The Democratization of Basic Instincts

Charles Danten

After the Renaissance, in the XVIth century, at the dawn of the industrial revolution, a “mutation of sensibilities” begins which will result in the XIXth century in a major change of the animal condition. Until then, confined to the wealthy classes, the passion for pets spread to the rising classes of the bourgeoisie, and even to the working classes. (1) 

A Terrible Plague 

Before that, men lived like animals, in tune with their animality, without any clear demarcation between one and the other; pigs, cows, chickens, dogs, and cats, everyone crammed together in the same house, in the same yard, and in the same street. Manifest violence, both towards humans and animals, was widespread, in all social strata. The men all carried knives in their belts, which they did not hesitate to draw at the slightest pretext. Fear was everywhere. One had to be constantly on one’s guard. (2)

 

Compulsory Schooling

The stick alone being ineffective, even counter-productive since it incited to revolt, the authorities of the time chose a gentler way to manage impulses and increase social cohesion: compulsory schooling. This major renovation in the way of training the animal inside is a Prussian invention that forced all citizens to submit to a long process of socialization that guaranteed good behavior while preventing dissension. Its institution was painful, as parents of that time were strongly opposed to it; children were often led to school by soldiers at gunpoint. (3) Today, ironically, only the gun, and even then, could prevent parents from bringing their children to school for indoctrination. 

The Weaponization of Writing 

According to French social anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, to instill good behavior, everyone had to learn to read and write, so the production of books suddenly intensified on a massive scale: 

Writing seems to favor the exploitation of men before their enlightenment. [...] The primary function of written communication is to facilitate enslavement. [...] The systemic action of European states in favor of compulsory education, which developed during the 19th century, went hand in hand with the extension of military service and proletarianization. The fight against illiteracy was thus confused with the reinforcement of the control of citizens by the Power. For it is necessary that all know how to read so that the latter can say: no one is supposed to ignore the law. (4)

The Civilizing Process 

 “The authority of the state and of the teacher must be transferred from the outside to the inside of the subject,” emphasizes the Prussian theologian Hermann Francke (1663-1727), one of the founders of the present-day educational system, “... that is why it is important to integrate the rules of power into the personality of the pupil as early as possible so that he will be self-disciplined.” (5) 

Thus, the principles of virtue and good behavior must penetrate deep into the student’s psychology, internalized, somatized to the point of making him think that he is free to do as he wishes. (6) 

If misbehavior was still punished by the stick (fear) or positive punishment, it was thought at that time, as it still is today, that passive domination, by the carrot (pleasure) was the ideal instrument of control. 

 

“Excessive severity hardens or embitters the pupil, strive to be a father not a disciplinarian; as an instrument of pedagogical control, affection is far more effective than corporal punishment; use gentle rather than open violence, that way, genuine obedience is not merely outward, but comes from deep within the soul. It is not rendered out of [hard] coercion but with a willing heart,” argues Hermann Francke. (7) 

In this training scheme, various handouts and treats quickly lead to dependence and submission to established rules. Replacing open violence with its anodyne, affection, what H. Francke calls “gentle violence,” (8) is much more efficient and revolt-proof. Anyone who doesn’t obey or act as is required receives no gratification or feel-good sensations. It’s as simple as that. In this form of training, the victim cannot revolt because there are no physical blows. All he feels is a void, or a vague, unpleasant sensation in the pit of his stomach. This makes this kind of invisible control much more perverse and crueler by its subtlety and sophistication than open violence. 

In older democracies, where this training scheme has been perfected, citizens in general no longer have to be forced to comply with established rules. Obedience is second nature. Instincts are regulated with state-of-the-art domination, with a minimum of open violence, thereby creating the illusion that everyone is free to come and go as he pleases, to the point of loving it and asking for seconds in the spirit of this quote falsely attributed to Aldous Huxley, but often repeated: 

The perfect dictatorship would be a dictatorship that would have the appearance of democracy, a prison without walls from which the prisoners would not think of escaping. A system of slavery where, thanks to consumption and entertainment, the slaves would have the love of their servitude. (9)

 

Civilization and Its Discontents 

This kind of educational scheme based on affection and gentle violence quickly causes a disruption of the emotional regulator, or “emotionstat,” and a progressive emotional dependence that leads to infantilization and feelings of emptiness and loneliness. In short, a chronic anxiety develops that pushes one to compulsive indulgence in a never-ending vicious circle, which can culminate in bizarre and unpredictable ways. 

