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old hand
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old hand
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organized re-enactments?
This was one of the hot topics while I was over there and one of the girls in the class did her paper on entertainment and activites. She brought in an article about mock fox hunts in which a guy would run around with a little bag of poo dragging behind him.
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Carpal Tunnel
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Just before we get all teary-eyed and emotional over the foxes, consider this.
I was talking to a guy at work the other day who is a whipper-in (looks after the hounds) for the Cheshire Hunt when it's out. Sometimes he rides with the hunt as well, but he hasn't got his own horse and has to borrow one. The packs aren't as big as they used to be (100+ dogs) because they cost so much to look after.
Anyway, he's a country lad and his father's and neighbours' farms are currently overrun by foxes because the foot and mouth epidemic has effectively put paid to hunting for the past year or so anyway. So they trap them. Not live traps, gin traps. Nasty things. But the farmers lose too much livestock to them to leave them be and they're busy people so live traps and their consequences are just a waste of their time.
The hunt may sound cruel (and the end isn't all that pleasant when the fox or hare gets caught, of course) but my informant tells me that the fox actually gets away in over 30% of hunts. It's much more a social pastime than a deadly serious pursuit of animals these days. At least in the Cheshire Hunt you don't get the upper class twats doing the riding and drinking while the lower class scum make sure it all happens. Most of the riders are local farmers and their families and they appear to take turns doing the work.
In most hunts at least one or two people get carted off to hospital from falling off horses, heart attacks and from general stupidity.
Still, a century ago it was probably true when Oscar Wilde suggested that fox-hunting was "the unspeakable in pursuit of the inedible".
The idiot also known as Capfka ...
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Carpal Tunnel
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teary-eyed and emotional over the foxes
Hardly. The consequences that I care more about are those which impact on people - any society that considers itself civilised ought not to have a problem abandoning such rudimentary nastiness as rape, murder, slavery, and the needless torture of animals (and in my book that includes factory farming).
Totemic? ~ well maybe, but symbols have an important social function.
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enthusiast
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enthusiast
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teary-eyed and emotional over the foxes
rudimentary nastiness as
1) rape,
2) murder,
3) slavery,
4) and ... factory farming
Agreed -- but not necessarily of the same order of magnitude. And perhaps meriting differing degrees of concern and attention. Some sins are greater than others.
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enthusiast
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[couldn't help but note the spoonerism  ]
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Carpal Tunnel
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as i travel, one place i always try to get to see is a local zoo. zoo's are a nice indicator of how a society treats animals. Nowday, some small older zoo's are undergoing renovations, recognizing the cruelty in keeping a lion or tiger caged in a 20 foot square room. Others are modifying there collection.. even as child, i hated that the bronz zoo didn't have panda's or kangaroos, but the zoo felt they could not provide the right habitate. In the 1950's, they started to reform the zoo, getting rid of cages, and replacing them with habitates, that sometimes made it harder to see the animals, but was great for the animals themselves. I am rather proud of the zoo, and how it treat the animals..
(one fall, an early cold snap froze one of the zoo's small lakes/ponds. on several connected island in the middle of the pond there was a gibbon "cage" (gibbons do not enter standing water if they can help it.) the gibbons, smart as can be, scampered across the ice, and made a get away! about 10 escaped before the thin ice cracked.. open cages do have some disadvantages.)
factory farming (there was a very candid article by Michael Pollan last month in NY Times Magazine.) is a form of cruelty to animals.
societies that practice cruelty, to animals, are half way to doing it to humans.
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Carpal Tunnel
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half way to doing it to humans
prezackly. and what is almost worse, are already affecting the way society thinks about what it is to be human, and what constitutes morally acceptable behavio(u)r.
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Perspective: If you could do so by a wave of your magic wand, which would you rather eliminate: rape, or foxhunts?
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Carpal Tunnel
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I think it was Cleveland Amory who said (paraphrasing) :
Show me how a race treats its annimals and I will tell you what degree of civilisation it has attained.
If you could do so by a wave of your magic wand, which would you rather eliminate: rape, or foxhunts?
That's like the old question "Do you still beat your wife?" There is no answer that will satisfy.
WARNING -- Reminds me of a story though!-
Seems that Israel was having a big problem with the increasing incidence of rapes. The legislature (Knesset) suggested a remedy might be to impose a curfew requiring women to stay indoors after nightfall.
Gold Maier , then Prime Minister, said she thought the curfew was a good idea but that it would be more effective if it required men to stay indoors after sunset.
The Knesset dropped the idea!
Hmmmmmm could it have been that the legislators were predominantly men?
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