Ethics of Breeding - from Eventing-a-Gogo

Here's a really effective article that I found which took (some of) the words about my opinions on breeding right out of my mouth. It's written very nicely and thoughtfully, so I thought it should be passed on. :)

Domestic Versus Wild

There are a great many scientifically ignorant people in this world who would argue that there should not be a difference in how we treat our domestic pets versus our wild animals. These people, those who say that all animals should be in the wild, not in people's houses or in cages are unknowingly in the same herd as the people who think wild animals can be kept captive under guises of research and conservation, but such captivity has, for the most part, run its course of usefulness. While very few people in this world are truly free of the 'master race' analogy that we are taught to give ourselves - I cannot say even that I am, as I have been trained like every other human animal to follow the herd - there is something quite disturbing about anyone who says there is no difference between wild and domestic, that it is 'okay' to keep a wild animal in captivity under any circumstance. What about captive breeding, you may ask? Well, if it must be captive, let it be as far from human eyes as possible. Let it not be entertainment. Let those animals who are being bred for the survival of their kind have room to roam instead of being boxed up in a pretty temperature controlled terrarium which is supposed to look like their natural habitat.

A domestic animal is not the same as a wild one. Absolutely, positively, overwhelmingly, NOT THE SAME. Why? You may ask. They look mostly the same! They're of the same genus - a house cat is distantly related to a tiger isn't it? Well, I can't deny that. House cats are distantly related to tigers and both house cats and tigers are classed under Felidae, so they are both cats. However, just because they are both cats does not mean that they are the same animal and it especially doesn't mean that they have evolved the same strategies for survival. Several thousand years ago in Egypt, a little African Wild Cat saw opportunity in the rodent infested granaries of the Egyptians and this source of easy food was something she taught to her kittens. "Hey - the food's more plentiful over there. There's also less predators around - why don't I spend less energy by hunting over there, where those big stupid two legged beasts are?" Well, the big stupid two legged beasts weren't actually stupid and once the ancient Egyptians realized that the cats were protecting their very livelihoods by chasing the mice and their granaries, the cat became a sacred animal, protected, loved and yes, mummified, because humans are not really secretly just jumped up fancy herbivores who got a power-over-other-living-things complex somewhere down the evolutionary line, which other animals can only shake their heads at us for - proverbially of course, since they don't communicate like we do. In any case, in return for easy food and protection, cats and other domestic animals give us their services, services which we ourselves cannot - or rather could not - provide for ourselves.

The point is, 'domestic' animals - I'm talking pets, animals we do not typically eat such as cats, dogs and horses - have developed evolutionary strategies which include working for (with) us. What do we give a dog for his loyalty? He doesn't have to hunt for food. He doesn't have to worry about predators. He has protection against the weather and if he breaks a leg, we set it for him. Dogs have a good deal. So do cats and horses. What does a horse get for her draft services? She gets reliable food, medical, shelter and the thing which is most of all most important to a herbivorous animal, she gets protection from being eaten by predators. What is the most important thing for predatory animals like cats and dogs? Look at leopards, look at lions - they sleep most of the day, so the most important thing to a predator, is the conservation of their bodily energy. In modern times a cat doesn't have to use energy searching for food and neither does a dog. These animals have clearly evolved - or rather adapted or started to evolve - with us as their evolutionary advantage and we have benefited from their services too. Our society would not have been possible without them. The only time this synergy, this symbiosis between species fail is when we, humans, abuse the sanctity of the relationship and you would have to be quite stupid to say that we have not done this, nor that we are not doing that, right now.

Wild animals, tigers, wolves, parrots, birds, dolphins, whales, bears, what have you - they have not adapted for a symbiotic relationship with humans. That is not their survival strategy - their survival strategy is the same survival strategy is the same one which they have been using for thousands of years and they reason they are still using these strategies is because they work. The shark is (perhaps arguably, since everything in science appears to be arguable) the most successful species group to have ever lived. They have been around for over five million years and during that time, their strategy for survival has not changed. Sharks today are (again arguably) using the exact same strategy for survival which their ancestors were using several billion years before anything that looked even marginally like a human ever walked the earth. These animals, who have not adapted for life with humans and who would have adapted by now if they actually wanted to, should not EVER be kept in captivity.

