Here's a thought experiment for you: If an animal inhabits your home, and you regard that animal as a pet -- that is, a creature you choose to shelter and care for because you enjoy its presence -- does that make you a "pet owner"?
Be careful how you answer, because that term -- "pet owner" -- really doesn't sit well with a lot of animal lovers.
So I learned in the most recent issue of Best Friends magazine, published by the Best Friends Animal Society. Prompted by the editors, quite a few readers wrote in to opine on what they think of the term "pet owner," and the responses were striking.
"'Pet' implies that animals are not individuals unto themselves, and 'owning' an animal reinforces the practice of treating companion animals as nothing more than objects to be bought and sold," contends Russel of San Francisco. Other readers said they prefer "companion, pet parent or animal lover" to pet owner. (And one lady wrote in to say that she and her husband, who are "childfree," dress their cat, throw her birthday parties and "talk to her like she's a person and we refer to ourselves as Mama and Daddy." This should start to give you a flavor for Best Friends' readership.)
And far be it from me to pass judgment on these folks. In my own, less effusive way, I think of myself as an animal lover too, so I can't complain about anyone who dotes on critters like this. I always had a cat and/or dog growing up, my "childfree" wife and I have a cat of our own now, and I've always been keen on animals in general, either wild or domesticated.
But the antipathy for the notion of "pet ownership" gives me pause. Not because some of these folks come across as slightly batty or over the top. (I mean really: birthday parties?) Somewhere, somebody is missing an important point, and it doesn't bode well for the animals.
Amid the stories about dogs and cats up for adoption, the profile of Best Friends' idyllic shelter operation in Utah, and the indignant denunciations of "pet ownership," this particular issue contains an in-depth article on Chicago's ongoing efforts to crack down on perpetrators of animal cruelty. It's equal parts dreary and encouraging, because enforcement of the city's anti-abuse laws are up markedly, but enforcement is just proof that some people hurt, neglect or wantonly kill domesticated animals.
It's a crime I've never understood, or wanted to understand. Better to cowardly pretend it doesn't happen, rather than picture some dumb, defenseless creature suffering. I'm sure it's the sort of thing that keep Best Friends readers awake at night, and in all likelihood reinforces their contempt for the idea of "owning" pets, as if they're just "things" or "possessions." That notion crops up repeatedly in the letters to the editor; that the very term "pet" relegates animals to the status of "commodities" or other inanimate property.
One young lady, who insists that her toy poodle is her "child" and her "best friend" dismisses the notion of owning the dog as vastly insufficient to express their relationship: "She is not a book, a computer or a cell phone...she is my child, and I am her parent."
But what if all this (completely earnest, well-meaning) insistence on seeing animals as essentially furry humans is part of the problem? These folks attribute human qualities like loyalty, affection and intelligence to their cats and dogs, and love them all the more for it. But apparently they don't ask whether the abusers, in a dark and twisted way, do the very same thing. If the perpetrators of animal cruelty see their pets as merely "possessions," why would they harm or destroy them? To put it another way: When did it last occur to you to intentionally damage a book, a computer or a cell phone that you own?
Answer: It didn't. These are inanimate objects, and assuming we purchased them, they represent some sort of value to us. By and large, they don't evoke feelings either of love or joy, anger or hatred.
As humans, we save those feelings for other humans, because they are "individuals unto themselves," not lifeless things. They elicit feelings within us, both positive and negative, as we interact with them. And those of us who love animals experience something similar in our relationships with cats, dogs and other domesticated creatures, which is why we keep them among us.
But it's not a one-way street. Really loving someone, human or otherwise, creates the possibility of also feeling anger, or contempt, or even hatred for that same being. I, for instance, love my cat. But when she awakens me before dawn, yowling insistently for food, when I'd rather be asleep, I won't pretend I'm not angry with her, or at least annoyed. What (dare I say it) pet owner can't identify with this fleeting emotion? It can feel outrageous; the cat KNOWS I want to sleep. She KNOWS it's early. She KNOWS I'll feed her soon. She's doing this ANYWAY! BAD CAT!
