Animal people looking for good organizations to give your money to, I beseech of you, please ignore PETA, who seems to spend most of their budget getting young women to get naked in public as publicity stunts. If you love both animals and people, look instead to less sexy but much more humane organizations like the Humane Society, who actually have done a bang-up job of using their issue of animal welfare to highlight the problem of domestic violence. From Salon, I see that the effort from organizations like the Humane Society, PAWS, the ASPCA, and the Humane Association (and no doubt many other animal organizations that don’t see the need to parade naked women around to make a point) to improve the public’s understanding of the link between animal abuse and domestic abuse have led to an article in O about the link.
For people who understand how domestic violence really works, this link is not surprising. Abusers use any leverage they can to terrorize their victims and break their will, and will happily resort to abusing and killing pets for that end. There’s also the added incentive of using the pet as leverage to keep your victim from escaping, because she knows that fleeing without or even with the pet might result in the abuser retaliating by killing her pet. In order to make pet safety less of a barrier to women fleeing abusive homes, the Humane Society has put together a list of 170 safe haven programs, where both the victim and her pets are cared for by the shelters, using various methods.
Sorry it took so long to leave a random ten thread! I had to take the cats to the vet this morning and overslept. So, leave yours in comments and here’s some videos to put you in a musical state of mind. Choices picked because norbizness told me these bands are playing at La Zona Rosa in June.
Very exciting.
For those who care about the cats, they’re fine. Dusty has been sneezing some, and the vet confirmed that she has allergies, and that we now have permission to sedate her with a quarter of a baby Benadryl. Unfortunately, Molly crapped herself in fear on the way to the vet, which I think was caused as much by Dusty howling, hissing, and beating her as it was by the car ride itself. After the vet visit, Dusty was perfectly happy to get back in the carrier, but was simply not going to let Molly get in there with her, and the whole clinic heard her explain this. Which really, if you think about it, is reasonable. I wouldn’t want to be in close quarters with someone known to shit herself like that. The vet had to give me a cardboard box for Molly, which was just as well and made the ride back home relatively peaceful and shit-free.
Geeks plus cats: A perfect Sunday morning bit of entertainment.
Via Our Bodies, I found this interesting Salon article that I can’t believe I missed when it first came out. It’s about that “Skinny Bitch” book you see everywhere and how the veganism preached within allows the writers and their audience to have the excuse to finally make explicit what’s implicit in our culture, which is the notion that body fat is a moral flaw. Convinced of the righteousness of veganism, the authors apparently feel entitled to berate their readers in the same voice women the country over use to berate themselves for fat-based imperfections like cellulite and weight gain, voice that holds fat not to be just unhealthy or unattractive, but to be sinful.
The relentless bullying peppered throughout the authors’ advice accounts for much of the book’s humor, including quips like “you need to exercise, you lazy shit,” “coffee is for pussies” and “don’t be a fat pig anymore.” It was a formerly anorexic friend of mine who nailed it when she read excerpts from the book. “When you have an eating disorder,” she told me, “that’s the voice you hear in your head all the time.”
Thanks to “Skinny Bitch,” women who hate their bodies no longer need rely on their own self-loathing to stoke the flames of what seems like motivation but is actually self-flagellation — penance for the sin of being too fat. Now dieters can have the convenience of a former model (Barnouin) and a former modeling agent (Freedman) putting their transgressions in the black-and-white terms of right and wrong. “If you eat crap,” they chirp, “you are crap.”
Apparently, the Hello Kitty vibrator is back.
It’s easy for the unafflicted to laugh at stuff like this and move on, but as a public service announcement, I have to say that Hello Kitty addiction is no joke. And it does sneak into the bedrooms of otherwise happy couples, wreaking cute destruction on functional sex lives and on the relationships themselves. I know, because I read Hello Kitty Hell, the long sorrowful wail of a man who has seen his wife get sucked deeper and deeper into her addiction. The vibrator is just the tip of the iceberg that is Hello Kitty’s plans to destroy the sex lives of innocent people by cuting the libido out of existence. For instance, this man is confronted between telling his wife that she looks great at her weight (and risk that she get her belly button pierced) and not saying that and implying that she’s a fatass.
