© dream traveler
Love the animals! God has given them the rudiments of thought, and joy untroubled. Don’t trouble it, don’t harass them, don’t deprive them of their happiness. Don’t work against God’s intent!
Fyodor Dostoyewsky The Brothers Karamasov
As to the Origin of Man, there abound a surprisingly large number of ideas, conclusions, convictions, doctrines or inklings, all depending on the quality of perception and panoramic overview of their apostles, or the general absence of both. Take, for example, my Editor (God bless him and all who sail in him!). He is of the scientific opinion and as far as he can see, which is very far indeed if limited to the confines of time and space, that we have crept long ago as something grey and slimy out of a primordial ocean and developed, not exactly accidentally but rather randomly, by means of a so far not wholly satisfactorily explained process called natural selection or Evolution, into what we are now.
Whereas I, sadly unscientific as I am, hold a diametrically opposed conviction. To the effect that it all happened when our Good Lord Almighty reclined one day in a meadow sprinkled with one thousand flowers in every colour, shape and perfume, and while He was busy designing a violet which had been taking shape in His mind since a week, that an idea occurred to Him, namely how nice it would be if there were someone, say for example a lovely young girl walking her dog, who could behold and appreciate this immensely generous and truly magnificent display of divine Beauty and Love. Which led, after some preliminary attempts, to you and me.
A line of reasoning far more compelling and uplifting than that of my Editor, you will agree, particularly since you haven’t any scientific means to prove me wrong. Yet I must admit that I’m myself something of an Evolutionary, though with the one difference that I begin where he has ended. Meaning some two and a half thousand years ago, with the arrival of two mighty and clearly God-sent teachers called Buddha and Jesus Christ. Whereby the latter is in this context of greater interest, due the impact he has had on the Western World.
Let us begin with the old Greeks who brought to breathtaking perfection what had been handed to mankind at Lascaux and Altamira some ten thousand years earlier, namely the divine spark called Art. And who nevertheless entertained the habit of attacking and overwhelming their own kind in the next city-state, killing the males and infirm, and selling the women and children into slavery. A barbarous point of departure, most certainly, but fundamentally upset by Christ’s Teachings which somehow, like Ariadne’s red thread, helped us to find our way through the ages towards the present day. And where we can say without blushing that some significant steps towards a better and more humane society have come to pass, particularly in the Christian world. To the effect that were you to explain a Pension Fund, Medicare or Animal Protection to an ancient Greek, he’d surely believe you demented or worse.
As it is, we are still far removed from a perfect Utopia, a place that hovers on the distant horizon like a shimmering Grail. Yet I fervently hope and pray, and sometimes even believe, that one day, one day after many a summer, mankind will be able to manage this immensely beautiful and limitlessly bountiful garden called Planet Earth with all the loving care and respect that is its due. A time that will come to pass when we have rid ourselves of power-hungry crooks and thieves and murderers, or whatever barbarians challenge the God-given right to till our soil with wisdom instead of greed, and to harvest its fruits in peace, and to laugh and to love to our hearts content whenever we feel like it.
Unfortunately, and sadly, and as a premise for these Halcyon days, must we recognize a basic aspect generally absent in every curriculum, namely that mankind was never a Family of Man as we were made so piously to believe, but has long since split into two branches that move alongside each other as if of the same genus, yet are fundamentally different. I am referring to the heading of this little essay, namely those who can feel and those who can’t. And which I have declared in one large brushstroke, and rather unscientifically, to represent two entirely dissimilar species, namely Humans and Inhumans.
The two will clash sooner or later, and it depends on the outcome of the battle if you and I and our children and grandchildren will be able to move on towards a feasible Utopia. Or if we relapse into a society of hapless ghouls crammed into shantytowns, who will finally, for want of acumen and stamina, revert to cannibalism before sinking into oblivion.
The parliament of New Zealand has recently approved a law that explicitly prohibits shechita. By doing so it followed the example of Iceland, Norway and Sweden who passed similar legislation already some time ago. Not to mention Hitler’s infamous Third Empire, who did the same as the first country worldwide in 1933, embedding it in a comprehensive body of laws for the protection of animals, including rigorous limitation of vivisection, that are exemplary and the precursor for most of our present laws of the same kind.
