FORT90 forum

http://www.nydailynews.com/news/ny_crime/2009/07/15/2009-07-15_cheyenne_cherry_taunts_animal_activists_after_getting_plea_deal_killing_kitten_i.html

Wow, that is cold. Somehow the comments section has veered into a liberal versus conservative non-debate.

R.I.P. TIGER LILY

Because every issue has to be a conservative vs. liberal debate. It's the natural order of things!

killing animals is only wrong when we think they're cute and housebroken

it's that whole peter sanger expanding circle thing.

not having grown up with pets beyond fish and hamsters, i don't have that same kind of attachment to dogs and cats most people have. i like them and all, but they're not very invested with "personhood" as it were.

I don't think it's really investing in their personhood as much as it is wondering what kind of person would be that cruel to something else.

If anything, she was trying more to intimidate the person she had a falling out with that involved an innocent 3rd party to the whole thing. I think I'm far more concerned if she could do that to a kitten, then what could she have done to a small child?

well, no, i tend to agree with singer on this. as isfet points out, some thing are more "people like" than others, with "cuteness" as a huge pull. personhood is more easily conferred on social animals (dogs, cats) that humans socialize with, and some they don't (wolves, bears, anything "cute"); they are, in turn, privileged against most reptiles and amphibians, and certainly most fish*; all of which are privileged above insects, even highly social insects like bees and ants.

the reason that someone cooking a kitten seems more evil than, say, gassing a roach with an aerosol poison is that the kitten fits into our "expanding circle" (to use singer's terminology) of what counts as a "being" thus coming closer to a kind of personhood with at least some nominal notion of rights. (general under the guise of some kind of human protection, simply because animals obviously don't have any kind of agency of rights themselves; you cannot charge a kitten with murder for killing a bird, etc etc and so forth, and you're applying human concepts to non-human actions.)

we are cruel to insects all of the time, excepting the jains. do any of us hesistate to kill a mosquito? and yet they are beings with lives.

think of it as a big ole x-axis, with "PERSON" on the left side and "INSENSATE OBJECT" on the right side. everything sits upon that scale.

* least vegan dish ever is a sechuzan dish where a live fish is poached in hot oil, covered in cooked vegetables and served still gasping for air.

I've made a less vegan dish before.

I'm sure this girl is not so stupid as to put a child in the oven because whether or not she feels any affinity towards babies, she knows that she could go to jail for murder, and if her friend put a baby in the oven, she probably knows she could go to jail as an accomplice for not taking the baby out of the oven. She probably did not realize she could go to jail for a year for not taking a kitten out of an oven though. Hell, I'm surprised about that too.

Also, you have to consider there is a huge difference between a kitten and your enemy's kitten.

edit:
To answer the question directly: most humans in the history of our race.

I'm not arguing that she'd put a child in an oven per se, but there are just other things she could do to a child.

man, the only thing less vegan than serving a still-living fish you just flash poached would be grinding up a mama cow and force feeding it its own baby.

Are you pro choice? Like dhex said, this is all on a sliding scale that's different for everyone. I know people who won't kill bugs, and my brother kills other humans.

If you were there for it, you would probably would have agreed it was pretty brutal. I won't get into it since it could potentially get me into trouble apparently.

I'm pro choice, although I don't like abortion.

Weird, I know, but It's not up for me to decide who gets an abortion and why they would abort.

who "likes" abortion though, I mean seriously

if you press enough buttons people will slip into "parasite" mode pretty quickly. that's more a function of escalated rhetoric than anything else, the flipside of zygote = living, breathing human or whatever. it gets ugly real quick, as would be expected.

back to the original story, there's a lot of underlying class conflict at work here, too. "animal rights" as a show up and protest hobby are a kind of luxury.

personally, her previous convictions aside, i'm not sure that this should be a "go to jail" sort of crime. fine, yeah. perhaps even community service or some kinda indentured servitude for six months to the aspca or whatever. but going to jail? i dunno.


now you're just being a cocktease. or a cruel-tease. not sure what the technical term would be.

To clarify, I think it's sad, but not like, she iced a baby sad. I would be sad if somebody roasted our cat but I wouldn't expect such a public outcry!

It was sort of amazing to me when we were in the process of getting our cat the amount of time and effort we saw spent on running the no-kill cat shelter she came from. I love wittle kitties and I love having her but man what if they spent the same amount of time helping out people? To me animal rights people always seemed a little selfish... or just totally out-of-touch.

In addition to the personhood issue, which is valid, there also tends to be a backlash against the killing of animals for no tangible purpose v. animals killed with a specific purpose in mind that goes beyond the "we only care about cute" notion.

but if you were to, say, put your enemy's hamster in the microwave, you wouldn't face jail time.

No, you'd just be killed and appear as a grave stone for your two other friends to see.

HAH

that sounds like a teaser for WORLD'S CRUELEST ANIMAL CRUELTY VIDEOS.

now if it was a hamster that belonged to a little girl dying of cancer...maybe?

Depending on where you are you might. Quite a few states have felony animal cruelty laws. Also it can be seen as both animal cruelty and destruction of property.

http://www.lisaviolet.com/cathouse/cruelty.html

Because people want to stop evil forces that threaten the good and the innocent, but because that's so impossible to achieve across the board, no matter how many are involved, even optimistically speaking, the next best thing is to carry that same attitude and motivation onto something that's a bit scaled down, for a cause that's actually manageable (to a certain extent).

Ultimately they themselves feel helpless in the world at large, so there's need to help out the little guy, especially since fuzzy little things are so defenseless. Whereas human beings are strong/smart/able enough to care of themselves, hence why many also feel that they're all inherently evil/pieces of shit that deserves what comes to them, so fuck 'em.

on a slightly less directly hostile vector:

in New Orleans, companion animals were left behind to fend for themselves, and wind up being needlessly shot in many cases by the police going door-to-door. Humans got evacuated.

There are a lot more programs and groups in place for the welfare of humans than there are for animals. Also, humans have the ability to speak and spread the word about their condition.  Animals don't have that option, so they either have the selfish animal rights people helping them, or they get to die.

I think her reaction post-sentencing has far more to do with her own need to distance herself from what happened and convince herself she's in the right, because how else do you live with doing something like that? Even if it was 'only' a more traditional food animal like a rabbit or a chicken, that's a brutal and cruel way to end a creature's life.