The “until I lose weight…” was followed by a long pause waiting for me to answer. I know from vast experience that “No dear, you look perfect.” was the correct answer, but that meant that I may have to look at a Hello Kitty navel ring for the rest of my life. On the other hand, “yes, good idea” meant I would have a lot of lonely nights ahead of me.
Before you rush to judge him, consider this, perhaps in an oral sex-related context:
I think Heather Havrilesky might be a tad too generous here about why there seems to be an influx of draconian, insufferably self-righteous assholes in animal rescue, particularly in big, liberal, coastal cities. She assumes it must be the nature of the work slowly molds people into inflexible, impractical meanies who get off on judging other as inadequate compared to themselves in terms of good treatment of animals, but I think it might be that rigid, holier-than-thou types are drawn to the work, and in very large cities, the population of holier-than-thou types is sufficiently large enough that animal rescue operations can be staffed completely with them, and no one of common sense punctures the bubble to remind people that their job is getting animals into homes, not passing often arbitrary judgments on perfectly acceptable people in order to feel self-righteous.
I hadn’t heard about the Ellen Degeneres breaking down in tears over the frustration of dealing with some animal rescue people until I read the article, and a quick Google search verified that certain sexist stereotypes about women who show emotion in public are creeping into the discourse about it. But it also shows how sympathetic people are to her plight, since a lot of people have been subjected to the withering and unfair judgments of the Animal People, and know how unbelievably frustrating they can be. The situation, as Havrilesky describes it, is this: Degeneres got herself a rescue dog and found, after a couple of days, that the cats weren’t having it. So she gave the dog to a very nice family, who the rescue organization leader found completely unacceptable as dog owners because they had children aged 11 and 12. So they staged a dramatic, Jessica Lynch-style, self-aggrandizing rescue operation to tear the dog out of the arms of the crying children. Degeneres no doubt is trying to guilt trip these animal rescue people into seeing sense and letting the kids have their damn dog back, but I’m sure that she is feeling pretty emotional about the whole thing, and guilty about letting the kids get excited over the dog, only to lose it to the meanie Animal People. As Havrilesky notes, the self-congratulation oozes off the statements from the owner of the rescue operation—it’s all very “Sinners In The Hands Of An Angry God”-esque.
I suppose that close watchers of the anti-choice movement could have guessed that it was just a matter of time before anti-choicers attached their pet issue to the Michael-Vick-murdered-dogs thing. “How can it be illegal to torture and murder animals while it’s legal to flush out an inch-long embryo?” is a question that makes sort of a rough sense to the slow-witted, but upon giving it any thought makes about as much sense as arguing that because both stubbing your toe and having a tooth pulled cause strong, throbbing pain, they are exactly the same thing and equally to be avoided.
Scott basically wraps up why the comparison is stupid and ties it off with a bow. The dogs vs. fetuses argument only makes sense to people who spend a lot of time engaging with cutesy pictures of disembodied fetuses and forget that women who have abortions actually have a medical condition that they’re trying to terminate. There’s no great life-changing inconvenience if you’re forced not to torture and kill dogs for sport, but pregnancy is a little different. Also—and this will also shock people who thought of the clever dogs vs. fetuses argument—unlike people who kill dogs for fun, women who get abortions aren’t popping back a few beers and thinking, “Heyyyyyy, you know what would really make the evening entertaining? Getting my uterus scraped!”
So, the two aren’t really alike at all. I would add to Scott’s argument that there’s also a society angle to this. Sadistic animal torture is both a problem from a moral perspective and a problem in the sense that once that kind of sadism enters a society, we are all the worse for it, because sadism can kind of spread out from there. Women get abortions most of the time because they’re making responsible choices about their health and futures. Strictly from the standpoint of discouraging sadism and encouraging responsibility, legal abortion and illegal animal torture make perfect sense.
I haven’t followed the story about Michael Vick and the dog-fighting too much. I think that laws against dog fighting are wise, but I can’t help but flash back on the fortunes of another admitted sadist who went after cats and wonder if there isn’t a double standard in our society.
