>What gives us *any* rights to have so cutely called 'pets'?  What gives
>us *any* right to do what we do to other species in the name of
>education?  Whose education?  What for?  Wanna education? Go out and
>look in your back garden, there is plenty of wild life there :-)
>
>It is a question of roles and 'existence'.  True caring for other
>species is to leave them well alone.  My own 'Theory of Evolution'
>states that the whole thing is back to front and that we are in fact
>will be 'evolving' to higher beings such as viruses and such like.
>
>We humans just cannot put our hands in our pockets and stop interfering
>with many processes.  We just keep on interfering and buggering things
>up in the name of 'humanity', 'education', preservation' and a host of
>other well meaning causes only found in the 'Chipping Norton Manual for
>Saving the World'.
>
>Said world will do just nicely if we stopped messing about with it.
>
>My only hope is that the Peter's Principle will eventually apply to the
>human species when it rises to its own level of incompetence and depart
>this world.
>
>Ahmad

Ahmad

You are truly a man of contradictions.  What's the point of building for
the future if we have none?

Surely we have rights to follow our own instincts too, especially as we
might actually be benefitting these animals?  

Many species became extinct before mankind ever walked the earth.  Mankind
is the best hope for survival of many species.  I used to believe our earth
could protect us for a few billion years, till the sun went boom.  Now it
seems as though the window of opportunity between the evolution of a
sentient species and an event which wipes the slate clean could be much
shorter.  

We're really no better placed than the dinosaurs.  And though human life is
diverse, human civilisation is now so complex as to be relatively fragile.
Maybe mankind with its dreams of space is the best chance for all life to
survive in the long term.

Maybe it doesn't matter in a rural setting, but giving our children, who
mainly grow up in concrete jungles, the chance to care about animals is
important too.  The domestication of animals is no recent phenomenon, but
deeply embedded in human evolution.  It's only in our "sick" society that
we've started to question its probity.

We don't have any pets and I have no personal axe to grind, but I think the
evidence that pets are good for people is persuasive, and the evidence that
being a pet has to be (not can be) bad for an animal essentially
non-existent.  Let's believe in ourselves and our beneficience at least
occasionally.

JB



%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%