Pet Ownership as SLAVERY (vegan / vegans / veganism)
11 April 2016 [link youtube]
Veganism is not the moral baseline: the wilderness is the moral baseline. The only ethical "treatment of animals" is recognizing their autonomy in their own habitat --and (for practical reasons) in 2016 human beings need to adopt laws to protect that habitat (and to limit human encroachment into it). There is no moral way to reduce a wild animal to being a human plaything: neither in the case of a "pet dog", nor "a pet monkey", nor "a pet lion" (and arguments to the contrary, making exceptions for dogs, are, indeed, "speciesism" of the most odious kind). It does not matter if you justify a "captive animal" as a "companion animal", and it does not matter if you (as a human) define the conditions of their captivity as "happy": the only moral relationship with animals is with wild animals. Animals that have been crippled (neutered, etc.) so that they will conform to behaviors imposed on them by humans (training, domestication, etc.) can never provide a "moral baseline" for vegans/veganism. Never.
Youtube Automatic Transcription
let's just kick this off with a
hypothetical you're vegan you go to a vegan protest you meet someone else who introduces themselves as vegan you decide to go back to this guy's house he owns a cat you think okay that's normal there are there are vegans who own cats uh and you ask him so tell me um do you buy cat food that's made out of dead animals do you buy you know a tin can that has a chopped up cow or chopped up lamb in it you know what do you what do you do with this cat you do you try to feed the cat a vegan diet he says you know no I also have pet rats oh really okay well it's that's not so unusual these days you meet vegans who keep rats as pets but you know um what do you mean and he says here let me show you he takes you upstairs and he has two rooms in his house one is full of cages with his pet rats and the other is for his cats to lie around in he says yeah I raise the rats over here then every day I take a few of them kill them and feed them to my pet cats in the other room I think you would be horrified I think that anyone would be horrified not just vegans I think a meat-eater would find that psychologically disturbing and I think the average vegan would find that ethically wrong why why is it that the same people who make excuses for buying a dead cow cut up and put into a little metal can to feed to a cat which is completely unnatural in the wild a cat would never kill and eat a cow that those same people think it's immoral for you as a vegan to kill a rat to feed your cat or to kill rats under any circumstances I have an earlier video on this channel that I encourage you to go back and take a look at that's called vegans kill rats a lot of people misunderstood the point of that video I do not believe that killing rats is okay mm-hmm I do not believe that vivisection on rats is okay I'm morally opposed to all the recession but I am willing to talk about the ethical contradictions difficulties and paradoxes that being a vegan leads us into and one of those paradoxes of course is the whole paradigm of pet ownership and domesticated animals existing with the in veganism hey what's up shout out to all my viewers in Siberia a lot of research on Siberia lately keep it on the right pile vegans and their excuses for owning pets one of the things I find tragicomic is that on the one hand vegans in 2016 want to engage in an over-the-top denunciation of animal ownership as slavery understandable some people get offended by the comparison some people respond positively some people are just confused by it and some vegans I think a minority do know enough about the history of slavery to say something intelligent and making this comparison others like I've mentioned before the material from direct action everywhere I think it they seem to have no sincere interest in history of slavery and they seem to make a sort of dishonest use of this history misrepresenting what it does and doesn't have in common with the struggle for animal rights to reform or abolish animal agriculture etc etc my point is here intelligent things can be said in making this comparison stupid things can be said also sometimes people are offended by this for no good reason sometimes they're offended for a good or understandable reason these are the types of awkward gray areas we all have to deal with in in pole today just to mention offhand so I've been doing a lot of research lately on Soviet Union on Russian communism you can compare some aspects of Russian communism to slavery but do you really know enough to say something intelligent about this of course the comparison isn't perfect what they did with the gulags with captive labor and so on it's not exactly slavery and there are many important ways in which it's different from slavery but still not a simple case of saying how dare you say that or what have you maybe you've got something intelligent to say maybe you don't I'm about to alienate about 50% of my audience but that's ok in fact that's the essence of what I've got to do here on YouTube the fact that your dog is happy from your perspective as a human being does not vindicate or exculpate the system of the domestication of animals at all not even 1% it doesn't mean it's ok alright and the parallelism here is the fact that your slave may be happy in a slave system of slave ownership that you personally may own a slave who is happy from your perspective as an owner does not vindicate the system