I’m sending the mouthwash bill to Flea. Had they leaned over and kissed each other, I would have had to go to the E.R. from the pain of my body rejecting the surge of too-cuteness.
Mighty Ponygirl alerted me to this bizarre story: This nursing home cat has an uncanny ability to tell who’s about to die and curls up with them. As Mighty says:
OK, now I’m left to wonder … if Oscar isn’t really interested in people, is it really ok to attribute Oscar’s curling up to the terminally ill to some sort of sympathetic desire to comfort the dying?
Maybe he really likes being in a building with a bunch of weak old people.
…In fact, maybe he’s getting really pissed off that he goes through all the trouble of staking these people out and is then removed from the room before he can eat them.
You can’t blame cats. They spend all their lives around the large, hairless monkeys and they have to wonder if we taste better than that damn kibble we feed them. So they wait and watch and on very rare occasions, one actually has the chance to know if we really do taste like raw pork.
Lauren made an LOLcat for the occasion:
What Mike Vick did is horrible. Earth-shatteringly, stomach-churningly horrible. If you haven’t read the indictments or heard the stories, I’m going to spare you the most graphic details of Vick’s dog-fighting operation. As I listened to various media outlets discussing this or that particularly violent activity, I was struck at how universal the outrage is. Everyone from West By-god Virginian ex-athletes to liberal ’shock jock’ types, and all their callers, were in agreement that Vick should be fired, suspended, locked up and pilloried. It was a chorus of horrified Americans, united in the idea that anyone who treats animals like that should be punished and we should have our values examined.
And they’re right. I hope they throw away the key.
You know what else is earth-shattering, stomach-churning, graphic, outrageous, and cause for national reflection?
This.
How’d that work out for us?
BERLIN (Reuters) - An aggressive squirrel attacked and injured three people in a German town before a 72-year-old pensioner dispatched the rampaging animal with his crutch.
I generally hate squirrels, due to their squirrelly behavior, but this squirrel seems like he had a plan.
In memoriam
…that I bring you this news.
The first Chinese panda released into the wild after being bred in captivity has died, Chinese media has announced.
Xiang Xiang was released in April 2006 from the Wolong Giant Panda Research Centre and was said to be adjusting well to his new life.
But the five-year-old was found dead in February. Officials said his death was likely due to a fight with wild pandas.
vs
I’ve mentioned during Friday cat blogging before that I have combined households with my boyfriend and in doing so, have mixed it up cat-wise, adding Molly and Dusty to a mix with Marc’s (temporary) cat Fiona.* As expected, things were horrible and hostile for awhile. Dusty and Molly were so pissed off that they had to deal with a new cat that they turned on each other as well as on Fiona. For a few days, the three cats just lived in 3 different rooms and each sat at their respective doors staring each other down. Then, the fighting began and after awhile, it got to the point where Fiona just had to glare at the other two and they would hide under the bed.
It seemed a solution had been found. Fiona had established her alpha status, now all we had to do was wait, and they’d chill out, right?
Well, I think it would have worked that way if Dusty hadn’t decided that losing her alpha status to Fiona was a blow to her ego unlike any other blow to any ego in all of history. She has nursed a grudge against Fiona and has decided that she’s going to try to restart hostilities in any way she can in order to make a grab for that alpha status. In the process, she has become a giant pain in the ass.
For one thing, she walks around the house growling and being pissed off half the time, just keeping her resentment on simmer. Occasionally, if Fiona is all the way across the apartment, she’ll chill out a little and play and let you rub her belly, like it was old times, but then suddenly she remembers that she’s At War and will jump up and double check her enemy’s coordinates.
But most of her time is spent stalking Fiona. She has turned into the cat version of Glenn Close in Fatal Attraction.** I half expect to come home one day and find one of Fiona’s mouse toys boiling in a cup of coffee. Dusty follows her around the house in full predator mode, stalking her for hours and then, when Fiona’s guard is completely down (which it actually is most of the time, since Fiona finds this all very tiresome), Dusty will run up and try to start a fight. If she’s lucky, she scares the crap out of Fiona, who hides behind the couch. If she’s unlucky, she gets beat up.