 While some will cope with this chronic anxiety by channeling it into various forms of escapes like cell-phone addiction, zootherapy, hoarding, smoking, bulimia, binge drinking, compulsive shopping, hypersexuality, others will simply channel it into various psychosomatic diseases like chronic urinary problems (interstitial cystitis), colitis, heart, skin problems, and self-mutilation. (10) 

This portrait can be transposed on a larger scale to nations and civilizations. Extreme or neoliberal capitalism, an Orwellian type of “inclusive” capitalism — defined by the morally unrestricted exploitation of goods, people, animals, services, and capital under the mantle of democracy, humanism, philanthropy, goodness, and love — which could be considered as another form of flight from anxiety, has certainly led us into a planetary depression. Never-ending commercial expansion, war, social chaos, sexual dystopia, loss of biodiversity, pollution, and a growing gap between the rich and the poor are a few psychosomatic expressions of this deep depression. In the same line of thought, the 9/11 attacks, for example, can be seen as a bizarre outcome of this illness, a form of self-mutilation of the same nature as genocides. 

 

The Bestiary, the Shadow and the Light of the Human Saga 

Naturally, this radical change in the exercise of power and the management of our instincts transposes itself on the human-animal relationship. The master implanted within deals with the outside world, notably animals, in the only way he knows how, preferably using various forms of affection. Hence, the enhancement of our virtues by positive and negative conditioning and the repression of our defects by positive punishment translate on the outside by a greater fondness for those species which flatter us via their latent symbolism, and an increased brutality towards those which shame us via their latent symbolism. 

This translates starting in the early XIXth century into an inordinate affection for pets (the light) (11) and the birth and massive proliferation of factory farms in conditions of cruelty that are completely unjustified from a strictly production point of view (the shadow). (12) 

To put it differently, our disturbing impulses are symbolically repressed in depth in factory farms, and our accommodating impulses are exalted on the surface in the homes. 

The demarcation between the two is often fuzzy because training schemes between these two poles — pleasure and fear — can vary considerably between and within species. This makes the relationship to animals — and to people, since they are also trained in this way — sometimes difficult to interpret, since there are so many variations. 

Broadly speaking, pets are situated towards the carrot pole and livestock at the other extreme, towards the stick pole. But within either extreme, the dynamics can vary considerably. The dog, for example, can be at either pole. However, the dog is usually trained with a mixture of fear and pleasure, while the cat, like the citizens of a well-oiled democracy, is trained almost exclusively with the carrot. The phenomenon must be seen on a global perspective rather than a case-by-case one. 

And on a horizontal scale of cruelty and hypocrisy graded from the least cruel and hypocritical to the cruelest and most hypocritical, the glorified relationship with pets is skewed to the cruelest and least authentic end of the scale. Here, as we shall see in a future article, goodness is the instrument of power and its most evil manifestation. 

Thus, according to this version of things, by its manifest violence and cruelty, the condition of farm animals would be a living dramatization of an openly totalitarian model of society, and, by its latent violence and cruelty, the condition of companion animals would be a living dramatization of a democratic model of society. The fact that these two categories of animals are present in a democracy indicates that within this political structure, totalitarianism is indeed still alive, but in a “declawed” or passive form, invisible to the naked eye, but ready to pounce at the slightest opportunity. 

This Theory Raises a Number of Troubling Questions 

Is our democracy authentic? Are children educated according to their own needs or are they weaponized for the same purposes as animals? Are women really nicer than men? And what about the people on the left, the so-called liberals and humanists? Are they more human than those of the so-called extreme right? Has humanity evolved to a higher level of consciousness? Does moral and spiritual evolution even exist? Is our current social structure an illusion collectively maintained with lies and deceit? 

If we presuppose, that domestic animals are revelators of authenticity. Their absence by our side would mean nothing, but according to this theory, their presence by our side would be symptomatic of a confused mind that tries to manage its impulses by different means oscillating between affection and fear. 

