From: Dr Sebby (drsebby@hotmail.com)
Date: Fri May 21 2004 - 17:26:03 MDT
....when you knowingly move into an area occupied by the very endangered
mountain lion, and then claim self-defense or the unbeatable "child
protection" arguement for needlessly killing it, it smacks of
self-righteousness extreme.
....your post DOES however, seem to justify the way we wiped out the native
americans. how dare they attack us when we move into their home and take it
over.
....i'd trade a couple kids any day for a mountain lion. what is the
mountain lion population? 5,000 individuals on the entire planet. humans?
- 6,400,000,000.
....how can you honestly believe the righteousness of killing it???
DrSebby.
"Courage...and shuffle the cards".
----Original Message Follows----
From: "Joe Dees" <hidden@lucifer.com>
Reply-To: virus@lucifer.com
To: virus@lucifer.com
Subject: virus: Re:Everyone Is Part of the War
Date: Fri, 21 May 2004 13:39:51 -0600
Traitors to Animal-Kind
A big cat in Palo Alto says much about the culture.
By Clinton W. Taylor
http://www.nationalreview.com/comment/taylor200405210925.asp
Dangerous cats, like most dangers, are uncommon in mellow, affluent Palo
Alto, California. Then two horses were attacked by a mountain lion near the
Stanford campus earlier this month. Stanford University's response to this
assault was decisive and emphatic: Jeff Wachtel, Senior Assistant to
Stanford's president, immediately announced that no firearms could be used
to capture or kill the creature, citing concerns about public safety.
Nothing would actually be done to capture the panther.
Following the horse-slaying, the cat apparently worked its way up creek
channels into residential Palo Alto, and rumors of its arrival followed. A
professor I know correctly instructed his children that, should they
encounter the beast, they should shout and raise their arms over their heads
to look big, in order to frighten it off. His concern was appropriate:
Mountain lions, though rare, have killed at least six Californians over the
past 114 years and mauled eight more.
On Monday, Palo Alto police tracked the mountain lion to a tree on Walnut
Drive. According to a grim video report by area TV station KPIX, police
considered using a tranquilizer dart, but decided against it because local
elementary schools would soon release their students, and darts might take
20 to 30 minutes to knock the animal out. So an officer aimed her rifle at
the mountain lion's heart. The sleeping cat stirred, and the officer fired.
It tumbled through the tree past a child's swing, ran behind a hedge,
crossed a driveway, and lay down to die amid some cactus and lavender.
That is quite a bit of excitement for these parts, and it is not surprising
that it has generated some headlines. What is surprising is the way a
wildlife-control operation unleashed such a torrent of moralizing and
outrage.
Second-guessing and recriminations began immediately. KPIX showed a video of
the shooting to Alfredo Kuba, a member of a group called In Defense of
Animals. "I think it's absolutely atrocious the way the police behaved,"
Kuba told them. "Obviously the animal was not posing a threat to anyone. It
was in a tree."
Meanwhile, the Palo Alto Daily News headlined Wednesday's paper with "Lion's
Killing Sparks Furor." It included a picture of flowers and written tributes
left at the base of the tree, including this eulogy: "Your death will not be
in vain. Tears are shed for you, and this brutality will inspire ACTION. You
are loved." (This was not the only written message directed to a specific
animal in connection to this incident. The San Jose Mercury News reported
that the owners of Kelsey, the Labrador retriever who chased the cougar up a
tree, received an e-mail calling their dog a "traitor to animal-kind.")
The letters page of the Daily News carried four notes condemning the
shooting. A letter asked where the "backup plan" was to prevent the
suffering of the dying animal. Another from a South African biology student
faulted the "trigger-happy", "incompetent" police for not packing adequate
firepower, and noted that the lion was not a threat because it was chased up
a tree by a dog. Another allowed that, had the cat been "alert and
aggressively approaching something or someone, then shooting the animal
might have been the only option," but insisted there had been time for
"trained professionals to be brought in."
A fourth letter, by Robert More of Palo Alto, compared the shooting of the
mountain lion to the U.S. invasion of Iraq, and found both unnecessary. "It
seems to me that what is potentially dangerous is the attitude that we need
to annihilate anything determined to be potentially dangerous."
I disagree with More's conclusions, but we both draw the same analogy from
this situation: There are underlying cultural ideas at work that inform
reactions both to the cougar's shooting and to the war in Iraq. It is not a
perfect analogy: The young cougar was a genuinely beautiful creature and its
death is regrettable, while Saddam Hussein's regime was a hellish travesty
of government mourned only by the deluded and the complicit.
Nevertheless, these (over)reactions to the cougar's demise stem from some of
the same ideas that drive opposition to the current worldwide war against
terrorism. Whether on the local scale of a dangerous predator loose in the
neighborhood, or on the grand scale of rogue states that sponsor terror and
proliferate weapons, many of the same ideas about the legitimate uses of
force shine through.