Except, not. She doesn't know any of those things, in the human sense of the word, which implies a moral understanding of right and wrong. She's just hungry and wants breakfast. She's not doing something wrong because she has no conception of "wrong." She's not human enough for that, and never will be.
So, dressing your cat up and baking her a birthday cake is all well and good, in itself, because it's merely hyper-affectionate. No doubt such a cat, though occasionally mortified at wearing a little kitty tutu, is well cared for.
But if you can swing too far to one extreme, and lavish love and affection at a human level on a non-human animal, someone else can go the other way, and savage an equally unwitting animal for its apparent disobedience, or defiance, or ill behavior. An "unreasonable" dog that barks incessantly might be beaten, or left out in the rain, because the owner has mistaken the behavior for something willful or conscious.
In such a case, attributing human impulses to the poor animal creates the illusion that some sort of reprisal is justified. We as a society punish human criminals, not just to prevent future crime, but because it makes us feel good. The criminal knew he acted wrongly; our outrage demands a commensurate punishment.
We do not, as a society, punish animals for wrongdoing, because we understand they lack the moral capacity to understand the concept of punishment. At best, we punish them to teach them not to do bad things in the future.
That is as it should be. No creature should suffer in ignorance, feeling only pain without understanding the reason for it. But to the extent that we allow ourselves to see pets as embodiments of our own best traits, we also run the risk that someone will project their distinctly human moral failings onto some poor, helpless animal, and act accordingly.
Saturday, August 27, 2011
Sunday, January 16, 2011
Reflections on Tuscon
When I first heard that a gunman had killed six people in Tuscon last weekend, apparently as part of an attempt to assassinate an Arizona congresswoman, I had no intention of writing about it. The early news coverage was spotty, but the initial picture had all the familiar hallmarks of yet another senseless massacre, the kind that happens all too regularly in schools, offices and public places. To me, it was yet another reminder that the world is often a chaotic, tragic place, and that much of human existence is ruled by the random hand of fate. In short, it was not an event I wanted to dwell on.
But the response to the Arizona shootings from the media in general, and from the liberal commentariat in particular, was too polarizing to ignore. Within hours of the attack on Rep. Gabrielle Giffords that also resulted in six deaths, prominent left-wing pundits like Paul Krugman of The New York Times were announcing that the shooting was "probably political" (in Krugman's words) and that the shooter was acting on the "violent rhetoric" coming from conservative, anti-Obama politicians.
And even when the narrative of the attacks and the background of the shooter became better known, and when it became apparent that Jared Loughner in fact had no tangible connection to Rush Limbaugh or the Tea Party, or for that matter any discernible political motivations whatsoever, prominent opinion-shapers on the left refused to back peddle, insisting that a "climate of hate" (Krugman again) had somehow impelled Loughner to commit mass murder, even if he had no literal connection to any political movement or figure. In fact, even the mounting evidence that he was in fact mentally deranged has done little to dispel that foggy narrative.
It was a shameful episode: a case of naked political opportunism without the slightest whiff of factual evidence to back up the charge. Hopefully the reputations of those who engaged in the smear will be tarnished accordingly.
But no one needs me to catalog how unjustified the "blame conservatives" campaign was. The Internet is already full of repetitions, so I won't bother arguing what's already been proven, such as the complete lack of political motivation for the shooting evident in the mountain of reporting being done on Jared Loughner, based on his own Internet postings and eyewitness accounts of people who knew him for years. I won't bother demonstrating that the infamous map created by Sarah Palin's political action committee during the 2010 elections showing the Tuscon congressional district under a gunsight's cross hairs is standard election imagery employed by both Republicans and Democrats. I won't catalog the instances of liberal politicians using violent or martial (and harmless) metaphors equivalent to the right-wing "rhetoric" that allegedly led Loughner to kill six people.
I will, however, offer a few brief observations regarding last weekend's killings that I haven't heard elsewhere, and which I think bear noting. Make of them what you will.
The behavior of the Tuscon sheriff coordinating the response to the attack was completely unbecoming for a law enforcement official.
