking its head — but the man discovered the cat living in his vacant rental property, where it had been "urinating and defecating all over and tearing up furniture":

He told Hansher that he opened the doors and windows and tried to chase the animal outside, but that it instead hid under the kitchen sink. He said he tried to grab it by the neck but could only reach the tail, and once he pulled it out, the cat began viciously clawing and biting at him.

The judge said: "It's abhorrent and repulsive what you did... I'd rather have an armed robber in front of me than someone like you."

Crazy!

Where's the line between pet costume...

... and tormenting an animal?

Any chance courts might say the West Hollywood ban on selling fur violates the Constitution?

Only in Ilya Somin's dreams:

If the law is challenged, judges will probably conclude that there is at least some “rational basis” for it, such as the need to protect fur-bearing animals from overhunting. Nor will it matter that the law bans the sale of fur clothing, but permits the sale of leather items. Such distinctions are also subject only to minimal scrutiny. Nonetheless, the debate over this case and others like it could help increase public awareness of the need to enforce constitutional protections for economic liberty.

When a ridiculous law is proposed, I assume it was designed to address some specific problem...

... and the drafter simply (and stupidly) forgot to think about what other things would be covered by the text. But this law, making it a 1st degree felony to photograph a farm, has so many inappropriate applications that it's hard to imagine a drafter that oblivious.

And what was the original specific problem that fired him up in the first place? There's this:

Organizations such as PETA and the Animal Rights Foundation of Florida contend [Sen. Jim Norman, R-Tampa] drafted the legislation in response to a number of high-profile exposés that revealed horrific conditions on farms around the country, and worry that without whistleblowers the industry will operate with impunity....

"A 19-year-old Brooklyn woman was arrested Tuesday for beating and killing her family's pet hamster."

"Monique Smith was in a fight with relatives and took out her rage on the helpless critter, which weighed less than four ounces, authorities said. The incident took place in June. It wasn't immediately clear why she was just arrested.... A necropsy showed the hamster had suffered blunt force trauma and liver damage."

"A 63-year-old man... was arrested... after police were informed he was seen touching a female horse in what appeared to be a sexual fashion.... The animal looked to be in pain during the incident."

For touching a horse, a man is arrested, gets his picture in the paper, and will be mocked for the rest of his life. 

Some bystander reported that the horse "looked to be in pain during the incident"? I was going to ridicule the notion of expression on a horse's face, but I Googled "horse face expression pain" and didn't come up empty. I'm no horse expert, but I tend to think there's a lot of subjectivity involved when people look at an animal's face and think they perceive the animal's feelings. And do I even need to mention the difficulty of distinguishing expressions evincing sexual pleasure and those that express pain — even on human faces?

I care about cruelty to animals, but the man had his pants on. I would leave him alone, even if he had his hand somewhere that unsettled an onlooker. Don't the police have better things to do? Putting this poor guy's picture in the paper with this story is the real cruelty.

"Where is the outcry from PETA?"

Asks a commenter at the Isthmus post about the camel the "Daily Show" brought to the protest.

Where's the outcry? Probably hanging out with the outcry from the Freedom From Religion Foundation over the Reverend Jesse Jackson leading a prayer (with the crowd of protesters in the Wisconsin Capitol rotunda):



(By the way, Jackson's prayer does not violate the Establishment Clause, and in fact, he has a free speech right to do what you see in that video. That is my official professorial opinion.)

"The Daily Show" brings a live camel to icy downtown Madison to do a comedy skit, and it gets entangled in a metal fence and falls down horribly.

This is difficult to watch...



Background and more video here. The show's comic actor John Oliver was on the scene. Obviously, the idea was to play on the comparison between Egypt and Wisconsin, which has been pushed by the local protesters.

Truly nauseating. The linked piece in the Isthmus says it "ends happily" because the animal is eventually able to stand up again. Ithmus is a newspaper of sorts. Let's see if — instead of smiling on camera and calling it a happy ending — the reporter finds out where the TV crew got the camel, who thought it was acceptable to bring a camel out in the ice and snow, who decided to put a collapsible metal fence around the animal, what training the handlers had, why the owners of the camel entrusted its welfare to these people, and what ultimately happened to the animal?

I kind of hate driving traffic to the Isthmus (and to the same reporter who wrote an article trashing me as an egotist because I declined to give him an interview), because it seems to be treating this as a kooky, quirky YouTube moment. It's not. It's animal cruelty.