In making the case that they can’t, Kathy Freston quotes last week’s UN report by the world’s leading climate scientists:
The livestock sector emerges as one of the top two or three most significant contributors to the most serious environmental problems, at every scale from local to global.
I’ve tried a number of times to go lacto-ovo with little success. Large doses of soy make me ill. I hate eggs. And I feel weak when I don’t consume a little beef or chicken now and again.
Over the years, I’ve settled on greatly reducing the amount of animal protein I consume by using beef, chicken, fish and the like as a condiment rather than the main ingredient in dishes. I buy organic whenever I can. But, I guess I should take more responsibility for my personal environmental footprint. We all should.
The discovery that some chimps today make wooden weapons supports the idea that early humans did too — perhaps as much as 5 million years ago — Stanford said.
Adrienne Zihlman, an anthropologist at the University of California at Santa Cruz, said the work supports other evidence that female chimps are more likely than males to use tools, are more proficient at it and are crucial to passing that cultural knowledge to others.
“Females are the teachers,” Zihlman said, noting that juvenile chimps in Senegal were repeatedly seen watching their mothers make and hunt with spears.
Females “are efficient and innovative, they are problem solvers, they are curious,” Zihlman said. And that makes sense, she added.
“They are pregnant or lactating or carrying a kid for most of their life,” she said. “And they’re supposed to be running around in the trees chasing prey?”
Of course, Lord Saletan and the rest of the usual suspects have already formulated a magic-bullet-theory explanation:
I do have one still-living animal housemate.
(more…)
When I became a feminist I was, of course, immediately issued a cat. Except there was some glitch in the database at Feminazi Headquarters, apparently, because they kept issuing me cats, and now I have three of ‘em, all lollygagging about the apartment and refusing to do anything to help pay the rent. Would you like a couple?
Photo below.
Why is it always so satisfying to bring up the cats?
Good question. I’m not sure why the existence of cats is supposed to scare women into marriage, or why having cats is fundamentally opposed to being married. Married couples, believe it or not, have cats.
But if people like Mary Grabar (the writer Jill is fisking) or anyone else wants to make it a competition between cats and men, so be it. I’m not so sure the winner will be who she thinks it is. And these photoshops I’ve done of my cat and Jessica’s cat (since we’re crazy single cat ladies) demonstrate why.
You could, in theory, do these same kinds of photoshops with men in the pictures instead of cats, but it would be creepy instead of funny. And as you all no doubt know, “Makes me laugh” ranks way high in women’s qualities they look for in a life mate.
It was nice while it lasted. There were ups (Shakespeare, Gandhi, Pam Grier) and downs (war, people who hog the entire aisle at the grocery store), but on the whole we had a nice run. Nothing to sniff at. But the end is nigh, according to Cute Overload.
I’d trot out the joke about welcoming our feline overlords, but I already have two. My ability to work the doorknob is my last grasp on power, so I hope they don’t find out about this.
Fire and Ice
Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.
From what I’ve tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.
But if it had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To say that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice.
—Robert Frost
Well, it looks like the death of us all may not be anything as dignified as fire or ice. Nope, according to a new report from the U.N.’s Food and Agriculture Organization, we may be checking out on a sea of cow farts. (Via.)
But what is even more striking, and alarming, is that livestock are responsible for about 18 percent of the global warming effect, more than transportation’s contribution. The culprits are methane — the natural result of bovine digestion — and the nitrogen emitted by manure. Deforestation of grazing land adds to the effect.
There is a certain poetic justice in the idea of humanity checking out under a wave of cow shit and flatulence. I would like to wring my hands over it, but the truth is that we did this to ourselves. It’s humiliating, but if we had wanted better for ourselves, we probably would put down the burgers and get on those greens.
As I write this post, there’s a thunderstorm unloading on the city. A thunderstorm in December. Granted, this is Texas, and we eat our fair share of the beef, so we deserve it first. Still, sucks.
Bunny hug, anyone uploaded by szen volta.