You might again ask why. Why? Because they are intelligent. Only people who have not had a beloved pet or whom are brainwashed by institutions - our entire society can be called an institution - are stupid enough to question the intelligence of other species. It is rare that you find a human who has worked extensively with animals from another species who would tell you that that animal is stupid, if he or she has worked with that animal at least somewhat on that animal's own terms and not with unnatural predatory intentions of gain such as profit. Zoos and marine parks can be pooled in the same file as the ghastly gladiator exhibitions of Ancient Rome because they are all for the most part just a glorified show made up for entertainment value. Many people who run zoos, would agree with this and I salute those such venues such as the Cincinnati Zoo who actually do put their money into true conservation of the wild animals they feature as well as places such as Big Cat Rescue which rescues captive large cats from domestic confinement, places where these animals simply do not belong. You may point out that the animals at Big Cat Rescue are still in confinement there, if you are familiar with the program, but there is a difference - Big Cat Rescue is working hard to end put an end to the captivity of large cats and further, they are trying to conserve wild populations of these animals.

Ancient crowds thought it was amusing watching men fight to the death against each other and ferocious beasts. This, our society calls barbaric, yet this same society of ours calls it okay to capture wild animals from their habitats and put them into captivity. There is a wrongness to any wild animal being in captivity, even one which is captive bred, for a captive bred animal is like an Aboriginal child being denied their heritage. They are in confinement. They may want to escape but they cannot and it would cost them too much energy to try. Life is about preserving and keeping biological energy and creating new life. No matter how pretty a cage is, it's still a cage, to the point where I think of my own indoor cat Copernicus and find my captivity of him - as well as the captivity of hundreds of other cats as perhaps being fairly wrong. I don't mean him running in the wild. I mean that it maybe and probably is wrong that he has no opportunity to roam, to come and go as he pleases. If a domestic animal is unhappy with their situation, they will run away, but we are possessive animals. We love them, we hold them, but is it right, to keep them inside, to make them see the same walls, day after day? If trapped in a room for months, a human goes insane. If trapped in a pool for years, so does an orca or any other cetacean.

Copernicus is not a wild animal. He is domestic and his evolutionary strategy is to live beside me. He has proven himself to be extremely loyal over these past weeks and he has proven that he loves me. I don't want my cat to be hit by a car or eaten by a coyote, yet these same dangers are ones which I face regularly in my own life, as a human. As a human in our modern age, living in North America, I can almost definitely say that I fear no predator more than my own kind. Bears will not come in the night to force me. Tigers do not kill for fun - they kill for food or territory (resources needed to sustain personal life) or to get rid of competition, which really, are exactly the same reasons why humans kill, only we call it war, which we say we detest, yet usually still ends up being all fine and dandy. No matter what side you are in a war, somebody from that side will call themselves 'right' or 'better' so isn't it wrong that we critisize animals for doing exactly the same thing?

I'm getting off topic, but the essence of this all comes down to this: domestic animals are not wild animals. If I ever have a place where it is mostly safe to let Copernicus outside, I may let him, definitely if he has a streetwise companion to help him learn. It is a proven fact that cats teach each other - mothers train their babies how to hunt. Leopards do this and so do house cats. So too, do mother dogs teach their babies if given a chance and mother horses teach their foals how to run, as well as what plants are good to eat as well as which are not. Wild mustangs have been known to self medicate themselves with herbs and to avoid certain obstacles which have proven to cause harm, from dead fall to high ridges during storms when lightning might strike.

Before any reader gets too hyped up with self importance about any of these domestic species 'needing' us, remember this; any animal, including humans, can and will go wild again if forced to. We ourselves are domesticated, but if push comes to shove, we are just another herbivore who can survive in the wild perfectly fine without any modern aid or help.

I'll get to the herbivore thing soon, maybe in my next post. Thank you for reading.


For a change, here's some documentaries and articles I strongly recommend regarding the captivity of wild animals, because I'm not sure how credible most people find some crazy, opinionated little Canadian with no bachelor's degree in anything.

1. Lolita: Slave to Entertainment
2. The Killer in the Pool (article) by Tim Zimmermann
3.The Cove (you can watch it here)

For the record, if anyone strongly agrees with any of my posts regarding conservation or animal rights - such as this one, feel free to repost so long as proper credit is given to me and the repost is linked to the original post here. (However, reposting any of the other works, particularly the works of fiction - as in, manuscript excerpts - or blog posts as my personal life as a whole - are NOT allowed under any circumstances. Links are okay, but NO reposts and it would be better if you asked me first before reposting ANYTHING. Thank you!)

Some Gratification...

