PETA appeals denial of roadside memorials for cows that died in the wrecks of 2 cattle-hauling trucks.

"The state previously denied the application, saying the [Illinois] Roadside Memorial Act specifies that only relatives who lost loved ones in highway crashes may request memorials."

So, it's not that the dead were not human. It's that nonhuman animals have relatives who are incapable of requesting a memorial. PETA says "the cows suffered and are 'worthy of remembering.'" But Illinois can't be accused of discriminating against nonhuman animals, which seems to be the issue PETA is pushing. Roadside memorials are for relatives who request them, and no relatives of the dead have applied. And let's be sensible, even assuming cattle remember their dead relatives, symbolic displays don't jog their memories.

"To come out and proudly boast you have one of the country's most magnificent creatures hanging on your wall is both unscrupulous and, frankly, professional suicide."

There's some discord over the "Exmoor Emperor," now deceased, but once the largest individual animal in all the realm.

Dog Fight in China.

It's eaters vs. lovers in a melee on the highway:

The mutts were destined for the dinner table - all 520 of them crammed onto a truck hurtling down a Beijing highway toward waiting restaurants in northeastern China.

Then fate intervened in the form of a passing driver, an animal lover who spotted the truck and angrily forced it off the road.

From there, things began spiraling out of control. News of the confrontation hit the Chinese blogosphere, sending more than 200 animal activists flocking immediately to the highway. Traffic on the road slowed to a standstill. Dozens of police officers were called in. Animal activists, however, kept arriving with reinforcements, carrying water, dog food, even trained veterinarians for a siege that ended up lasting 15 hours....

The mob of dog lovers finally won the standoff by pooling together more than $17,000 to pay off the truck driver. But their victory was quickly eclipsed when they soon realized they had no idea where to house the hundreds of loud, wild and decidedly not-housebroken canines....

[D]og transporter Hao Xiaomao said he lost a small fortune, more than $3,000, after being forced into the deal. Worst of all, because he failed to deliver, no one has been willing to hire him since.

"I still don't understand what was immoral about my shipment. People also eat cow and sheep. What's the difference?" he asked. "They were just a group of rich bullies who own pets and have nothing better to do."...

In China, poor people have been eating dogs for a long time and keeping a pet dog is an activity associated with the rich. Rescuing dogs might seem to us like championing the weak, but in China, the strong vs. weak argument is flipped, because the dog eaters are the poor, and the dog lovers are the pet-owning rich. Or so it seems.

Camel massacre.

For the earth.

ADDED: If you're going to kill all those camels for the environment, why not do the fully conservationist thing and eat them? Anthony Bourdain shows how it's done in Saudi Arabia:

Let's talk about morality.

America has a strong consensus about a lot things even as we are divided on others:



What surprises you the most here? Are you surprised that 80% of Americans say suicide is morally wrong? I've often had to struggle with commenters on this blog when I have taken the firm position that suicide is murder, but I think America mostly agrees with me. There is generally an outpouring of sympathy when someone commits suicide. Why don't we express our moral opprobrium toward the self-murderer? I think it's because that person is gone, and we feel sorry for those who are left behind. They are the victims.

Doctor-assisted suicide is an important subcategory of suicide, and the Gallup report says that it "emerges as the most controversial cultural issue in Gallup's 2011 Values and Beliefs poll." But what is notable is that support for assisted suicide has been dropping and has reached its lowest level of support in 8 years.

"Red meat, white meat, blue meat, meat-o-f**king-rama. You will eat it. Because not eating meat is a decision."

"Eating meat is an instinct! Yeah! And I know what it’s about. 'I don’t want to eat the meat because I love the animals. I love the animals.' Hey, I love the animals too. I love my doggy. He’s so cute. My fluffy little dog... He’s so cute — There’s the problem. We only want to save the cute animals, don’t we? Yeah. Why don’t we just have animal auditions. Line ‘em up one by one and interview them individually. 'What are you?' 'I’m an otter.' 'And what do you do?' 'I swim around on my back and do cute little human things with my hands.' 'You’re free to go.' 'And what are you?' 'I’m a cow.' 'Get in the f**king truck, ok pal!' 'But I’m an animal.' 'You’re a baseball glove! Get on that truck!'"