Shechita? you may ask.
To be honest, I wasn’t familiar with the term either. Though shekl, skiksa, shmonzes, shmock, shreck or shpielberg ring a bell, shechita has so far eluded me. Meanwhile I know better. It is Hebrew and details the ritual slaughter of animals. Who, as a result of this devout and allegedly religious treatment, are elevated to a higher plane and thus render certified kosher meat that can be consumed by every observant Jew without endangering whatever might be endangered if it were not. The custom, called Halal, is performed by pious Muslims as well. Shechita in practice looks like this: female animals have their throats cut, males their private parts severed, and fowl are strung up by the wings and slashed open from neck to bottom. And while they roar and scream and wither in terrible pain, their blood gushes out of the gaping wound, for ten minutes and more, until it becomes a mere trickle and death mercifully ends the agony. During the unfolding of this gruesome scenario a specialized rabbi hurries by and blesses the tormented beasts and sanctifies their meat and thus guarantees its safe consummation.
Shechita, then.
In my late teens, already fully indoctrinated and beset with a profound shame for crimes my fatherland has never committed, I eagerly swallowed the glorious accounts of Israel’s untimely birth as a welcome antidote. It prompted a vague relief triggered by the realization that those who were only recently led to the ovens like helpless lambs could suddenly take up arms and turn into fierce warriors. And it excluded any historical objectivity, something hard to come by in any case as the combined media onslaught had been relentless long since. Movies like Exodus caused every guilt-ridden Christian heart to beat higher, underscored by a distinctly Aryan looking hero who ridiculed still cherished old stereotypes. And books like O Jerusalem were all-time bestsellers.
The latter is a gripping tale of that ancient city’s latest and presumably final conquest, and includes a particularly heroic account of the battle for the control of the road which winds its way from the plains into the Judean hills and towards the Holy City itself. Defended furiously by Arab sharpshooters who had no earthly right to be there except that they owned the land, did the advance of Jerusalem’s liberators come repeatedly to naught until someone conceived the brilliant idea to sequester a bulldozer and fashion a provisional track further to the south. Which enabled the attackers to sneak into the enemy’s rear and confound him accordingly. And which gave you a foretaste of the future IDF’s handling of the situation in Gaza and on the Westbank. Much later in life, after a hearty pint of cool wine in the Trappist monastery at Latroun, I walked the road myself for a stretch to get an impression, and wondered as so often before how far imagination and reality can lay apart. As to the conquerors, they were mostly Haganah and became famous afterwards. Except for one intrepid commander called Shaltiel whom I never heard of again in later accounts. He is still much on my mind, because it was him who sacrificed a new-born lamb on the flanks of Mount Scopus once the conquest of Jerusalem was complete.
I remember to this day how a cold finger run down my spine when I read these lines. It abruptly quenched any enthusiasm and made me feel instead as if I had peered into an abyss that could never be bridged. To cut a sweet little lamb’s throat and let it slowly and agonizingly bleed to death as tribute to a bloodthirsty god, one who presumably had facilitated the victory, seemed a relapse into Man’s distant and darkest past, a barbarous act that no civilized society could ever condone. Yet there it was, in front of my eyes, and couldn’t be refuted. Feeling bewildered and unsure of my new heroic perceptions, I decided to treat the whole thing as an isolated incident, a kind of faux-pas unrelated to the brave new country that had so miraculously sprung up in what was once euphemistically called Palestine.
Around the same time I read Lawrence Durrel’s Alexandria Quartet, a collection of four loosely connected novels that were much acclaimed and are probably still good reading. Among the generally elegant and sophisticated scenes one stands out that is breathtaking in its sheer horror. Namely when one of the leading characters finds himself in a walled yard and sees how a few Bedouins wield heavy axes and hack off the legs of a living camel and let it bleed to death.
I’m writing from memory, and perhaps do Durrel an injustice, but what struck me most was the nonchalance with which he described the horrible feat. As if it were part of life, like fly swats or tea with fresh peppermint. Much later I witnessed accidentally a similar incident in North Africa. It cured my desire to visit Muslim countries for good and made me a fervent foe of their relentless encroachment of our civilized Christian world.