Today, watching an episode of Monster Quest concerning the hybridization of humans and chimpanzees, I got some gratification on my theory that we can't judge intelligence by how we humans see it. A scientist on the show commented that things which we think are smart, like being able to play the piano, would be meaningless in the middle of a place like a congo, while the intelligence of an animal such as a chimp would mean a lot there. It's good to know that I'm not the only person who questions our selfish assumption that we are the 'smartest' animals on Earth or that we are 'above' all other animals. This thought is sick and I would like to see it ended someday so that perhaps maybe we can move forwards in a way that supports all life on Earth, with respect.

Entelodonts and Evolution

I just watched National Geographic's Prehistoric Predators, the entelodont episode and it was interesting because the entelodont was essentially a predatory species of pig. Like my mythical starfers, it was a hooved predator and that's fascinating, particularly when you consider how a predator with hooves would have to hunt, being unable to grip its prey with its claws. To me, entelodonts are even kind of beautiful with the way they looked, though they're described as ugly 'pigs from hell' and 'terminator pigs' for their rather badass anatomy. These were some really unique predators, not unlike us for their originality in existence! However, watching this and hearing the theory of this fascinating animal's demise, there is a clear moral and that is that in order to survive extinctions, animals must evolve in new ways. The entelodont attempted to survive by making itself get bigger, but that did not work, because evolution threw them the wild card of the bear dog, a species that while smaller, could do everything an entelodont could do and do it better. Bear dogs were also smarter than entelodonts and faster runners, able to hunt in packs, so when push came to shove, they were the end of the world for the entelodonts.

To say it clear, the moral of the story is is that evolution is an arms race and if your arms aren't the best, you're dead but also, if your food source is removed, you will also die. I believe that we humans need to pay attention to this; yes, we are omnivores and we can eat anything, but if our conciousness does not shift soon, if we do not evolve, we will not survive to the next era. I think what we need to do, is shake off the mantle of instinct; it controls so much of what we do, from giving us the impulse to be curious about babies when we previously disliked them as adolescents to the male desire to mate, and mate a lot. The problem with humans mating, is that we're nearly as prolific as rabbits and there's already too damn many of us on this planet for it to support us. We need to stop being selfish about our rampant reproducing and we need to educate ourselves as well as our neighbours more strongly about the effects we have on the environment. We need to evolve. We need to be thoughtful.

The Human Species is Selfish

According to most people and probably the holy bible, being overly selfish is a form of sin - so, why is it, does modern society and several high profile, well known religions, preach that humans are better than animals, that they were created to serve us and that we are 'higher beings?'

You know what that sounds like to me?

Once upon a time, there was a boy in Austria who liked to draw swastikas on the outer wall of his school. He grew up, ran for power in a neighboring country and eventually got it. His name was Adolf Hitler. Because of him, millions of other humans were quite literally slaughtered in one of the most obscenely vile crimes ever committed against humanity, the Holocaust and one of the things Hitler preached was that there was a 'master race.'

Now, doesn't that sound familiar?

In general 'modern' humans are constantly preaching that they are better than animals, that we are a 'master species' - when in fact, despite science, I do not believe that we can truly say that we know how animals think. We simply can not. Why? Well, that's simple. Think of different species as different countries, with different beliefs and religions. A person in so-called '1st World' Florida living in a mansion cannot possibly even begin to relate to the poor, impoverished '3rd World' farmer in Tibet. In the same manner, a human cannot possibly begin to relate with a dog, because a dog's way of thinking is even further removed from the way the farmer thinks in comparison to the rich guy who lives in Florida who has five cars. Why? Because dogs and humans are entirely different things and thus, we have entirely different ways of thinking from each other.

Let's start with primary senses.

As you know, reading this, a human's primary sense is sight. We perceive our world with our eyes; in fact, in a natural situation - aka, primitive cave men circumstances - and we remain unchanged from our nomadic 'cave man' ancestors by the way, we are the same species - it would be almost impossible for a human to survive while blind without technology. Why? Think about it - while it has been proven that at the loss of one sense others will improve, a blind human still can't see that random tree coming up that his or her walking stick didn't tap or they wouldn't see the cougar sitting silently in said tree overhead of them. Mind you, sighted humans probably wouldn't even see the cougar, but the fact remains - in an environment of uneven terrain and shrubbery, where you cannot see much less smell or hear the food that you are attempting to forage for, you as a wild human would most certainly die without the help of sighted humans.