Within days of the shooting, Tuscon Sheriff Clarence Dupnik was neck-deep in the political controversy when he announced that "vitriol" coming from, specifically, Rush Limbaugh had something to do with Loughner's motivation for the shooting. That this particular opinion is stupid and baseless is too obvious to belabor further; but that it was announced by the chief law enforcement officer responsible for responding to the aftermath of the attack is disgusting.
As sheriff, this man's sole, and weighty, responsibility is to determine what happened at Saturday's attack, what laws were broken and by whom. It is one thing for a newspaper columnist to rashly assign blame for a killing for political purposes; it is something else entirely for a police official investigating the attack to do so. That Dupnik, a liberal and an avowed Rachel Maddow fan, couldn't refrain from interjecting his (completely groundless) opinion of the attack in the course of doing his very serious job is indicative that he is unfit for office. It is a reminder that government officials everywhere, whether elected or appointed, exercise considerable influence over the lives of the citizens they're supposed to serve, and that as such, they must be held accountable when they abuse their positions.
Many liberals have become hyper-sensitive to criticism after two years of defending Obama's unpopular legislative agenda.
For many of the left-wing commentators at The New York Times, the Washington Post and other bastions of liberal opinion, Loughner's rampage was just the latest in a growing list of politically tinged acts of violence supposedly fomented by the angry rhetoric emanating from the right. As proof, they invariably trot out the same set of examples to prove their point, including the 2009 murder of a security guard at the Holocaust Museum in Washington by an elderly anti-semite (which I wrote about at the time), the nut who flew a small plane into an IRS building last year, again killing an innocent employee, and not least, the vandalism of Rep. Gifford's Tuscon office last year, during the height of the health care reform drama.
Somehow, these events constitute a pattern of violence motivated by conservative outlets. Yet the pundits connecting the dots never seem to mention that the Holocaust shooter, James von Brun, was a rabid, unbalanced anti-semite, and that anti-semitism plays no discernible role in the conservative opposition to Obama (who is supposed to be a Muslim anyway, according to crypto-conservative conspiracy theorists); that the IRS attacker had a personal feud with the agency over his own taxes and that his rambling manifesto criticized George W. Bush without mention of Obama; or that the petty vandalism at Gifford's office pales in comparison to the bullet fired through Republican Congressman Eric Cantor's office window in Richmond, also during the health care frenzy.
Details, details.
The sad, unsatisfying truth is that a small minority of people commit acts of violence for a whole host of often inscrutable reasons, and innocent people from all parts of society are liable to find themselves in the cross hairs. Attempting to shoehorn these chaotic, often inexplicable crimes into a coherent pattern of politically motivated violence that just happens to impugn your opponents is the tactic of a charlatan who cannot or will not evaluate each episode objectively.
The Arizona shooter is part of the tragedy.
Lost amid all the blame games is the man actually behind the killings, 22-year-old Jared Lee Loughner. Opinion writers of whatever political persuasion tended to give him short shrift when weighing in on what the attack really meant. Sure he was "deranged" or "ill" and his actions were "monstrous," but that's about all we heard about him from the people trying hardest to sum up his actions. Almost all of them wanted to move on the "real" lesson; Loughner himself has been almost a bit actor. (The straight journalists who have documented so much of Loughner's life have, by contrast, unearthed an enormous amount about the man.)
To me, this is perhaps the least-discussed aspect of the attack. While I'm no mental health professional and don't wish to speculate on his condition, it seems apparent from much news coverage that Loughner suffers from some type of mental illness that impelled him to commit murder. According to Internet postings he was deeply paranoid about the government controlling the minds of citizens through "grammar." He sufficiently frightened students and faculty at a local community college with his violent, offputting classroom comments that he was eventually kicked out. He posed weird, dark questions to online forums. He had a history of petty, drug-related brushes with the law. People who knew him for years before Saturday's attack described him as increasingly isolated and angry.