Sara Dickerman has an interesting article in Slate about why it is that pork tends to capture the imaginations of those writing about some of the ethical issues behind meat-eating more than any other meat. After hashing over some various issues, including the religious taboos against eating pork, she comes around to what strikes me as the obvious reason that pigs capture our imagination. Simply put, Pigs Are Us.
Among regularly eaten beasts, pigs are probably the closest to human. They’re intelligent, social, relatively unfurry—and they resemble us on the inside. When Pollan looks at his dead pig in the woods, he is swept with revulsion. “I’d handled plenty of viscera in the chickens I’d gutted on Joel’s farm, but this was different and more disturbing, probably because the pig’s internal organs … looked exactly like human organs. Which is why, as I recalled, surgeons hone their skills by operating on pigs.” Indeed, the boundary between human and porcine seems uncomfortably blurred in folk and literary traditions across the centuries: Odysseus’ gang was turned into pigs by Circe, a baby turns into a piglet (shown here on a baby tee) in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, and chef-pig statuettes are a not-insignificant category among kitsch collectibles.
Eating pork is uncomfortably close to cannibalism. From what I understand, human flesh tastes pretty pig-like. Baby pigs are unbearably cute. And of course, there’s the fact that pigs are smarter than dogs. I suspect that the religious taboos against pork were a reflection of these facts, especially since the taboos crop up in a series of dietary laws that broadcast the general idea that the people who have this diet are more civilized than other people. If you’re going to restrict people from eating a meat to show how civilized they are, then I’d imagine you’d start with the animal most like us. Dickerman hints at this in her article, but these things that make pigs more human-like make their presence in factory farms even more despicable—pigs become horribly neurotic being raised right on top of each other and will chew on each other in desperation. In other words, by cramming pigs into factory farms, we are driving them mad. Under the circumstances, continuing to eat pork that’s made in factory farms because it tastes good makes as much sense as kicking dogs to death and justifying it because it gives you pleasure.
Anyway, I bring it up because it adds an interesting wrinkle to the ever-contentious issue of vegetarianism. Ezra had an amusing post up yesterday about K-Lo getting all pissed off when she read this study showing that IQ correlates to vegetarianism, in that the higher the IQ, the likelier you are to be a vegetarian. The discussion in comments was interesting, too, because people actually managed to avoid dragging out hoary old stereotypes about vegetarians, such as the idea that we spend all our time glaring at people for ordering meat in restaurants or whatever. In fact, the opposite—it’s noted in comments that a lot of the time, the scary vegetarian judgementalism is nothing more than making people feel guilty by just eating. Sort of like how people feel guilty if your dinner companion eats a salad while you chow down on the fettucine alfredo.
K-Lo is almost surprisingly hostile to this study, which doesn’t actually establish causation, as Ezra points out. She titles her post, “PETA Propaganda!” Her hostility is pretty par for the course for adamant anti-choicers like her, though god knows PETA is such a vile organization that all people who actually care about animals and the environment need to avoid them and call them out constantly. Hostility towards animal rights is de rigeur for anti-feminists—a good example is at Hugo’s where his stance against animal testing made his anti-feminist commenters go nuts in a way that they usually reserve for when he claims women have rights. I don’t agree with Hugo’s stance, but the general principles behind it strike me as sound. Naturally, the issue of abortion came up in the comments at Hugo’s, which fit well into what a commenter at Ezra’s bemoaned.
Why do they hate America? (uploaded by gingerbugjones)
Roy Edroso points out that the new conservative culture warrior battlefield is over the movie Happy Feet, which appears to be a movie about penguins that was made to entertain small children. There are concerns that the movie, while ostensibly an animated piece of fiction, might have troubling indicators that it was produced in the reality-based world where penguins actually die if humans starve them to death. This intrusion of reality into the animated feature is annoying conservatives who feel that they are owed an opportunity to destroy their children’s minds by disallowing them any information about the real world. The question that comes to my mind is that if conservatives think it’s mean to children to make a movie that admits the environmental damage could kill off the penguins: If they think that finding out that penguins are in danger of extinction could do harm to their children, then what the hell are they going to do when the penguins actually go extinct? Tell them that the beloved animals messed with Jesus so he had them killed?
