Kill Knut!
The Church of Gaia
| March 24, 2007
| Tim
Berlin, Germany:
Berlin Zoo's abandoned polar bear cub Knut looks cute, cuddly and has become a front-page media darling, but an animal rights activist insisted Monday he would have been better off dead than raised by humans.
"Feeding by hand is not species-appropriate but a gross violation of animal protection laws," animal rights activist Frank Albrecht was quoted as saying by the mass-circulation Bild daily, which has featured regular photo spreads tracking fuzzy Knut's frolicking.
"The zoo must kill the bear."
If this were the wild, and this polar bear would be running around in Alaska, then I can fully understand why we'd be very concerned about letting it get too friendly with humans.
But it's a zoo bear, for heaven's sakes.
The disturbing thing here is that animal rights activists like Albrecht argue that there's no difference between humans and animals. Not very pro-animal, and not very pro-human. The guiding belief system here is evolution (as a religion, that is) -- that if nature says something should die, it should die.
"If a polar bear mother rejected the baby, then I believe the zoo must follow the instincts of nature," Albrecht said. "In the wild, it would have been left to die."
The German animal rights organization "Four Paws" argued along similar lines, saying it would not be right to punish the cub for a bad decision made by the zoo.
Other activists have also argued that current treatment of the cub is inhumane and could lead to future difficulties interacting with fellow polar bears.
"They cannot domesticate a wild animal," Ruediger Schmiedel, head of the Foundation for Bears, told Der Spiegel weekly in its Monday edition.
Evolution should not be a religion. When it becomes one, you get Nazi Germany. The only way to draw that distiction is then to assert that evolution applies to animals but not to humans. But if so, on what basis -- especially as we increasingly insist animals are no different than humans?
We're on a very slipperly philosophical slope, here.
What is truly hilarious about this is that they miss evolution in action right before them. You see, as part of nature(1), we selected(2) this bear to enter into a symbiotic relationship, where Das Bild makes money of of his cuteness, and we give him fish. Therefore we are selecting cute polar bears to help sustain the species, which will eventually become a species of really cute polar bears. I could live with that!
(1) Oh, wait, animal rights hippies seem to divide us from nature, what a fun contradiction in terms.
(2) note careful and intentional use of term(s)
Yes, I've noticed that too. We're just part of nature, except when we grow and survive. Then we're "unnatural." Grasses and insect life cover the earth and change it utterly -- when once, it did, not -- is it "unnatural"? Then we cover the earth and -- well, that must surely be a mistake.
Note that both judgements appeal to the idea that Nature has a brain -- hence my filing this under "The Church of Gaia."
And in terms of watching for exact terms and usages, how's this for a giveaway sentence?
"If a polar bear mother rejected the baby, then I believe the zoo must follow the instincts of nature," Albrecht said...
Again, Nature itself has a brain -- an animal brain -- run by "instincts", not reason -- and we must blindly follow it. Darwin isn't just King, he's God.
Dawkins, though I criticise him, is far more JudeoChristian than these sorts of people.* Like most atheists, and as much as he may say he hates Christianity, he was raised under, and deeply indoctrinated with, the idea that man can and should decide how things should go -- that man should subdue nature, and choose not to let "evolution" not be the top guiding principle. He simply lacks any coherant continuing justification for such a stance, other than merely stating he personally prefers it.
That argument won't survive into the second generation. And hasn't.
(* I think that correlates with his being an angry atheist -- such anger always makes me suspect the person, really, deep down, believes in God. One doesn't, after all, actually get mad at truly nonexistent entities like unicorns and the Easter Bunny.)
I agree that there are a fair number of people who "worship" nature, and that leads to rather odd, unworkable philosophical systems. So this isn't exactly a reply to your post. But I've thought about this matter a bit and I've often wondered; what kind of evolutionary forces are exerted by the application of the law? It seems like one of the biggest harms to society comes , not from any physical or mental deficit of its members, but by the failure of its members to cooperate with one another. So would the application of law favor traits that aid cooperation? I'd suspect so, but I can't think of any way to test the notion since the criteria are so vague.
One of the biggest problems that I have with the whole "humans as evolution personified" is that they're just so bad at determining what is 'fit' or 'not fit.' From Buck V. Bell onwards, the results of attempts to selectively breed humans, aside from being horridly immoral, don't even fulfil the original stated criteria.
And as was mentioned earlier, symbiosis with humans seems to be a very useful trait, evolutionarily speaking.
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What is truly hilarious about this is that they miss evolution in action right before them. You see, as part of nature(1), we selected(2) this bear to enter into a symbiotic relationship, where Das Bild makes money of of his cuteness, and we give him fish. Therefore we are selecting cute polar bears to help sustain the species, which will eventually become a species of really cute polar bears. I could live with that!
(1) Oh, wait, animal rights hippies seem to divide us from nature, what a fun contradiction in terms.
(2) note careful and intentional use of term(s)
Posted by: The Zapman on March 24, 2007 12:41 AM