Of course, this is the main reason why humans hunt in packs. Indeed, we have an obsessive instinct to protect our frail, which may actually prove to be a detriment to the DNA of our species as a whole, because as much as I probably sound like Hitler saying this, there's very little natural selection going on in modern human society. Everybody is getting laid. It doesn't matter what you look like - there's so many damn many of us that if you're a human who really wants to reproduce, you can do it - in fact, you don't even need a mate for the act of reproduction anymore! See? No natural selection.

Okay, that was off topic - back to dogs and humans.

While humans are animals which obviously depend on their eyesight, dogs are an entirely different pot of coffee. No, really. Forget all your anthropomorphic ideas that dogs and other animals think in exactly the same way that we humans do - they don't. Think of different species as having different operating systems - humans, being so flawed, would be Windows. Animals would be something more like Macs. Oldschool, bullet proof macs. Why?

Dogs, you see, do not see the world persay. They smell it. A dog's nose is thousands of times more powerful than a human's - in fact, a wolf can smell a single drop of human sweat for up to a month. (Wolves are also a great deal smarter than Fido, but let's not get into that right now.) In any case, a dog's sense of smell and a wolf's is pretty much the same ball of wax. Dogs can detect minute amounts of drugs, food odours in luggage and even cancer, because they, unlike us, can actually smell what is happening inside a living body - how do you think a wolf can pick out a weak specimen in a herd without it showing any outward ague? Impressed yet by dogs and wolves? You should be. Now, think - if a dog is 'seeing' everything with her nose, then she is detecting probably millions of things in her world that we as humans are completely and utterly blind to. When a dog walks into the forest or even a pet food store, you might have noticed that it'll usually get pretty excited - that's because it's experiancing something of a sensory overload. While we humans walk the stagnant, dusty halls of the pet supply store, just seeing colours and symbols on bags, Fido is detecting the ingredients in every single bag. Fido is recognizing a plethora of smells he knows - and perhaps a larger plethora of smells he doesn't. He wants to find out what they all are - but will he get to? Doubtful. Fido isn't a wolf in the wild who can.

As a greater example, there is a test frequently employed by scientists to determine how self-aware an animal is. An adult human can usually always recognize them self in the mirror, because adult humans have a fully developed sense of sight and can deduct via their sense of space that that ugly bloke or handsome devil (depending on how they see themselves) staring back at them is themselves. However, human babies aren't so intelligent. In fact, they're pretty stupid until about the age of two and border collies (yes, a breed of dog) are smarter (by human standards) than most human toddlers. But, babies are babies. They aren't self aware - they have an excuse!

So what am I getting at?

The fact is, the mirror trick is obsolete when it comes to animals whose primary sense is not sight. Dogs have good eyesight - they can even see in muted colour - but when faced with a mirror, most dogs won't recognize their own reflection. Why? Are they stupid? Are we superior to them because we can?

Absolutely not!

A dog's primary sense, as before explained, is smell! Most people who have owned a dog or studied them out of curiousity can agree that dogs can recognize their own scent. In fact, most animals are scent driven and greet each other by politely breathing into each other's faces - 'sniffing noses.' They might think that another dog looks familiar, but the only way they'll know for sure is if they smell the other dog's breath. When an animal sniffs another animal's exhalations, they are smelling air that has passed through the other animal's lungs, close to its blood which is a baffling chemical stew of cells, nutrients, various biological chemicals and hormones. They can tell the other animal's age, sex, state of health and even emotional state. Further, because they are in a sense smelling another animal's blood, they're quite likely also able to smell subtle differences in its chemical make up that make it Charlie and pooch #2 Fido.

In short, you can't judge the intelligence of an animal by how it reacts to a mirror, because chances are sight isn't its primary sense and it's also probably not even paying attention because there's a bunch of freakish two-legged animals surrounding it with cameras, staring at it.

Staring is aggressive body language. If I was a dog being stared at by some stranger, I very likely would not be very interested in all in the stupid shiny thing in front of me. And the dogs who bark at their reflection? Well; remember - this is an animal that works by scent. He's probably freaked out by the strange dog that is copying him and apparently has no smell. If he could smell that strange dog, he'd relax, but he can't.

For the sake of the record, there are scent-orientated animals who are smart enough to recognize their own reflection. Dolphins navigate by echolocation, so sight is certainly not their favoured sense, seeing as they are often swimming through extremely murky water, but they can still recognize their own reflection - and so can some dogs in fact.