Denis Leary, quoted a propos of the James Lee, the now-dead manifesto guy.

"In a city that is known for its exotic dancing and for being progressive and edgy..."

"... how sad that a woman would be banned from using her own body in a political protest."

"It doesn't matter what an animal does, or where it does it, it will be deemed fair game for the documentary."

"Human notions of privacy which rest on ideas of location or activity are ignored in terms of animals."

An academic agonizes.

Imagine the roles reversed. The animals somehow take over and they are making David Attenborough-style videos about human beings.... Well, picture this, but with people:

"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.

"Swiss turn down lawyers-for-pets plan."

Now, there's a teaser/headline that confused me. I thought: What? Do you turn in your lawyer and get a pet in exchange?

But I clicked through — over at BBC.com — and saw that it was just about a proposed national system of government-funded lawyers who would provide legal representation to animals.

ADDED: It was just pointed out to me that I was confused the wrong way.  I should have thought that it was about handing in your pet and getting a lawyer. The expression "cash for clunkers" was used in the explanation of why I was wrong about being wrong. And somehow those 2 wrongs did not make a right.

When the whale killed Dawn Brancheau... was it an instance of domestic violence?

"They really develop an interesting intimate relationship with these whales!" That is said about Dawn Brancheau, in this video depicting her with a killer whale, in happier days:



"Animals are real, sensitive to the touch, and they can feel all those things," Brancheau explains as she demonstrates her practice of rubbing the whale. Brancheau was rubbing the whale's nose when he turned on her and dragged her to her death.

Here are 6 theories of why the whale may have killed Brancheau. #3 is:

He was feeling sexual

[Whale expert] Nancy Black has also said it might have been a hormonal outburst from the killer whale. The killer whale was often isolated and encouraged to breed.

"He was used a lot [by SeaWorld] for mating and could have even been enacting a mating behavior during the incident," said Black.

Now, obviously, I don't know the extent to which the woman and the whale had a sexual relationship. I don't know it either from her perspective or the whale's. But the whale is an intelligent creature with feelings and in need of relationships, and the woman — if we listen to her own words — believed that she was providing a relationship. But think of it from the whale's perspective. Imagine the whale's sexuality. Imagine the frustration, tension, and deep longings.

No, you can't get that far trying to imagine how the whale felt. Animals are real, sensitive to the touch, and they can feel all those things. What things?! We don't really know. And yet we use them, for our purposes, which they cannot possibly understand. We imagine that we provide them love and companionship and touching. But we must know that even if a human being could fully grasp what the whale felt, she could never give him what he really needs.

***

The whale's name? Tilikum: 'Til I come.

On swatting a fly.

1. BBC gives you 10 ways to swat a fly — including a technique called The Barack.

2. PETA doesn't appreciate The Barack: "We support compassion even for the most curious, smallest and least sympathetic animals. We believe that people, where they can be compassionate, should be, for all animals."

3. There's a song called "Never Swat a Fly." I'm familiar with the old Jim Kweskin version ("Don't do that, Delores/You should never swat a fly"), but here's the 1930 Abe Lyman version. Lyrics:

Never swat a fly, he may love another fly
He may sit with her and sigh the way I do with you
Never harm a flea, he may have a favorite she
That he bounces on his knee the way I do with you
Never stop a moth when he is gliding through the air
He may have a date in someone's flannel underwear
Ah! Ah! Be careful!
Never spray a nit with a great big can of Blitz
He may think some nit has it the way I do with you

"It's okay to eat fish 'cause they don't have any feelings..."

... or, oh, maybe not...

***

Song lyric in the post title comes from this:

There was this blackboard kitty cat...

I'm only partially responsible for drawing that.

As long as I've got the iPhone in hand and open to the camera app...



I call that "Office Shelfscape."

And then, here's "Office Floorscape":



So really, Althouse, what is it? You've got the kitty cat, drawn on the board in, apparently, a conlaw class, and then, amidst law books, some "compassionate choices" for chickens, and that old familiar office toy, Blue Flame? What are we to make of this?

The vegetable will respond to you.

ADDED: They get close to but never articulate the central problem: The commercial — aired on the Superbowl — would prompt innocent children to do comical things with vegetables that would, to adults, have sexual meaning.

