jinchilla said:
I am inclined to spend more time with lou as you seem to be expressing haughty contempt.
Uh huh. Sure, go hang with the guy who hates humans. I bet he'll love ya... unless you're human. But, since you also have a low opinion of your fellow primate, maybe the two of you will get along. After all, you have something in common! You hate each other.
Since you have decided to take my remarks personally in a peculiar way, it's only fair that I explain what I'm trying to say here.
1. Animals are dumb. Humans are dumb too, but you have a strategic alliance with humans that gives you shoes, cars, and cable television. (NOTE: if you're going to tell me that you want to give up modern conveniences, then I suggest you start with the Internet.) Other humans will get better treatment from you than animals because, if you don't give it to them, they'll arrest you and throw you in prison. Not fair? Maybe. Still better than being a clubbed seal, no? Even our punishments for humans are gentle compared to our regular treatment of other animals, and you are afforded this status at the top of the great chain of being by accident of birth. If it were possible for you to escape this exalted position (which is difficult, because people will keep trying to rescue you) you would probably not survive in the "natural" world.
2. Other humans afford you a social status. Animals, in the mean, do not. Some nice cats will try to feed you, but (being a big human) you would probably starve on the provender provided by a single cat, and the idea of a slave cat society whose purpose is to feed you is no better than shooting and eating cows. For the most part, other animals view you as food, dangerous, or a nuisance, and do not share your social mores, particularly not the ones regarding how you feel you deserve to be treated. A chance encounter with another person usually ends without you being harmed; a chance encounter with a wild buffalo usually ends with the buffalo scraping you off the bottom of its foot.
3. Some people try to claim that animals are better than humans because they don't create industrial effluent, drive cars, or throw away styrofoam containers. The fact that most animals can't operate anything more complicated than a chew toy doesn't enter into their thought process; for these people INABILITY = CHOOSING NOT TO, which is to say that slugs have moral superiority over human beings because slugs do not build nuclear bombs. True, no slug will ever be responsible for a nuclear holocaust, but... slugs don't do anything, except eat and make more slugs. To attach moral status to their actions is to misunderstand what morality is.
4. People kill all kinds of animals in appalling ways all the time and no one cares. Cougars from the Rockies were introduced into a wild region in Florida to interbreed with Florida Panthers in an attempt to save the species; the local panthers killed all of the imported ones. Animals like the timber wolf (as I previously stated) are periodically reintroduced to the US wilderness, whereupon they are immediately wiped out by the same gun-toters who wiped them out last time. The wolf-replenishers claim that they are "repatriating the species". The wolf-eliminators claim that wolves "do environmental damage". So the wolves die confused and alone in a hail of gunfire so that two groups of morons can feel good about themselves, each thinking that they did the right thing.
So, to sum up briefly:
1) People are stupid but you have to be nice to them
2) Animals are stupid and you don't have to be nice to them; most people don't understand how to be nice to them in any case
3) Most people's view of animals and their status as thinking and feeling things is predicated on an idiotic assumption that animals are morally superior because they're incapable of doing anything
4) Hundreds of similar crimes to the seal cull go on all the time, and people have chosen to decry this single crime because it happened somewhere else and they think seals are cute.
In short, many people live in a fantasy world where they understand very little about animals and their nature and treatment, and thus do not realize their own hypocrisy when they whine about one incident and disregard others.
Somewhat ironically, I would assume that Dr. Lou knows more about animals than most people, as he shoots them for fun. I never respected sport hunting, but he has actually seen them in their natural environment (or so I assume) which is more than most people have seen.