Sunday School

[Reg the Fronkey Farmer]

Hmmm, I have a 5K tomorrow and it is cold here.

[jakelafort]

Great weather for a run. Don’t skip it. Skip to it.

[Reg the Fronkey Farmer]

[TheEncogitationer]

Jake,

I’ve never said: “There oughtta be a law” against horse racing, just that a quick, clean take-down of a 15-point buck is less cruel than running a horse to exhaustion, then finally putting him out of his misery and into a glue factory if he gets too old or breaks a leg on the track, all for giggles of bastards probably just as fat as the hunter.

And pelts make good rugs, coats, belts, and wallets that are well worth displaying for their craft and art.

Oh, and any tobasco I would apply to an animal is after it is dead and fully-cooked or jerked to perfection. Sumptuous!

[—]

Reg the Fronkey Farmer wrote:

I had to look that species up. Longfin mako, is what I came up with. I thought it might be rare, but without a dentist shooting something at it, how can we know for sure? Regardless, it doesn’t look like it’s having a good day.

[TheEncogitationer]

Reg,

I would never hunt for the vanity of a trophy, as I am not one who is that hard-up for attention. I also think a better way of getting elephant or rhino ivory would be to domesticate them and instead of killing them, simply give them a sedative and remove the ivory, which will grow back in time and which could be vat-grown from stem cells just like the meat.

With that said. I think people have some warped priorities to regard the Dentist/hunter Walter Palmer as “The Most Hated Man In The World” (said in Keith Olbermann echo.)

Robert Mugabe turned Zimbabwe from the breadbasket of Southern Africa to a global basket-case dependent on foreign aid, with a currency that isn’t even good wallpaper, and took the promise of National Independence in 1975 and turned it into a one-party dictatorship that hounds and murders dissenters and dealt with the HIV/AIDS crisis by persecuting Gays.

If anybody, Robert Mugabe should be in the qualifying for Walter Palmer’s award.

• This reply was modified 4 years, 2 months ago by TheEncogitationer. Reason: Adding an "a" to "wallpaper."

[—]

With that said. I think people have some warped priorities to regard the Dentist/hunter Walter Palmer as “The Most Hated Man In The World” (said in Keith Olbermann echo.)

One would assume most people are speaking figuratively. Of those hated in the world, perhaps for a brief time he was garnering the most attention in certain parts of the world. Though perhaps his acts were emblematic of a sort of senselessness that bothers us to many of the harms caused in this world.

If asked to compare him to pedophiles or serial killers, I’d think most would put him lower on the hate scale. Yet even so, on some level many of us can accept a sort of sickness drives the latter two that even if reviled, is something we can kind of grasp as a state of brokenness. But this poaching sits in a sort of uncanny valley of senseless violence that we can’t quite categorize as neatly, and that’s bound to cause an itch in the brain, especially if we start unravelling our bizarre logic around acceptable and unacceptable killing. Again, with the pedophile and serial killer, we’re not going to struggle all that much with ambiguity.

That’s my pet theory, anyway which is thoroughly backed up by nothing whatsoever.

But as for most hated, that’s just one of those bs titles. It’s like how every year a ‘sexiest man alive’ is declared, and every year it’s not Richard Ayoade, we’re just supposed to go along with the lie? No, it’s obviously just a marketing gimmick—a headline to sell magazines and ad space.

[jakelafort]

Enco, you wrote… just that a quick, clean take-down of a 15-point buck is less cruel than running a horse to exhaustion, then finally putting him out of his misery and into a glue factory if he gets too old or breaks a leg on the track, all for giggles of bastards probably just as fat as the hunter.

Deer are as a matter of survival on edge, alert, sensitive and i suspect highly subject to anxiety. Shooting a deer as you know often results in non kill shots that must cause the wounded animals incredible suffering. The movie Powder captures that sentiment.

Your notions as to horse racing are not exactly typical although they have occurred. Horses run to exhaustion in the sense that they tend to give their all. On the other hand so do professional and Olympic athletes and even regular Joes and Janes. And as i indicated thoroughbreds are by nature super competitive. If a horse breaks down and has a catastrophic injury it will be given a drug to end its life. I would call that humane. I think USA only has five or six states that permit assisted suicide. And we also put our pets down when they are without hope or sometimes keepers just can’t afford the procedures required. The glue factory is a thing of the past. There used to be in American horse racing retired horses or unsuccessful who were taken to the slaughterhouse. That to my knowledge no longer occurs. Also there are big efforts to finding homes for retired thoroughbreds. The top performers with intact genitals have a life of leisure and sex and typically on very nice farms. The others generally well cared in their retirement.

I reject your suggestion that justifies hunting/killing an animal if it has utility for humans. Plains Indians and bison? ok. But fat bastards who want to kill bambi and have all they need and then some? not for my money..
Whales have been hunted nearly to extinction and their carcasses had varied applications for human benefit. That fact does not justify taking their lives.

