HSUS Fraud story today

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Originally Posted by singingtothewheat

They are a right wing, special interest group

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???
the opposite of right wing actually...

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Originally Posted by Colin Vestrand

???
the opposite of right wing actually...

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Actually I don't think they have any wings. Animal rights is neither a left or right issue, they'll give money to whomever will support them regardless of political ideology.

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Originally Posted by MarkS

Actually I don't think they have any wings. Animal rights is neither a left or right issue, they'll give money to whomever will support them regardless of political ideology.

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i'll agree with that for sure... i guess i was just thinking of all the groups that they have major clashes with that would be considered right wing...

The sad part is how misguided these folks are, overall. There is not, in my opinion, anything wrong with giving some rights to animals. The problem is with trying to force animals to be wild and free the way you want them to be, without regard to what's actually in their best interests.
Our snakes are a bundle of instinct and primitive emotion, with little thought going on--but these people presume that, if given a rational choice, they would choose to be wild.
Let's see--harsh temperature changes, uncertainty of food and water availability, predation, parasitism, etc....versus a perfect climate, clean water, food handed to you often, and good health.
Maybe captivity isn't so bad after all? There have been many occasions in which wild animals, raised in captivity, have opted to stick around after being released.

The other side of the issue is sentience. I can't say I disagree with the Great Ape Trust's efforts to get governments to afford special rights to our closest relatives. Once we are forced to acknowledge that great apes have all of our cognitive abilities--just in a slightly different arrangement--and are in fact as bright as the lower rung of the human normal range--I think we would be ethically amiss not to act on that knowledge.
They aren't human, but that doesn't mean they're not intelligent beings. They aren't as creative as we are, but that doesn't mean they're incapable of being creative, or solving problems, and sometimes the extent of that capability is shocking. They don't have to be like us in order for us to acknowledge that they're sentient, do they? Their impulse control is too low for them to be trusted among us as if they were human--but they can whip our butts when it comes to short term spatial memory. We're not the best at everything either--they can beat us at some mental tasks, too. Now that we have reluctantly but definitively discovered that chimps are homonids like us, and don't come from a different evolutionary branch after all, shouldn't we revise our treatment of them accordingly?

An orang at the local zoo here once disassembled a light in his cage and removed the wires. He fashioned them into a lock pick, picked the lock to his cage and let himself and his friends out. He hid the pick in his cheek, so he managed to keep doing this over and over again while the puzzled keepers tried to figure out who was leaving the door open....
How many people do you know who would have thought of that?

That all of these issues are lumped into the category of one thing--'animal rights'--is a shame. The extremism of that category may sadly prevent more moderate and sane efforts at making some changes that really should happen.

We've already acknowledged that animals have a right to humane treatment--these groups distract from our struggle to determine what 'humane' really means, and instead want animals to fit into some 'wild and free' ideal that they have for them. It's completely outside the boundaries of reality, because the truth is, from an evolutionary perspective, being our pets is a really good thing for most species. If we know how to care for and breed them, then we do--and their survival is assured. The most successful species on the planet, apart from us, are our pets or pests. Living with us appears to be good for the species that do it.

The above is all way too long and too rambly, I realize, but these are the things I think about. The reptile industry has some areas that it needs prodding to shape up in--and these attempts to ban everything outright are likely to create such a strong reaction that those areas won't be changed. That's a shame for us, and for the animals.