Torturing wildlife on the taxpayers’ dime

Bella's babies

Sometimes there just aren’t enough fluffy bunnies in the world.

There’s a U.S. federal agency called “Wildlife Services” that — like many such agencies — has a name about 180 degrees opposed to its actual purpose. Called “Animal Damage Control”  until 1997, Wildlife Services’ job is, bluntly put, to kill or otherwise control wild animals that are perceived as causing problems for humans.

Wildlife Services has a number of different programs, some of them undeniably necessary . The agency coordinates federal wildlife rabies control programs including oral vaccine distribution. It works with airports to deter flocks of geese from flying into jet engines. It plays a role in managing invasive species. Wildlife Services is a division of the US Department of Agriculture’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service, and much of the agency’s mission centers on protecting the interests of American agriculture.

What the agency’s best known for is protecting one specific U.S. agricultural interest — public lands livestock ranchers — from predators. For decades Wildlife Services has worked with ranchers in the American West to kill off predators so that those ranchers’ assets stand a better chance of making it to slaughter. It’s kind of a sweet deal for the ranchers: graze your sheep and cattle on land you don’t own for a dollar and change per head per month and have your competition taken out on the taxpayers’ dime. Never mind that predators can be kept away from most livestock reasonably efficiently by spending a little money, training herd dogs, keeping cattle and sheep together (cattle deter coyotes), or  hiring more herders. That’s out of pocket money for the ranchers. Corporate welfare is just as appealing in Wyoming as it is on Wall Street.

Wildlife Services has taken a lot of criticism for its coyote control methods in the past, including the use of bait stations laced with sodium fluoroacetate, a deadly poison that can inflict significant collateral poisoning on non-target animals if used indiscriminately. Putting a piece of meat out on the range unmonitored, tied to a gun designed to shoot a dose into an animal’s mouth if it tugs on the bait definitely qualifies as indiscriminate, and bait stations intended for coyotes have killed other carnivores from black-footed ferrets to golden eagles.

The agencies has also used leg hold traps and snares to capture coyotes, as well as methods like aerial hunting and use of hunting dogs. All of these are predictably controversial, with sensitive coyote huggers like yours truly taking up positions against and hard-headed pragmatists pointing out that sometimes unpleasant measures are necessary.

I would expect both sides would agree, though, that hiring out the job of coyote control to creepy sadistic assholes is unwarranted. My friends over at Demarcated Landscapes posted yesterday about a Wildlife Services’-employed “wildlife specialist” they’d noticed posting photos of his unorthodox control methods. Those photos are seriously upsetting: the t[disgusting];dr version is that he sets traps for coyotes, then sets his dogs on the immobilized coyotes to rip them to shreds.

[UPDATE: I note that there’s no actual indication that the guy was on the clock with Wildlife Services when he took the photos in question. Still, even if this was “off-duty” recreational torture, hiring him calls Wildlife Services’ screening procedures into question.]

Baby Bunnies

palate cleanser

The Demarcated Landscapes post has apparently stirred up a bit of attention: they’ve been getting hits and image downloads from the USDA office in Fort Collins (which is apparently the “gentleman’s” regional office) including photos this guy has posted to Facebook back to 2010. They cleverly saved screenshots of it all, which is lucky because the guy’s Twitter and Facebook accounts seem to have been closed in the last few hours.

I’m not saying here that it’s uniformly wrong to kill problem coyotes, though Project Coyote has a wide range of excellent resources for people interested in more peaceful methods of coexistence. But if you need to trap a coyote, you’ve got it trapped, you have a gun, and you decide to kill it as a form of one-sided blood sport? I completely agree with Demarcated Landscapes in their summation of the situation:

Please, someone, get this man psychological counseling. Anyone who is entertained or amused by letting his dogs kill a trapped coyote has something very, very wrong with him.

Appallingly enough, this method of killing coyotes seems not to be illegal in much of the west — it’s apparently not even particularly unusual. But on the federal payroll? You can voice your concern, should you be so inclined, to Rod Krischke. Wyoming State Director, Wildlife Services, P.O. Box 59, Casper, WY 82602; (307) 261-5336; rod.f.krischke@aphis.usda.gov.