of slavery even one bit ok and if you've studied any particular example of slavery historically whether in Sri Lanka or Haiti or the United States ancient Egypt or ancient Greece of course there are examples of individual slaves who are happy and that may of course be in part because that individual slave knows that his or her status is much better than other slaves just next door or just in the back yard or just on the plantation it may be because their particular owner treats them very graciously or what-have-you it is true in every slave society you could find individual slaves who were happy from their own perspective and of course much more commonly you found slave owners who were convinced that their slaves were happy from the the owners perspective and to say that this does not vindicate the system of slavery is the understatement of the millennium alright so the fact that you believe that your dog is happy relative to your perspective as a human being as the human being who owns the couch that the dog lies on to me is the stupidest most fatuous most immoral thing I've ever heard out of a vegans mouth and I've been hearing it let me tell you your response to my earlier videos I mean one earlier video called vegans kill rats please do not judge that by its title it's a nuanced argument I'm not saying it's okay to kill rats I'm not saying it's okay to perform vivisection on rats i I believe vivisection is completely immoral I believe killing rats is morally bad however I'm willing to reflect on the complexities and paradoxes we all get led into in real life real life involves hard decisions like killing rats even when you think it's a bad thing sometimes that's the sort of thing we have to take responsibility for as vegans life is full of nasty and brutal contradictions and you know there are vegans who join the military and kill human beings this is real life you know what it's about and I don't pursue a kind of I don't pursue consistency as an end in itself consistency is important rationality is important but it's also part of a mature perspective on the world a mature perspective on ethics to be able to recognize and talk about with detachment the circumstances in which we ourselves become hypocrites the contradictions and paradoxes that life in practice draws us into um why is it that there's such a difference between the excuses these vegans make for house pets such as dogs and cats let's just stick with dogs for this video um and the way they regard a monkey kept in captivity alright if I had a monkey in my apartment here you would not give a if I told you that the monkey was happy doesn't matter my perspective does not matter any of you would be asking the hard questions you'd be saying well look you know you say this monkey is happy but you know it doesn't really have the kind of habitat it would have in the wild oh no no don't worry it's happy I can even show you photographs on Instagram I can film them and put them on YouTube and show you how happy is maybe I could even compare him to monkeys being kept in a cage the conditions at the zoo or the conditions at the lab and say look my monkey is really happy I treat him better than than some other monkey's maybe my next door neighbor has a monkey that's being kept in much worse conditions I can compare that the comparisons are irrelevant how about that monkeys life in the wild it involves both sex and violence if you really get at your reading and again I think I think vegans just do not read this kind of material I can sympathize to some extent but I don't the people who try you know to help out monkeys monkeys that are either rescued from the circus or rescued from labs people were in the gray area of having these domesticated animals that can't be returned to the wild the sex and violence are some of the hardest things to deal with well you've rescued these chimpanzees but it doesn't mean you can return them to a Garden of Eden now you've got them and they're trying to kill each other and you got to separate them into separate cages maybe you idiotic Lee you thought you were freeing these animals from cages you didn't want to put them in a cage you've got some kind of habitat you put the in there they start trying to kill each other now you put them back in cages which they're comfortable with cuz they love these kinds of people and you realize oh my god these animals have competitive behaviors violent behaviors and sexual behaviors that are extremely difficult for human beings to manage you know in in a domesticated scenario you're vegan you own a dog is your dog spayed or neutered really think about what that means if I owned a chimpanzee as a pet would it be neutered would I take it and perform a medical operation on it to deprive it of its natural instincts and behaviors so that it could be a better companion to me what what does that mean what are the implications of that and it's so easy for people to think that way to question that way when it's a monkey or a lion they'd say oh well this is immoral having a lion with its balls chopped off a neutered lion you know kept in a cage or kept in your living room just to amuse you oh that's that's immoral but a cat doing the same thing with a house cat you see this as morally acceptable why that is speciesism for all of the BS talk about speciesism and slavery that difference that excuse you're making for a dog or a house cat that you wouldn't make for a lion or you wouldn't make for a chimpanzee that is real speciesism and its really a problem within veganism