From: "Snooze"
Organization: SBC http://yahoo.sbc.com
Newsgroups: rec.ponds
Date: Fri, 19 Nov 2004 10:17:26 GMT
Subject: Fish as pets

The reality is modern farm animals have been selectively bred to be as dumb,
docile and as large as possible over the past few thousand years. Compare
the size of frozen turkeys found in grocery stores. Modern factory turkeys
are these large dumb birds, that are too big to survive on their own, in
their historical natural environment.

If you could somehow travel in time to 1400 CE and release a flock of
factory turkeys in north america, the whole flock probably would become a
great feast to the first pack of wolves it runs into. Can a factory turkey
even fly?

Same holds true for cattle, chickens and sheep. Even 100 years ago, a cow
had to have enough intelligence to survive living on the plains alone or
with the herd for a few months at a time. These days intelligent cattle
panic when they're hoisted onto the conveyor, and release all kinds of
hormones into the bloodstream which ruins the flavor of the meat. Sheep are
reputed to be dumb enough that an entire flock will follow the leader off of
a cliff.

My favorite is PETA's stance on pets such as dogs and cats. Mother nature
has decided the ideal size for a member of the Canidae family is in the
range of a fox, wolf, coyote, dingo, african wild dog, hyena. This means
things like the toy group, small terriers, etc wouldn't survive. Same goes
for cats, a lot of fancy breeds just wouldn't survive for long.

Snooze


I don't think PETA would disagree with any of this. I think their main
point would be that raising animals as food or breeding animals for certain
traits to suit our human tastes is disrespectful to the animal and to life
itself. Although I detest the way PETA conducts itself, they don't hold the
patent on promoting respect for animals. Many of us who are not terrorist,
nutcases cringe at the response by some that just because an animal is dumb
or weak that its life is therefore meaningless unless it provides some use
for humans. We have not only treated animals like this but we have also
treated other humans like this. We eventually realized that this was wrong.
It is not such a huge leap to equate animal suffering to human slavery.