Idea #1: Weapons are bad, and taint those who use them.
The comment that "trained professionals" should have handled the situation
ignores the fact the officer who killed the mountain lion was herself a
trained professional, not some jackleg vigilante. There is a notion shared
throughout these letters and comments that the force used was excessive, and
that a tranquilizer gun should have been employed. But tranquilizer guns are
not instantaneously effective, and they are not standard issue.
There was no non-lethal option at hand that could neutralize the threat
quickly. The officer on the scene could have stood there wishing for such a
device, but instead she did her job with the best tools and judgment at her
disposal.
In the right hands, tools like that rifle make civilization possible.
Without them, we'd be up to our navels in mountain lions, or worse; and we'd
have no time for civilized pursuits like writing panegyrics to feline
martyrs and e-mailing canine traitors.
On an international scale, weapons under the command of a competent and
disciplined military are especially good for deterring human threats,
because humans are social animals that can occasionally learn from others'
experiences. An excellent example of this sort of behavior is Muammar
Qaddafi's relinquishing of Libya's WMD programs. After seeing how
dictatorial regimes like Taliban Afghanistan, Saddam's Iraq, and Charles
Taylor's (remember him?) Liberia fared against American resolve, Qaddafi
folded, without a shot being fired. This example is antithetical, however,
to the blue-state mantra that violence absolutely never solves anything.
Idea #2: We had it coming.
What do you expect, when development expands relentlessly into the habitats
of wild creatures? Each new house and road and parking lot destroys more
habitat area, and then the creatures have nowhere to go.
We have two choices: somehow stop the expansion of civilization, or learn to
live with bears rifling through our garbage, deer crashing through our
windshields, and mountain lions carrying off the occasional cyclist. A third
option, resisting these incursions, would be immoral, since we are all
complicit in prosperity's depredations and the animals don't know any
better.
The same principle is writ large in the opposition to the war on terror.
Western success, according to anarchist philosopher Franz Fanon, rests on
slavery and oppression, an idea shared by both the American and European
Left, and the terrorists. So what do you expect when unjust Western
prosperity establishes a toehold? It causes an inevitable reaction, in the
form of terrorism. This principle assumes that, like wild animals, potential
terrorists are utterly incapable of exercising the restraint we demand of
ourselves. This idea is dreadfully condescending, of course, as well as
wrong: See Qaddafi, above.
Idea #3: Treed animals don't pose a threat. And Saddam was up a tree.
Nice theory, but in fact, threatened, cornered, or wounded animals are at
their most desperate and dangerous.
Saddam was boxed in, all right. The problem was that the population of Iraq
was boxed in with him, and paying a terrible price for our forbearance. And
the other problem is that through the corrupt U.N. Oil-for-Food program,
through payments to the families of Palestinian suicide bombers, and through
relationships with terrorists like Abu Abbas, Abu Musad Al-Zarqawi, and
possibly even Mohammed Atta, Saddam continued to threaten and corrupt the
world.
Idea #4: A deadly attack must be imminent to justify deadly force.
In criminal law, this statement is strictly true. But when dealing with
rogue nations or terrorist groups seeking WMDs, just as against stealthy
predators in the neighborhood sizing up the schoolchildren, imminent is far
too late. As President Bush put it in his 2003 State of the Union address,
"Some have said we must not act until the threat is imminent. Since when
have terrorists and tyrants announced their intentions, politely putting us
on notice before they strike?"
Considering this list of reasons shows how simplistic and wrong it is to
accuse the antiwar left of cowardice. In fact, they are quite brave, I would
even say reckless, to bear the risks of predatory felines and predatory
states so cheerfully (if, that is, they truly understand the risks.) But
that bravery is simply the logical outcome of these deeply held, deeply
flawed principles that deem effective resistance to be immoral. Stoic
resignation is the only option left to them.
I, on the other hand, remain an unabashed coward. Hungry cougars,
sarin-spewing terrorists, nukemongering dictators, I lack the courage and
the intellectual agility required to keep on ignoring them. Threats to
civilization must be confronted, with deadly force when necessary. Waving
our arms around, shouting, and trying to look big is no way to go through
life.
Clinton W. Taylor is a lawyer and a Ph.D. student in political science at
Stanford.
---- This message was posted by Joe Dees to the Virus 2004 board on Church of Virus BBS. <http://virus.lucifer.com/bbs/index.php?board=61;action=display;threadid=30330> --- To unsubscribe from the Virus list go to <http://www.lucifer.com/cgi-bin/virus-l> _________________________________________________________________ Tired of spam? Get advanced junk mail protection with MSN 8. http://join.msn.com/?page=features/junkmail --- To unsubscribe from the Virus list go to <http://www.lucifer.com/cgi-bin/virus-l>
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