 

 

Did anyone attend The Paradigm Symposium?

I’m just curious — The Paradigm Symposium was held last weekend in Minneapolis, featuring such remarkable stars of the wacky contingent as Erich von Däniken, Giorgio Tsoukalos, and George Noory. This is the conference I was invited to attend, but didn’t bother.

For such a glitzily publicized event and a large collection of weird “stars”, though, there isn’t much appearing on the web about it. Maybe everyone who attended was sworn to secrecy as they left, or the Men in Black showed up and wiped all their memories.

Anyway, if you were there and would care to submit a guest post, I’d probably put it up here.

I’ve been told that Eve Siebert attended, and also tweeted about it. Surprise, surprise, the speakers didn’t understand evolution.

Stedman being Stedman

Oh, christ, Chris Stedman has an excerpt from his book Faitheist on Salon. It’s classic Stedman, and classic accommodationism: it’s all about Stedman and how awful atheists are. He does a lot of humble bragging — he goes to a party with a bunch of cold, dead-eyed atheists who treat him dismissively, but hey, his socks have holes in them and he’s sad about how rude atheists are! — and he “quotes” a lot of nameless atheists who say unkind things about religion. His message is that atheism is toxic, and you can’t help but feel that it’s all about how they don’t love Chris Stedman and his wise appreciation of the deepitiness of faith enough.

But don’t you worry about Stedman! After his brutal manhandling by the godless zombies of atheism, he just scurries off to his “weekly religion class at Loyola University’s Institute of Pastoral Studies, a Jesuit Catholic-run program for priests, nuns, and lay leaders”, where everyone is loving and tolerant and most importantly, appreciative of Stedman.

It’s something I’ve noticed before in the conflicts between New Atheists and these accommodationists. We’re willing to say that their softer approach is part of the spectrum of tools we need to use to overcome the folly of religion (heck, the UMM Freethinker’s group invited Stedman to speak here last year), and we don’t mind someone with different views working with us towards that, but the accommodationists have a completely different enemy. They consider religion their good buddy and pal, while the real target is…atheism. That shines through in Stedman’s excerpt — everywhere, he makes excuses for religion, while treating atheism as inexcusable.

There’s a reason Stedman gets no respect at atheist parties, and it isn’t his socks.

Larry Moran has got his number, though, and rips into him. Just go read that.

I’m not a believer any longer, but I do believe in respect. The “New Atheism” of Dawkins and Harris is simply toxic.

I’m getting awfully sick of this nonsense. What he really means is that it’s okay to passionately disagree about all kinds of social and political issues (gun control, socialism, capital punishment, quackery, political parties, abortion) but if atheists challenge the existence of god(s) that’s a whole different kettle of fish. Somehow, it’s “disrepectful” to declare that belief in supernatural beings is wrong and it means that intolerant atheists can’t, and won’t, work with anyone who disagrees with them because their position is “toxic.”

As a bonus, read the comments. Lately, I’ve been getting asked a lot of questions about why atheists who care about social justice and ethics (like Larry) don’t just become humanists. Larry explains why: he doesn’t find the specific goals of most formulations of humanism to be in alignment with his principles, so he doesn’t identify with them (he sees too much of a libertarian taint to most humanist definitions). In the future, when people pester me with those questions in which they are unable to see any difference between atheists and humanists, I’ll just send them to Sandwalk.

Ian Cromwell has about the same level of respect for Stedman as Moran. Must be the Canadianity.

Ophelia joins in the pigpile! And she’s not even Canadian!

We’ve got a live one here, maybe

Someone calling themselves “averagetruth” has popped in a few times over the last few weeks to dump some garbage in the comments — so far, he or she has just been doing fly-bys, never responding to any arguments, but watch for ’em — the three-comment threshold has been passed and you can tear into these idiot remarks without hesitation. Here’s the latest:

Do you really want the US to sign “treaties” with the UN so that people cannot paint their houses whatever the fuck color they want? Are you aware that globally, temperatures have been *declining* for the past 16 years?

You are aware that entropy will eventually cause all temperatures to drop to a few degrees Kelvin in any case?