So where does this lead to?
To my dog.
Meaning, I own a dog. Though I might also say, he owns me. In other words, the borderline between who owns whom has never been clearly defined and is generally fluctuating. Of course he depends on me for dinner and visits to the pub, items that stand high on his daily agenda. Whereas our long morning and evening walks, of great importance for my health and weight control, are largely his responsibility. God help me if I don’t roll out of bed at seven a.m. latest and put on my walking boots. Because if I don’t, due perhaps to a soiree that ended in the early morning hours, I am treated to a slowly escalating intimidation that begins with nearly inaudible moans, builds up to my slippers being lifted and dropped, and culminates in censorious barks. Someone, though hopefully not you, may say: well, hit the troll over the head and he’ll shut up!
Yet this I can’t do.
And why? Because I love him, just as he loves me. Like so many civilized pet owners the world over, have I discovered one of God’s greatest mysteries, namely that a dog, or most animals at that, have not only the same range of emotions as I have, from despair and sadness to contentment and boundless joy, but are also capable of compassion. In their simple way, of course, which is nevertheless as pure and deep-felt as that of a child. And since my wife has long ago parted company, and since so far I haven’t found a new one, and since my sons whom I love more than my life have recently stepped out into the world to become men in their own right, I regard myself lucky indeed to have someone who fills, at least in part, the void they have left in my heart.
Now you might say: fair enough, and may he wag his august tail forever. But don’t you get carried away and whine about God’s great mystery, namely the compassion of animals. Because if you do, I must remind you of the eagle that strikes the pheasant, or the lion that slays the antelope, and how hard I’m put to recognize a great deal of compassion there.
To which I say: I know!
Or better, I’m aware of the contradiction and need to paint a slightly larger picture to set it right. Whose canvas, or fabric, is the premise that a benevolent God has created the World, with each and every detail a finely tuned and thoroughly considered masterpiece. If this line of argument isn’t to your taste, I can fully understand it, but beg you to read on since we might be able to meet halfway down the road. Yet if you do agree to this point of departure, allow me to speculate as to His whereabouts. Meaning whatever the dimension that could be called His abode, it most certainly includes all of ours. Which implies in turn that He and I are interwoven in a way that escapes my understanding, particularly since He has elected to remain in the background and is recognizable only by His works, but that one day I’m bound to make His acquaintance. This because interwoven cannot, in the last consequence, be defined as anything else but sameness.
If this is an acceptable idea, it provides me with my first argument. Namely that death has no sting, a fact maintained long since by every decent mystic and thinker. Animals know this. I’ve had a number of dogs in my life. Most have died peacefully of old age, two were killed by cars, and one developed in his old age a bad ear-infection that no medicine in the world could do anything about. While I saw him suffer and felt unable to make up my mind, I found him one icy winter-morning after a long search in the outmost corner of my garden, laying there, slightly shivering, but looking up at me with a calm and far-away expression in his clear brown eyes. His time had come, it was obvious. He stood on the threshold and wished to return to his Maker. We spent most of the day in my armchair, he on my lap and with a painkiller, and the next day I gave him a sleeper and called the vet. Whereupon I buried him, got mindlessly drunk for a day or two, and continued to live. But I took away the realization that whenever I was shocked in the past by seeing, perhaps in a documentary, one animal killing another for food, I could from now on divide the event into two positions, namely pain and death. With the latter having been, consciously or subconsciously, by far the larger horror. But not anymore. As to the former, it contained indeed a moment of terrible fear and suffering. Though usually only a moment.
Once, on the high seas, I had a tooth pulled with carpenter’s nippers and no anaesthesia whatsoever, because my temperature was rising and I simply couldn’t stand the pain anymore. To tell you the truth, I might have preferred to be munched by a crocodile or slain by an eagle. The difference, in any case, couldn’t have been very great. As to eagles, I once saw one in Spain’s magnificent Parque Doñana, a large natural reserve set into the estuary of the Guadalquivir. An Imperial Eagle it was, a bird so large as I have never seen before. He flew up from his nest, entered into a warm current and sailed skywards with hardly moving a wing until lost from view. While I stood there gaping and stunned, my friendly guide told me that I had been lucky, since the bird was shy and this grandiose display of God’s magnificence was a rare occasion indeed.