In this perspective, the human-animal bond would be a way to detect, with surgical precision, the evil that can sometimes hide in its opposite, goodness. Thus, if you want to know the true nature of a person — or on a larger scale, a nation like the US — that looks down at you from the height of his moral and spiritual superiority, with a dog tethered to his feet or a cat on his lap, you will know where that person or nation is located on the scale of goodness. If the animal in question eats industrial kibble, even better, you will then smell for good the putrid odor of sulfur that emanates from its entrails... the devil’s favorite den, these days and ages. 

In short, we try to obey the precepts that are written in some guide of good conduct of our invention; short of solutions and out of desperation, we blindly follow the leaders who best embody the human ideal that we covet. 

In the meantime, the real problems are relegated to the back burner: how our brain works, how we fall victim to its traps, how our buried past leads us by the nose and how we refuse to question our founding creed. In the end, our moral and spiritual evolution is not the result of understanding, but of mimicry and escape. 

 

References and Notes 

1. K. Thomas, Man and the Natural World: Changing Attitudes in England (1500-1800), Penguin, 1983. 

 2. Norbert Elias, The Civilizing Process: Sociogenetic and Psychogenetic Investigations, Wiley-Blackwell, 2000. 

3. John Taylor Gatto, The Underground History of American Education, 2002; Dumbing us down, 2008; Weapons of Mass Instruction, 2011, New Society Publishers: www.johntaylorgatto.com. 

4. Claude Lévi-Strauss, Tristes tropiques, Plon, 1955, p. 344. 

5. James Melton, Absolutism and the eighteenth-century origins of compulsory schooling in Prussia and Austria, Cambridge University Press, 1988, p. 40. 

6. A more in-depth explanation of somatization of behavior is beyond the scope of this article. For those who are interested in this question see: Antonio R. Damasio, “The Somatic Marker Hypothesis,” Descartes' Error. Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain, Harper Collins, 1994, p. 174. 

7. James Melton, work cited, p. 42. 

8. Ibid. 

9. http://wiki.gentilsvirus.org/index.php?title=Thread:Discussion:FV:Huxley1958:LeMeilleurDesMondes/Citation_faussement_attribu%C3%A9e_%C3%A0_Huxley&lqt_method=edit&lqt_operand=783 

10. “Troubles du contrôle des impulsions,” Catalogue and Index of French Medical Sites. http://www.chu-rouen.fr/ssf/psy/troublesducontroledesimpulsions.html. 

 11. Kathleen Kete, The Beast in the Boudoir: Petkeeping in Nineteenth-Century France, University of California Press, 1994. 

12. Jean-Pierre Digard, “L’élevage industriel,” Les Français et leurs animaux : Ethnologie d’un phénomène de société, Fayard, Pluriel Ethnologie, p. 41.

Animal Hoarding and Other Similar Pathologies

Charles Danten

Collectors keep dozens, sometimes a hundred or a thousand animals in their homes, in filthy conditions. American scientist Gary Patronek has estimated that there are about two thousand animal collectors in the United States - a figure he says is far from the truth. (1)

The vast majority of hoarders are women, on average fifty-five years old, single, divorced, or widowed. The stereotype of the old cat lady is wrong as half of the collectors Patronek counted were employed, some in professions as mundane as teaching and real estate. Among them, Patronek even counted four veterinarians. 

Cats are the favorite victims of collectors, followed by dogs, birds, reptiles, small mammals (ferrets, rats, hamsters), horses, cows, goats, and sheep. Many of them have a real menagerie in their house and on their property.

In every home, there is an accumulation of miscellaneous items such as newspapers, laundry, books, and garbage cans. Some collectors meticulously preserve dead animals. Many others have sexual relations with their animals. (2)

Researchers liken this habit to obsessive-compulsive disorder. "There are far more similarities than differences between obsessive-compulsive disorder and animal collecting," notes researcher Gary Patronek, "the interaction between a living thing and a person gives it a level of intensity that does not exist with a pile of newspapers. (...) Collectors use these animals to fulfill their emotional needs, while denying those of their pets (...) Psychologists suspect a link between animal collecting and attachment disorders." (3) 

If the object of the passion varies, according to the inclinations and the means of each one, its origin is on the other hand the same: an unspecified psychological insufficiency. Thus, the collected object is more or less accessory, provided that the collector finds his fulfillment. 