Yet, for the record, if you put the average joe human in a room and asked him to consciously recognize his own scent from many others, he probably wouldn't. In fact, he probably wouldn't even want to smell any of them, because we humans often seem to dislike the natural smell of our own species. It's often only through the use of various perfumes that we can consciously recognize specific humans. No human wants to smell anyone else's scent glands - armpits, breath, anus, feet - because we're as a general rule, just not scent orientated animals. Yes, there are humans with a stupendous sense of smell (for a human) but these are the exception, not the rule. Extraordinary humans like these are usually found in the food industry. Personally, I can vouch for the fact that while I am undoubtedly a strange example of humanity, I am extremely normal in the fact that my sense of smell is nigh non-existent and in fact, I don't like eating in the dark because I simply have to be able to see my food. See? I'm an animal that depends on eyesight for survival - I need to be able to see my food to make sure that nothing has contaminated it, that it's safe. It's the same reason most humans are not keen on sticking their arms down a dirty hole after a ring - because they can't see what else might be in that hole. It's survival instinct, hardwired around humanity's dependency on its eyes. Most humans become anxious if we cannot see a perceived threat to ourselves, just like the freaked out dog that barks at its reflection in confusion because it cannot smell it.

"So?" you ask - "Dogs don't have language. Animals don't talk to each other. Humans must be superior, because we can."

Such a selfish, human-like way to think - you have to put yourself outside of the human perspective! Forget that you're a human. Seriously. Do it. Mentally remove yourself from your human perceptions. Think outside the 'box,' if you will!

The statement that animals do not have language or culture is grotesquely wrong. Think about it - humans, from a sensory perspective, are rather pathetic creatures. Yes, it's true - we are. We have pretty good eyes - but we can't see in the dark, we have a great sense of touch - but pretty much all mammals have that, we have okay hearing - but we can only hear within a certain range of decibels - whereas most animals can hear a far wider scope and as a whole as a species, our sense of smell positively sucks. We're lucky if we can smell dinner cooking in another room. No seriously. We are. There's lots of humans who have no sense of smell at all, or who have lost it. This is pretty much unheard of in animals and because humans have such bad whiffers, there isn't even a common term for a human who can't smell. Blind in the nose? Deaf in the nose? What?!

As a species, a human's secondary sense for perceiving the world around them is most definitely hearing and because we have such a poor sense of smell, we depend on watching each other's body language combined with each other's vocalizations to communicate - truthfully, humans really don't make that many sounds either.

"What?!" you ask, "But what about our vast dictionaries? We make loads of sounds!"

Actually, we don't.

While different languages often have different sounds (making the learning of some near to impossible for outsiders, who will lack the ability to hear some sounds in languages that are very foreign to theirs) the truth is, in any human language there aren't many of these sounds. Each word that we make is really a conglomeration of a very small group of sounds, a group that is smaller than the 26 characters in the modern English alphabet. For example:

'K' makes a 'kuh' sound - but so does 'C' and 'Q' without a 'U.'
'S' makes a 'sss' sound - yet so can 'C!' (In fact, 'C' is a rather useless letter if you ask me.)

So, here are the actual sounds of an english speaking human:

'Ah' 'Beh' 'Deh' 'Ee' 'Fff' 'Geh' 'Hah' 'Ih' 'Jeh' 'Kuh' 'Ell' 'Mmm' 'Nnn' 'Ooo' 'Peh' 'Rrr' 'Sss' 'Teh' 'Veh' 'Wuh' 'Zzz'

Notice... some letters are missing. There's only about 21 distinct sounds made by the characters in the English Alphabet which we mix together to create words, adding in tonal inflections as the flavour to convey our points across better. Dogs only have about five distinct barks, but they also have growls and oh, yes, they can howl! So, they might seem to have less distinct sounds than us, but there's several things we humans have to take into account when judging other creatures for lingual skills:

1. Most animals can make sounds which are both below and above human decibel range of hearing.

2. Most animals can hear sounds which are both below and above human decibel range of hearing.

Personally, I think that dependency on body language in human societies versus animal societies is probably about equal and the amazing thing is, is that most humans - and animals - can read body language across special barriers - one has only to watch recent documentaries on dogs to know this fact. Further, domestic cats do this too and is it really that far of a stretch to say that wild animals do it with each other as well? Body language is fairly universal - perhaps another fact of thousands which supports evolution. Humans and all other animals share a common ancestor - somewhere way back in antiquity. But I'm not going to obsessively argue evolution right now. No. Don't even try it with me!