Magnificence, yes! Which brings me to my second argument. Could I imagine an Imperial Eagle living on peanuts? I can’t. Could I imagine the animal kingdom without eagles? I can, but prefer it to be as it is, even if it includes moments of fear and pain, my own as well. Because whoever falls victim to a larger predator, will return almost immediately and without delay to its Maker. This because of the fundamental truth that animals, contrary to man, are by definition innocent.
Whereas those who inflict suffering and prolong it because a heathen god demands it that way, or for any reason whatsoever, are hideously and unforgivably sinful. And who must therefore pay dearly for their evil deeds when the hour of reckoning arrives, when they will find themselves in a timeless mirror image of their past cruelties, when their gruesome habits will have accumulated to a scenery worthy of Dante’s Inferno, when they wade in a sea of blood accompanied by the screams and roars of their victims, when they will eternally… despair!
Laws then, like those already promulgated before you and I were born. Laws that explicitly prohibit Shechita and Halal, and thus are a first good step to rid us of Inhumans who multiply out of all proportion and vie already for the day when they have overwhelmed us and force us into barbarous slavery.
Michael Colhaze (email him) is a pen name.
Facing the Future as a Minority
Amen, Michael! Excellent writing on an extremely important issue which helps define and distinguish us as a people.
Well illustrated article as well.
It has always been my contention that when the Aryan goes the way of the dodo so will animal-kind. The barbaritytowards animals, as well as people, of Buddhists and even Hindus and Taoists and animists in Asia has to be seen to be believed. Good Heavens the sight of a Chinaman with a slaughtered dog on his backpack has to be one of the horrors one wishes to have been able to pass on viewing. Strangling, ALIVE, dogs hanging in front of Korean butcher shops, makes the meat tender you see. Then the Chinese frying, ALIVE, cats in hot oil, they used to set them on fire, but today’s China is too modern for that sort of stuff for a strictly gourmand’s delight.
What Africans do is also not really fit topic for discussion.
However let us not, for a moment, forget the GANGSTERS responsible for the END of the White Race.
Mr. Colhaze you are an excellent writer. I’ve enjoyed each of your pieces but this is the first I’ve commented on them. You take an idea and with words paint a picture in my mind. Thank you.
A truly magnificent article, Mr. Colhaze. One of your best.
Just today I rec’d in the mail a request for donation from World Society for Protection of Animals. Their literature included photos of the dancing bears of India, where they pierce a hole in the animal’s nose to put a rope thru it that the Kalandar then yanks on, etc.
And then there’s those POS Spaniards who set fire to bulls’ horns to get them to flail and dance about, dashing themselves against walls while the subhumans cheer and get a big thrill out of it.
There is quite a bit of evidence in support of Darwin’s hypothesis: morphological, genetic, fossil-based, whatnot. In contradistinction, there is none for a magical being having magically created life-forms. The latter “hypothesis” (if one may even deem it such) needs much more evidence to be believed in than the former. Plus, one doesn’t need any “scientific evidence” to prove you wrong, Mr. Colhaze. The burden of proof is on you for such a presposterous claim.
Anyway, I see a lot of this one-sided theistic nonsense about “God’s magnificence”. Conveniently, it is forgotten that the same God who makes the soaring eagle (who rips apart other life-forms to exist) also makes the cockroach, intestinal parasitic worm, and the virile pathogen. Indeed, the concept of an omnibenevolent deity is muddled by the existence of flies and cholera. I’ll go so far to say that it seems difficult to gauge the deity’s moral code save for that of the law of tooth and claw with suffering written throughout. Stating that those who suffer return to their “Maker” and all is forgotten is asinine. It’s a lame argument, pure and simple. Too bad your “Maker” doesn’t share your placid worldview for running things!
Read about medieval Britain, if we have attained a superior morality them it’s by means of the selection of placid temperaments as Gregory Clark says.
I don’t think westerners can ever really comprehend the inner meaning of eastern mysticism. It begins in mists and ends in schism.
