Ernest Hemingway (or somebody else) once said those who have never seen a bullfight have no business criticizing the “sport.” [sic] I agree. The bloodlust and thrill of watching death cannot be exaggerated. I have never seen a bullfight but I know. I know because of my own spine-tingling episodes with killing and torturing. I think it is safe for me now to confess to my deeds that happened 65 years ago, especially since nobody can testify to what I did and most people will assume I am engaged in a lying boast. Here is what I did. I raped and tortured three girls, killing one of them because she pleaded loudly for her life.

Ah, what joy it was. I am afraid that if I revealed details, people would criticize me, insult me and, worst of all, try to put me in jail. Like Hemingway, I say that unless you have done it yourself, you have no business criticizing me. And to this day I have nothing but respect and admiration for matadors. It is with much sadness I have just learned that the sport is in decline. Animal rights advocates have been hot on the trail of bull breeders for five years, and bullfighting once the purveyor of much pleasure will soon be a thing of the past. In 2007 there were 3,700 bullfight festivals in Spain but this has shrunk annually to 2,300. It is a shameful time in Spain’s history. The region of Catalona has actually banned the great national pastime altogether. The economy is crumbling. Bullfighting is still a $3.3 billion industry, and I pray it won’t get lower because 10,000 people from matadors and breeders down to bullring workers and promoters desperately depend on the deaths of bulls so they can go on living. Juan Pedro Domecq, a breeder, says the the economic crisis is huge. Small breeders are being driven out of business and matador colleges are suffering, too. The big property boom in bullfight towns has burst. In somewhat odd language, the survival of the bulls is “killing us” says Mr. Domecq. Bullfight attendance is down 10% in just the last year, and bulls are living longer. To say, as animal rights spokespersons do, that that this survival trend is all for the good makes an anti-macabre joke of the matter.

What can be done to halt this spread of life? Nothing much, I’m afraid. Some people always preach education but where will that get lovers of corridas? Everything one needs to know to make an honest objective assessment is already out there. Sniff the hundreds of gallons of fresh blood and you will know all you need to know. Until I was ten years old, my mother prepared a pound of bloodied flesh for me twice weekly. So lightly did she cook the martyrs that I could hear them groan as I stabbed my knife deep into their flesh. Each stab yielded exquisite pleasure for me. How I miss those days!

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OLÉ1 This will help cure those lowlives who are not passionate about bullfights.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=endscreen&NR=1&v=jPE33jwbTy0

For the Ladies. CHRISTINA SANCHEZ! Magnifica. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-uxf3B22Ono&feature=endscreen&NR=1

I say, LOVE HER OR GET GORED!

At the conclusion of a lecture I gave at the University of Michigan on animal rights, 30 years or so ago), the first person to rise up from the audience to say anything was the Vice-President for Academic Research and he greeted me in this manner: “Don’t we have more important matters to worry about than what happens to cats, dogs and mice?”

He took me by surprise and I mumbled a feeble response. After I left the auditorium, I thought I should have said, “Had I spoken today about stained glass in 14th century Italy, would you have challenged the worth of my topic?” No doubt, he wouldn’t have done so because his presence at such a talk would have been evidence of his interest. In the case of my lecture, he had come as a heckler, to put me down.

Actually, I don’t mind such things. I kicked myself only because I couldn’t come up with a nice riposte. Philosophers thrive on unfriendly debates. Indeed, a good man in Florida has said, “The uncontroversial life is not worth living.” I am sorry I did not think of that first. Among the inanities that people toss out unthinkingly are “If you have nothing nice to say, say nothing” and “Politics and sports don’t mix” and the absolute worse of them all is, “I hate talking about God and religion; it is too personal a thing and you can never change anybody’s opinions.” Even if I assume for the moment that it is true that you can never change anybody’s view about the existence of God via rational inquiry, I still fail to see how that bears on whether the subject is worth pursuing.

By the way, today I do NOT believe in animal rights as I did in my mad heyday (from 1974 to about the early 1990s). I believe only that animals should be treated well, that many forms of treatment are forms of abuse and should be abandoned; for example biomedical experiments, hunting and trapping, wearing exotic animal remains, supporting circuses and a dozen other things I won’t bother to mention. Life without these excesses is comfortable and good. If you must continue to eat steak, do so and, as the VP at University of Michigan implied, we have more important things to worry about, mostly overt, intentional cruelty.

I guess he was right.

I speak as the president of the Gendin Idiosyncrasy Club.

