By Octopus
Among all life forms known on this planet, there is no limit to the limitless decadence and moral depravity of human beings. It is no longer enough to enslave dogs, cats, birds, reptiles, and goldfish as pets for self-amusement. Now these upright-walking, downright loathsome bipeds are plotting the abduction of my friends, the jellyfish, as trinkets to display on every desktop:
One especially fiendish biped has invented a way to keep jellyfish in small aquariums next to your iFAD without sucking them into the water filter intake. Most cruel and diabolical of all, circulating water will confine my friends to the middle of the tank ... consigning them to a lifetime circus performance with no breaks, no benefits, and no collective bargaining rights.
Octopus is appealing for your help. If you have biped friends with a pulsating invertebrate fetish, tell them to get a goddamn lava lamp instead. Better yet, tell your biped friends to bag one of these …
Anyone read "After The Flood" by Margaret Atwood? It's a bleak look at a corporate-controlled dystopian future. This is straight out of that, where people wear jewelry with little live fish in them. I swear, it's not the first time something from that book has proven to be true.
ReplyDeleteI am told that, among the mollusks, that cephalopods have much higher reasoning ability; perhaps you should employ this evolutionary capacity to ponder if the jellies are not indeed in a more safe and secure environment, out of the reaches (and mouths) of all those chordates who would be most eager to scarf them up in their natural environments. After all, nobody hunts bears in the zoo!
ReplyDeleteI am a peace loving man, a vegetarian of more than 30 years. While I believe dogs have a happy life and I consider their relationship with humankind to often be symbiotic, I am completely sympathetic to the atrocity of this. I consider it not that different than having fish in small tanks or birds in small cages. Either way you are confining them in a small prison, much to their agony and to your amusement; even as you call them pets.
ReplyDeletePeople torture fish to death, while half argue that they cannot feel and the other half argue that it’s irrelevant, because fishing is relaxing.
If you complain about this, they mention that fact that most people exterminate, which they inaccurately describe as the same thing. First, they accuse me of eating meat, but soon find that this argument fails.
Their efforts to prove that I am also guilty of such crimes is irrelevant. My guilt or innocence in no way exempts them. Furthermore, to try to absolve themselves with these arguments completely misses the point:
So long as we maintain that the feelings of other living things are irrelevant, because they are not human or because we think pain and suffering should only matter if you ascribe reason to the suffering thing, then that is the problem and everything else is a symptom.
That assumption that the feelings of only reasoning humans matters is barbaric and so are all actions that flow from the permission it gives humans to abuse the less powerful for our own amusement or profit.
SoBe,
ReplyDeleteYou nailed it!
Robert: “nobody hunts bears in the zoo!”
I have personally interviewed many zoo critters, and their views are unanimous. Given their druthers, they prefer the wild in contrast to the deadly boredom of zoo life. They resent the cloying, condescending baby talk of their keepers, and the presence of gawking bipeds and their brats (including the smell of rancid popcorn butter on their breath). All canids are undivided in their resentment of Fox News for giving them such a rotten reputation.
John: “ First, they accuse me of eating meat …”
Where I come from, everybody eats to live, and predation is a constant fact of life. It is the way of the reef, and those at the bottom of the food chain usually don’t take it personally (except for cats who take everything personally; and an octopus is a four-sided cat).
Somewhere along the way, some group of misguided bipeds got the notion that their kind deserved to have dominion over all other creatures ... those who swim in the sea, crawl on land, or fly in the air. Do you know what happens when a species loses its predators? They tend to overrun everything. Look at the human population bomb! Perhaps it is time to restore the natural balance by predating bipeds … starting with Republicans.
I wouldn't keep jellyfish confined against their will in a glass jar, nor would I confine the beautiful pindakaas with it either.
ReplyDeleteUm, are we forgetting that jellyfish have no brain of any kind, which means no will, no fear, no awareness, no boredom, excitement or anything at all, much less "agony?"
ReplyDeleteMight as well succumb to ahimsa and commit suicide rather than confine your intestinal flora and deprive the worms of food.
I mean Amoebas have rights!
Captain,
ReplyDeleteOf course amoebas have rights! Without these earliest life forms, their progeny, their offshoots, their derivatives, and credit default swaps, where would we be today! We should revere them as we would any ancestors.
And just because you don't see invertebrate brains doesn't mean they don't have any ... or feelings, or consciousness. If you rub them the wrong way, they'll certainly let you know.
I think the earliest known life forms were more like bacteria. Amoebae are relatively advanced and quite complex. Deadly too, but that's another matter.
ReplyDeleteIt's not that I have no romance in my soul or that I don't respect animals, but I do remember what the life of a wild creature is like -- short, brutish and hungry; tortured by parasites and torn by predators. Wild creatures don't die of old age and nearly all survive through the destruction of other life. We call that the balance of nature, red in tooth and claw. I'd rather be at the top of the food chain, thanks and we are at odds with the rest of the biota mostly because we destroy habitat, not because we eat them or put them in protective zoo custody -- or elect them to public office.
"... we are at odds with the rest of the biota mostly because we destroy habitat, not because we eat them or put them in protective zoo custody -- or elect them to public office."
ReplyDeleteThat is why I think of the Swash Zone as a fabled place. Where else can a big dinosaur return from prehistory and reclaim his former glory; where pirates come out of retirement to ply the seas again and plunder the ingrates; where upwardly mobile cephalopods can raise themselves from the depths to the trees!
I have tried to recruit an amoeba to write for the Swash Zone but they are exceedingly hard to convince. They are solitary to a fault; yet they offer a unique unicellular perspective unencumbered by complexity.
Often, I think of the Swash Zone as a kind of residence commune offering all the conveniences of a zoo with the benefits of independent living.
Octo and all,
ReplyDeleteFabled indeed. This simple animal's sense is that humans are still relating to nature mainly as a resource -- an ancient idea that had some excuse up until around the Nineteenth Century. Or, now and then, as a diversion, which is a subspecies of turning it into a resource. The kindest thing to do vis a vis nature is to realize that it's everything humans are NOT. People are the artifice-loving animals, the artificial animals, in all but a few basic functions they share with the other creatures. If nature can't be respected and even treated with reverence for its "otherness," one must fear for nature and humanity alike.
Where can I buy one of those tanks and do they come with the floating jelly things aswell?
ReplyDelete