Alfred,
You got any proof that what you’ve just described actually takes place in Asia?
Over the years, I’ve seen some cooked up recipes floating around the internet.
One case involves around Brenda Walker’s description of a cooking recipe in Asia.
She was describing how a live animal is torched for better taste or health or something along the line. I know what she did was she switched the orders around and patched it up with stories from other recipes. When a dog is “prepared” for a meal, first the dog is killed, and boiled to remove much of its hair, and finally the dog is torched to burn off the remaining hair. In one of her articles, Brenda wrote as if a live animal is torched and then she added the flavor by claiming how this process makes the meat tastier or whatever.
White nationalist seems to like this kind of cooked-up recipes because it makes them superior over Asians, but also the media bosses seem to like this as well. They can always use it to keep in check any Asians who doesn’t toe the line(i.e. The Holocosty).
Hello, I’ve spent a lot of time in China, and yes, the stuff about killing dogs happens. I’ve seen them hanging outside of restaurants, peeled, on the sidewalk by the entry door. There are usually cages with a few live ones too, close by. Dog meat is eaten all over China, but moreso in the South East. Most Northern Chinese don’t eat cats, but the Southeasterners do … not as a regular diet item though, only in special dishes like “longfenghu” (dragon-phoenix-tiger, being snake, chicken and cat).
Be careful about confusing China with “Asia”. They’re not all alike. To my knowledge Japanese don’t “do” dog and cat.
don’t forget killing live lobsters in boiling water – that shit should be banned
http://www.weirdasianews.com/2007/08/01/cats-boiled-alive-popular-chinese-cuisine/
Didn’t I read somewhere that former Israeli terrorist and Prime Minister Menachim Began never made a speech without mentioning blood?
A Chinese coworker I had expressed the thought that killing and eating dogs was no big deal (even though she knew it was repugnant to Americans). So it must be fairly common in China. I wonder if dogs have the ancient history of working with humans like they do in the West.
So is the subtext that Jews are Inhuman? That does require a religious underpinning because nothing like that could ever be justified by science. Jews are fully human as is every human on earth. But of course, there are differences among the many ethnic groups in terms of IQ, temperament and other characteristics. But there is absolutely no basis for saying some group or another isn’t human at all.
Now Whites seem to have more affection for animals in my experience but this compassion is in no sense limited only to Whites. Peter Singer, the Jewish philosopher, is a huge advocate for an almost silly belief in “animal rights”. And there are Jews that sit on PETA (again a bit extremist in my view). Beyond that we all know Jews that own dogs and have treated them well.
So this ancient practice in Judaism is barbaric, but I can’t say this disqualifies all Jews as human. And given the popularity of dog fighting among Blacks, Whites and Latinos, cruelty to animals seems to be a vice common to all humans.
Jeff
I think he just says that inhumans are inhuman. If it touches on a certain religious group, so it includes the group as well, but surely not the whole tribe.
David F – if Mr. Colhaze has “simply replaced the general misanthropy of the animal rights activist with a specific projection upon out-groups ” – then well done Mr Colhaze!
Now let’s get those “feel-good” White libs to do the same. never miss a chance to point out how horribly non-Whites treat animals.
Never.
Not one time.
I don’t know where to put my hat on this.
The Buddhists are great on kindness (or profess to be), but they cut off other human attributes. Their main goal seems to become a kind of ghost.
The Christian paradigm is yoked to bloody sacrifice. Even though they don’t practice bloody sacrifice, they think that the intense suffering of a man on a cross discharged God’s anger, much like one discharges a capacitor (“Thanks for suffering, Son. I feel much better, with my anger discharged! I think I will even start seeing humans as righteous, now.”)
I think there is something beyond religion–some kind of inborn kindness, something genetic, I don’t know. But I think Whites have more of it, in general, than others.
“Those who feel and those who can’t”–reminds me of the sci-fi novel, Dune, where Paul has to stick his hand in the box to endure mentally-induced hallucinations that his hand is being holocausted. He endures it and is pronounced “human.”