I’m glad the Democrats went down to defeat yesterday as they continued their stupid, vicious quest for law and order. I want guns only in the hands of registered hoodlums and Mafia gangsters. I live in dread of gun-packing police who flaunt their weapons openly and I’m not crazy about rifle-bearing “sportsmen.”

Obama and his sycophants present their opponents as either irrational or in the pockets of the moneyed NRA. Bah! Obama himself and his weird followers are in pursuit of ducks, geese and deer…and proud of it. These creatures do not have a forceful lobby. The best that bears can do is to wear those funny placards around their necks that say, SUPPORT THE RIGHT OF BEARS TO BEAR ARMS. That won’t hack it.

I would be glad to give up my 2nd Amendment right to go packing in the dismal hope I will some day bring down some humans who trespass in my garden if those Democratic trespassers would be willing to surrender once and for all their hunting licenses. What’s that saying? Quid pro quo? I love mongrelized Hungarian.

Much as I love my little 6-shot 38 caliber revolver, it ain’t much compared to those heavy rifles you can buy at Cabella’s Store For Killing. I can make the sacrifice if the Cabella gang can do likewise.

Meanwhile, Kenya man, quit your bellyaching.

Taping of Farm Cruelty Is Becoming the Crime
By Richard Oppel Jr., The New York Times
08 April 13

In one covert video, farm workers illegally burn the ankles of Tennessee walking horses with chemicals. Another captures workers in Wyoming punching and kicking pigs and flinging piglets into the air. And at one of the country’s largest egg suppliers, a video shows hens caged alongside rotting bird corpses, while workers burn and snap off the beaks of young chicks.

State legislators have proposed or enacted bills that would make it illegal to covertly videotape livestock farms, or apply for a job at one without disclosing ties to animal rights groups. They have also drafted measures to require such videos to be given to the authorities almost immediately, which activists say would thwart any meaningful undercover investigation of large factory farms.

Some of the legislation appears inspired by the American Legislative Exchange Council, a business advocacy group with hundreds of state representatives from farm states as members. The group creates model bills, drafted by lobbyists and lawmakers, that in the past have included such things as “stand your ground” gun laws and tighter voter identification rules.

One of the group’s model bills, “The Animal and Ecological Terrorism Act,” prohibits filming or taking pictures on livestock farms to “defame the facility or its owner.” Violators would be placed on a “terrorist registry.”

Animal rights activists say laws passed last year in Iowa, Utah and Missouri make it nearly impossible to produce similar undercover exposés. Some groups say that they have curtailed activism in those states. “It definitely has had a chilling effect on our ability to conduct undercover investigations,” said Vandhana Bala, general counsel for Mercy for Animals, which has shot many videos, including the egg-farm investigation in 2011.

In coming weeks, Indiana and Tennessee are expected to vote on similar measures, while states from California to Pennsylvania continue to debate them.

Opponents have scored some recent victories, as a handful of bills have died, including those in New Mexico and New Hampshire. In Wyoming, the legislation stalled after loud opposition from animal rights advocates. In Indiana, an expansive bill became one of the most controversial of the state legislative session, drawing heated opposition from labor groups and the state press association, which said the measure violated the First Amendment.

After numerous constitutional objections, the bill was redrafted and will be unveiled Monday, said Greg Steuerwald, a Republican state representative and chairman of the Judiciary Committee. The new bill would require job applicants to disclose material information or face criminal penalties, a provision that opponents say would prevent undercover operatives from obtaining employment. And employees who do something beyond the scope of their jobs could be charged with criminal trespass. An employee who took a video on a livestock farm with his phone and gave it to someone else would “probably” run afoul of the proposed law, Mr. Steuerwald said. The bill will apply not just to farms, but to all employers, he added.

The president of the Indiana chapter of the A.F.L.-C.I.O., said the legislation would punish whistle-blowers.

Livestock companies say that their businesses have suffered financially from unfair videos that are less about protecting animals than persuading consumers to stop eating meat. As for whistle-blowers, advocates for the meat industry say that they are protected from prosecution by provisions in some bills that give them 24 to 48 hours to turn over videos to legal authorities.

“If an abuse has occurred and they have evidence of it, why are they holding on to it?” asked Dale Moore, executive director of public policy for the American Farm Bureau Federation. But animal rights groups say investigations take months to complete.