I am not gonna sugar coat horse racing and say there are no moral issues. There are. On the other hand it is not equitable to lump all issues of animal rights without contemplating the nature and severity of the issues.

[Unseen]

jakelafort wrote:

thoroughbreds are by nature super competitive

Yeah, so are pitbulls. But horse racing, like dogfighting, bullfighting, cockfighting, and circuses keeping animals should be illegal.

You need to bone up on horse racing. It’s a brutal way to treat a horse. Horses chasing around in a field for their own pleasure is a whole different thing from forcing them to the edge of their ability and health so that people can bet on them and the owners sell their semen be it in person (mating) or in jars. They are mistreated during their training and often drugged before racing.

Worse, perhaps, when their racing days are over and they have no further use in breeding, they are often shot or handed over to slaughterhouses.

This article should prove educational: The Inevitability of Dead Racehorses.

Pay special attention to the links on the right where the dead racehorses for each year are listed. All horses that should have lived out their days being horses, not commodities.

• This reply was modified 4 years, 2 months ago by Unseen.
• This reply was modified 4 years, 2 months ago by Unseen.
• This reply was modified 4 years, 2 months ago by Unseen.

[jakelafort]

Unseen wrote: Yeah, so are pitbulls. But horse racing, like dogfighting, bullfighting, cockfighting, and circuses keeping animals should be illegal.

You need to bone up on horse racing. It’s a brutal way to treat a horse. Horses chasing around in a field for their own pleasure is a whole different thing from forcing them to the edge of their ability and health so that people can bet on them and the owners sell their semen be it in person (mating) or in jars. They are mistreated during their training and often drugged before racing.

Worse, perhaps, when their racing days are over and they have no further use in breeding, they are often shot or handed over to slaughterhouses.

This article should prove educational: The Inevitability of Dead Racehorses.

Pay special attention to the links on the right where the dead racehorses for each year are listed. All horses that should have lived out their days being horses, not commodities.

First point is that persons who want horse racing banned because of cruelty to horses have dirty hands and it is hypocritical if they’re purchasing meat for consumption yet calling out the cruelty in horse racing. There is no comparison in the scope, extent and degree of cruelty between the tens of billions of animals raised each year to be slaughtered and the horse racing industry.

Second, the horse racing industry is filled with women and men who make horses the focus of their lives and have a deep respect and love of equines. As such they give incredible care to their steeds. That translates into the best grooming and care available. And it means when horses are unsound they are taken out of competition and out of training. My sense is that horses often are quite proud and thrive on performing. Can’t prove it but having read a few books about horse intelligence and behavior and countless hours at race tracks that is my opinion.

That guy who wrote the linked article is a crusader. I expect he is a vegetarian or vegan so i have no problem with him taking the stance he has. However some of his assertions are misleading or inaccurate. That list of horses who died is just bullshit. Only a small percentage died in training or racing. That fact should be made plainly. There is an issue with unscrupulous purchasers of retired horses who go to slaughter. There are people in horse racing who try to prevent that sad ending. On the other hand with so many of us eating meat how can we complain about slaughtered animals for consumption?

I lack the time to finish my thoughts. More later.

[Unseen]

@Jake

Your first point suffers from the “tu quoque” fallacy. If your opponent is being hypocritical, that doesn’t disprove his argument. In a sense, tu quoque is a kind of “poisoning the well” fallacy, because it asks you to consider the source of the allegations not the  allegations themselves.

As for your second point, there’s a lot of romanticizing going on there, which ignores the obvious abuse of the animals. Racing animals who aren’t 100% developed, breeding animals who can put out enough energy to break their own legs through exertion, killing them as soon as they become an expense rather than a source of income. Drugging them. Inbreeding them. Etc., etc., etc. It’s much the same in the dog breeding industry where winning shows is the most important thing, NOT the welfare of the animals.

The fact that we do eat meat, which is the best and most natural form of protein—we ate fish, rabbit, and mastodon before we were able to eat peanuts, kidney beans, and garbonzos)—is beside the point. We should, I grant, make the process as humane as possible, but that is a poor argument for the outright abuse of animals, not for anyone’s sustenance but just to make a few bucks while providing entertainment for gamblers.

• This reply was modified 4 years, 2 months ago by Unseen.

[_Robert_]

We had a polo grounds next door, ~1970. Most of the houses around there were owned by Argentineans. Us kids would sneak in or get a few bucks for cleaning the trash under the bleachers. I saw a pony suffer a massive compound leg fracture and roll on-top of the player during a practice. They shot the horse right there and used a tractor to lift it off the guy who was brain damaged by now. Sometimes the ponies would trip over the wood polo field boundaries or take a 50mph wooden polo ball to the nose or get whacked with mallets. Not a huge fan of polo or any animal racing sports. It’s like ancient Rome type stuff.

Our food animals do get revenge in a sense being one source of zoological based pandemics. Fucking nasty wet markets.

