The Senseless Slaughter of Mink, Reviled
Buckethead's cute li'l heartwarmer about cannibalistic mink (below) seemed funny on Friday, but it's Monday and my bile is up. This kind of crap does irreparable damage to the cause of actually reasonable environmental crusades by making us all seem bugfuck crazy.
You see, I am inherently inclined to view favorably the causes of nutball environmentalists. It's part of my bleeding-heart centrism. That's not to say that I endorse them, their means, or their crackpot theories, but I really, really agree that it's a good idea to, for example, reduce fossil fuel emissions worldwide, manage the clearing and cutting of forests, explore alternative fuel solutions, and work towards getting more people to accept a low-animal-product diet as a healthy and tasty alternative.
However, asspots like these here ruin the whole party. In fact, asspots like these are the whole damn party, if you write off (as I do) the birkenstock-and-black-sock "concerned liberal" crowd who write small checks to the WWF, ride in bicycle rallies, compost their trash, and live in small rural college towns. So many of the real environmentalists live on the Chesapeake or in upper Maine, wear gumboots, hunt, log, and trap, and actually see, and give a shit about the actual world we live in. But these guys never make it on the news, because they never blow things up.
When I was in college, the Monkey Wrench Gang and "ecofeminism" was all the rage. Somehow all that stuff just seemed to me to be... how do I put this...bullshit... and left me wary of far-left crusades like environmentalism, campus "free speech" crusades, antiglobalism, and Dennis Kucinich. So much of it is woolly-headed crypto-Marxist claptrap that totally ignores reality in favor of impossible solutions. And we've seen what good Marxism has done for the world.
You know, not to ramble or anything, but I guess this kind of well-meaning mink-slaughter is just the kind of thing you'd expect from a demographic who put Che's sexy mug on tee-shirts and angrily defend Stalin against those slanderers who think murder is a big deal -- "You don't get it! Those were mistakes! We'll get it right next time!" Leaving it unclear whether getting it right means that soon we'll all live in the Worker's Paradise, or soon we'll all be dead. Personally, I'm not sure which would be worse.
So fuck them. Although shenanigans like this mink-slaughter are only a tragedy for a few mink and some farmers, plenty of environmentalists are more sinister. The San Diego arsonists, tree-spikers, and the rest of their radical ilk are petit terrorists, plain and simple, and they make it really fucking hard for the rest of us concerned citizens to be taken at all seriously.
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I hate to be the defender of
I hate to be the defender of a group that tends to leap before it looks, but it was not animal rights activists that created the conditions for it to occur. Not all animals are "social" in the sense that they spend a lot of time with each other. They live solitarily, grouping only to raise newborns. They are very agressive animals--they will attack larger animals, they will attack each other if there are issues over resources and reproduction. They are fairly territorial. Putting hundreds of minks together in a factory was already an unnatural condition, one that required careful balancing. The animal rights activists who released the minks acted stupidly, but they did not the invent the conditions that brought so many together in one small part of the world--that would foster aggression itself. Furthermore, cannibalism tends to be encouraged by "factory farming" where large numbers of the same species are unnaturally congregated together and create undo stress.
NDR,
NDR,
While I agree with you that it's hard to keep thousands of territorial minks living in close quarters, the article makes it plain that the mink farmers were diligent about keeping filial lines together so that cannibalism wouldn't occur. The release of the mink by the environerds was the precipitator of the mass lunching.
No matter what you think of mink farming (personally, not overly pleased), my point is that environmental activists rarely think through the consequences of their actions, and the means they use to the end they desire. Which results in what we had last week.
If the Right wants to talk
If the Right wants to talk about "mink killers" as being in any way representative of the left, then we'll start talking about guys who keep Nazi Plates in their cupboards as being representative of the Right.
It's ridiculous. These people are nuts, and they don't represent anybody but themselves.
They are representative of
They are representative of the environmental movement, if not of the entire left. And remember Ross, you're a liberal, not a leftist. Just as I am a conservative, but not a right wing fanatic.
My point is that the
My point is that the attacking the system of factory farming is an issue separate from the rehabilitation of the animals therein. If this were a cock fighting operation we would be in agreement on the solution: shut it down, imprison the culprits, and euthanize the animals.
NDR: that sounds like Reno's
NDR: that sounds like Reno's solution for the Branch Dividians.