even within vegan activists people who consider themselves devoted vegan activists right this indicates just how deep this problem runs and how little any of these people care about the wild about wilderness and habitat conservation as a moral baseline not a dog who's had its balls chopped off sitting on your couch pretending to be a human for your amusement for your campaign and ship okay in the wild that dog would kill and eat you wild dogs kill and eat human beings you think having a piglet as a pet is cute not only okay wild boars into what you want to Google this right now it will disturb the hell out of you do a Google search for wild boar eating deer in the wild pigs kill and eat large mammals like deer they are true omnivores they will kill a deer and strip the flesh off it raw they will eat the corpse directly human beings can't do that you know human beings think of themselves as omnivores but we're physically incapable of tearing apart and eating a you know a corpse like like a deer or even a pig or what-have-you off the ground pigs the cute cuddly pigs if you know people from the backwoods they'll tell you in the old days when people would commit a murder one of the easiest ways to cover it up to destroy evidence to make it harder for the police to investigate was to take the human body and throw it into a pig pen domesticated pigs in a few hours would tear apart the corpse and eat the flesh off of human corpse that's your cute cuddly Pig what is it that makes it so cute and cuddly depriving it of the wilderness depriving it of socialization with access to members of its own species you think it's cute for a human being to hold a baby bottle and feed a piglet I don't think that's cute where's that pig's mother right where's that pigs pack its social organization a pig or a wolf grows up in a pack that socializes it to have the instincts and behaviors that it needs to survive that it needs to compete within its own species that it needs to ultimately kill members of other species including human beings because we are naturally the enemies of these other species in the wild including pigs including wild boars if you encounter a wild boar or in a feral boar in the woods it's terrifying even if it's alone let alone in a pack this reminds me of different stories I knew I knew a guy in in Southeast Asia and he had lived in an abandoned coconut farm so someone had tried to make money with coconuts and they'd given up and there were wild pigs living in this advantage coconut plantation and the jaws of an adult Pig are so powerful that a whole fresh coconut not a dry coconut fresh gonna they can crack it open and then eat the the flesh inside and the result was on this particular patch of land these wild pigs became absolutely enormous because they could eat unlimited amounts of fat basically from from these coconuts and of course they hunted other mammals including if they had a chance human beings and also this this wasn't a normal forest with forest cover you know the trees all grow up tall and straight with gaps between them because it's a man-made coconut plantation so these pigs could really chase you down through the alleys between the trees it was absolutely terrifying because this is this is man and pig meeting is wild and you want to take this animal and the private of its socialization the private of its natural habitat the private of its instincts and ultimately deprive it of its sexuality which one of the most uncomfortable things to talk about right you think your dog is happy the dog that sleeps in your couch you think that dog one that didn't want to know its own mother - you think that dog didn't want to be a parent itself the dog didn't want to be a father or a mother depending on its gender you think that dog doesn't want to have sexual relations than its own species you know and to compete with other members of species how are you gonna provide that you can you can take away the wild from an animal you can never give it back you can an animal mentally and physically so that it can't survive in the wild but can you do the reverse it's so strange to me that vegans themselves are so deeply conditioned by speciesism that they see these problems when it's a monkey or a lion but they don't see it or they refuse to see it when it's a cat or a dog and the excuse is I love my dog I love my cat the hell you do okay what what does it mean to love a lion it means you respected enough to give it its autonomy and its independence and to live in the wild at least most of the time I think human beings can have interesting and meaningful interactions with wild animals and I could tell stories about that too I mean I used to live on the edge of the last jungle jungle that's now been completely cut down in Thailand and Laos people who really live around wild animals you can sometimes have friendly encounters even with wild bears and you know it's surreal but it happens you can talk to anyone about this but that's nothing like the system of domestication and as I say the system itself remains bad just like the system of slavery even if individual slaves are happy even if individual animals are happy and if you know about the real history of slavery it wasn't all people living at a distance from their slaves one of the ways in which slavery is profoundly corrupting the human spirit is that people would have their own children raised by slaves so they live in a house in a very intimate way with their slaves if you go to Southeast Asia Thailand Cambodia Laos you may notice