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Cruelty to animals does not only make a difference between city and country.

As you have already mentioned, barking dogs are a big nuisance all the time.  But although I don't like pets in general, I blame the dog owners. They only use the dogs as toys and showpieces.
I watch here every day how the dogs are chained day and night on the balcony (they strangle themselves halfway). In between, the dogs are rebuked by screams or blows.

In this case, the cruelty to animals is the result of a lack of respect for everything that is not useful in this minute.

Then there is cruelty to animals out of a general lack of respect for nature.  An example of this is eating a monkey's brain from a living monkey.  Or cooking living lobster.

Then there is cruelty to animals for religious reasons.  Kosher butchering should be mentioned here.

Or cruelty to animals for research.
Whereby I differentiate here between research against diseases and research for cosmetics.
On a small scale I can accept cruelty to animals for research against diseases.

So it is not just differences between urban and rural areas.

Interesting essay. In my opinion, animal (and human) rights can be sorta deduced through mathematical calculation.

I was at the Negara Zoo in Malaysia once. A lynx caught my eye. The cat was in a rather small enclosure and it kept walking in circles. I watched it for a few minutes. It didn't stop circling the whole time. It clearly had a lot of pent-up energy and no way to release the energy. It kept walking in circles, probably slowly going crazy by the limited range of its world.

When you look at animals in the wild, you get an idea of how much energy they need to spend per day, and how much space they require for that. These are biological functions. Space and energy can be quantified and assigned for an animal. When you try to place limits, that's when things start to get fuzzy, but we don't need to go that far. A lynx in the wild lives over a vastly wide range, dozens of square miles. And then you cram it into a couple square feet; that's a disparate contrast.

If we look at the animal in its natural habitat and quantify typical energy expenditure, space, food intake, calories, water, mating habits and so forth, we can make an estimate of what this biological being needs to live with a decent quality of life.

Andy Passenger wrote:

Then there is cruelty to animals for religious reasons.  Kosher butchering should be mentioned here.

You don't need to go to religions for kosher or halal butchering. That method. too, points to a difference between town and country. Another blog-post reminiscence of mine about my childhood in the Australian bush contained the following paragraph:
To put food on the table, Dad killed a sheep every ten days, and we ate mutton three meals a day every day. I remember the violence of the killing – SAS-style, I guess: head jerked up from behind to expose the throat to the knife and allow the blood to gush out. The body was hung upside-down on a hook to let the rest of the blood leak out. In town, we bought from a butcher. Nowadays, meat is pre-packaged by supermarkets. (And sometimes it probably isn’t meat at all!)

That method is now pretty much outlawed in city abattoirs in the Western world, but it still goes on in the countryside where there are no abattoirs, and it is not considered a wicked thing to do, there. Every year, we wrung the necks of roosters for our Xmas dinners. Many city-dwellers would regard that as cruel, whereas farming families generally regard keeping hens indoors their whole lives as cruel.

metalhead9 wrote:

Interesting essay. In my opinion, animal (and human) rights can be sorta deduced through mathematical calculation.

I was at the Negara Zoo in Malaysia once. A lynx caught my eye. The cat was in a rather small enclosure and it kept walking in circles. I watched it for a few minutes. It didn't stop circling the whole time. It clearly had a lot of pent-up energy and no way to release the energy. It kept walking in circles, probably slowly going crazy by the limited range of its world.

When you look at animals in the wild, you get an idea of how much energy they need to spend per day, and how much space they require for that. These are biological functions. Space and energy can be quantified and assigned for an animal. When you try to place limits, that's when things start to get fuzzy, but we don't need to go that far. A lynx in the wild lives over a vastly wide range, dozens of square miles. And then you cram it into a couple square feet; that's a disparate contrast.

If we look at the animal in its natural habitat and quantify typical energy expenditure, space, food intake, calories, water, mating habits and so forth, we can make an estimate of what this biological being needs to live with a decent quality of life.

To see this you can also go to the HCMC zoo.

Andy Passenger wrote:

To see this you can also go to the HCMC zoo.

Most zoos in the world, I expect. Andy, Google's first link for HCMC is some place in Minneapolis, USA. Which one did you mean?
(disambiguation)

Gordon Barlow wrote:

Andy, Google's first link for HCMC is some place in Minneapolis, USA. Which one did you mean?
(disambiguation)

I think it depends on the phone/computer country settings, choosen language, browser cookies and browser history.

Here, Google's first links are all about Ho Chi Minh City.

Further to my post #4 above... It's interesting that the tribal religions that insist on the halal and kosher rituals betray their origins as rural religions and not town ones. It's towns that would have organised their slaughters of food-animals into abattoirs, whereas rural communities kept to the way their ancestors did it. So it seems, anyway. Did Christianity (for instance) begin in the towns, and didn't think it made sense to keep the individual method of killing? Any thoughts on this?

I'm not aware of any rural religions besides Digambara.

Are the religious methodologies worse or better than today's prevalent mechanical methods?



Is this the best way to go?

metalhead9 wrote:

I'm not aware of any rural religions besides Digambara.

Metal - you don't think Africa has some rural religions, or some islands in the oceans? And you don't think it's possible that some religions were started in deserts or other isolated places? Think, man, think!

I meant religions of rural origin with food certification agencies at the current time. There aren't that many. I suppose the "rural" and "tribal" classifications are subjective in the context of this conversation; it depends on what you believe.

Scientists will have to succeed at pain quantification to determine the best way to slaughter an animal.

Christianity probably began in Bethlehem, which was a city equipped with laundry cleaners and butcher shops at the time. Butchers had been around since before the advent of the three Abrahamic religions.

Town and country have entirely different attitudes towards animals - well, live animals anyway. In the Australian bush - which was probably pretty much like outlying farms everywhere - live animals had no rights at all; in the towns, they generally did. Cuteness was no protection. What could be cuter than a bunny-rabbit, or a baby kangaroo? Here's a post from a few years back called "Inside the rabbit-proof fence".