So, in short, animals have language. This is pretty much accepted in scientists studying cetaceans such as dolphins and whales - but I'd say that it's present in most other animal species too; after all, it's not how big your brain is that counts - it's how you use it and the typical human uses very little of its brain! What's not to say that animals don't use more eh? We can't firmly say, even with science what an animal thinks, because we are humans! We are a different species from a dog, a cat, a bison, a horse - granted, there are likely animals who do just survive off of simple instinct, like ants perhaps, but it is my theory that most animals are in fact very smart, just as smart as humans, just in a different way!

As for the question of if animals have culture? I believe that's a stupid thing to even ask. Of course they do - that's like saying that people in Britain don't have a different culture from people in a traditional Indian town. Frankly, it's racist of humans to propose that animals don't have culture - how do we know that they do not? How do we know that they do? Well, actually in some species there's some pretty good evidence for the latter; dogs and wolves are the same species after all - look how differently they live. Wolves in the desert and wolves in the forest also would have different cultures, as would a mustang opposed to a racehorse. Is animal culture rich? Hell yes it is. Want an example? Wolves mourn their dead. After her mother died, my cat Smokey searched and cried for her for days - clearly she was in mourning. When babies of any mammal species are taken from their dams they cry and the mothers get depressed - they want their baby back! Doesn't this denote intelligence? Doesn't this denote culture? An alpha female wolf will show her family what she wants them all to hunt by parading in front of them a piece of the targeted prey, like a cached leg. Hell, pretty much all pack animals use strategy when they hunt - is a leopard's ambushing spring from a tree upon an impala really that different from a human hunter loosing an arrow at a favoured buck? No!

Humans are animals, yet we like to pretend that we stand on a pinnacle above the rest of our earthly brethren, pretending that we are better. "We are the master race, because we can use tools! This is what makes us smarter than everyone else!" we say. "We have gods, so we are smarter!"

Um, really? No. We are not. Sorry human kind - but we're no more stupid or intelligent than Fido. We're a great deal more dangerous, but that does not make us better. That makes us worse - given a choice and removal from humans, dogs go feral. Natural selection takes place - they become wild things again, like the dingos of Australia. Who says dolphins don't have gods? Who says that deer don't? A human will go feral just the same as a dog if placed in 'the wild' for long enough.

So, why are humans selfish? We frequently run screw with the environment for our own 'self gain' - thus shooting ourselves in the foot. We breed incessantly and we are far worse than rabbits, because rabbits can't blow shit up with napalm, or worse, do things ala Hiroshima the nuclear way. Despite all our great technology, we humans are usually too stupid to realize until after the fact that doing certain things, like filling in wetlands or mowing down miles of pristine forests might be very bad. Also, despite our great technology, humans, an omnivorous species whose only claim to being able to eat other animals is the pepsin in our stomachs, are still eating meat, despite how unsustainable meat is. The fact is, we as omnivores-ranging-more-on-the-herbivorous side of the spectrum have a choice - we can survive perfectly fine without meat or we can eat it and wonder why things are getting so polluted. Meat eaters are selfish - we eat meat because we see it as a status symbol. 'Oh, we're better than the other herbivores, because look what we can do.' If we were better, we would recognize several facts:

1. We do not have digestive tracts that are tailored towards the digestion of meat. If we did, our intestines would be extremely short (carnivores digest things very fast), our stomachs would be far more acidic than they are (cats and dogs have a stomach acid acidity rating of 1-2 molars - the purpose of it is to fry harmful parasites and bacteria; thus true carnivores have the ability to eat carrion, aka rotten meat, which humans cannot - carrion would be extremely dangerous to us) and we do not have the proper teeth for eating meat. If we did, our canine teeth would be an inch long and the rest of our teeth would be a lot pointier! Carnivore teeth act like scissors and stabbing knives.

2. Anatomically, we are geared towards eating a chiefly herbivorous diet. In fact, of all the primates, humans probably have the shittiest teeth for meat consumption. Our teeth are like a cows - morter-and-pestle molars combined with scissoring, snipping incisors at the front. Our canines are pretty much non-existent. Further, we have a small stomach (carnivores have big stomachs for the purpose of storing meat) and a very long intestinal tract, ideal for the digestion of plant material. As well as that, our saliva has amylase in it, a digestive enzyme specifically geared for the breaking down of the carbohydrates that we depend on - carnivores, you should know, run off of fat, not carbohydrates for energy. When humans get fat we get fat, but for carnivorous animals like sled dogs, fat's the magic ingredient in their ability to run for what seems like almost forever.