According to scientists Maria Vaca-Guzman and Arnold Arluke, "collectors do not lack arguments and excuses to justify their mania and make it more socially acceptable. This is how they clear their name and protect their self-esteem:" (4)(5)(6)

The Good Samaritan Argument

Some will use the Good Samaritan argument, claiming that these animals would have died anyway, and that by adopting them they are saving them from certain death. In their logic, death is considered an unthinkable option, any other possibility, no matter how horrible, is considered preferable. In other words, the Good Samaritan absolves himself of blame by giving his obsession a noble purpose. The "rescuers" who collect wild or domestic animals in non-killing shelters fall into this category. 

The Love Argument

Many claim to love their animals, deeply, as much or more than their own children. Naming their animals after their children or being loved by their pets is the ultimate proof of their love, and that all is well in the best of worlds. Collectors consider their pets to be an integral part of the family. They say things like: 

We take good care of our pets, the proof is they are happy and they love us back (...) this is heaven for them (...) they play ball... they love it... they don't have mange and they love to be here... did you see how this dog flicks his tail? This dog wants to play ball. It's elephant man syndrome. Appearances are deceiving. It is not by things like this (conditions of captivity) that one should judge suffering. (7) 

Other Arguments of Denial

Some deny the facts or minimize their consequences. Others try to divert attention by pointing the finger at those who take them to task and by calling them names (ad hominem attacks); they look for scapegoats by saying for example: it is society's fault if animals are mistreated; it’s the breeders who produce too many animals; owners don’t have them neutered or are not sufficiently responsible for the animals under their thumb; some will plead ignorance, lack of know-how, good intentions, a physical or psychological handicap of some kind that prevents them from taking good care of the object of their devotion; the lack of intellectual freedom caused by a difficult life that pushes them to act in this way, against their will. Others confess to being under the influence of a mysterious force that the media calls "extreme love." (8) 

The most affected, and the most resistant, employ the full arsenal of excuses and justifications. Strategies of denial commonly evoked, to different degrees, by all animal owners, including animal activists who seem to be as unaware as everyone else that sometimes it can be cruel to be kind. (9)

***

This psychological profile carries over to those who are fixated on money, accolades, knowledge, and ideas; fraudsters, corporations, and investors who accumulate money for no other reason than to enrich themselves; nations who hoard information, nuclear warheads, and soldiers; institutions and intellectuals who accumulate books endlessly in private or public libraries; breeders who herd millions of animals into unsanitary, unspeakably cruel factory farms, and authorities who hoard children in factory schools to be indoctrinated into the logic of consumerism are also unaware collectors. 

« Hoarding," in the broadest sense, a generic term which can be applied to all neurotic forms of accumulation, is an escape, a means like any other to ease the tensions inherent to the human condition. Pollution and destruction of biodiversity, moral decay, gender dystopia, race-mixing, multiculturalism are the equivalent on a planetary scale of the filthy conditions typical of animal collectors' houses. 

According to this version of things, the current pet craze is a hidden form of collective hoarding.

References

1. Gary J. Patronek, "Hoarding of animals: An Under-estimated Public Health Problem in a Difficult to Study Population," Public Health Reports, 114 : 81-87, 1999.

2. Ibid. 

3. Randy Frost, "People who hoard animals," Psychiatric Times, 2006. 

4. Maria Vaca-Guzman and Arnold Arluke, "Normalizing passive cruelty: The excuses and justifications of animal hoarders,"  Anthro-zoös, 18(4), 2005.

5. Lynn Tryba, "Trash menagerie. The disturbing world of animal hoarding," Psychology today, 2002.

6. Maria Vaca-Guzman and Arnold Arluke, Article cited.

7. Ibid.

8. Ibid.

9. Patrick West, Conspicuous Compassion. Why Sometimes, it Really Is Cruel to be Kind, Civitas, 2004. 

“Furry Babies” Are Lousy Baby Substitutes

When a man is penalized for honesty, he learns to lie

Criss Jami, Salomé

  

During the Renaissance, at the dawn of the Industrial Revolution, humankind underwent a “mutation of sensitivities.” This would eventually lead, in the 19^th century, to an important change in the animal condition. A passion for animals, which had previously been limited for the most part to the lords, would be propagated throughout the rising classes of the bourgeoisie, making its way into the hearts of average people. (1)