you may not if you're if you're if you're not sensitive if you're not observant there are still these really strange cultural prohibitions about the level you sit at and culturally before Western influence none of those people sat on chairs traditionally be sitting on the floor or you'd sit with a you know a very small pillow raising you up low of the above the floor by a few millimeters this this kind of thing is traditional and interesting that's also contrast to Chinese culture when the Chinese would visit Southeast Asia they thought people were barbarians because they didn't city in high chairs maybe Europe and China had a chair based culture and so these days you did not it was a floor a floor sitting culture but they still still today in many context they are very particular about who is sitting higher than whom now one of the reasons for that Cambodia traditionally that was often the only difference between slaves and masters when they set to eat at the same table in the same household you know the slaves would sit a little further down the table and they would sit directly on the floor as opposed to sitting on a rat hand mat or something raised you up a bit now Cambodia was very influential throughout the region you know many aspects of Thai culture allow culture etc are directly imitative of Cambodian culture including the the actual words for pillow and mats a lot that's I mean just mentioned interestingly the the sense in which those cultures were imitating aspects of Cambodian refinement for many centuries still show up even even linguistically but these cultural indicators of who is a slave and who is a free man they can last for a long long time whether it's in Europe and Asia or what have you but part of what makes slavery so disturbing when you study it in detail on any one culture is that it does involve the type of relations that vegans still have today with their pets it does involve relations of love between unequal parties it does involve entertainment it involves the slaves singing and dancing for the master you know it involves you know the same way you say your dog sleeps on your couch it involves the slaves sleeping on the Masters couch and a lot of really murky gray areas which again make it very happy for people who benefit from the system slavery to really perceive the ways in which this is profoundly corrupting and evil to society as a whole the difference for us as vegans or just as people who own pets really is the juxtapositioning animals that we still think of as wild versus animals where we have forgotten or lost the reference point for wilderness as I say I think pigs are an example along with cats and dogs were people including vegan have given into a speciesist mentality and thus justify a form of slavery without even thinking it through because they do not when they think of a pig whether as a cute piglet or as a farm animal they do not think of a wild boar they do not think of the behaviors of this animal well same for the dog same for the cats lions are different by and large another weird category are whales and dolphins I heard very disturbing radio documentary that dealt with the bizarre and immoral relations be human beings and dolphins when dolphins were kept in quite small tanks in captivity basically dolphins being kept in a swimming pool for scientific research now this research did not involve torturing the dolphins it isn't this particular research was not of that variety they wanted to test dolphin intelligence and they wanted the Dolphins to be highly motivated and cooperative for these tests well guess what dolphins have a sex drive what are these human beings gonna do when they have a dolphin and a tank and they're trying to keep it motivated and cooperative and the dolphin is miserable and among the instincts it can't exercise is its desire for sexuality if you have a pet chimpanzee you're gonna know about that their sex drive is gonna be a shocking and uncomfortable part of your life if you have dolphins in captivity anyone would know that if you have a lion most people like whether they're soo or again some of these things are well motivated you know these parks that are trying to rescue lions that used to be in the circus and give them a kind of comfortable retirement one of the most bizarre things they complain about is of the lion you know spraying human beings with their their hormones they can they can spray a liquid you know hormone and people to mark them as their territory who would have these bizarre episodes people kid into well what what compromise were you expecting the animal to make even when you put an animal through an immoral humiliating demeaning surgery to remove its reproductive organs to remove those instincts still that animal will have an stifled echo of its natural sexual desires and behavior that you're probably gonna have to deal with that it's probably could be an uncomfortable and embarrassing part of your life well this dog is decorating your couch or whatever right and yet people seem to recognize that this is creepy this is immoral this is wrong when it's a monkey on the couch when it's a dolphin in that scientists tank a dolphin that needs to be relieved shall we say I'm keeping this a bit vague the same problem can happen with birds that are being kept captive including birds that are endangered and in captive breeding programs the the reasons for these things are not always pure evil I mean you know I've heard about people trying to keep goats as pets I've met one person who kept goats as pets you know goats in anything resembling the wild you know the violent territorial instincts the competitions between the males you know rutting Bucks the the the males butting heads and so on woody what are you going to do to control those instincts to turn this defiant independent animal into your toy into your slave into your plaything it's sick domestication of animals as your companions is sick if you claim your pet dog is happy that is every bit as absurd to me as if you claimed your pet goat was happy your pet lion was happy your pet ape was happy the hell it is
