Accidental animal crueltyI once invented a brilliant game - I'd sit at the top of the stairs and throw cat biscuits to the bottom. My cat would eat them, then I'd shake the box, and he would run up the stairs for more biscuits. Then - of course - I'd throw a biscuit back down to the bottom. I kept this going for about half an hour, amused at my little game, and all was fine until the cat vomited. I felt absolutely dreadful.
Have you accidentally been cruel to an animal?
This question has been revived from way, way, way back on the b3ta messageboard when it was all fields round here.
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rob, Thu 6 Dec 2007, 11:13)
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@frankspencerSpecific others, yes. I agree with that. And it might lead us to keep our slaves once we have them, and it might inform the way that we treat them. But there still seems to be a world of difference between instances of cruelty and a wide claim about the worth of groups of people.
(For example, there were slaves in Athens and Rome who were independently wealthy, educated, and so on; they just lacked certain rights that certain citizens had. One can embrace some system of slavery without having to be cruel. Many slave-owners or genocidal maniacs might be cruel *in addition* - but many may be very humane in a face-to-face situation. (Himmler was concerned for his SS men, who were distressed by what they were ordered to do - even though they did it. Stanley Milgram's obedience experiments from the 1950's are a - frankly terrifying - demonstration of the disjunction between banal evil and individual humanity.)
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Enzyme is powered by sunlight, Tue 11 Dec 2007, 12:54,
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