Another thing that makes humans a pretty selfish lot is that we have a habit of imposing our ideas on other beings, whether they're an animal or even our own species. We have a decidedly bad superiority complex. One of the ways in which this is particularly bad, is when we go out and impose vegetarian or vegan diets upon cats and dogs - animals which are clearly carnivorous. This gets particularly disgusting when it comes to cats, because as obligate carnivores, animals which must eat meat to survive, who cannot digest anything else, this imposing of a herbivorous diet can have disasterous, life threatening consequences.

More things humans do which are selfish and vile to their fellow creature?

-Sport hunting - it's not predation, because you aren't depending on the death of that animal for food, you're killing it for fun, which is, you guessed it, murder.

-Being prey animals, we humans freak out the second one of us is killed by a predator. The only difference is, humans have guns and we're likely to blow the brains out of said predator, who was usually only looking for a meal, something we humans do ourselves, yet which we conveniently forget. No, I'm not going to get into this issue either, but the fact of the matter is, if we don't want to be eaten, we should try harder to be unappetizing. We're humans! We pretend we're the best damn thing on the planet most of the time, so why can't we be more responsible without resorting to violence? There are ways of dealing with predation without killing those predators - like using guardian dogs - we didn't become symbiotic partners with dogs just so that they could sit on our laps!

- We are grossly abusive to our symbiotic partner species, dogs, cats and horses. Every time we breed a dog with predisposed serious genetic problems, we are subtly torturing that dog's descendants, guaranteeing that at least some of them will have those serious genetic problems. First and foremost, because dogs cannot choose their own strong healthy mates via natural selection in our society, we must provide genetic selection services for them - starting with not allowing dogs with genetic problems to breed. We would do well to breed for soundness first.

If you want disturbing example, approximately 90% of today's thoroughbred racehorses in North America are direct descendants of the Canadian racehorse Northern Dancer. While it's fairly impressive for a male animal that Northern Dancer got laid so many times, the fact remains that with that many horses being descended from him, it means that there is a lot of inbreeding going on in the thoroughbred racing industry today with relatives being bred to each other, which is likely a cause of the many fatal breakdowns that are happening on the backstretch (ala Barbaro, anyone?) Most horses in domestic care do not have a choice about who they get to mate with - humans decide that for them and these animals receive no sexual education to understand what is happening to them as they would in the wild living with their herds, with the result being that when a domestic mare is covered, she usually has to be held against her will, her legs fettered while a stallion essentially rapes her. Meanwhile the stallion has no education to tell him that he's being too rough with her. In the wild, he would have that and the mare would absolutely have a choice in whether she gets covered or not - if she doesn't want it, a wild mare can quite easily send a good sharp kick to a stallion's nether regions to tell him off and he'll definitely get the point as he reels in agony! Probably more sad is that most domestic stallions never get to meet their babies - whereas their wild counterparts help their 'wives' raise their babies. (Wild mares are in fact often extremely loyal to their stallions. Horse harems are closely knit family groups.)

Compared to dogs and horses (I don't even want to venture into the vile world of how we treat livestock like cows and chickens) cats have it pretty easy in domestication. Dogs have it pretty easy too - unlike horses, they are still able to maintain natural culture of a sort under human care, living in surrogate packs quite happily with we their symbiotic partners - in return for their services, we feed, shelter and care for them. It's a sweet deal for dogs, cats and yes, horses too. Horses in captivity do somewhat get to live in herds, but they just usually don't have the culture that they would have in the wild. There's no ball kicking in the pasture, because humans gender segregate horses for the most part. Stallions are typically ill-socialized hooligans, because humans often keep them alone, without at least other male horses to play with. (This is for their own safety, but it still sucks for them.) The poor things probably feel overwhelmed whenever they meet a girl!

Anyway - cats. Cats have it pretty posh, most of the time. Why? Cats are probably the only one of these three typical symbiotic partners that decided to join humans on their own from the wild. Why did these small, easily spooked animals join us loud things? Well, cats are smart animals and they figured out that we, in contrast are extremely messy animals, thus attracting high numbers of a cat's favourite prey to our habitats - mice. Ancient Egyptians realized that their rodent problems disappeared with the little spotted wild cats roaming around, so they started trying to encourage cats to live near them and cats, who saw that we humans are perfect at attracting rodents, decided that living with us would probably be a pretty sweet deal. They were right. However, as humans become more sedentary, sometimes too lazy for dogs, will cats suffer as dogs have genetically? Hopefully not. There is hope in the cat world; some breeders of Persian cats are breeding for cats with less pushed in (bracheocephalic) faces, which means that they are breeding for healthier animals. (It is hard for bracheocephalic animals such as Persians, bull dogs and pugs to breathe and they frequently have health problems. English Bulldogs, because of their huge heads and tiny hips cannot be born naturally and must receive c-sections in order to give birth. Bulldogs are also top heavy and will drown if dropped in the water, because they are unable to hold their heads above the surface in it.)

