What is the diference between a plant and an animal? “Most of us regard plants as quite diferent from animals, and many of us think of them as furniture. But plants actually share a very large number of biological functjons with the animal kingdom, including mechanisms for sensing and responding to enemies (e.g., immune responses), cellular and molecular organizatjon, and even behaviors. Moreover, because they must interact with animals in diverse and intjmate ways, plants possess many characteristjcs uniquely suited for infuencing animals, including humans.” “Plants are just very slow animals.” Dr. Jack C Schultz Division of Plant Sciences at UM Columbia
“A 2013 study in the Journal of Experimental Biology found that crabs avoided electric shocks, suggestjng they can, in fact, feel pain. Bob Elwood, one of the study's authors and a professor at Queen's University Belfast, told BBC News at the tjme: ‘I don't know what goes on in a crab's mind. . . . But what I can say is the whole behavior goes beyond a straightorward refex response and it fts all the criteria of pain.’” Lindsey Bever Washington Post
Dr. Kate Daring MIT Media Lab • Afuer playing with a Pleo (a fuzzy cute robotjc dinosaur) for an hour, partjcipants refused to destroy the Pleo with a hatchet. • They refused to destroy other partjcipant’s Pleos when told doing so would save their own Pleo. • When told one Pleo had to be destroyed or they all would be, one partjcipant reluctantly hit one with a hatchet.
“We need another and a wiser and perhaps a more mystjcal concept of animals. Remote from universal nature, and living by complicated artjfce, man in civilizatjon surveys the creature through the glass of his knowledge and sees thereby a feather magnifed and the whole image in distortjon. We patronize them for their incompleteness, for their tragic fate of having taken form so far below ourselves. And therein we err, and greatly err. For the animal shall not be measured by man. In a world older and more complete than ours they move fnished and complete, gifued with extensions of the senses we have lost or never atained, living by voices we shall never hear. They are not brethren, they are not underlings; they are other natjons, caught with ourselves in the net of life and tjme, fellow prisoners of the splendour and travail of the earth.” Henry Beston, 1928 The Outermost House: A Year of Life on the Great Beach of Cape Cod
“You will wonder, maybe, how it is that a person can both appreciate wild, living things and kill them too. I see your dilemma and I’ve faced this questjon before.” Pete Dunne “Before the Echo” “I like to watch [deer]…I fall in love. How can I say this, and say that I kill them?” CL Rawlins “I Like to Talk about Animals” “The killing bothers me. Even so, I haven’t stopped huntjng.” Bruce Woods “The Huntjng Problem” “It is necessary to understand and love your prey with a force precisely equal to your desire to kill and eat it.” Russell Chatham “Dust to Dust”
“The struggling fawn suddenly went limp in my arms. Panicked, I told my husband to pull the feeding tube out of her stomach. Though Sandy had quit breathing and her death was clearly imminent, I held her head down and slapped her back in an atempt to clear her trachea. Warm, soured milk ran from her mouth and nose, soaking my clothes and gagging us with its vile smell. I turned Sandy over in my arms, and my husband placed his mouth over her muzzle. While he blew air into her lungs, I squeezed her chest as a CPR course had taught me to do for infants in cardiac arrest. ‘Come on, Sandy, wake up. Please wake up!’ Sandy never woke up. The afuernoon Sandy died, however, was not convenient for mourning. We were going to a group dinner that evening and had to prepare a dish. Through tears I made a marinade for the roast. While the meat smoked over charcoal and hickory, we brooded over Sandy’s death. When the roast was done, we wiped away our tears, cleaned up and went to the dinner. Our moods brightened as our roast was quickly gobbled up, and the evening’s high point came when several guests declared that our roast was the best venison they’d ever eat. The best deer meat. Part of an animal my husband, an avid hunter, had willfully killed and I had gratefully butchered, wrapped, and frozen—a deer that was once a cute and innocent litle fawn…just like Sandy.” --Ann Causey, “Is Huntjng Ethical? htps://eng101spring11.fles.wordpress.com/2011/01/causey-is-huntjng-ethical.pdf