Undercover workers cannot document a pattern of abuse, gather enough evidence to force a government investigation and determine whether managers condone the abuse within one to two days, said Matt Dominguez, who works on farm animal protection at the Humane Society of the United States.

“Instead of working to prevent future abuses, the factory farms want to silence them,” he said. “What they really want is for the whistle to be blown on the whistle-blower.”

Video shot in 2011 showed workers dripping caustic chemicals onto the horses’ ankles and clasping metal chains onto the injured tissue. This illegal and excruciating technique, known as “soring,” forces the horse to thrust its front legs forward after every painful step to exaggerate the distinctive high-stepping gait favored by breeders. The video also showed a worker hitting a horse in the head with a large piece of wood.

Prosecutors later credited the Humane Society with prompting the federal investigation and establishing “evidence instrumental to the case.”

That aid to prosecutors shows the importance of lengthy undercover investigations that would be prevented by laws requiring video to be turned over within one or two days, Mr. Dominguez said. “At the first sign of animal cruelty, we’d have to pull our investigator out, and we wouldn’t be able to build a case that leads to charges.”

Obama’s human rights campaign in Africa is failing miserably (but not surprisingly). For the grim story, turn here.
http://www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/2013/feb/25/obama-failing-african-spring/

What the article does not discuss at all is Obama’s indifference to the slaughter of protected species in Africa. Given his passion for speaking out in favor of hunting, it is not surprising. For details on elephant and rhino slaughter, please turn to today’s www.watchingpolitics.

As a once-upon-a-time VIP in People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, I still appreciate PETA’s dedication to animal rights but it is a wild, crazed, group of fanatics given to hyperbole and distortions in an otherwise just cause. Still, you can do a lot worse by supporting it. On the other hand, the Animal Welfare Institute is governed by mature persons who engage in no histrionics, street demonstrations, raids on animal laboratories or other attention-grabbing techniques. It works quietly to pressure Congress and other organizations that are animal oppressors. It succeeds because it has well-placed persons in important organizations doing all they can to change things. It reports to its membership quietly via is quarterly publication that you can subscribe to if you wish: awionline.org. [Or write to AWI at 900 Pennsylvania Ave., SE, Wash, D.C. 20003]

Warning: If what you most want is to live a tranquil life free of misery then neither of these organizations is your cup of tea. I am damned if I know why you would want that but I will philosophize on another occasion. I no longer have anything to do with PETA (for private, rather than ideological, reasons) and want to recommend that you support AWI to your fullest capability. The simplest way is to leave it a bequest in your will. Alternatively, you can send it monthly donations that come painlessly out of your checking account. And I do mean painlessly because if you can’t afford $20/month then you, yourself, should be collecting welfare. But if you have income exceeding $52,000 then, keeping in mind the great principle of diminishing marginal utility of money, you can do a lot better than $20 per month, and as your income rises, so should the percentage of your dough that goes to worthwhile causes also rise.

You owe it to yourself (and maybe the world) to find out why enlisting in animal causes is the best thing you can do to live an honorable life.

The National Institutes of Health is making progress in phasing out government-funded chimpanzee experiments and retiring most federally owned chimpanzees to sanctuaries. But the agency shouldn’t hold 50 chimpanzees for future research.

“The Institute of Medicine made it clear that chimpanzees are neither necessary nor useful research subjects. While they suffer needlessly in laboratories, millions of taxpayer dollars are wasted on inappropriate housing and unproductive research,” says Elizabeth Kucinich, PCRM’s director of government affairs. “While we are happy with the progress this report suggests, we advise that chimpanzee experiments be phased out completely.”

The report from the Council of Councils Working Group on the Use of Chimpanzees in NIH-Supported Research states that the NIH should permanently retire all but 50 of the 360 government-owned chimpanzees to a federal sanctuary program. The Working Group’s report recommends that NIH should not revitalize breeding of chimpanzees for any research, including new, emerging, or re-emerging disease research.

If the NIH accepts the recommendations of this report, the approximately 170 chimpanzees at the Alamogordo Primate Facility (APF) in New Mexico should be sent to sanctuaries. This includes Ken and the 23 chimpanzees, previously housed at APF, who are in poor health facing laboratory procedures at Texas Biomed in San Antonio. Ken, for example, is at risk of sudden cardiac death according to medical records obtained by PCRM through the Freedom of Information Act. Ken and the others should now be removed from the laboratory and reunited with the other Alamogordo chimpanzees in permanent retirement.

