Animals

Yet Another Amazing Story From “The Great Stupid”: The Fat-Shamed Pig!

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

We began this day with head-exploding stories from the Weird, Woke and Wonderful, so we might as well end with another. This one is genuinely funny; indeed it made me laugh out loud twice, something I haven’t been able to do for four weeks. Thank you, silly, humorless hyper-sensitive people!

As a special bonus, it involves a baseball team, and today is MLB’s Opening Day!

The St. Paul Saints announced the name for the baby pig that will deliver baseballs and provide refreshments for umpires during the first half of the 2024 season. This is a tradition for the minor league team, which has had many baseball pigs as mascots over thirty years. The Saints recently began using two pigs per season,because they grow so fast. This time, the fan submission included f a masterpiece of topical swine-naming: “Ozempig.” Here’s the announcement:

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It’s Time To Play That Exciting Game Show, “Cute, Silly,or Wrong?”!

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

Hello everybody! I’m your host, Wink Smarmy, and welcome to “Cute, Silly,or Stupid?,” the popular ethics game show where our panelists try to decide whether an individual or organization is doing or saying something that strikes a positive emotional chord with the public sincerely, or whether they are cynically grandstanding or virtue signaling to achieve popularity, influence, money, or power. Welcome panel! And here’s today’s challenge…

A video posted to Facebook by the Richmond Wildlife Center shows Executive Director Melissa Stanley dressed as a giant mother fox to feed a red fox kit (that means a baby fox, not a kit you use to assemble foxes) rescued by the center earlier this month.

“It’s important to make sure that the orphans that are raised in captivity do not become imprinted upon or habituated to humans,” the post said. “To prevent that, we minimize human sounds, create visual barriers, reduce handling, reduce multiple transfers amongst different facilities, and wear masks for the species.”

Here’s the video:

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Ethics Hero: Lya Battle, “Our Lady of the Strays”

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

John Hammond, as every fan of Michael Crichton, “Jurassic Park” and dinosaurs knows, built an aspirational cloned dinosaur park on a Costa Rican island, and thanks to chaos theory and “Newman,” it turned out to be a deadly disaster. But the InGen founder wasn’t too far off; he just chose the wrong species. In Costa Rica’s Central Valley and its surrounding highlands, a woman named Lya Battle has been presiding over a farm inherited from her dog-loving father (who shot her mother, but that’s another story) known locally as Territorio de Zaguates (“kingdom of strays”). She and her staff take care of, feed and love nearly 1000 stray dogs, which Costa Rica, like most non-affluent countries has far more of than it does pet dogs. (There are an estimated one million strays.) Lya boasts that she knows the name of every one of them on her farm. Here’s another photo:

Netflix featured the Lya and the Territorio in the second episode of its series “Dogs;” National Geographic has featured her story, and I learned about the amazing dog haven from an old episode of Jack Hanna’s nature series.

Lya’s Territorio takes responsibility for spaying and neutering every new dog arrival. It operates like a typical shelter, providing food and medical attention, except that the dogs run free. The most stunning scene is when all 900-plus dogs “go for a walk,” with staff leading them into the hills and forests in a noisy, barking pack.

You can get a sense of what this is like from this video…

If Elephant Seals Can Learn To Be Ethical, Surely Humans Can…

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

Right? Hello? Buhler?

A report published last month in the journal Marine Mammal Science relates what scientists, specifically wildlife biologists and seal specialists, had never observed before, or even thought possible. In January of 2022, a male elephant seal, all two tons of him, galumphed into the surf to rescue a seal pup from drowning. “The rising tide had pulled the pup out to sea and, too young to swim, it was struggling to stay afloat. The [pup’s mother] was still on the beach, answering the pup’s plaintive cries with calls of her own, which attracted the attention of a nearby male….he gave the female a sniff and then ‘charged out into the surf’…When he reached the pup, he used his body to gently nudge it back to the beach — probably saving its life.”

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Apparently My Dog Thinks I’m Woke

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

Times opinion editor Alicia P.Q. Wittmeyer used a podcast to explain how the great political divide affects dogs. Training styles and methods can be as much about identity as efficacy, she has realized. “Are you imposing colonial concepts on your dogs? Are you harming their mental health? Is your style of training woke?”

Alicia’s rescue dog likes to chase joggers. “There are a few ways to deal with your dog having a jogger chasing problem,” she says. “And these solutions maybe fall into one of two camps, positive reinforcement training or balanced training. Positive training is a style of dog training that basically says, we’re not going to make your dog physically uncomfortable in order to get it to behave the way you want. So what it argues for doing is rewarding behavior you like, and basically managing your dog so that it can’t engage in behavior you don’t like, and just kind of ignoring it.”

Balanced training, however, or what I would call Skinnerian training, involves negative reinforcement. “If your dog is doing something that you don’t like,” Alicia explains, “to discourage that, we want to make it uncomfortable for the dog to do that. We want to give some kind of negative stimulus. Sometimes that might be a noise, or sometimes like a squirt of water to the face.”

“But sometimes it’s more physical discomfort than that. That means punishing your dog. And usually that punishment comes in the form of something called an e-collar, a tool that will give your dog an electricity stimulus.”

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The Res Ipsa Loquitur Files: Yeah, Thanks Lincoln Center, But I Think I’ll Skip “Jungle Book Reimagined”

/ Jack Marshall / 20 Comments

Surely there are still some live theater production that are not arm-twusting agitprop and woke propaganda. Surely.