This change in the animal condition corresponded to mankind’s efforts to civilize and moralize the general population, a slow process of taming our impulses. (2) Before this crucial step in our spiritual and moral evolution, manifest violence was widespread throughout all social strata, both towards humans and animals. Slavery was considered natural and legitimate; animals, the poor, the insane, blacks, women, and children were generally treated as chattel or cannon fodder. Men all carried knives in their belts and did not hesitate to draw them at the slightest dispute. “Fear reigned everywhere; one had to be on guard all the time,” writes the magisterial, historian, and sociologist Norbert Elias. (3) Food animals were butchered in the middle of the street in horrible conditions. Pitting dogs against bulls or bears was a fairly common pastime for both rich and poor. It was not rare to see an annoyed coachman beat his exhausted horse to death when it refused to advance. (4) It was thus necessary to find ways to heal the evil that was threatening order and eating away at society’s very base.

Animals as Saviors 

For the Christian Church of that period, to love animals as did the saints St. Francis of Assisi and St. Cuthbert was a way “to establish the pure reign of charity among men,” notes French sociologist Éric Baratay. The idea was to eradicate “the taste for blood and cruelty, to improve Man for his brothers and thus to protect humanity itself.” (5) 

Because mistreatment of animals became a sign of poor cha-racter and was then considered a bad example for children, it was believed that the opposite — affectionate contact with pets — would help mankind free itself from its archaic cruelty and insensitivity. According to this evolutionary strategy, as evolutionary biologist Kevin MacDonald would put it, loving animals means loving human beings, and not loving animals is almost proof of inhumanity. It was Thomas Paine in The Age of Reason who said, “Everything of cruelty to animals is a violation of moral duty.” (6)

It has long since been forgotten, but humane societies like the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (SPCA), which came about in the 19th century in most Western countries, were originally founded mostly to put an end to violence towards people — the link between cruelty to animals and cruelty to humans being long established. (7) 

Even the famous French “Gramont” law from 1850, which condemned public mistreatment of domestic animals, had among its aims an anthropocentric one: to improve mankind. (8) This law had equivalents in all Western countries. For example, in 1820, abuse of livestock and “blood sports” were prohibited in several American states. An 1866 New York law, which later became a model for all anti-cruelty laws in America, made it a misdemeanor to maliciously hurt or kill any domestic animal. (9)

The universal idea that affection for animals makes us more human takes on various forms across different cultures, but it is recognizably part of the founding credos of numerous societies. It has become popular wisdom, and we shouldn’t underestimate its power over us. (10)

 

Animal as Doctors

Our appreciation of animals is not based solely on the notion that they make us better human beings; it is also that they add a little spice to our often sad and fastidious lives. We interpret this as a contribution to our physical and mental health, believing that they heal us from various threats to our wellbeing — inactivity, violence, anxiety, stress, solitude, boredom, depression, cancer, and mental illness, to name but a few.

This symbiotic concept, which suggests that people’s physical, moral, and psychological ills may be cured by the reassuring presence of animals, has become known as “zootherapy” or “animal-assisted-therapy” as it is now called, a term “that can refer to institutionalized therapy sessions led by health professionals or another such intermediary as well as simply having an animal at home. The word ‘zootherapy’ is thus a generic term designating the positive impact of animals on people,” (11) and to give you the full story, I will add the impact of people on animals, since it is generally agreed that this form of affection is as good for them as it is for us. 

American Jewish psychiatrist Boris Levinson, who is conside-red the modern day father of this concept, summarized the im-portance that animals could have in people’s lives in several beacon articles published in the sixties and seventies. (12) According to Levinson, who advocated sex with animals, an emotional relationship with an animal is in itself a physiological intervention comparable to a drug. Since the publication of his writings, this line of thinking has become so mainstream that zootherapy is now a modern institution, with many such interventions being carried out as official treatments. They are “administered” by individuals and by organizations, all of whom aggressively promote the perceived benefits of companion animals. 