There are many other reasons why humans are selfish, but you know what the nice thing is? It seems like we're slowly getting less selfish.

Which means there is hope - for both us, our planet and the billions of other animals living here. We can do this humans! We can save ourselves and our world!

All we have to do is be a little less selfish.

It's Biology Dear Watson

Time for some science!

Now, today in the shower, as I was washing my hair (something which occurs far less often for me than for majority of the population who seem to pretty much have a phobia of going without a shower every day - a phobia which is incredibly wasteful and unreasonable unless your job is filthy like my Dad's) I thought, not for the first time, that it really is freakin' weird that the only part of our bodies in which humans have long hair is on their skulls. Think about it. It is. Most animals have fur pretty much everywhere - my kitten Copernicus, who is a Turkish Angora, is a great example of this. He's one furry little bastard. Besides humans, there are very few animals in the world which run around mostly naked like us and most of them are domesticated dogs or Sphinx cats.

It's a fact that humans are extremely strange animals, but what I'm wondering here, is why we evolved to only have long hair on our heads. It is illogical to think that the use of clothes contributed at all to our shaggy heads, because human kind evolved in Africa, a very hot landscape where clothes aren't particularly needed except to maybe cover our nether regions. The invention of clothes probably only came when our ancestors started wandering north and realized that "oh crap, we have no fur like the animals, so we're freezing our willies off! We can't take this! We'll die if we don't do something quick! Somebody - invent clothes!" (The conversation, if there was one, probably did not go along those exact lines. Probably a bunch of our not-so-bright ancestors had to die by hypothermia before one came around and realized that it might be intelligent to think up a solution. Probably a woman; the men were all out doing manly stuff.)

Besides the vetoed theory that clothes have anything to do with it, our hair really is not particularly useful, even when it's long. I have a lot of experiance with this, because much like our cave man ancestors, I didn't have the greatest concept of hygiene as a child. (More so, I hated baths because they make me fall asleep.) The result of this of course, was that my hair tended to get greasy. Now, hair grease is something which a lot of humans seem to get. At some point, there was probably a purpose for it, but more often then not, I have experianced that hair grease is not at all useful. Not only does it make the human scalp itchy, if it gets cold, that grease is going to disable your hair's insulating properties, because it's basically sweat, which is the human body's version of coolant. When sweat dries on the skin and the temperature drops, the sweat, which was meant to keep you from overheating, suddenly becomes a double sided knife - it keeps making you feel colder, which is not at all a good thing when the mercury goes lower!

Further discouraging the point of human hair evolution is the fact that hair does almost absolutely nothing for keeping insects away from your body (like a horse's mane does,) because there's just not enough of it to protect your skin, unless you really grow it out. Furthermore, it's hard to even argue that it might be some sort of mating display thing to attract the opposite sex, because both genders have it and different cultures have it longer or shorter. Really the only way our hair would be useful, is if it was fur and insulated our entire bodies, but it doesn't.

Human hair is weird. Why do we have it? What is it's purpose? That's what I would love to know!

FACTS OF THE DAY

- Aspartame, a common sweetening agent in gum and soft drinks turns into formaldehyde at approximately 98 Degrees Fahrenheit which is the average temperature of the human body. Formaldehyde is commonly used to preserve corpses. In humans, ingesting formaldehyde can lead to vomiting, dizziness, abdominal pain and death. More disturbing, if possible, there is evidence that formaldehyde can have carcinogenic side effects - as in, this shit can cause cancer. Why is something which can turn into it in our sweets?

- Despite what most mistaken humans believe, humans are omnivores, not carnivores and besides possessing just one evolutionary trait geared towards the disgestion of meat (the pepsin in our stomachs,) humans, along with our ape relatives, aren't even members of the order Carnivora, a group which includes nearly all strictly carnivorous mammalian animals. Not even the argument that humans have canine teeth can be used, because horses, strict herbivores, often have them too. Take that meat eaters! (To be fair, I know humans need protein, but in this day and age and with our modern knowledge, it really doesn't have to come from animals. Beans in particular are a fantastic form of protein and have far less of an environmental impact than that top sirloin burger most people wish to saver!)