hypothetical you're vegan you go to a vegan protest you meet someone else who introduces themselves as vegan you decide to go back to this guy's house he owns a cat you think okay that's normal there are there are vegans who own cats uh and you ask him so tell me um do you buy cat food that's made out of dead animals do you buy you know a tin can that has a chopped up cow or chopped up lamb in it you know what do you what do you do with this cat you do you try to feed the cat a vegan diet he says you know no I also have pet rats oh really okay well it's that's not so unusual these days you meet vegans who keep rats as pets but you know um what do you mean and he says here let me show you he takes you upstairs and he has two rooms in his house one is full of cages with his pet rats and the other is for his cats to lie around in he says yeah I raise the rats over here then every day I take a few of them kill them and feed them to my pet cats in the other room I think you would be horrified I think that anyone would be horrified not just vegans I think a meat-eater would find that psychologically disturbing and I think the average vegan would find that ethically wrong why why is it that the same people who make excuses for buying a dead cow cut up and put into a little metal can to feed to a cat which is completely unnatural in the wild a cat would never kill and eat a cow that those same people think it's immoral for you as a vegan to kill a rat to feed your cat or to kill rats under any circumstances I have an earlier video on this channel that I encourage you to go back and take a look at that's called vegans kill rats a lot of people misunderstood the point of that video I do not believe that killing rats is okay mm-hmm I do not believe that vivisection on rats is okay I'm morally opposed to all the recession but I am willing to talk about the ethical contradictions difficulties and paradoxes that being a vegan leads us into and one of those paradoxes of course is the whole paradigm of pet ownership and domesticated animals existing with the in veganism hey what's up shout out to all my viewers in Siberia a lot of research on Siberia lately keep it on the right pile vegans and their excuses for owning pets one of the things I find tragicomic is that on the one hand vegans in 2016 want to engage in an over-the-top denunciation of animal ownership as slavery understandable some people get offended by the comparison some people respond positively some people are just confused by it and some vegans I think a minority do know enough about the history of slavery to say something intelligent and making this comparison others like I've mentioned before the material from direct action everywhere I think it they seem to have no sincere interest in history of slavery and they seem to make a sort of dishonest use of this history misrepresenting what it does and doesn't have in common with the struggle for animal rights to reform or abolish animal agriculture etc etc my point is here intelligent things can be said in making this comparison stupid things can be said also sometimes people are offended by this for no good reason sometimes they're offended for a good or understandable reason these are the types of awkward gray areas we all have to deal with in in pole today just to mention offhand so I've been doing a lot of research lately on Soviet Union on Russian communism you can compare some aspects of Russian communism to slavery but do you really know enough to say something intelligent about this of course the comparison isn't perfect what they did with the gulags with captive labor and so on it's not exactly slavery and there are many important ways in which it's different from slavery but still not a simple case of saying how dare you say that or what have you maybe you've got something intelligent to say maybe you don't I'm about to alienate about 50% of my audience but that's ok in fact that's the essence of what I've got to do here on YouTube the fact that your dog is happy from your perspective as a human being does not vindicate or exculpate the system of the domestication of animals at all not even 1% it doesn't mean it's ok alright and the parallelism here is the fact that your slave may be happy in a slave system of slave ownership that you personally may own a slave who is happy from your perspective as an owner does not vindicate the system of slavery even one bit ok and if you've studied any particular example of slavery historically whether in Sri Lanka or Haiti or the United States ancient Egypt or ancient Greece of course there are examples of individual slaves who are happy and that may of course be in part because that individual slave knows that his or her status is much better than other slaves just next door or just in the back yard or just on the plantation it may be because their particular owner treats them very graciously or what-have-you it is true in every slave society you could find