Anyway, Roy has found that Lileks is joining the anti-Happy Feet bandwagon. I’ll leave the aesthetic discussion to Roy, except to say I’ve never actually been convinced that Lileks has aesthetics so much as he has politically-tinged nostalgia, and that his enthusiasm for the 40s and 50s has little to do with the aesthetics of everything from film noir to boomrang patterns and everything to do with an urge to live in a time when white men could be unapologetic assholes and everyone else just had to put up with it. Still, even I was shocked at how Lileks managed to turn a dancing penguin movie into yet another opportunity to rant about how he longs for the good ol’ days.
I remember when animals were used as stand-ins for humans, to shed light on human behaviors and foibles; now animals are stand-ins for creatures more ethically advanced than humans. (See also, The Ant Bully. Or rather don’t; that movie said it was okay to be an individual as long as you were part of a collective, and no one ever had competing goals or ideas. Muddle-headed twaddle.) If the current filmmakers had made “Ol’ Yeller,? the dog would have been allowed to stay rabid and chew all the locals. Why, bitin’s what a dog does! And I wouldn’t say he was mad. Why, sometimes I think the crazy ones are the only sane folk around! And who are we to say what’s sane and insane, really, in a world where – AAHHH! JESUS CHRIST! HE BIT ME! GOD, GET HIM OFF!
Lileks, in his eagerness to argue that a movie about some sweet animals done wrong by destructive humans is yet another sign of the times—”the times” being defined as the time when his inferiors in sex, skin color, or apparently species knew their place and that place was subservient—ignores some glaring contradictory evidence to his theory that back in the good ol’ days, humans always had some moral superiority over animals in the movies, and were never, ever shown as a force of destruction in the innocent lives of animals.
Or perhaps Lileks remembers Bambi’s mother’s death as a triumphant moment demonstrating the milk of human kindness.
Red State was also angry at what they see as anti-human propaganda.
As with so many cartoons today featuring talking animals, carnivores and humans are uniformly evil (well, except for the penguins themselves - the fish they eat are not anthropomorphized).
Just when you think conservative paranoia couldn’t get worse, they will surprise you. This theory that Happy Feet is anti-human does fit into a general trend of conservative rhetoric, though. Other examples:
- Gay people get married=assault on straight marriages.
- Equal rights for women=hating men
- Racial equality and affirmative action=”reverse racism”.
- Wanting the rich to pay their fair of taxes=class warfare.
- Suggesting that it might not be wise for America to get itself into imperialist, unmangeable wars=hating America.
And probably a lot more I’m not thinking of. The general view of conservatives is that the world is out to get them and no one could ever advocate for anything like equality or justice or even the environment for any reason but hatred for rich, white men. You get the distinct impression that they think there’s a checklist of qualities they have and a liberal cabal that controls the media running down the list, forcing people to hate those qualities one at a time: straight, white, male, American, rich, homo sapiens; check. Within a year, I expect the punditry to start complaining that the liberal media is trying to convince children to hate carbon-based life forms.
Nothing like a helping of Roadside America, only I don’t think healthy minds think about a healthy helping of man-on-deer sex when you’re traveling through Duluth, MN.
Superior, Wisconsin resident Bryan James Hathaway has an inventive public defender. Fredric Anderson, argued that the charge of “sexual gratification with an animal” should be dismissed because the deer was dead, so it was no longer by law “an animal.”
“The statute does not prohibit one from having sex with a carcass,” Anderson wrote.He continues the legal gymnastics by claiming that the statute, which is under the umbrella of “crimes against sexual morality,” was meant to protect animals, so this case simply doesn’t apply if the carcass is no longer an “animal.”The Webster’s dictionary defines “animal” as “any of a kingdom of living beings,” Anderson said.
If you include carcasses in that definition, he said, “you really go down a slippery slope with absurd results.”
Anderson argued: When does a turkey cease to be an animal? When it is dead?
When it is wrapped in plastic packaging in the freezer? When it is served, fully cooked?