“Minimize sufering. Maximize well-being.” “If a being sufers, there can be no moral justjfcatjon for refusing to take that sufering into consideratjon.” --Peter Singer Practcal Ethics “I don’t think that we should discount the sufering of a being because of its species (any more than we should discount the sufering of a human because of its race, sex, IQ, etc.). The principle of equal consideratjon of interests, which I defend, is simply that we should give similar importance to similar interests. If hitng a horse causes the horse as much pain as hitng a child, then they are equally bad. Of course, if hitng the child causes more pain, then it is worse – and if hitng the horse causes more pain, then that is worse.” --Peter Singer htp://decodedpast.com/peter-singer-sufering-consequences-speciesism/76109
“In the fnal analysis, huntjng is a magical practjce. It seeks to bring hunter and hunted together...Each tjme you take to the felds and forests, there is a long chain of hunters behind you whose collectjve experience is not all that diferent from yours.” --James A. Swan In Defense of Huntnn
“That the hunter has a special relatjonship, more nearly a kindship not only with wildlife but with the wild itself has long been understood, however, grudgingly. It is hardly news that the hunter-conservatjonist, and his tremendous record of success, is a traditjon that dates well back to the previous century.” -- Thomas McIntyre “What the Hunter Knows”
“We are hopeless romantjcs about this imaginary Big Woods—it no longer exists in any faintly viable form. Even one of the far corners of creatjon, the north slope of the Brooks Range, is litered with oil drums. It seems funny, too, to discover that every American in the deepest litle synapse in his brain considers himself a natural at huntjng and fshing, a genetjc Pete Maravich of the outback.” --Jim Harrison “The Violators” “I’ve listened to the war of words waged between those who defend huntjng and those who decry it. Listened to the arguments mouthed by sportsmen—banal truths about ‘controlling the herd’ and ‘harvestjng the surplus’ and ‘maintaining the balance,’ as if huntjng were some sort of civic-minded cleanup. That’s not why they hunt…. Maybe they cannot artjculate their reasons and so retreat behind the defensive arguments erected by game-management engineers. Their rhetoric bridges no gaps and does no service to the truth” Pete Dunne “Before the Echo”
In “Moral Saints,” “I don’t know whether there are any moral saints. But if there are, I am glad that neither I nor those about whom I care most are among them. By moral saint I mean a person whose every actjon is as morally good as possible.” “[A moral saint would be] dull wited, humorless or bland [since a more cynical or sarcastjc sense of humor] would require one to take an attude of resignatjon towards the faws and vices to be found in the world. Similarly, an interest in something like gourmet cooking [would be proscribed since] there seems no plausible argument that could impartjally justjfy producing a pate de canard en croute [when human resources could be devoted to more compelling moral needs]. Susan Wolf “Moral Saints”
“A person who dedicates herself to art or science or philosophy, who makes herself a great ballplayer or a great chef does something we admire. She works, not solely for her own happiness, or out of an inexplicably strong but arbitrary desire; rather she is drawn to something she (correctly) fnds worthwhile in the enterprise.” “The perfectjon of one’s talents is…obviously of dubious moral value [but it is] nevertheless something we recognize as being worthy of admiratjon; it has value though we may not know precisely how to describe that value.” Susan Wolf “Morality and the View from Here”
“[The impulse that leads me to hunt] is not the same as laziness or abandonment of responsibilitjes…. Success when it comes must be difcult and uncertain. The efortless taking of game is not huntjng—it is slaughter. President Jimmy Carter “A Childhood Outdoors” “[When huntjng], there are no easy kills. That idea is abhorrent…. My father taught me…no three-wheelers. No snow machines. No riding around in riverboats waitjng for foolish moose to wander out onto riverbanks. No snagging or clubbing salmon in streams. No spring shootjng of ducks on their nests or fall airboat chases to gun the birds down on the water.” Craig Medred “Venison Sandwiches” “The ultjmate quest for hunter and climber is the same. Hunter and climber both enter an intjmacy with the earth at the cost of ofuen enormous physical and mental efort.” Ruth Rudner “The Call of the Climb”
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