Thought Exercise #8: Due 10/29/13

"Something remarkable has been happening in the post-industrial contexts across the world since the 1990s: a shift from considering pets (especially dogs) as a species apart, to a reconsideration of pets (especially dogs) as profoundly appropriate objects of human affection and love....the prototypical Fido who slept on the floor and ate scraps from the table has been replaced by Lucy, a companion with increasing legal rights who sleeps on a bed and eats upscale foods....In many post-industrial places across the world, dogs are for the first time being formally and regularly accommodated in doggie beaches, parks, high-class hotels, cafes and restaurants; department stores and mainstream retail catalogues feature substantial selections of pet goodies; and new genres of boutiques and retail outlets for pets (many of them online) have emerged."
--"Critical Pet Studies?" by Heidi J Nast

As a dog owner, I consider dogs as more than just pets, than as just cute little fashion items to be stuffed in frilly clothes and purses to tote around so that other people can coo over them and probably even humiliate them. My dogs hate clothing, for the record. It annoys me so much when people consider little dogs as "the ultimate fashion accessories." No, stupid, dogs are not fashion accessories! They're living beings who deserve love, care, and attention from human families who raise them!

I also have heard of, and know of, people who simply abandon or give away their dogs when they can no longer care for them. Some young couples will adopt dogs as practice for raising a child. Once a baby arrives, the couple will abandon the dog. I just think, "WTF? How in the world could you do that to a dog? The dog loves you and needs you, and you get rid of it just because it isn't human?" I also know of someone who has raised several dogs when he was young, but had to give them away. One of the dogs he raised was when he moved out of his parents' home at age 16, but when he had to leave for UCLA for college, he had to give his dog away. I just think, "You know you going to college. Why the Hell did you raise a dog then?"

It makes me sad that many apartment buildings prohibit dogs from living there. When I was in Canada, my mother and I were surprised to see people walking their dogs into stores at malls. These were incredibly well-behaved dogs as well.

When I think of dogs, one dog that comes to mind is the dog Wishbone, the titular character of the PBS Kids' show from the 90's about a Jack Russell Terrier who loves classic literature and retells them to the audience. It was so cute to see a live-action dog star in his own TV show and watch him interact with other humans as if he was one of them. It makes me wish dogs all over the world could be loved by humans that much.

Thought Exercise #7: Due 10/22/13

"When we say that all human beings, whatever their race, creed, or sex, are equal, what is it that we are asserting?....[I]t is simply not true that all humans are equal. Like it or not, we must face the fact that humans come in different shapes and sizes; they come with differing moral capacities, differing intellectual abilities, differing amounts of benevolent feeling and sensitivity to the needs of others, differing abilities to communicate effectively, and differing capacities to experience pleasure and pain. In short, if the demand of equality were based on the actual equality of all human beings, we would have to stop demanding equality. It would be an unjustifiable demand."
--"All Animals Are Equal," by Peter Singer

It is true that it is fallible to say that every person is equal to one another. It's an idealistic statement, much like Communist society, in which everyone is ideally seen as equal in terms of socioeconomic classes and monetary prospects. In our diverse species, there are people of all different races, heights, intelligence quotients, skin color, looks, and skills. For instance, one cannot expect an art history major to run a program that a trained computer engineer could do under one minute, nor can one expect a fifteen-year-old girl to mother a child the way a more financially-capable thirty-year-old woman could do.

But what of animals? It is ridiculous to say that all animals are the same, as there are thousands of species adapted to different environments and behaviors. But what can one say when trying to compare humans to animals? The socially-ingrained immediate response most people will perhaps say on this matter is that "Humans are superior to animals." But how can they justify that? Just because animals do not have the IQ of humans? Because animals cannot industrialize and build cities and weapons of mass destruction? They, in their own ways, can be considered vastly superior to humans. For instance, dogs have better sense of smell than humans do, and bears are much more massive and powerful than humans are, and fishes can breathe in water. In addition, when humans die, they don't contribute to the ecosystem. In short, humans are not equal amongst each other, and humans cannot be considered superior to animals.