I'd like an investigation. Should someone be prosecuted?

ADDED: The reporter, Jack Craver, apparently obliges John Oliver who tells him to shut off the camera. The animal struggles for 10 minutes, we hear in the final video, but there's no video of most of that — it seems because Craver bowed to the authority of a comedian. Craver refers to Oliver as a "correspondent." Hello? He's an actor.

In that final video, Craver turns the camera on himself right after the animal finally struggles to its legs. I realize he's happy that the animal has managed to stand up, but I find it hard to believe that is a face of a human being that just watched an animal suffer for 10 minutes.

You know, the world is real. And "The Daily Show" is fake.

IN THE COMMENTS: Jack Craver stops in and I respond:

Craver writes: "I did not oblige John Oliver's request to turn the camera off. As the video shows, I kept the camera on and shot two more videos."

You say, in the final video, that there were 10 minutes of the camel on the ground, but you do not show 10 minutes. The video with Oliver ends a few seconds after he asks you to stop, and the next video begins at some later point.

And I don't assert what I don't know. I say "apparently" and "it seems." If you have the full 10 minutes of the suffering camel on the ground. Please post it. Or send it to me and I will post it. And please tell me why your face looked so fresh after looking at that 10 minutes of torture. And why you wrote a cutesy post about it as if you were pleased that you got to see a celebrity and scoop some video.

"It's news to me that my article that you gave a generally positive review last year, and that your husband gave 'a solid A-" was meant to trash you.'"

Well, you need to think a lot harder about a lot of things. You are quite unsophisticated, and I don't particularly enjoy embarrassing you because you are or were a UW student and I am a teacher. See if you can figure out why we addressed your article like that. See? I'm a teacher. I'm trying to teach you to think better. I'm sure you know you were trying to trash me and I am sure your colleagues at the Isthmus knew that and I'm sure the folks around the law school saw it that way. Now, be a man and admit that, and then go back and think through why Meade and I patronized you the way we did.

What Tucker Carlson said about Michael Vick.

"I’m Christian. I’ve made mistakes. I believe fervently in second chances. Michael Vick killed dogs in a heartless and cruel way. I think, firstly, he should have been executed for that. The idea the president of the United States would be getting behind someone who murdered dogs is beyond the pale."

Obama opines on Michael Vick's being given a second chance.

Eagles owner Jeffrey Lurie described the phone call he received from the President:

"He said, 'So many people who serve time never get a fair second chance,' " said Lurie, who did not indicate when the call occurred. "He said, 'It's never a level playing field for prisoners when they get out of jail.' And he was happy that we did something on such a national stage that showed our faith in giving someone a second chance after such a major downfall.''

How inspiring is the return of Michael Vick? Will it hearten those who are attempting to return to society after serving time and make the rest of us more likely to welcome them back? Or will it make us more likely to think cynically that the rich and famous get special exceptions from the rules? Does Vick make the field look more level or less level?

IN THE COMMENTS: Meade (adopting the commenting style of Trooper York) wrote:

"Pot had helped, spreading genital herpes; maybe a little felony conspiracy in interstate commerce/aid of unlawful animal fighting venture when you could afford it."

- Dreams from My Blotter: A Short Memoir by Barrrk "OokieRonMexico" Obama (2010), pp. 93–94.

Rialby said...

"They talk about me like a dog" - BHO

I guess talking about him like a dog is better than what Michael Vick might do... pick him up by his tail, swing him around and smash his head against a cinder block wall.

Hmmm. You know, I've never gotten the impression Obama had much affection for Bo.

The Supreme Court declines to add depictions of animal cruelty to the categories of speech that the First Amendment does not protect.

Good. This doesn't — of course — mean that you can't punish acts of cruelty to animals.

ADDED: Here's the text of the opinion (which I don't have time to read at the moment). There is one dissenter: Justice Alito. The law that the Court struck down was a congressional response to "crush videos." In these, high-heeled women stepped on animals until they died, which some people find sexually stimulating.

"Are zoophiles attracted only to sexually mature animals — and if not, does this make them 'zoopedophiles'?"

"Do zoophiles find particular members of their preferred species more 'attractive' than other individuals from those species, and, if so, are they seduced by standard beauty cues, such as facial symmetry in horses? What is the percentage of homosexual zoophiles (those who prefer animal partners of the same sex) over heterosexual zoophiles?"

Questions, questions. I must say I've never thought about any of those questions before.