individual slaves who were happy from their own perspective and of course much more commonly you found slave owners who were convinced that their slaves were happy from the the owners perspective and to say that this does not vindicate the system of slavery is the understatement of the millennium alright so the fact that you believe that your dog is happy relative to your perspective as a human being as the human being who owns the couch that the dog lies on to me is the stupidest most fatuous most immoral thing I've ever heard out of a vegans mouth and I've been hearing it let me tell you your response to my earlier videos I mean one earlier video called vegans kill rats please do not judge that by its title it's a nuanced argument I'm not saying it's okay to kill rats I'm not saying it's okay to perform vivisection on rats i I believe vivisection is completely immoral I believe killing rats is morally bad however I'm willing to reflect on the complexities and paradoxes we all get led into in real life real life involves hard decisions like killing rats even when you think it's a bad thing sometimes that's the sort of thing we have to take responsibility for as vegans life is full of nasty and brutal contradictions and you know there are vegans who join the military and kill human beings this is real life you know what it's about and I don't pursue a kind of I don't pursue consistency as an end in itself consistency is important rationality is important but it's also part of a mature perspective on the world a mature perspective on ethics to be able to recognize and talk about with detachment the circumstances in which we ourselves become hypocrites the contradictions and paradoxes that life in practice draws us into um why is it that there's such a difference between the excuses these vegans make for house pets such as dogs and cats let's just stick with dogs for this video um and the way they regard a monkey kept in captivity alright if I had a monkey in my apartment here you would not give a if I told you that the monkey was happy doesn't matter my perspective does not matter any of you would be asking the hard questions you'd be saying well look you know you say this monkey is happy but you know it doesn't really have the kind of habitat it would have in the wild oh no no don't worry it's happy I can even show you photographs on Instagram I can film them and put them on YouTube and show you how happy is maybe I could even compare him to monkeys being kept in a cage the conditions at the zoo or the conditions at the lab and say look my monkey is really happy I treat him better than than some other monkey's maybe my next door neighbor has a monkey that's being kept in much worse conditions I can compare that the comparisons are irrelevant how about that monkeys life in the wild it involves both sex and violence if you really get at your reading and again I think I think vegans just do not read this kind of material I can sympathize to some extent but I don't the people who try you know to help out monkeys monkeys that are either rescued from the circus or rescued from labs people were in the gray area of having these domesticated animals that can't be returned to the wild the sex and violence are some of the hardest things to deal with well you've rescued these chimpanzees but it doesn't mean you can return them to a Garden of Eden now you've got them and they're trying to kill each other and you got to separate them into separate cages maybe you idiotic Lee you thought you were freeing these animals from cages you didn't want to put them in a cage you've got some kind of habitat you put the in there they start trying to kill each other now you put them back in cages which they're comfortable with cuz they love these kinds of people and you realize oh my god these animals have competitive behaviors violent behaviors and sexual behaviors that are extremely difficult for human beings to manage you know in in a domesticated scenario you're vegan you own a dog is your dog spayed or neutered really think about what that means if I owned a chimpanzee as a pet would it be neutered would I take it and perform a medical operation on it to deprive it of its natural instincts and behaviors so that it could be a better companion to me what what does that mean what are the implications of that and it's so easy for people to think that way to question that way when it's a monkey or a lion they'd say oh well this is immoral having a lion with its balls chopped off a neutered lion you know kept in a cage or kept in your living room just to amuse you oh that's that's immoral but a cat doing the same thing with a house cat you see this as morally acceptable why that is speciesism for all of the BS talk about speciesism and slavery that difference that excuse you're making for a dog or a house cat that you wouldn't make for a lion or you wouldn't make for a chimpanzee that is real speciesism and its really a problem within veganism even within vegan activists people who consider themselves devoted vegan activists right this indicates just how deep this problem runs and how little any of these people care about the wild about wilderness and habitat conservation as a moral baseline not a dog who's had its balls chopped off sitting on your couch pretending to be a human for your amusement for your campaign and ship okay in the wild that dog would kill and eat you wild dogs kill and eat human beings you think having a piglet as a pet is cute not only okay wild boars into what you want to Google this