Thought Exercise #6: Due 10/15/13

"Taxidermy was made into the servant of the "real." Artifactual children, better than life, were birthed from dead matter....Taxidermy was about the single story, about nature's unity, the unblemished type of specimen. Taxidermy became the art most suited to the epistemological and aesthetic stance of realism. The power of this stance is in its magical effects: what is so painfully constructed appears effortlessly, spontaneously found, discovered, simply there if one will only look....Small wonder that artistic realism and biological science were twin brothers in the founding of the civic order of nature at the American Museum of Natural History. It is also natural that taxidermy and biology depend fundamentally upon vision in a hierarchy of the senses; they are tools for the construction, discovery of form."
--"Teddy Bear Patriarchy Taxidermy in the Garden of Eden."

I find it strange to think of taxidermy as the servant of the "real." It's like saying that death serves life. But as I ponder upon what it means to serve the "real," the author seems to mean that objects, devoid of what constitutes living beings as alive, exist to serve and be subjected to whatever living beings wish to do with them. By nature, all living beings seek out for the best for themselves, as it is the law of Darwinism and the survival of the fittest. Sometimes, some of us will even seek out perfection, even if perfection never truly exists. To taxidermize a living being is to appreciate its aesthetic beauty, its decorative usage, but never entering the realm of substance. It's as if the desired parts of the living being is picked out, and the rest, its proclivities, are simply discarded.

An interesting excuse it is, to say that the bodies of living beings are taxidermized for the purpose of biological sciences, the better it is to study what was once living flesh. It is also an interesting dichotomy to state that artistic realism and biological science were twin brothers at the American Museum of Natural History, and that taxidermy and biology depend fundamentally upon vision in a hierarchy of the senses. It could be said that taxidermy serves as a gateway to the study of biological life, leading to the study of beings in their natural habitats and in zoos, and lab experiments honing in on life on a molecular level. Thus, taxidermy is a state of being, paralyzed in limbo between life and death, opening gates to questions of the state of living.

Thought Exercise #5: Due 10/8/13

"Looking through old medical textbooks and dictionaries, I see that the comparisons have existed within medical discourse as well--elephantitis, ape-hand syndrome, lobster-claw syndrome, pigeon chest, goosebumps, chickenpox, and phocomelia) seal-like limbs....These animal comparisons exist in...medical discourse...through which disability is still perceived today."
--"Beasts of Burden: Disability Studies and Animal Rights," by Sunaura Taylor

To us humans, it seems that these terms for medical conditions are labelled as such simply because these symptoms are not natural in humans. If something is not deemed natural and human-like, it is judged as an animalistic quality. Is it really so derogatory and insulting to animals to compare what we consider freaks of nature to them? Do we humans really mean it as an insult to animals? It is true that most humans consider themselves above animals. Therefore, perhaps the association of animals in our medical terms does more than just indicate that these medical conditions are not natural in humans. Perhaps, to people, the association of these terms with animals act as red alarms that their very beings, heir sick bodies, are deteriorating and descending down from the pedestal of humanity, crumbling into the abyss of animality.

 The more I think about it, the more similar I think humans are to animals. It is silly that humans pigeonhole ourselves into the category of humans, and then the rest of living beings are collectively referred to as animals. After all, animals do not think of themselves as a collective single species. There are many species, just as how there are many different races and ethnicities among humans. I still remember Sunaura asking the class the question of whether it is possible for animals to know when a peer among their kind is disabled. She told us about how one chimpanzee was treated differently by his fellow chimps because of his disability, and also of a Japanese monkey who was able to live a long life and be seen as a caretaker despite her disability. Our state of being boils down to the fact that all living beings are walking sacks of chemical reactions, with the goal of surviving every single day of our lives. Surviving involves interacting with other beings. It's simply Darwinism, plain and simple, a dog-eat-dog world in which humans like to think of themselves as the superior being.