In short, he appears to have had problems that required some sort of treatment. And now it's too late for that, and for him. Whether Loughner is found guilty of first degree murder as a completely sane defendant, or some lesser charge resulting from clinical insanity, his chances of a normal life have been completely destroyed at age 22. Whether he's executed, or imprisoned, or committed to a psychiatric facility, he'll never be part of mainstream society and all its opportunities again.
And after the obvious tragedy of the people he killed and the loss for their families, this strikes me as the real pity of the Tuscon attacks. Judging from his voluminous comments and postings online, Loughner was a deeply unhappy person, burdened by the stigma of rejection by women, by employers, by the Army that wouldn't have him (all on understandable grounds, given his apparent condition). He posted discussion threads on an online gaming forum like "Talk, Talk, Talking about Rejection" and "Does anyone have aggression 24/7?"
It all reads like an ill young person making vague signals that he needed help, in the wrong place, to the wrong people. The right treatment might have gotten his problems under control in time to avoid last weekend's atrocity. That he didn't get that treatment doesn't appear to be anyone's fault; it only compounds the tragedy that took six lives and irreparably wasted a seventh.
But the response to the Arizona shootings from the media in general, and from the liberal commentariat in particular, was too polarizing to ignore. Within hours of the attack on Rep. Gabrielle Giffords that also resulted in six deaths, prominent left-wing pundits like Paul Krugman of The New York Times were announcing that the shooting was "probably political" (in Krugman's words) and that the shooter was acting on the "violent rhetoric" coming from conservative, anti-Obama politicians.
And even when the narrative of the attacks and the background of the shooter became better known, and when it became apparent that Jared Loughner in fact had no tangible connection to Rush Limbaugh or the Tea Party, or for that matter any discernible political motivations whatsoever, prominent opinion-shapers on the left refused to back peddle, insisting that a "climate of hate" (Krugman again) had somehow impelled Loughner to commit mass murder, even if he had no literal connection to any political movement or figure. In fact, even the mounting evidence that he was in fact mentally deranged has done little to dispel that foggy narrative.
It was a shameful episode: a case of naked political opportunism without the slightest whiff of factual evidence to back up the charge. Hopefully the reputations of those who engaged in the smear will be tarnished accordingly.
But no one needs me to catalog how unjustified the "blame conservatives" campaign was. The Internet is already full of repetitions, so I won't bother arguing what's already been proven, such as the complete lack of political motivation for the shooting evident in the mountain of reporting being done on Jared Loughner, based on his own Internet postings and eyewitness accounts of people who knew him for years. I won't bother demonstrating that the infamous map created by Sarah Palin's political action committee during the 2010 elections showing the Tuscon congressional district under a gunsight's cross hairs is standard election imagery employed by both Republicans and Democrats. I won't catalog the instances of liberal politicians using violent or martial (and harmless) metaphors equivalent to the right-wing "rhetoric" that allegedly led Loughner to kill six people.
I will, however, offer a few brief observations regarding last weekend's killings that I haven't heard elsewhere, and which I think bear noting. Make of them what you will.
The behavior of the Tuscon sheriff coordinating the response to the attack was completely unbecoming for a law enforcement official.
Within days of the shooting, Tuscon Sheriff Clarence Dupnik was neck-deep in the political controversy when he announced that "vitriol" coming from, specifically, Rush Limbaugh had something to do with Loughner's motivation for the shooting. That this particular opinion is stupid and baseless is too obvious to belabor further; but that it was announced by the chief law enforcement officer responsible for responding to the aftermath of the attack is disgusting.
As sheriff, this man's sole, and weighty, responsibility is to determine what happened at Saturday's attack, what laws were broken and by whom. It is one thing for a newspaper columnist to rashly assign blame for a killing for political purposes; it is something else entirely for a police official investigating the attack to do so. That Dupnik, a liberal and an avowed Rachel Maddow fan, couldn't refrain from interjecting his (completely groundless) opinion of the attack in the course of doing his very serious job is indicative that he is unfit for office. It is a reminder that government officials everywhere, whether elected or appointed, exercise considerable influence over the lives of the citizens they're supposed to serve, and that as such, they must be held accountable when they abuse their positions.