One serious faux pas here is that it was posted in the Lounge, which is not a place for argument. Just so averagetruth knows, future attempts to crash the social area will get the comment moved to Thunderdome, a more appropriate area, and if averagetruth can’t learn, we’ll just have to ban the dope.

But I just want to point out that I’ve run across a beautiful visual argument against that claim that temperatures have been declining on Skeptical Science. Just go look at it, it’s devastating to that point (and really, the source is the Daily Mail?)

At least the entropy argument is novel. Hey, averagetruth, you’re going to be inevitably dead in less than a century — does that mean you might as well just curl up and die right now? The heat death of the universe really isn’t a good argument against taking action in the span of the life of a species.

The Amazing Atheist reveals his lack of humanity again

I’m sure you’ve all heard the tragic story of Amanda Todd, the teenage girl who killed herself after prolonged bullying. Normal human beings will read about her and be near tears; she was broken by callous sexual predators, her life made miserable, and she finally gave up on it.

The Amazing Atheist is not a normal human being.

Instead, The Amazing Atheist raged at the fact that this young woman was getting attention when other people have died, too. She was a well-off Western girl with plenty of privileges, so how dare we consider her story particularly tragic? There are so many other people who are worse off than she was!

Well, you know, we have a couple of choices in our lives.

We could, for instance, search the world for that one person who is in the worst circumstances of anyone; the person who is suffering the very most right now. We can do this while turning up our nose at each other afflicted individual who isn’t hurting enough for our standards; why, you’re a quadriplegic dying in a ditch? But you don’t have shingles! And both your eyes are intact! I’m sure we can find someone worse off than you. And then when we find that ultimate person in pain, we can promise to do everything we can to help them.

But I’ve noticed that people who make that kind of argument aren’t actually offering to help anyone. Their perversely inverted, demanding standards are really an excuse to turn away from the miserable they consider undeserving, to justify refusing to help…because that ultimate sufferer will never be found.

But you do have a choice. The other thing you could do is recognize deep pain in others and do what you can to help them. If one person had sincerely and honestly turned to Todd when she was being abused, and offered to help, maybe she’d still be here, and the world would be a slightly better place.

She wasn’t asking for much.

The Amazing Atheist begrudges her that much.

I don’t see any difference between him and the bullies who beat her up and mocked her on facebook and poured scorn on her in school.

And some people wonder why there is a growing rift in the atheist movement. All you have to do is look at people like the Amazing Atheist to see that some atheists, people who are convinced that there is nothing beyond ourselves, that we are dependent entirely on our fellow human beings and nothing more, lack that humanity that is our only source of unity and our only true reason for living.

Don’t be surprised that some of us want nothing to do with such sociopaths.

The ducks are gonna get you

Some poor young girl, deeply miseducated and misled, wrote into a newspaper with a letter trying to denounce homosexuality with a bad historical and biological argument. She’s only 14, and her brain has already been poisoned by the cranks and liars in her own family…it’s very sad. Here’s the letter — I will say, it’s a very creative argument that would be far more entertaining if it weren’t wrong in every particular.

I’ve transcribed it below. I couldn’t help myself, though, and had to, um, annotate it a bit.

[Read more…]

Well, I won’t do that again

So, after a long grueling week of travel and work, I land at the Minneapolis airport, where my plane gets parked for half an hour while we wait for our gate to clear, and I open up Twitter. And am greeted by a pile of fan mail from someone called @SammyBoal, who had created their account just an hour before in order to vomit up innuendo and insults at me and Rebecca Watson. This was pretty awful stuff — sexual smears and contempt for women. Fortunately, twitter makes blocking people easy, so I did and all of those wretched comments vanished…and I also made this statement:

These sickos will sink to amazing depths…the slymepit mentality is appalling.

@SammyBoal didn’t last long after that. The wave of revulsion, with people clicking on block, block, block to this bozo, led to the software at Twitter suspending the account. I wasn’t the only one appalled.

