There are many ways to swing the focus here. The first that popped into my head was the issue of them being used in such a manner to begin with, the cruelty aspect of it. The second is why the fuck they would ever think it was possible in the first place and where the idea came from. I'm all over the place here I know. FOCUS: Discuss the story and whether or not you think its cruel to do and why. At what point do humans draw the line with their attempts to entertain and make money off of things such as this? Sure I feel bad the guy was killed but I don't agree with the idea in the first place. When I watched the footage from the interview with the lady that had her face ripped off by that chimp all I could think was, that thing was in a home living with people and in a split second he snapped and literally gnawed her fingers off, let alone what he did to her face. Then they played the tape of the 911 call and the owner screaming for them to hurry because "He is eating her..." Gruesome.
To be honest, I have no sympathy for people who get mauled when they are exploiting dangerous animals. Didn't Siegfried or Roy get fucked up by their tiger? I just feel sorry for the poor fucking beer who got abused all his life then got killed when he did what comes naturally to bears, maul the shit out of things.
I think turn around is fair play. If someone wants to teach a wild animal to do tricks for money, I'm all for it. That person is to be held accountable for themselves and the lives of people they expose to the animal. A fucking ice skating bear? Sure, that's pretty cool. A rebellious ice skating bear? Even better. Don't take a job working around wild animals if your unwilling to be accountable for yourself when you get shot in the face with the shit gun. Speaking of animal abuse, I like the ice skating bear way better than the cat on acid I came across yesterday.
There are no boundaries when it comes to making money. Cruelty is nothing but collateral damage in the world of capitalism and greed. Think about it in a worldwide perspective. I was going to start in by making the point that these are wild animals, and people who try to tame wild animals deserve to have their faces ripped off once in awhile. Then I got to thinking...hell, we're all animals. Really, "wild" and "domesticated" really don't do much as a categorization for anything. A chimp may tear off some chicks face, and at the same time down the block a middle-class mother is dismembering and eating her 2 year old child. A pit bull tears a mailman's leg off, and an abusive husband breaks his wife's arm. On and on. I guess it's safe to say that all living things at times just hit a point --be it as the result of abuse, cruelty, neglect, or for no particular reason at all ...and go flip-mode. It's just part of living in this chaotic world.
So, do you then agree with the bear being killed? I don't know what else they could have done with it I guess. It's been humanized so release isn't an option. I assume they have zoos there so, I'm not sure if that could have came into play. Bad things happen to good things and people every single second of every single day. To say the chimp deserved to be killed because of the severity of what he did to that woman isn't right, to do so because he would have killed her is. This is not the case with the bear though. He was shot and killed later.
I think they had to shoot the bear once a wild animal gets a taste of human blood it is pretty much game over. The other choices would be to let it go in the wild, in which case it would probably starve to death, or put the bear in a zoo where it would be a danger to those around it or pay to have the animal housed in seclusion. It sucks but putting the bear down was probably the most humane way to treat the situation.
You surprise me because you're an avid hunter. One wouldn't expect this kind of reaction from someone that has all the hobbies you have. And yes, it does suck. Bears have long thick claws. Do they declaw them like cats in cases such as a circus performing one?
I don’t believe that's possible (like a cat, anyway) because bear claws are more akin to dog claws. Trimmed, maybe, but not declawed. At least without amputating the tips of their toes. I think. I've been wrong before. I agree with Dewercs. It's unfortunate, but there really isn't a safe way to keep the bear after it's done that. They're animals, so reasoning with them isn't like reasoning with a human. Once they realize "hey, I can kill these humans when they piss me off and they aren't that tough." they're a significant threat to all humans. All that said, watching a bear ice skate is pretty cool. However I can't watch it without picturing the bear going "You motherfucker...you better never turn your back on me. One slip...one instant you aren't paying attention I will maul your ass faster than you can say Pooh. I'm in ice skates asshole! I will savor the taste of your liver."
It's interesting how people equate "hunting" with "loves to kill shit indescriminately." I'm an avid hunter, and an animal lover. The two things are not mutually exclusive. Hunting is a very bittersweet thing, and all responsible hunters strive for a fast, clean kill. 99% of the time, a properly hunted animal suffers less in its death than their farmed counterparts. A lot of people ask me why I hunt, and basically, I guess you could say that I respect the animal I'm going to eat enough that I'm willing to kill it myself. I don't have to distance myself from the uncomfortable events that are invovled with the slaughter and preperation. To me, the biggest hypocrites are those who have no problem eating their meat from the butcher, but bitch about hunting. Animal cruelty is something that I do not tolerate. If I'm in a position to do something about it, I will. For instance, I came upon a traffic accident last year where a young girl had clipped a deer with her car, but the deer was not dead. An RCMP officer was on scene, and the deer was bleating and trying to get away. It was obviously very fucked up, and was not going to survive. I asked the RCMP officer why he didn't put the animal down, and he said "animal control has been called". He said he couldn't do anything until they got there. That, of course, if crap... he just didn't want to do it himself. He felt more comfortable letting the animal suffer than having to do anything about it himself. I went back to my car, got my knife out of the glove compartment, went to the deer, and slit its throat. It quickly bled out, and was still within seconds. The girl who hit the deer freaked out over the fact that I did what I did, and the cop came rushing out of his car all pissed off, and threatened to arrest me for a bunch of bullshit. I got pissed at him, told him to go right ahead, and I'd love to see how that'd play out in court or the media. I _KNOW_ I did the right thing, and am willing to stand by it. He shut up for a few seconds, steamed, and then told me to leave. I felt badly for hours.