To learn more about ending chimpanzee experiments, visit PCRM.org/GAPCSA. That’s the Physicians Committee For Responsible Medicine.
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McDonald’s, Chicken-Fried Steak Served in Top U.S. Children’s Hospitals:

1.Shands Hospital in Florida is a top children’s hospital for heart surgery. But it has at least five fast-food outlets, and the patient menu includes artery-clogging meatloaf with gravy, according to PCRM’s new report on children’s hospitals that serve the most unhealthful foods.

The four other children’s hospitals named in PCRM’s report also host fast-food restaurants and serve young patients foods loaded with cholesterol and fat:

The Five Worst Children’s Hospital Food Environments

1. Shands Hospital for Children at University of Florida Gainesville, Fla. At least 5 fast-food outlets, including Wendy’s; patient menu includes a ham-and-cheese croissant, barbecue chicken, and meatloaf with beef gravy
2. Monroe Carell Jr. Children’s Hospital at Vanderbilt Nashville, Tenn. 4 fast-food outlets, including Taco Bell/Pizza Hut Express; cafeteria features barbecue chicken, cheesesteak wrap, and chicken-fried steak with cream gravy
3. St. Louis Children’s Hospital-Washington University St. Louis, Mo. 2 fast-food outlets, including Pizza Hut; patient menu includes sausage, bacon, ham, grilled chicken, and roast beef with gravy
4. Children’s Hospital Los Angeles Los Angeles, Calif. McDonald’s on first floor of hospital; patient menu features pizza and hot dogs
5. Riley Hospital for Children-Indiana University Health Indianapolis, Ind. McDonald’s in hospital next to cafeteria; patient menu features sausage, bacon, and corn dogs

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YpBPavEDQCk

On better evidence than this, OJ.Simpsom went free.

For some odd reason, (probably the search for glory and tenure), archaeologists at the University of Leicester announced Monday that a skeleton found under a parking lot in central England is in fact the remains of King Richard III, the last English king to die on the battlefield. Using carbon dating – a technique that gets you exactly nowhere – plus the maddening irrelevant but thrilling-to- them-discovery that “The skeleton has a number of unusual features: its slender build, the scoliosis and the battle-related trauma,” Jo Appleby, a member of the Leicester team, said in the announcement. “All of these are highly consistent with the information that we have about Richard III in life and about the circumstances of his death.”

Good grief, lock my cremated remains in a steel gun case and throw it into the deepest part of the ocean blue. Otherwise, I fear that the evils I do will not be interred with my bones.

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Where are Seabiscuit and Secretariat when you really need them?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g2gqtmLchGM

I used to know James Sterba. He was and is a prolific anthologizer who once lifted an essay of mine from a journal and reprinted it in one of his books. I found out about it months later. I did not get a royalty check but didn’t mind. My attitude towards plagiarism and uninvited article grabbing was and remains, “Oh, big deal.” Just don’t hurt my dog.

Now, Jimmy Boy has written a book reviewed by Russell Baker in the NY Review of Books – Nature Wars: The Incredible Story of How Wildlife Comebacks Turned Backyards into Battlegrounds. According to Jim, humans are fighting a losing war against woodland animals. Canada geese, wild turkeys, and white-tailed deer, all of which were once assumed to be picturesque and even lovable denizens of the dark and safely remote forest have taken over our urban gardens.

In little more than a single generation, our long relationship with nature has withered in a culture that finds Americans giving themselves up to the indoor ease of the technological way of life. Today’s average American spends most of the day indoors or inside an automobile traveling some hellish commuter road between workplace and home. Experience of his own natural habitat comes largely from watching beautifully photographed films on television. In Sterba’s word, he has become “denatured.”

Denaturing has produced an unrealistic and somewhat sentimental view of woodland creatures, which, as Sterba construes the situation, is one reason so many seem to feel they can trespass in our gardens with impunity. Humans no longer relish combat with creatures of the wild. Sterba refers to human champions of this animal or that as “species partisans.” Though sympathetic to their devotion to animals and their care for the environment, he clearly disapproves of some of the tactics they employ in pursuit of their high-minded objectives. Officials of an upstate New York village planning to rid the community of an infestation of Canada geese find themselves, for example, confronted by TV crews summoned to cover a protest against a pending “goose Holocaust.” After sharpshooters are hired by Princeton, New Jersey, to cull its deer population, “the mayor’s car was splattered with deer guts and the township animal control officer began wearing a bulletproof vest after finding his dog poisoned and his cat crushed to death.” People “denatured” from their own habitat tended to treat the environment and its other inhabitants in mindless ways, unintentionally and often with the best of intentions.