But then the hyperskeptics kicked into action. I got dunned with people claiming that the slymepit really wasn’t that bad, how dare I damn them with this accusation, I should research the place before making such accusations (never mind that I’ve had past experience with it, that I see its denizens commenting all over FtB, and that it’s fucking called the fucking Slymepit).

@SammyBoal isn’t a Slymepitter – please research that crap before putting it out there. Thanks.

Your pit doesn’t seem much better. You just like it because of the way it agrees with you & vice versa.

Having read all the posts there (yes, I have – bronchitis has afforded me a lot of time), don’t see that kind of asshatery.

Oh, really? I am skeptical of your hyperskeptical hyperskepticism. But OK, I’ll go look. Briefly. And right away I found one of the Slymepit denizens disavowing @SammyBoal.

What this person – https://twitter.com/SammyBoal – is doing is quite another, fucking repugnant, and I hope he/she/it isn’t hanging around here on The Slyme Pit. If he/she/it is, please speak up so I can ignore your vile crap now.

That’s a good start, but when your regulars think a person like @SammyBoal could be a likely hanger-on, you’ve got a problem. Even they think it is entirely possible that this was a pseudonym for one of their long term Watson/Myers haters.

But have no fear. The party line quickly absolved them of guilt: it was an ally of Watson putting on an act to make the Slymepit look bad.

I think it’s a sock to make her disagreers look extra bullying, rapey, and stuff

Right. So for years and years, Rebecca Watson’s bestest friends have been cobbling up sock puppet accounts to send her hate mail. Those thousands of revolting youtube comments? All buddies putting on an act. If we carry this logic further, the Slymepit itself is a great big pretense put on by all of her pals who make daily piles of insults and threats just to make her feel good about herself.

Ahh, but the best part: the haters were all fired up because the video of Rebecca Watson speaking at HFA has just been released…and their response was to post photos of obese women in degrading situations. Over and over. Amplified and made worse because everyone quotes the original ‘witty’ photo, so you end up with a whole page of fat woman photos, with people tittering over them and speculating whether it’s a drunk Rebecca Watson or Stephanie Zvan, and somehow they start whining about Natalie Reed and Ophelia Benson. The whole impression is of a bargain-basement 4chan where all of their childish ire is aimed at women on freethoughtblogs.

Who knew bronchitis affected the eyes?

Oh, well. I am vindicated, and next time some blinkered asshole tells me to hyperskeptically examine my well-founded assumptions about the slymepitters, I’m just going to direct them to this post, because I’m not going to read that vile collection of misogynistic scum again, no matter how hard they try to guilt me into it.

Hypocrisy alert

Representative Scott DesJarlais of Tennessee is a fanatical Tea Party Republican who campaigns on his fanatical pro-life stance and his fanatical ‘family values’ who fanatically touts the importance of traditional marriage.

You know exactly where this is going, don’t you? I could just stop writing right here and you’d be able to fill in the rest of the story.

Yep, his marriage fell apart thanks to his philandering, and now we have a recording of a phone call with his ex-mistress in which he’s urging her impatiently to get an abortion. The only thing we’re missing so far is a gay fling and voting “yes” on a Democratic health care bill to confirm his demonic status.

Not that it matters. He’s still leading in his election campaign. The Tea Baggers don’t actually give a damn about their so-called values — you don’t have to live them if you just shout them angrily enough.

Newsweek panders to the deluded again

I’ve got to wonder who is responsible for this nonsense, and how it gets past the staff at Newsweek. Every once in a while, they’ve just got to put up a garish cover story touting the reality of Christian doctrine, and invariably, the whole story is garbage. This time around, the claim is proof of life after death, in Heaven Is Real: A Doctor’s Experience With the Afterlife. This time, we have a real-live doctor who has worked at many prestigious institutions, as we are reminded several times in the story, whose brain was shut down and who then recites an elaborate fantasy of visiting heaven.

[Read more…]

Uh-oh, he’s on to us!

Rats. Paul Broun (Ridiculous, Ga) sees right through us.

All that stuff I was taught about evolution and embryology and the Big Bang Theory, all that is lies straight from the pit of Hell. And it’s lies to try to keep me and all the folks who were taught that from understanding that they need a savior.

So…this guy gets elected down there in Georgia?