Maurice,
I agree with you about Buddhism, although I disagree with your interpretation of Christianity. From a functional standpoint, one might accurately say that that human beings are inherently sinful (which we obviously are) and feel the need to expiate these sins (which in debased PC Protestantism/Judaism takes the form of anti-racist scapegoating, Western self-flagellation, and aid to the third world). The idea of Christianity is that *all debts have been paid* already by Christ–the individual simply needs to acknowlege the sacrifice by accepting Christ and His teachings, repenting of their sin, and turning towards a moral life out of love and gratitude.
I also agree that whites seem to be less tribal in their moral thinking and more moved by the suffering of strangers. K.M.’s work offers some plausible group evolutionary reasons why this tendency could be adaptive in the early European environment. I consider it both a strength and a weakness. Our societies can be very humane, but easy to undermine if a particularlist group takes the benefits without reciprocating.
I like that episode fron Dune. It illustrates a very classical/Catholic understanding of human nature. All animals have instincts that are usually to their good, but humans alone are “rational animals,” who can be expected to govern their instincts through reason, and override them when necessary.
Mr. Colhaze, you are to be commended for your wide-ranging and fertile mind combining Dostoevsky, ancient Greece, confessions of an unscientific bent, evolution, zionism, shechita, Christianity, animal cruelty, dentistry on the high seas, bird watching in Spain, canine empathy, etc., etc. into one somewhat rambling essay. It reminds me of the writing of William F. Buckley, Jr., whose genius I could never fully appreciate.
We are all somewhat complicit in animal cruelty and exploitation from our leather shoes to that cheese pizza we can’t seem to get enough of. Take the dairy industry. Most folks don’t realize that a dairy cow must have a calf (called “freshening”) before it can give milk. What happens to the male calves? Some go to veal farms where they are kept in crates so small that they are unable to turn around for the six months that they are allowed to live. The rest called “bob” calves go to slaughter after a couple of days. Livestock dealers called “order buyers” go around to the various farms picking up bob calves. Sometimes they stay in the back of the truck for days in stifling conditions while the order buyer makes his rounds. Then it’s off to slaughter. Now these calves are too fragile to be shot in the head with a captive bolt pistol or electrocuted. Most are slaughtered kosher. The rabbi, dressed in a vinyl apron, rubber boots, hard hat and mask and standing in a pool of blood grabs the calf, pulls its head back and with one stroke severs the the calve’s neck from ear to ear. If the knife touches bone, the calf is not kosher. (Go figure that out). Then the calf is shackled and hung upside down to bleed out before its gutted, skinned, etc. Skin from young calves is a highly prized commodity as is the veal.
And what happens to its mother? Did you ever wonder where that ground beef in the supermarket meat case comes from? Yep, older dairy cows.
I am in tears reading this article. As a vegan, I understand the interconnectedness of all beings, and of the cosmos itself. We are all ONE! Until man understands that there will always be war and no state of peace. Man must evolve spiritually into the realm of Oneness. I do believe like you stated that man at some point shall achieve peace, but in order to achieve complete peace we must extend mercy and compassion toward all living beings. As long as man continues to exploit and murder non-human animals for food, clothing, entertainment, etc. we will not experience peace. Peace begins on your plate. Thank you for writing such a hopeful article!
TGD
I know, I know!
As always, the borderline cannot be clearly defined. It is up to each individual, and we are still a long way from a truly humane society. For the rest I’ve said it very clearly:
“Whereas those who inflict suffering and prolong it because a heathen god demands it that way, or for any reason whatsoever…”
Comparing me to William Buckley jr. is a great compliment, thank you. Whereas in fact I just try to make my point without getting too boring.
TGD: “Now these calves are too fragile to be shot in the head with a captive bolt pistol.”
Who on earth told you that? I have a number of black angus free-ranging in my “yard”, know all about calves, and that’s pure bullshit.
There’s no excuse whatsoever for the inhumane treatment of food animals. Either raise and slaughter them humanely and painlessly, or eat @#$%ing fruits and vegetables.
Kosher, your ass
As the practicing family butcher and livestockman, I believe myself qualified to say; “kill the brain with one calm shot,” You can bleed by your best method after that.
This is also normal slaughterhouse practice.
Any other method of killing an animal is inhumane (sub human).
Can jew hear me?