Here's the actual PETA commercial, by the way. Did they ever really mean it to air? With this controversy, obviously, they get the publicity and they don't have to pay. Maybe I should have ignored them, but Whoopi commanded my attention.

Vegetarian Thanksgiving -- why and how.

Why? Are you kidding?! We just found out that turkeys were once living, breathing creatures and that they must suffer bloody murder if they are to become food.

No, actually, maybe some of us have been vegetarians for a long time. I'm not (though I had a 5-year stint as a vegetarian). But I don't care about any particular meat on any particular day enough to complicate the preparation of dinner when I have guests who are vegetarians.

How? Tofurky? That's insane. Let's not exacerbate abstinence with fakery. It's time for winter vegetables, mushrooms, and grains. Did you notice that this recipe for sweet potato and butternut squash soup has been topping the NYT most-emailed list all week?

HuffPo is aghast that turkey-killing doesn't faze Sarah Palin.

Deal with it, you candy-asses. If you eat meat, something like that is going on in the background for you too.

"If the mammoth can be resurrected, the same would be technically possible for Neanderthals."

With some old hair and $10 million, scientists have a way to construct a real live mammoth, and they can't help thinking about making a Neanderthal man:

But the process of genetically engineering a human genome into the Neanderthal version would probably raise many objections, as would several other aspects of such a project. “Catholic teaching opposes all human cloning, and all production of human beings in the laboratory, so I do not see how any of this could be ethically acceptable in humans,” said Richard Doerflinger, an official with the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops.

[George Church, a well known genome technologist at the Harvard Medical School] said there might be an alternative approach that would “alarm a minimal number of people.” The workaround would be to modify not a human genome but that of the chimpanzee, which is some 98 percent similar to that of people. The chimp’s genome would be progressively modified until close enough to that of Neanderthals, and the embryo brought to term in a chimpanzee.

Got a problem with that?

IN THE COMMENTS: jprapp said:

And Hymowitz thinks men these days are angry. Just wait ‘til real Neanderthals try love in the age of Darwin via assortative mating, only to find pair-bond partners with angry Yale Law grads. Genetics ain't all it's cracked up to be. Until an epigenetic (ala genome) project is completed, I’ll stick with Crichton.

(I added the link to Tuesday's discussion of the Hymowitz article.) I responded:

Crichton died, but we can rebuild him from some fingernail clippings.

Now, I see Brian Lundmark has already cartooned that.

"Intranational tourism is radically constricting, and humbling in the hardest way -- hostile to my fantasy of being a true individual..."

I want to talk about this passage from a footnote in the David Foster Wallace essay "Consider the Lobster" (at page 240 in the paperback essay collection):

My personal experience has not been that traveling around the country is broadening or relaxing, or that radical changes in place or context have a salutary effect, but rather that intranational tourism is radically constricting, and humbling in the hardest way -- hostile to my fantasy of being a true individual, of living somehow outside and above it all... To be a mass tourist, for me, is to become a pure late-date American: alien, ignorant, greedy for something you cannot ever have, disappointed in a way you can never admit. It is to spoil, by way of sheer ontology, the very unspoiledness you are there to experience. It is to impose yourself on places that in all non-economic ways would be better, realer, without you. It is, in lines and gridlock and transaction after transaction, to confront a dimension of yourself that is as inescapable as it is painful: As a tourist, you become economically significant, but essentially loathsome, an insect on a dead thing.

My questions:

1. Is Wallace saying anything about travel in general, or just intranational travel, or just travel that deserves the label "tourism," or just tourism that is also "mass"? If he's not saying something about travel in general, what is it about this subset of travel that deserves this special loathing?

2. What do these feelings have to do with being an American, and what is "pure" and "late-date" about it? Haven't there been "alien, ignorant, greedy" travelers all over the place and throughout the ages?

3. As we know, Wallace was deeply depressed and ultimately committed suicide, and is that the main thing that passage means?

4. On page 237, Wallace tells us that "lobsters are basically giant sea insects" -- lobsters and insects are all arthropods -- and that they are "garbagemen of the sea, eaters of dead stuff," so if we become "an insect on a dead thing," we're like the lobster, right? And therefore we shouldn't eat lobster, presumably. Or should we? We are after all hateful, in that view, so why spare the lobster?