University of Concordia psychology professor Theresa Bianco, for example, cannot say enough good things about pet therapy: 

There is a substantial body of research showing that people of all ages derive a multitude of psychosocial and health bene-fits from their involvement with pets. […] Moreover, these benefits are not limited to pet ownership, but also extend to therapeutic interventions involving a variety of animal species. In some instances, the mere presence of the animal is sufficient to reduce anxiety. (13)

American veterinarian Marty Becker summed up the vital role animals play in people’s lives at a symposium on animal well-ness: 

Most important, veterinary medicine is embracing the bond as a vital force for not just happy, healthy pets… but happy, healthy people as well. (14)

The present height of the pet phenomenon is thus closely linked to the perceived benefits of animals on people, and of people on animals. Allow me to emphasize the word “perceived,” because while public and manifest mistreatment of animals was indeed prohibited starting in the 19th century, the use of animals for recreative, therapeutic, and spiritual purposes has untold consequences, not only on animals and nature but also on humanity.

Extract from The Globo Trickster Book

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Is a plant-based diet the future of humanity?

By Charles Danten

Our friends from the Globalist community would like to abolish animal-based diets for health and environmental reasons. But before we jump the gun, let’s first make sure that this radical meat-to-tofu flip-flop is fully justified. The reader can decide at the very end whether or not he still wants to be a vegetarian or to become one. 

https://www.eurocanadians.ca/2022/01/is-egetarianism-the-future-of-humanity.html

 

Animals are the shadow of the human saga

Charles Danten

The morphological and psychological changes that domesticated animals have undergone in a relatively short time period to become what they are today are not without strange resemblance to those we have undergone across our own recent evolution. The techniques of domestication – confinement, food deprivation, physical and mental castration, selection for docility, incest, and coercion – were also used to domesticate humans. It could be said that the animal condition is actually an unconscious transposition of the human condition; accordingly, my book, Slaves of Our Affection. The Myth of the Happy Pet, can be considered an allegory, or a metaphor, of the human condition. Animals are indeed the shadow of the human saga. Following are several examples along these lines.

Confinement and food deprivation

To domesticate some of the bigger or more dangerous species like wolves, the size and character of the individuals had to be acted upon. One of the techniques used was food deprivation and confinement. Recent studies have shown that food quality and conditions of captivity have an impact on the weight of offspring at birth, on their vitality, and on longevity. According to specialists, these remarkable physiological changes are attributable to the stress linked to captivity and to hormonal disturbances associated with a physically and psychologically abnormal state of dependence. The increased frequency of disease and the decrease of mobility and general activity also have a strong impact on the size and vigor of the newborn. 

Modern-day breeders of Pot-bellied Vietnamese pigs, for example, are quite familiar with the effects of a lack of exercise and nutritional deprivation on animals. Some do not hesitate to keep theirs hungry and in miniscule cages to hinder growth. (17) These methods have actually been known for a very long time and have even been applied to humans. As such, two thousand years ago, the Greeks closed up their children in chests, called gloottokoma, made for this purpose. The Romans underfed their children with the same goal in mind. (18) 

After a few generations of this treatment, the facial bones are flattened and saggy, the jaw is shorter, and the teeth, smaller. Chewing is done less efficiently. Limbs are also shorter, and the biomechanics of the body are transformed. Fatty tissues are more abundant and musculature is less developed. At archaeological sites, size is one of the criteria used by anthropologists to identify animals as either domesticated or at least as no longer having lived in their natural habitat. (19)(20)(21)

Food deprivation or an inadequate diet also has a marked effect on sexuality. In nature, the oestrogen cycle depends on food availability. In order to adapt to a chronic lack of nourishment and a short life expectancy, a captive animal reproduces more quickly. It goes from having one heat cycle per year, like wolves, to having two or three depending on the pressure of selection being exerted. (22) It is also sexually precocious. A female dog can come into heat at five or six months of age, while a wolf is only mature at two years. Promiscuity and devious sexual behaviour is the norm in captivity, whereas it is nearly absent in most species living in their ecosystem. (23)(24)(25)

As noted by Konrad Lorenz, like other domesticated animals, humans no longer subjected to natural selection also accumulate irregularities and malformations, which would otherwise be quickly eliminated. (26) In Greece and Turkey for instance, paleopathologists have uncovered thousands of deformed human skeletons dating back to the beginning of sedentary life and agriculture, which show the unmistakable signs of nutritional disease and stunted growth. The hallmark of domestication is a genetic drift that cumulates into marked decadence. (27)