A judge should decide what the Legislature intended “animal” to mean in the statute, he said. “And the only clear point to draw the line in that definition, I believe, is the point of death.”
BTW, if Hathaway goes to the pokey on this one, it won’t be the first time he was caught with his pants down engaging in sick behavior.
In April 2005, Hathaway pleaded no contest to one felony charge of mistreatment of an animal for the shooting death of Bambrick, a 26-year-old horse, to have sex with the animal.Add it to the list of these cases of unbelievable animal abuse occurring in our Great “Christian” NationTM.
* A man in Tacoma, Washington accused of having sex with the family dog — with the acts videotaped by wife.
* Michigan State Police troopers charged a Saginaw man after he was seen engaging in sexual acts with a dead dog.
* A man in Bainbridge, GA jumps a fence at a stockyard and porks a hog
* A Mesa, AZ fire battalion chief caught with his pants down in a barn assaulting a lamb
* A St. Gabriel, Louisiana seventeen-year-old was caught on tape committing unnatural acts with a horse.
Hat tip goes to Coturnix, who passed on this quaint bit of business in the comments of another thread.
Avert your eyes or have a barf bag ready — and get Rick Santorum on the horn pronto.
Het man-on-dog action captured by wife. So sick that I just can’t print the more descriptive paragraph of the act (this happened in Tacoma, Washington) that is in the article.
A man accused of having sex with the family dog has been charged under the state’s new animal cruelty law, which makes bestiality a felony, a prosecutor said. Michael Patrick McPhail, 26, of nearby Spanaway, pleaded not guilty Thursday to one count of first-degree animal cruelty in Pierce County Superior Court.***
From Saginaw, MI, a story that, if you can believe it, tops the above.
A 44-year-old Saginaw man remains jailed today on charges of bestiality after he was seen engaged in sexual acts with a dead dog, Michigan State Police troopers said.Someone should send Daddy D, Lou Sheldon and Don Wildmon clippings.Ronald Kuch was arrested after police searched the area of Midland and Carter roads Friday for a man who ran away from a Bay County Animal Control officer. The entire incident was within view of a nearby day care center.
Other recent stories of citizens with a BIG problem:
* A man in Bainbridge, GA jumps a fence at a stockyard and porks a hog
* A Mesa, AZ fire battalion chief caught with his pants down in a barn assaulting a lamb
* A St. Gabriel, Louisiana seventeen-year-old was caught on tape committing unnatural acts with a horse.
Hat tip, Shakes Sis.
UPDATE: Okay, it’s not real. My bad. Shows what I get for believing my friends’ emails, which I’m actually usually skeptical about.
And everyone thinks animal rights activists are only motivated out of bleeding heart syndrome. Maybe they’re trying to save our collective asses.
Since this story is irresistible, I will quit resisting it.
BEIJING (Reuters) - An intoxicated Chinese man who tried to give a panda a hug at Beijing Zoo found himself biting it in self defense after his clumsy attempt at affection was savagely rejected, local media reported Thursday.
Zhang Xinyan, a building worker on holiday from China’s central Henan province, climbed into an enclosure that held Gu Gu, a seven-year-old panda, at Beijing Zoo after the man had drunk four pints of beer during lunch at a nearby restaurant, the Yanzhao Metropolis Daily said.
Zhang, who couldn’t remember the incident clearly, had wanted to hug the panda and shake its hand after having watched similar scenes on television.
“When I was in there, the panda was eating bamboo. Then, it seemed some people shouted, which startled the panda. He rushed over to bite my leg,” Zhang said.
Zhang, who tried in vain to push the panda away, was bitten twice and forced to the ground, the paper said.
“I took the opportunity to bite the panda’s back, but its fur was too thick,” Zhang said.
Eventually, a zoo worker sprayed water from a hose to rescue Zhang from the panda’s clutches, the paper said.
Earlier reports erroneously indicated that the panda made scurrilious remarks about the silliness of Maoist propaganda, but it turned out later that the fight was actually over whether or not the term “graphic novel” was pretentious.
The issue is not settled at this time.