I do hunt, but I love to see animals in the wild where they are supposed to be, when I hunt I carry a gun and a camera and I take more pictures of animals than I shoot. When I shoot animals I try to make a kill shot so animals don't suffer and when I kill animals I eat them. I don't like to see wild animals in circuses, in my heart I just don't think it is right. Having a performing wild bear is asking for trouble and it just does not sit well with me. The situation with this bear is bad all around. Plus I like bears, this one walked up on me in New Mexico this fall, I was well hidden so he did not see me, he was about 40 yards from me. I watched him for 10 minutes, I shot him twice both times with a camera.
I think that those people got what they deserved; most "trained animal" circus acts are degrading to the animal and should be stopped. There was a documentary about Russian circus bears on the Discovery Channel in the late '90s, and they were treated very badly. New members may not know this about me, but I love hunting down and catching/photgraphing snakes, spiders, scorpions, and and anything else that wanders the South Texas brush country. What can I say? I'm a country boy. I've caught live rattlesnakes many times, and every time they were just trying to get away. I understand that there is a possibility that I might be bitten and die from doing this, but never would I want anyone to take action toward the snake. It's almost like racism; getting mad at someone/thing for being itself, something it had no choice in. It is doing what it is supposed to do. If you play with fire, you can get burned.
I think one of the better arguments for hunting is that it allows animals to live as natural a life as possible while (usually) dying a very quick death. I often see overlap between anti-hunting and anti-(animal)farming/PETA people, so I find this to be a decent argument. The animal gets to live in the wild for its entire life, and instead of being eaten alive by something else, it gets a bullet to the vitals. I doubt that a bullet to the heart kills as fast or as humanely as a well-placed bolt gun to a steer or a pig, but that's a close-up hit to the central nervous system, which is hard to beat, and I'm pretty sure that a bullet to the heart is a nicer death than fleeing from a pack of wolves, feeling your hamstrings severed as you try to escape, and then being, y'know, eaten. Also, in areas where we've taken out the predators, the prey animal populations can boom, eat more food than is sustainable, and then all starve a few years later. I also feel a bullet to the vitals is probably a nicer death than starvation, and if we've upset the natural order in such a way, I think it's sorta our duty, especially if we have any interest in keeping the rest of the local nature "natural". Fuck circuses, by the way.
If the bear had gone to the store, bought it's own skates, got frustrated at not being able to be as good as the other bears on the ice and flipped it's shit, then I'd say it got what it deserves. However, the poor bastard was forced into doing something it was never meant to do and acted in accordance with it's nature. Anyone who thinks otherwise is a cunt. There's a reason they're called 'wild' animals, and this proves it-shit, if a so called intelligent human being can machine gun his co-workers to death because he didn't get a promotion, why should we be surprised that an animal whose nature is to kill flips out when it's forced to perform against its very nature? Good on the bear-sad thing is, had it been human it would have got a trial and probably got off for being abused.
And therein lies the problem. The idea of putting Bears on ice skates is totally fucked. People who pay money to go see bears on ice skates are equally fucked because they are actively supporting this primitive shitehouse practice. People can be judged by how they treat animals, if you find this fun I judge you to be a contemptible cunt.
I don't subscribe to the 'all human life is sacred' thing, so it doesn't bother me that someone doing his job badly got killed. It's animal training, if the animal kills you, you're doing it wrong. Shitty thing to be doing in the first place.
I felt the same way about the Crocodile Hunter: yes, he had balls. Was I shocked he was killed? NO. Why? Because he literally had it coming: When you fuck with a wild animal and it kills you, THAT'S WHY YOU'RE DEAD. Because you fucked with a wild animal. Bears, much like wildcats, dangerous snakes and reptiles that eat livestock are not meant to be pets and perform tricks for our amusement. There is a reason that the idiots that keep them as pets lock them up AT ALL TIMES. They are designed to kill other things in order to survive, and they don't give a fuck who that kill is.
Also, and I don't mean to make light of the situation, but could you imagine if bears somehow learned to speed skate because of this? That's a legitimately terrifying mental picture. A 500-pound grizzly traveling at speeds of up to 53 mph in a straightaway. We don't need that shit.
Russian zoo's are pretty bad too. That's a traveling Russian zoo...... I think I'm pretty much following the crowd with this one. You put a bear in skates and don't feed it well enough and you get to take the consequences. It sucks that they had to shoot him, but most reasonable zoo's won't take an animal that has attacked a person. Zoo's are money making enterprises, and the insurance and danger to the employees would be outrageous. So yes, its sad, but it had to be done because any good zoo wouldn't take him, and the zoo's that would have look like that picture up there.
I'm a hunter and an animal lover, Netdata's story pretty much mirrors many of the situations I've been in. I've had to put down countless animals because some asshole dropped them off on my property rather then taking care of them, so they dumped them in my lap to take care of. Guess what? I shoot them. Not because I want to, because I have to. If I kept every puppy and kitten abandon on my property in the last 3 years I would have over 200 dogs and 600 cats. I hate shooting puppies and kittens, it tears me apart when I have to do it, but it is more humane then leaving them to run wild and get eaten by something bigger then them. I'd much rather my bullets went straight into the head of the person that dropped those cute animals on my property and left me to deal with their problem.