The production is described on the Lincoln Center website as a “rethinking of the Rudyard Kipling classic ‘The Jungle Book'” that “updates the original’s colonizer-centric perspective.” More specifically, the New York Times review tells us,

“Instead of a boy raised by wolves, Mowgli is a refugee girl separated from her family as sea levels surge. She is adopted by animals who have formed a peaceable kingdom in a city that humans have left behind. Many familiar characters appear, slightly altered. Baloo the bear is now a bear who was forced to dance by humans before escaping the humiliation. The Bandar-log monkeys are now former lab specimens, still traumatized by being experimented on but longing to replace their former masters. Kaa the python is dangerous and hypnotizing but also hung up on memories of captivity in a zoo.”

Gee-what-fun. Can a Disney version be far behind?

On Biases And The Vicissitudes Of Life…

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

This day got derailed early and never got back on track, so this post is as scattered as I am.

1. I just voted. Though only two contests were on the ballot here in Alexandria, and I know nothing about any of the candidates, I voted for an Independent and a Republican solely because I am convinced that the Democratic Party is now completely untrustworthy, and that anyone running under its banner does so despite undeniable evidence that he or she is consorting with villains. That said, the spectacle of democracy in action always chokes me up a little. Does that make me a sap?

2. Reader Sarah was kind enough to inform me that I used the word “censorious” incorrectly in the previous post. Indeed I had: inspired by First Amendment blogger Ken White, who coined the phrase “censorious asshat” when discussing those who sued or otherwise bullied those who posted unpopular opinions on the web, I always assumed that the word described “someone with a fondness for censorship.” It doesn’t.

3. Life competence lesson: keep engaging, you may learn something. Charmed by a CNN headline that I’m certain will make this coming weekend’s compendium by Power Line, I posted “An Arizona golf course is under attack from a squadron of pig-like creatures” on Facebook. I found the use of “squadron” especially alarming, and even listed the collective nouns for pigs, swine, hogs, boars and feral pigs to show that “squadron” wasn’t among them. But Facebook Friend, old theater collaborator and occasional Ethics Alarms participant Greg Wiggins did his due diligence research, and informed me that the collective noun for this particular pig-like creature, the Javelina, is indeed “squadron.”

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A “Great Stupid”-George Floyd Freakout Mash-up Classic! The Fentanyl Overdose Death Of A Black Perp In Minnesota Will Result In A Name Change For Scott’s Oriole

/ Jack Marshall / 18 Comments

I’m not kidding.

This story has convinced me that the obsessions of the woke-infected have no limits. Hold on to your skulls…

The American Ornithological Society announced yesterday that it will remove human names from the common names for birds to create “a more inclusive environment for people of diverse backgrounds interested in bird-watching.” It is expected that around 80 birds in the U.S. and Canada will be renamed, the announcement says.

Wait, what?

It seems that this political correctness movement among bird brains began in 2018, when a college student named Robert Driver proposed renaming the McKown’s longspur, a small bird in the Central United States was named for John P. McKown, who collected the first specimen of the species in 1851. Ah, but Driver’s research revealed that McKown was insufficiently psychic about what causes would be deemed acceptable in a hundred years or so, and thus he fought Native American in the Seminole Indian in 1856, then participated in an expedition against Mormons in Utah in 1858, and worst of all, became general in the Confederate Army. Driver’s crusade was rejected at the time, because…well, it was stupid, to be blunt. The bird was named for McKown because McKown first spotted and identified it. His politics, positions on Indian relations and military exploits have exactly nothing to do with that distinction. 99.99% of people who hear the name “McKown’s longspur” don’t know or care who McKown was, or what he did in the Seminole War, nor should they. Driver—I’ll have to check to see what wokeness indoctrination factory he got his degree from—was just a bit ahead of his time. His ilk hadn’t started toppling Thomas Jefferson statues yet.

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Warped Dog-Owner Ethics From “The Atlantic”

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

Ann Althouse, who reads a magazine I gave up on when it went full Trump-Deranged, flagged an article called “Too Many People Own Dogs: If you love dogs, maybe don’t get one.” Ann belongs to a dog-loving family so she has some credibility in the area, but the author, Rose Horowitch, who talks about ethics a lot in the article, is seriously confused, and I’m surprised Ann doesn’t see it.

The article begins with a discussion of dogs on Prozac and how anxious people make their dogs anxious. First, the average dog owner is not going to put a dog on Prozac. It is true that dogs, being natural empaths, often mirror the moods of their owners; on the other hand, dogs without behavioral issues make anxious people less so. Dogs also want a job, and if keeping an anxious adult from freaking out is their role, that’s fine with them.

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Unethical Architecture: A Chicago Convention Center Is A Bird Murdering Menace

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

Was this really necessary?

According to the Chicago Bird Collision Monitors (CBCM), a volunteer conservation project dedicated to the protection of migratory birds, the dead bodies s of at least 1,000 small birds, including Tennessee warblers, hermit thrush, and American woodcocks were found around Chicago’s McCormick Place, the largest convention center in North America. Douglas Stotz, a conservation ecologist with the Chicago-based Field Museum, told NPR, “In one night we had a year’s worth of death.” Typically between 1,000 and 2,000 birds die each year from flying into the building, which is a bird-killer due to its thick, mostly glass walls. The number of deaths is probably much higher, because many birds continue to fly after suffering serious collision then die hours later, far from the scene of the crime.

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