J a p a n e s e    C u l t u r e

I have been in Japan a long time. It is my country now (whatever everyone else may think). So, I get upset when Japan is insulted. And I find this advert for "The Cove" or its agenda really insulting.

I am not keen on making animals suffer. I have lived and worked in the proximity of sheep, cows and pigs. They strike me as being very intelligent. They all seem "aware" in one way or another. Sheep have friends, even human friends. They ball their guts out when they loose their children. Cows have character. They are certainly sensitive. Pigs, well they are as intelligent at least as dogs. They almost seem to have a sense of humour. And yet I eat them, my friends. Many of the people who appear in the video above also eat the bodies of "my friends".

Hell, indeed, we are all watching the Internet when children are dying. Human children are dying, for the lack of an injection, a bowl of rice. And snakes are eating mice. And spiders are eating flies. What am I getting at?

I am all for those that point out and do something about suffering. But when a bunch of cow-eaters come to the other side of the world to 'expose' and talk about the suffering caused by an out-group, an other, a victimisable, demonisable other, that gets my goat.

I posted the following to an English language news website below an article about the dolphin hunt in Taji, where, above my comment anglophones had called for questions to be asked of at the forthcoming Taji council meeting, and had expressed distress about the hacking to death of dolphins. Here are the questions I would like asked.

What is wrong with blood and hacking? Is it the colour? The arm movements? Or the suffering? Are animals being brought up in coffin sized cages for *all their lives* and then being shipped, herded, and finally electrocuted, squealing, suffering any less? Or perhaps infinitely more? Which would you prefer, what would anyone, any animal prefer: freedom while being hunted, or a a whole life in coffin-sized enclosure with a 'quick' bolt to the brain waiting at the end? Do you now what percentage of 'humanely slaughtered cows' are alive as they are turned into steak? Don't you feel inclined to take the moat out your compatriot's eyes first?
Does having saved a human represent any acid test of inedibleness? Does eating dogs t herefore represent bararity? Don't many creatures live in harmony with each other, helping each other? Do we therefore not eat all the helpers? Is it only helpers of humans that should not be eaten? What is it about dolphins that you find so inedible?
What is it about cows and pigs and chickens that makes them so low, so infinately low, that one can torture them and slaughter them for so much longer in so vastly greater a quantity? For the sake of reducing animal suffering, don't you wish that all the animal protien in the world was obtained by the hunt of wild species, rather than life-long-box-tortured animals? Are you or your supporters using this movement, their interest in this movement, as an excuse, a way of forgetting the vastly more grotesque, torturous slaughter of enourmous proportion going on in your own countries? Do you realise that your dolphin lovin' cow-torturin' cultural hypocracy turns some folks' stomachs? Does demonising the killing of animals in another country help to reduce animal suffering, or encourage people to forget the torture going on in their kitchen? Are you for real? Do you have no shame?

The English language media outlet in question immediately censored my post above as being irrelevant. So I post it here.

I don't approve of hacking, bludgeoning, electocuting, captiuve-bolt-pistolling anything to death, and even less doing after keeping that thing, that animal in a cage all its life. I approve even less of the "projection" in freudian terms, going on the above video because I think that it lets the suffering continue. By presenting the suffering as something that takes place elsewhere, upon animals that oneself does not slaughter, it enables these fine celebrities, and their fans, to ignore what is going on around them.