[Unseen]

Mistreatment of Race Horses
https://howtheyplay.com/animal-sports/Mistreatment-of-Race-Horses

The Ugly Truth About Horse Racing
https://www.theatlantic.com/culture/archive/2014/03/the-ugly-truth-about-horse-racing/284594/

This article covers much, but one point brought home to me was that foals with no racing prospects are sometimes sent to slaughter. They “love” horses? Don’t male me laugh!

The slaughtered horses that shame our racing
https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2006/oct/01/horseracing.sport

Then this video of a horse euthanized even though it could stand on all four legs simply because it injured a leg. On Youtube there are TONS of shocking videos of hideous broken leg injuries, and such injuries are so serious that horses often do have to be put down because horses aren’t very good at rest and recuperation and want to be running about, and so such repairs seldom work.

I would like to have shown some of the more horrific injuries, but frankly I would have to watch those videos first and simply couldn’t stomach watching even one. I have seen one or two in the past and that was enough for me.

• This reply was modified 4 years, 2 months ago by Unseen.
• This reply was modified 4 years, 2 months ago by Unseen.

[jakelafort]

Unseen i have acknowledged that there are issues in horse racing. I also acknowledged that the crusader has equitable standing to make his case provided he is vegan/vegetarian which is an assumption i make. I did not say or imply otherwise. We ought not commingle hypocrisy and logical fallacies. So for instance a priest may rail against coveting your neighbor’s wife in his sermons while molesting little girls and having an affair with the wife of a church goer. The priest’s behavior and hypocrisy does not impact the issue whether coveting is in and of itself wrong. On the other hand we ought to point out the hypocrisy!

BTW you may not be aware that there is a related idea or doctrine in law known as unclean hands or dirty hands. When a plaintiff has been guilty of the act complained against, the defendant may have the defense of unclean hands and the plaintiff may be denied relief as a matter of equity. Interesting, init?

If you are only acquainted with horse racing based on lure, propaganda and various cultural tropes and memes there are a great many misconceptions. The crusader indicated 6 is the age of full development. Not buying that. In general a race horse attains its greatest level of ability at age 4 or 5. After that there is a very gradual decline in performance. Highest performance necessarily requires full development so i think he is full of shit and will stretch the truth not only in the interest of a good story but to further his agenda.

The idea that horses are killed as soon as they become an expense rather than profitable is also untrue. It is illegal for owners to kill their horses. There is a great effort to have retired horses adopted. Many are treated like gold. The issue comes with retired horses that are sold to fuckers who have them slaughtered. But again meat eaters can’t really complain about that, can they? I think it is a fucking horror show and so do a great many in the industry whom i have read over the years. And i know there are people in the industry who not only complain but take action against the horrifying practice.

The economics of horse racing that he laid out is also untrue. But again it furthers his agenda. No doubt he feels justified in stretching the truth if it serves his ends.

Drugging horses is a cruelty issue as it sometimes causes a horse to continue racing when it would otherwise pull up out of a race. Fortunately federal legislation recently passed known as the Horseracing integrity and Safety Act. A panel will be or has been appointed to pass rules that are uniform in all of the states to root out illegal substances and make racing safer. Elsewhere in Europe and Asia even lasix and bute which are standard medications in North American racing are banned. The thought is that if we permit meds that enable balky horses to race then their genetics will encourage similar offspring. If not sound enough to race clean then not sound enough to race. They also are more draconian when an offender is caught. I suspect that the USA is headed in the same direction.

I agree inbreeding is a problem. It is in humans as well.

I disagree with your animal protein take. Yes animal protein has some amino acids that are beneficial but it also has heme which is strongly associated with various forms of cancer. And i think it is fairly conclusive that vegetarians live longer and with fewer diseases than heavy meat eaters

You write: We should, I grant, make the process as humane as possible, but that is a poor argument for the outright abuse of animals, not for anyone’s sustenance but just to make a few bucks while providing entertainment for gamblers.

I reject that notion. Enco did the same thing and essentially it is the tu quoque fallacy repackaged. The abuse or cruelty to animals is a thing unto itself without reference to the abused animal’s utility for humans. By the way we can get by just fine without animal protein. Just a b12 supplement and wullah no unspeakable animalcide. Horse racing isn’t just to make a few bucks or entertain it is the livelihood of tens of thousands.

Again horse racing is not lily white. But seen in its actual light it pales in comparison to factory farming. That shit just horrifies me. And i was a participant for many years with that same disconnect…adoring the pet and examining the various steaks in the market without any feeling for the antecedents and silent story of unspeakable suffering.

[jakelafort]

Unseen that first link has this quote. Inevitably, those fragile bones break under the enormous stresses put on them. That is not stretching the truth. That is a bald face lie.

One of the links indicates that horses about to be slaughtered know what is coming. I have read same thing many times with respect to livestock. Why do i have this image of a nazi telling a concentration camp Jew to go ahead and have a shower and some hot soup? Slaughtering animals is really horrifying. I would be in favor of having all citizens witness how farm factory animals live and are slaughtered. If we ban that i am happy to ban horse racing.

As to horses breaking down i have seen it live. It is horrifying.

[Author]

Posts