Thoughts on animals.

[Mouse]

I dunno where people here stand on animal rights and stuff. Everyone here knows I'm obsessed with animals but I'm not one of the unreasonable crazy animal rights activist people. I understand where everything fits into place, but there are a couple things that have been on my mind lately.

I don't follow horse racing, but I like horses, and most people know about Barbaro's breakdown recently. It's brought up a lot of old thoughts and concerns with horse racing in general. While I don't think there is anything generally wrong with racing horses (as horses, being horses, they live to run) but the fact that a lot of the time the horses are overworked and a lot of the things they have them do are unsafe and just kind of foreshadow the fact that a lot of horses are going to breakdown in a race.

http://sports.aol.com/horseracing/story/_a/barbaros-breakdown-a-cruel-blow/20060520205009990001

Some people might remember Go For Wand's breakdown in 1990. I was born in 1990 so I don't remember it. -.-;. But it's spoken about often and it brings to people's attention how horrifying the injuries can be.

http://www.angelfire.com/realm2/classical0/gfw.html
(Pretty graphic.)

Anyways, I dunno what I'm getting at. Just that a lot of things that people take for granted everyday in society's involvement with animals isn't as safe as people thought it was. The most common example is the meat industry, but since that's what everyone talks about and people think it's typical crazy hippie pot smoking animal rights activist territory so I decided to concentrate a bit on horse racing.

Something a lot of people are just coming to be aware of though is how crazy PETA is. I'm sick of people using PETA as representitive of all people concerned about animal welfare. They are known to lie, cheat and steal to get their (often unfounded and false) stories across. It's sickening because of how extremeist they are, they get people to think ALL people concerned about animal welfare are crazy, and it pushes the entire cause back.

For example crazy 'animal rights' activists believe any explotation of animals is immoral. Without taking into consideration the fact that domesticated animals need human care because they were bred over many many years to have that need so that humans could own them. In order to end animals needing human care, pets would need to wiped off the face of the earth altogether or we'd wind up with a shitload of strays and babies all over the streets because domesticated animals have no more natural instinct on breeding and when enough is enough because humans have controlled their reproduction for so long.

So, there is a line. My animals depend on me and I do my best to care for them because that's what they do deserve.

Also, rats, mice and birds are not protected under the Animal Welfare Act in the US. Which, certainly, testing to a degree is understandable when it's for the good of people. But. This is where I draw the line -
 - Cosmetics should NOT be tested on animals. People's vanity isn't worth anything's life.
 - Animal testing is only reasonable when it's used to encourage medical discoveries and save people's lives or improve people's quality of life. So, it's stupid to test shit on animals that may improve like, a chronic runny nose or something.