Many liberals have become hyper-sensitive to criticism after two years of defending Obama's unpopular legislative agenda.
For many of the left-wing commentators at The New York Times, the Washington Post and other bastions of liberal opinion, Loughner's rampage was just the latest in a growing list of politically tinged acts of violence supposedly fomented by the angry rhetoric emanating from the right. As proof, they invariably trot out the same set of examples to prove their point, including the 2009 murder of a security guard at the Holocaust Museum in Washington by an elderly anti-semite (which I wrote about at the time), the nut who flew a small plane into an IRS building last year, again killing an innocent employee, and not least, the vandalism of Rep. Gifford's Tuscon office last year, during the height of the health care reform drama.
Somehow, these events constitute a pattern of violence motivated by conservative outlets. Yet the pundits connecting the dots never seem to mention that the Holocaust shooter, James von Brun, was a rabid, unbalanced anti-semite, and that anti-semitism plays no discernible role in the conservative opposition to Obama (who is supposed to be a Muslim anyway, according to crypto-conservative conspiracy theorists); that the IRS attacker had a personal feud with the agency over his own taxes and that his rambling manifesto criticized George W. Bush without mention of Obama; or that the petty vandalism at Gifford's office pales in comparison to the bullet fired through Republican Congressman Eric Cantor's office window in Richmond, also during the health care frenzy.
Details, details.
The sad, unsatisfying truth is that a small minority of people commit acts of violence for a whole host of often inscrutable reasons, and innocent people from all parts of society are liable to find themselves in the cross hairs. Attempting to shoehorn these chaotic, often inexplicable crimes into a coherent pattern of politically motivated violence that just happens to impugn your opponents is the tactic of a charlatan who cannot or will not evaluate each episode objectively.
The Arizona shooter is part of the tragedy.
Lost amid all the blame games is the man actually behind the killings, 22-year-old Jared Lee Loughner. Opinion writers of whatever political persuasion tended to give him short shrift when weighing in on what the attack really meant. Sure he was "deranged" or "ill" and his actions were "monstrous," but that's about all we heard about him from the people trying hardest to sum up his actions. Almost all of them wanted to move on the "real" lesson; Loughner himself has been almost a bit actor. (The straight journalists who have documented so much of Loughner's life have, by contrast, unearthed an enormous amount about the man.)
To me, this is perhaps the least-discussed aspect of the attack. While I'm no mental health professional and don't wish to speculate on his condition, it seems apparent from much news coverage that Loughner suffers from some type of mental illness that impelled him to commit murder. According to Internet postings he was deeply paranoid about the government controlling the minds of citizens through "grammar." He sufficiently frightened students and faculty at a local community college with his violent, offputting classroom comments that he was eventually kicked out. He posed weird, dark questions to online forums. He had a history of petty, drug-related brushes with the law. People who knew him for years before Saturday's attack described him as increasingly isolated and angry.
In short, he appears to have had problems that required some sort of treatment. And now it's too late for that, and for him. Whether Loughner is found guilty of first degree murder as a completely sane defendant, or some lesser charge resulting from clinical insanity, his chances of a normal life have been completely destroyed at age 22. Whether he's executed, or imprisoned, or committed to a psychiatric facility, he'll never be part of mainstream society and all its opportunities again.
And after the obvious tragedy of the people he killed and the loss for their families, this strikes me as the real pity of the Tuscon attacks. Judging from his voluminous comments and postings online, Loughner was a deeply unhappy person, burdened by the stigma of rejection by women, by employers, by the Army that wouldn't have him (all on understandable grounds, given his apparent condition). He posted discussion threads on an online gaming forum like "Talk, Talk, Talking about Rejection" and "Does anyone have aggression 24/7?"
It all reads like an ill young person making vague signals that he needed help, in the wrong place, to the wrong people. The right treatment might have gotten his problems under control in time to avoid last weekend's atrocity. That he didn't get that treatment doesn't appear to be anyone's fault; it only compounds the tragedy that took six lives and irreparably wasted a seventh.
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