right now it will disturb the hell out of you do a Google search for wild boar eating deer in the wild pigs kill and eat large mammals like deer they are true omnivores they will kill a deer and strip the flesh off it raw they will eat the corpse directly human beings can't do that you know human beings think of themselves as omnivores but we're physically incapable of tearing apart and eating a you know a corpse like like a deer or even a pig or what-have-you off the ground pigs the cute cuddly pigs if you know people from the backwoods they'll tell you in the old days when people would commit a murder one of the easiest ways to cover it up to destroy evidence to make it harder for the police to investigate was to take the human body and throw it into a pig pen domesticated pigs in a few hours would tear apart the corpse and eat the flesh off of human corpse that's your cute cuddly Pig what is it that makes it so cute and cuddly depriving it of the wilderness depriving it of socialization with access to members of its own species you think it's cute for a human being to hold a baby bottle and feed a piglet I don't think that's cute where's that pig's mother right where's that pigs pack its social organization a pig or a wolf grows up in a pack that socializes it to have the instincts and behaviors that it needs to survive that it needs to compete within its own species that it needs to ultimately kill members of other species including human beings because we are naturally the enemies of these other species in the wild including pigs including wild boars if you encounter a wild boar or in a feral boar in the woods it's terrifying even if it's alone let alone in a pack this reminds me of different stories I knew I knew a guy in in Southeast Asia and he had lived in an abandoned coconut farm so someone had tried to make money with coconuts and they'd given up and there were wild pigs living in this advantage coconut plantation and the jaws of an adult Pig are so powerful that a whole fresh coconut not a dry coconut fresh gonna they can crack it open and then eat the the flesh inside and the result was on this particular patch of land these wild pigs became absolutely enormous because they could eat unlimited amounts of fat basically from from these coconuts and of course they hunted other mammals including if they had a chance human beings and also this this wasn't a normal forest with forest cover you know the trees all grow up tall and straight with gaps between them because it's a man-made coconut plantation so these pigs could really chase you down through the alleys between the trees it was absolutely terrifying because this is this is man and pig meeting is wild and you want to take this animal and the private of its socialization the private of its natural habitat the private of its instincts and ultimately deprive it of its sexuality which one of the most uncomfortable things to talk about right you think your dog is happy the dog that sleeps in your couch you think that dog one that didn't want to know its own mother - you think that dog didn't want to be a parent itself the dog didn't want to be a father or a mother depending on its gender you think that dog doesn't want to have sexual relations than its own species you know and to compete with other members of species how are you gonna provide that you can you can take away the wild from an animal you can never give it back you can an animal mentally and physically so that it can't survive in the wild but can you do the reverse it's so strange to me that vegans themselves are so deeply conditioned by speciesism that they see these problems when it's a monkey or a lion but they don't see it or they refuse to see it when it's a cat or a dog and the excuse is I love my dog I love my cat the hell you do okay what what does it mean to love a lion it means you respected enough to give it its autonomy and its independence and to live in the wild at least most of the time I think human beings can have interesting and meaningful interactions with wild animals and I could tell stories about that too I mean I used to live on the edge of the last jungle jungle that's now been completely cut down in Thailand and Laos people who really live around wild animals you can sometimes have friendly encounters even with wild bears and you know it's surreal but it happens you can talk to anyone about this but that's nothing like the system of domestication and as I say the system itself remains bad just like the system of slavery even if individual slaves are happy even if individual animals are happy and if you know about the real history of slavery it wasn't all people living at a distance from their slaves one of the ways in which slavery is profoundly corrupting the human spirit is that people would have their own children raised by slaves so they live in a house in a very intimate way with their slaves if you go to Southeast Asia Thailand Cambodia Laos you may notice you may not if you're if you're if you're not sensitive if you're not observant there are still these really strange cultural prohibitions about the level you sit at and culturally before Western influence none of those people sat on chairs traditionally be sitting on the floor or you'd sit with a you know a very small pillow raising you up low of the above the floor by a few millimeters this this kind of thing is traditional and interesting that's also contrast to Chinese culture when the Chinese would visit Southeast Asia they thought people were barbarians because they