Chew on these ideas for awhile

Cliché or not, sometimes "food for thought" feels like the only right way to say, "Here's something I read and found interesting or stimulating. . . Maybe you'll like it too."

In extracting the following passages from Lee Hall's book, which was the subject of the last post, I’m hoping they’ll be food for your thought.

· Some future discoverer of the ancient culture called humanity might fairly decide that we Homo sapiens were an insecure lot. Until the end, we kept on fighting and vanquishing animals by deliberately ignoring the unremitting destruction of their territory. By ignoring their numbers when they fell in the wars we waged. By the deforestation of their habitat and the expansion of the farming we prized. By only permitting them to exist insofar as we could take advantage of them as tourist attractions, experimental subjects, film props, guards, playthings, or something to package in bright yellow foam and unwrap, ingest, and excrete.

· Treating farm animals as pets calls on us to delight in the total subservience expected by an affluent society over its animals. Indeed, the custom of petkeeping was established as a display of status by a population which can afford to keep more animals than it can use as food, with the leisure time to breed animals to enjoy as a form of play.

· Few would argue against the idea of neutering domesticated pet animals; these animals are selectively bred to be dependent on humans.
#