This is fucked up, but is this functionally worse than freezing mice and rats for snake food? Would we be more comfortable if he had been freezing lambs or piglets for his snake to eat? Should he have euthanized the snake once it grew too large to live on rats? Snakes are carnivores and eat meat. Puppies are just a really cute and loveable configuration of meat. Puppy mills, COVID lockdowns, and the increase in living expenses have resulted in a crisis of too many pets that need homes. Too many dogs are being bred, and too many dogs are being euthanized.
I’m not in any way condoning snake owners freezing puppies to death. It’s just weird the way we compartmentalize animal abuse so we can ignore the suffering of animals we arbitrarily choose not to care about.
Mice are cute, but dogs communicate trust and love for us so very clearly. Betraying such trust is for monsters.
dogs communicate trust and love for us so very clearly
So do cows. And pigs are smarter than dogs.
The line between food and friend is arbitrary.
Pigs are better problem solvers than dogs, that doesn’t mean they’re carte blanche smarter. Dogs have a level of social intelligence and selected-for ability to interact with humans that no other species does.
Pigs definitely have a social intelligence that at least rivals those of dogs, if it doesn’t surpass it. Just because we keep them in a way that traumatises them from an early age on, doesn’t mean pigs aren’t socially intelligent. Wild boar and the like form highly complex social structures and are quite able to communicate in between one another. The only thing pigs actually express more than dogs is the utter disregard for anything but their own survival when under duress. This however might be explained by the way they reproduce. Pigs are K-Strategists, whereas dogs aren’t.
Is that crime specific to puppies or in theory they woukd have got into trouble if they froze another animal like a rat or mouse or rabbit ?
Frozen rodents are already a thing for snake food. They feed rats to snakes no problem and rats really intelligent creatures.
The choice of puppies is weird but a snakes gotta eat and you can’t exactly just feed them a head of lettuce. Is puppies really that much worse than piglets or rabbits?
Once a snake gets to a certain size rats won’t be enough anymore. At that size there aren’t any good mass market options so those snake owners will usually take what they can get. I knew a guy that bred reticulated pythons and he wound up having a deal with a pig farm where they would sell him any piglets that happened to die early for dirt cheap (because what else where they going to do with them). But if you don’t luck into an arrangement like that what do you do? If you have an ample supply of unwanted puppies I guess it would make sense to use puppies. As awful it sounds to western sensibilities, dogs are livestock in other parts of the world.
Maybe don’t own an animal you’re not prepared to take care of?
Were they frozen to death, or frozen after death? It really does make a difference.
Exactly. If he was humanely euthanizing them and then freezing them for snake food then there really isn’t anything that wrong here. I know most people would prefer that the meat of choice not be puppies but that’s just how western society views dogs. But societal views aside it’s no different than using piglets which are what a lot of large snake owners use.
never ask a meat eater what the difference between killing dogs and pigs is
One is delicious and has a lot of meat, the other doesn’t and is very fucking expensive in comparison.
That’s about the gist of it.
Anything else?
Never ask a vegan why we can’t use wool products.
the wool industry is exploitative, as is the farming of all animals
Exploitation aside, what’s your alternative?
See even if we actually magically got control of the wool industry so we knew with 100% certainty there was zero exploitation anywhere and producing a lot of wool wouldn’t be the priority anymore, and profits weren’t chased, but just the best care we can provide for sheep. Like the absolute best possible.
In that case, the sheep still have to be sheared, which produces wool. Why shouldn’t that wool — essentially a waste product at that time — be utilised by someone?
Or are you suggesting the sheep aren’t sheared? Because that’s very unhealthy for them in the long term, because it’s an animal that’s evolved to rely on humans shearing them. They literally wouldn’t properly survive, they’d become over entangled with wool and start having all sorts of health problems.
That is animal cruelty, to inflict something like that on purpose. Then the only alternative left is exterminating every sheep in the world.
That or there will be some wool that is completely moral to use.
One can oppose exploitative practices and still use wool. I have several wool items, and they last years and years, despite me getting them from second hand stores. I also have a leather jacket, which was originally made in the 70’s.
Someone who buys cheaply made clothing from some Asian sweat shops is definitely contributing more to the suffering of sentient being than I.
Wool isn’t immoral, exploitative practices are. Eating meat isn’t bad, exploitative farming is.
My brother hunts deer (as a part of a hunter’s association who function as the local nature conservationists essentially by taking care of the populace) and I have absolutely no moral qualms eating the meat from him. I don’t like buying industrially farmed meat, it’s just not ethical.
My point is vegans often take so absolute positions that they are literally impossible to defend without revealing the lack of logic in the absolutist positions.
