Kettu makes a valid point about introduced animals. The introduction of rats, cats, dogs, horses, cattle, sheep, pigs, rabbits, camels (apparently this is the only country in the world with wild camels, so I've read) and so on was just a part of the whole European incursion into this nation, which is a wider and different subject. The aboriginal people, arriving from the North many thousands of years ago, hunted many species of Australian prehistoric mega-fauna to extinction before my noble ancestors arrived, and promptly found themselves considered fauna (until a referendum in the Sixties decided to legally declare them human beings) and the subject of many hunts themselves. Disgusting species, aren't we? Surely bow-wows and kitty-cats are so much nicer.
But that was not my impetus. I'm closer to Mikko's and others' points about pets as vanity items. I've tended to see pets as pretty much extensions of their owners frail egos. I honestly don't understand, or want to understand, the whole companionship thing. People just seem to aquire them as they aquire other things to own. The fact that pounds are stuffed with unwanted wretches in need of extermination, not to mention the proliferation of ferals, is something else pets "bring to the table", Mr Marx. I had, for years, a neighbour with four dogs in a tiny yard right next to my bedroom - no need to elaborate how easily I slept during that time. They were never walked, once. When they moved, three of the animals had to be put down due to their owners' hopeless incompetence. The neighbour after that - a worthless bogan single mum with an equally worthless teenage daughter who's parties finally, and thankfully, obliged me to move to a better area - had, for a short time, a dog, who burrowed it's way out of the yard and attempted to find it's way back to the rural area it came from. She never saw it again. Companionship my cock, people just aquire pets out of habit, or out of fetishism. By the way, ever hear the story of the old lady who was eaten by her cats when she dropped dead at home?
Vegitarianism/veganism has its benefits, no doubt, but as an ethic, it's bullshit. I was vegan for a while, back when I thought it was possible to "make the world a better place" (ie, make it more into something I liked). But one day I just gave into the craving for chicken and haven't looked back since. Currently I want to enjoy as much red meat as possible before it becomes something only the super rich can have - whether I die in a gutter or in a nursing home bed, I don't want to look back and bemoan the pleasures I denied myself out of simple ethical stupidity.
Animals are pretty fucked, when you look at them. Ducks, for example - the evolution of their genitals is based on rape. Corkscrew cunts to attempt to outwit corkscrew cocks. Seen that legendary video of the duck raping a male duck corpse? Aren't they cute? And wasn't it the baboons who go to war with each other to claim females from each others' tribes? Some ape, anyway.
Human attitude to animals is fraught with hypocrisy and denial. Here in Australia, there was a public reaction against the Japanese whaling. From the same nation that once prided itself on "riding on the sheeps' back". How many more examples can come to your mind? I hope I get to taste whale meat before I die.
The more I think of it, the more I realise that organic life, from microbe to ourselves, is just FOOD. I keep the nick-name "wormfood" on my email as a reminder of what Shakespeare had Hamlet tell us -
"Your worm is your only emperor for diet. We fat all creatures else to fat us, and we fat ourselves for maggots. Your fat king and your lean beggar is but variable service—two dishes, but to one table. That's the end."
When people like Boyd Rice and others go on about "predator and prey", they don't seem to mention the why - that is, it's all about getting something to eat. Organic life, as a whole, consumes and defecates itself, plant and animal, in an eternal orgy of eating. It doesn't matter a jot if we all still lived in tiny villages and spent all day tracking down wild cows, or mass produced the things in modern factory farms - we eat, and that's all there is to it.
We are the predator, we are the prey. We are the fodder, we are the feces.
Oh, and those of you I offended with my last post? Get fucked.