It is the white-tailed deer, however, that dominate all discussion of wilderness creatures versus human society. This may be because there are simply too many deer for their own good. Sterba’s figures indicate that as recently as 1900 all of North America had a deer population of perhaps 500,000. He recalls the excitement of seeing a deer standing perfectly still on a northern California mountainside in 1956. Seeing a deer at all in those years was a thrilling event. Now it is likely to be merely irritating, if not downright alarming.

By the 1990s the deer population had exploded. Various estimates for the United States put it at 25 to 40 million and growing unchecked, and apparently uncheckable. By 2006 this vast and scattered herd was being called “a mass transit system for ticks carrying Lyme disease.” Sterba’s figures put deer damage to farm crops and forests at more than $850 million; the deer had eaten $250 million worth of landscaping, gardens, and shrubbery. By eating plants that grew under large trees they damaged songbird habitats and put certain bird groups at risk.

“But threats to forests and songbirds paled in comparison to the whitetail’s menace to people in the form of collisions of deer and motor vehicles, which were occurring at a rate of three thousand to four thousand per day,” according to Sterba. “The toll of cars crumpled, people killed and injured, Lyme disease contracted, gardens destroyed, crops eaten, and forests damaged,” he writes, justified The New York Times’s editorial conclusion that “white-tailed deer are a plague.”

Deer fans cleared the landscape of the last major deer predator remaining: themselves. Most did not hunt. They posted their property with “No Hunting” signs and passed laws against discharging firearms that effectively put large areas of landscape off limits for hunting:

Suddenly, for the first time in eleven thousand years, hundreds of thousands of square miles in the heart of the white-tailed deer’s historic range were largely off limits to one of its biggest predators. Suddenly, an animal instinctively wary of predators, including Homo sapiens, found itself in a lush habitat where major predators—drivers being the exception—didn’t exist.

Oh, what to do? What to do? James has the solution. Thinking of possible ways to avert a disaster in deer–human conflicts, Sterba imagines a return of the human predator. He writes of “professional” hunters who are seen as “new saviors” in some suburbs where sharpshooters are hired to kill deer and are paid with tax dollars. He describes a proposal to have professionals train local hunters to become “urban deer managers,” with the costs offset by selling venison in farmers’ markets. “It seems like a good solution,” he concludes, “but it probably won’t happen anytime soon.”

What a great idea! In case deer have souls, let God sort them out. In the meanwhile, the great Kenyan sharpshooter now residing in the White House will be glad to endorse Sterba’s proposal and join the hunt himself. As for me, I’m mad, now. I think I’ll write a letter to Jim and ask for a long overdue royalty check of $100.

Obama has some good ideas and I would like to wish him much success in his second term pursuit of them. Unfortunately, I cannot because he has left out the most pressing matters of all.

1. There is the matter of federal prison reform. Not a word was said about that. Frankly, and you MUST agree, the torture, inhumane living standards, rape and occasional murder of hundreds of thousands of prisoners is a greater horror and much more serious indictment of America, than the bizarre assassination of 20 children in an elementary school in Connecticut. Given the disparate coverage these two travesties have received, you would never guess which was worse.

2. Hospital reforms. If you think that the President cannot do anything about the 100,000 accidental deaths, most due to incompetent surgery, (Oops, sorry about that), you are wrong and the victims are DEAD wrong. Perhaps, he doesn’t care, perhaps he is not well-informed. If the latter, Secretary Sibelius is the culprit. She should be fired tomorrow as Obama’s first official act in his 2nd term of office.

3. For some years I have not been a member of the animal rights movement. Still, I take animal welfare very seriously and I place myself somewhere between the utilitarian’s concern for animals and the concern of the animal rights people. The President is blissfully unaware of the difference. The President does not seem to know about the thousands of cases of abuse in animal research facilities that are our country’s greatest shame. The President does not seem to know about the frequent violations of the Marine Mammal Protection Act. The President is certainly unaware of the fact that the U.S. is a signatory to CITES – the convention on international trade in endangered species. The President and his latest henchman, Colin Powell, have declared they are not foes of recreational hunting and trapping.

So long as the President is unconcerned about these major deficiencies in his agenda, I cannot climb aboard the bandwagon. Dennis Kucinich sees the problems but we blundered by not supporting him in 2008. There is no second chance.