didn't city in high chairs maybe Europe and China had a chair based culture and so these days you did not it was a floor a floor sitting culture but they still still today in many context they are very particular about who is sitting higher than whom now one of the reasons for that Cambodia traditionally that was often the only difference between slaves and masters when they set to eat at the same table in the same household you know the slaves would sit a little further down the table and they would sit directly on the floor as opposed to sitting on a rat hand mat or something raised you up a bit now Cambodia was very influential throughout the region you know many aspects of Thai culture allow culture etc are directly imitative of Cambodian culture including the the actual words for pillow and mats a lot that's I mean just mentioned interestingly the the sense in which those cultures were imitating aspects of Cambodian refinement for many centuries still show up even even linguistically but these cultural indicators of who is a slave and who is a free man they can last for a long long time whether it's in Europe and Asia or what have you but part of what makes slavery so disturbing when you study it in detail on any one culture is that it does involve the type of relations that vegans still have today with their pets it does involve relations of love between unequal parties it does involve entertainment it involves the slaves singing and dancing for the master you know it involves you know the same way you say your dog sleeps on your couch it involves the slaves sleeping on the Masters couch and a lot of really murky gray areas which again make it very happy for people who benefit from the system slavery to really perceive the ways in which this is profoundly corrupting and evil to society as a whole the difference for us as vegans or just as people who own pets really is the juxtapositioning animals that we still think of as wild versus animals where we have forgotten or lost the reference point for wilderness as I say I think pigs are an example along with cats and dogs were people including vegan have given into a speciesist mentality and thus justify a form of slavery without even thinking it through because they do not when they think of a pig whether as a cute piglet or as a farm animal they do not think of a wild boar they do not think of the behaviors of this animal well same for the dog same for the cats lions are different by and large another weird category are whales and dolphins I heard very disturbing radio documentary that dealt with the bizarre and immoral relations be human beings and dolphins when dolphins were kept in quite small tanks in captivity basically dolphins being kept in a swimming pool for scientific research now this research did not involve torturing the dolphins it isn't this particular research was not of that variety they wanted to test dolphin intelligence and they wanted the Dolphins to be highly motivated and cooperative for these tests well guess what dolphins have a sex drive what are these human beings gonna do when they have a dolphin and a tank and they're trying to keep it motivated and cooperative and the dolphin is miserable and among the instincts it can't exercise is its desire for sexuality if you have a pet chimpanzee you're gonna know about that their sex drive is gonna be a shocking and uncomfortable part of your life if you have dolphins in captivity anyone would know that if you have a lion most people like whether they're soo or again some of these things are well motivated you know these parks that are trying to rescue lions that used to be in the circus and give them a kind of comfortable retirement one of the most bizarre things they complain about is of the lion you know spraying human beings with their their hormones they can they can spray a liquid you know hormone and people to mark them as their territory who would have these bizarre episodes people kid into well what what compromise were you expecting the animal to make even when you put an animal through an immoral humiliating demeaning surgery to remove its reproductive organs to remove those instincts still that animal will have an stifled echo of its natural sexual desires and behavior that you're probably gonna have to deal with that it's probably could be an uncomfortable and embarrassing part of your life well this dog is decorating your couch or whatever right and yet people seem to recognize that this is creepy this is immoral this is wrong when it's a monkey on the couch when it's a dolphin in that scientists tank a dolphin that needs to be relieved shall we say I'm keeping this a bit vague the same problem can happen with birds that are being kept captive including birds that are endangered and in captive breeding programs the the reasons for these things are not always pure evil I mean you know I've heard about people trying to keep goats as pets I've met one person who kept goats as pets you know goats in anything resembling the wild you know the violent territorial instincts the competitions between the males you know rutting Bucks the the the males butting heads and so on woody what are you going to do to control those instincts to turn this defiant independent animal into your toy into your slave into your plaything it's sick domestication of animals as your companions is sick if you claim your pet dog is happy that is every bit as absurd to me as if you claimed your pet goat was happy your pet lion was happy your pet ape was happy the hell it is