Comments on: Short answers to easy questions

By: HP

HP — Tue, 21 Sep 2004 22:05:02 +0000

Lewis Grizzard once commented something along these lines: I think you should be able to hunt anything you want, provided you eat what you kill. And you can’t kill a second deer until you finish eating the first one. So how do the English serve fox? In a pie? Or roasted, with boiled peas and mash?

By: Nabakov

Nabakov — Tue, 21 Sep 2004 16:12:38 +0000

Hands up anyone commenting so far who would personally tear apart a live fox, badger, hare, rat or bear? Thought not. It’s a bitch of a job. By the by, when the pro-hunting protestors crashed the Commons, why didn’t security set the dogs on them?

By: Donald Johnson

Donald Johnson — Tue, 21 Sep 2004 13:31:11 +0000

I don’t agree Daniel, and the bit about university education was a cheap shot of the kind I’d normally expect a conservative to make. (Lefties should make up their own cheap shots, not steal them.) Moral intuitions provide data, but they often tell us as much about the prejudices of the person holding them than about morality. Beslan is worse in the obvious sense that some people deliberately murdered children, instead of merely allowing them to starve out of apathy, and if that’s all you mean, no argument, but I think the focus on the villain rather than the victim is what’s wrong here. If it’s a bad thing when children die, then surely we should pay more attention to the millions of deaths we could prevent than to hundreds killed by terrorists. Not that we should ignore Belsan or say that it shouldn’t have been on the front pages, but why, if compassion for human life is what drives us, do we do so little about the starvation deaths? It doesn’t seem to be the tragedy of an avoidable death that moves people, but whether or not there’s a villain handy. Most people (left and right) are more interested in atrocities (especially the ones committed by our favorite villains, which are also “clearly” more evil than the ones committed by the side we might support). I think that this is motivated less by compassion than by the desire to hate evil villains. As for hunting vs. factory farming, the cruelty of the farms seems far greater to me, even apart from the sheer scale involved, unless I’ve been misinformed about what goes on in the farms.

By: Abiola Lapite

Abiola Lapite — Tue, 21 Sep 2004 12:34:12 +0000

——-BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE——- Hash: SHA1 “Because slavery is inhumane.” Your opinion. Fine. Then don’t own slaves. But don’t impose your opinion as a moral law.” Yes, because as everyone knows, animals and human slaves are exactly alike, aren’t they? This is what gets to me about animal rights people: in their quest to extend “rights” to animals, they end up devaluing the worth of their fellow human beings. ——-BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE——- Version: GnuPG v1.2.4 (MingW32) – GPGshell v3.10 Comment: My Public Key is at the following URL: Comment: http://www.alapite.net/pgp/AbiolaLapite.txt iD8DBQFBUBGgOgWD1ZKzuwkRAjZYAJ9sfU0t/qn0kQMTjXtTFfrI3bE+BQCffIYS Y81g3rhkEUOMVFb3rabLWns= =oWv2——-END PGP SIGNATURE——-

By: Mrs Tilton

Mrs Tilton — Tue, 21 Sep 2004 12:06:17 +0000

Daniel asks: What d’you think about badger-baiting and dog-fighting, Mrs T? Ought to be legalised? That's a good question. My answer is here, as is a question for you.

By: ChrisPer

ChrisPer — Tue, 21 Sep 2004 02:54:13 +0000

“Staggering research’, says Nick of my words: “Well, I have talked with a few English folks up and down the pecking order and I am convinced”.. So sue me, it’s my opinion. But I have read what I can find about status-display via posturing opinions. When its old-fachioned church-going types doing it, you may freely call it hypocrisy; but if it’s members of the Church of Right- Thinking Social Consciousness perhaps it’s different.

By: Warthog

Warthog — Mon, 20 Sep 2004 23:03:42 +0000

Perhaps the dogs should be registered in Ms. Marples Manners School so that their brutish tendencies could be unlearned.

By: dsquared

dsquared — Mon, 20 Sep 2004 21:42:33 +0000

Donald: I don’t think there’s anything at all wrong with our moral intuitions. I’ve always believed that common intuitive propositions like “hunting is worse than factory farming” and “child murder is worse than malnutrition” are the basic data of morality, and that any theory of ethics worth having ought to be explaining them rather than criticising them. (I cite as evidence for these two propositions the fact that typically, it takes several years of university education to leave someone believing the opposite)

By: Donald Johnson

Donald Johnson — Mon, 20 Sep 2004 21:11:45 +0000

I’m as appalled about animal cruelty as most non-PETA people, but like Otto (aka Sherlock) I thought the point of this post was to make an interesting analogy between fox hunting and much larger scale animal cruelty vs. Beslan and vastly larger numbers of children dying from starvation or disease. I think there’s something wrong with our moral sensibilities—most people seem to be more outraged by the murder of hundreds of children by obviously nasty villains than they are by a millions of children who die from boringly preventable causes. Evidently the most important thing is the presence of a suitably fiendish villain—the children’s deaths function as props, sort of like those innocent people that get killed at the beginning of a Hollywood revenge drama, providing the hero with the excuse he needs to spend the rest of the movie building up a large body count with karate chops, automatic weaponry, and exploding vehicles. Nobody makes movies about kids dying of diarrhea which inspires people to join NGO’s and bring clean drinking water to poor villages. Or lobbying to change trade rules to benefit poor countries. But the thread turns out to be about foxes, so I’ll weigh in here—foxhunting seems kinda barbaric to me. But we ought to spend more time thinking about factory farms.

By: dsquared

dsquared — Mon, 20 Sep 2004 19:32:28 +0000

By the way, I don’t think that the moral rule “Don’t tear animals appart for pleasure” does violate the Categorical Imperative.

By: Ginger Yellow

Ginger Yellow — Mon, 20 Sep 2004 15:08:10 +0000

““Because hunting foxes with dogs is a sadistic pleasure.” Your opinion. Fine. Then don’t hunt. But don’t impose your opinion as a moral law. Violates Categorical Imperative, don’ty’know?” cf:”“Because slavery is inhumane.” Your opinion. Fine. Then don’t own slaves. But don’t impose your opinion as a moral law.” Animal rights is one of the few areas where I think the law should be moralistic, for the very obvious reason that animals can’t stand up for themselves.

By: Matt McGrattan

Matt McGrattan — Mon, 20 Sep 2004 14:13:24 +0000

It’d help if I’d actually spelled ‘scent’ correctly…

By: Matt McGrattan

Matt McGrattan — Mon, 20 Sep 2004 14:10:48 +0000

There already is an alternative—it’s called drag-hunting in which the hounds follow a sent laid in advance by people dragging scented stuff behind them. The only thing missing is the actual slaying of the fox at the end. However, the slaying part if quite important to these people…

By: victor falk

victor falk — Mon, 20 Sep 2004 14:02:14 +0000

Would it be possible to have the hounds trained not to kill the fox? Most dogs don’t know what to do if they actually catch up when chasing a cat. Or is the pack instinct too strong? I know it’s maybe not a realistic alternative, with the enforcement and control issues that would come up, I just wonder if it is possible.

By: victor falk

victor falk — Mon, 20 Sep 2004 13:59:29 +0000

would it be possible to train the hounds not to kill the fox? most dogs don’t know what to do if they actually catch up when chasing a cat. Or is the pack instinct to strong? I know it’s not a realistic alternative, with the enforcement and control issues that would come up, I just wonder if it is possible.