Wonderful writing every single time. Thank you.
Nice article. I too detest the needless cruelty towards animals. But I think that the author has some wrong thoughts on these issues. I think it is wrong to give Christianity the credit for those White men who live in harmony with nature (and today only a minority of Whites lives so). As Mister Prebost said it is probably a racial thing that Whites are less cruel to animals than other races. And he correctly points out that there is a strange fascination with blood in the central ritus of the Holy Communion which is a bit alien to the Aryan soul.
And the question remains: Shall we all become vegans? Becoming a vegan is often a sign of world-weariness. There is a growing trend among Japanese men to become vegans and it seems that this is a sign of a deep crisis although I can sympathize with those men (to some extend at least).
http://www.slate.com/id/2220535/pagenum/all/p2
(My tradeoff: I don’t eat mammals, but take the proteins of chicken and fish).
We will not be in total control of our society until we have absolutely ended the practice of ritual slaughter but the putting an end to these primitive tribal religions such as Judaism altogether. Primitive tribal religions cannot be tolerated in the future. The freedom of religion is fine but the practice thereof must not make any impact on the enjoyment of life by others and this includes animals.
All of our ancestors killed animals in huge numbers. Europeans, Asians, Native Americans, Africans … and they had done so for hundreds of thousands of years. In fact, there is a fascinating book called “Catching Fire”, which proposes that cooking animal meat was a big part of our evolution (less time spent digesting cooked meat and more energy in food eaten). See the book here:
http://www.amazon.com/Catching-Fire-Cooking-Human-ebook/dp/B0028P9BE6/ref=dp_kinw_strp_1?ie=UTF8&m=AG56TWVU5XWC2
So if that is true, we wouldn’t even be the humans we are today if we hadn’t slaughtered hundreds of millions of animals! So again, it’s not a healthy sign to enjoy tormenting animals, but let’s not get all sentimental about it.
Jeff – the fact that our ancestors ate lots of meat doesn’t mean we have to all do the same thing today or in some far-off future. If you look at the history of man, major changes have occurred more than once.
First, everything we ate was raw, uncooked and wild.
Then, fire was applied to food, so the diet was more cooked, though not completely, but still wild. Still a huntin’ & gathrin’ world.
Then the biggie, agriculture: still some gathering and hunting, but also plenty of deliberately grown food, mainly grain, became an important part of the diet.
And now, at least civilized peoples eat a mix of cooked, raw, grown, and maybe a wee bit of wild food. Some avoid meat completely and others thrive on it.
So, what I’m getting at is that another major change is not impossible. Maybe a giant transformation will occur, where we begin to identify with our “little brothers and sisters”, the animals, and refuse to eat their flesh. You may think this is just not doable, that we will all become anemic, etc. But if you had tried to explain cooking or grain-growing and the concomitant settlement in communities (instead of chasing animals around) to those who didn’t practice these things, they would probably would have thought it all impossible.
Yes, Richard Wrangham is correct (that book on amazon you refer to). I have heard his ideas ages ago put forth by others. It sounds logical and correct to me. But he himself is an awful liberal bastard. I’ve read some of his stuff, he is so politically correct, it’s painful to watch.
http://www.theoccidentalobserver.net/2010/06/kevin-macdonald-some-thoughts-on-richard-wrangham/
Barkingmad you are right, we may change. I’m sure in the future some way will be found to artificially create the proteins we need – and in a tasty format!
I didn’t know that author was liberal, always good to know. So yeah, I think it would be good to get away from hurting animals as much as possible, I’m just saying that most of our great grandfathers killed them all the time – not for for some silly ritual but out of necessity.
I just want to make sure we don’t equate human and animal.
Equating human and animal was the very point of this article. We are all ONE! So why shouldn’t we race-mix to the limit of our capacities? Colhaze is a troll and he’s laughing at us.
Hear, hear! Colhaze’s sneering assertion that the burden of proof is not on him for his woozy mysticism, his intolerably smarmy whimsical tone, and his lack of anything resembling a straightforward argument makes my skin absolutely crawl; couldn’t finish this article. Worst writer on OO, loathsome. Do us a service and drop him – and his fans – overboard.