Castration

In addition to acting on the size of animals by food deprivation and confinement, we have sought to calm the natural ardours of more aggressive species and to inhibit unbridled sexual instincts. Castration has been the favoured method of doing so since the beginning of domestication. In the New World, only a few centuries ago, castration was also used to calm those black slaves who tended to revolt or escape a little too often. Theirs is a lesser-known story than that of the eunuchs, or castrated men, in China, Greece, Persia, and ancient Rome. Eunuchs were charged with protecting the harem and some became the irreplaceable confidants of the lords. In the 16th century Chinese imperial court, more than 20,000 eunuchs served as functionaries, guards, messengers, and servants. Finally, there was a time of partiality to castrated choral singers. Farinelli (1705-1782) was among these; he had a brilliant singing career that put him at the personal service of Spain’s Philippe V. The king, who was afflicted with chronic melancholy, found relief only in listening to the miraculous voice of Farinelli, one of the world’s best-known human songbirds. (28)

Selection for docility

While neutering has always been the favoured method of making animals tamer and more docile, it has its limitations: for obvious reasons, you cannot sterilize animals you intend to breed. So, creating animals that were more subdued and manageable also required selecting for docility. As I mentioned earlier, animals with the most pronounced juvenile characteristics were also the most attaching and the most moving; they were the ones that received the most mercy. In other words, the most docile and submissive animals, those that obeyed the most, that let themselves be picked up or taken along, were those which had the best chance of being kept and bred. A recent study has shown that wild foxes raised for fur and selected for their docility towards man will behave like dogs within only twenty generations or so. They seek out human company more and more, and wag their tails. Physically, they shed for longer periods, their ears become floppy, their tails straighten, and their coats change color. The persistence into adulthood of juvenile physical traits and infantile behavior constitutes one of the most striking features of the domestic animal. An adult dog demonstrates behaviors typical of a wolf cub: he seeks frequent attention, he likes to play, he barks, he wiggles, and he crawls submissively. Like a child, he is extremely dependent and, consequently, easily bored. The dog is an eternal adolescent, impetuous and extravagant, and this is probably what makes him so endearing. We would feel very differently about dogs if they outgrew these qualities and acquired social maturity. (29)

It is worth noting that totally dependent animals, whose owners make them lead an almost vegetative existence with limited or no contact with other members of their species, often do not show any sexual impulses; when they do, the impulses are not pronounced or are abnormal and directed towards their adopted master. Some hyper-domesticated males do not raise their leg to urinate and some females do not go into heat, if they do at all, before two or three years of age. 

The brain of a captive animal is smaller than that of his wild counterpart and his senses are much less sharp. Dependence is associated with a degeneration of sensorial faculties. Because domestic animals live less intense lives than wild animals, their senses of smell, sight, hearing, taste, and touch are less solicited; as a result, they become dulled. (30)

In human beings, the shift from nature to culture has favored a form of evolution, which caused some profound changes in our morphology and in our psychology. Man’s flat face, high domed skull and large brain, reduced pelt, large eyes, and small teeth are all infant features that we retain into adulthood. (31) Additionally, the civilization process has resulted in a tightly woven network of social interdependency that is directly related to an increase in docility and submissive behavior. (32) In our present consumer world, adults, like children, are extremely sensitive to a lack of attention. Unless they are constantly entertained and encouraged, they are prone to anxiety, boredom, and depression. 

Inbreeding

Once an animal is smaller, docile and under control, it can be transformed, molded, and sculpted like a garden plant, according to the needs and desires of its creator. The preferred way to do so is by inbreeding.

By mating brothers and sisters, fathers and daughters, mothers and sons, the desired traits are more quickly manifested – after only a few generations – in higher and higher numbers of the offspring. These traits eventually become fixed in the genes and reproduce themselves with a predictable regularity. Such inbreeding is the cornerstone of domestication. The transformation of a species is possible thanks only to animal incest. (33)

Even in humankind, incest has been used across history to maintain “purity.” Kings, for example, had sex freely with their children. Nobles married kin. In Jewish and Arab communities that practice endogamy, the gene pool becomes so limited that health problems begin to occur more frequently, forcing its members to actively seek new genes outside the community. Today, with few exceptions, we no longer marry next of kin - too dangerous - but we do tend to assemble and marry with likeminded people, a kind of positive “incest,” which leads to cultural, racial, and ethnic preservation.

Coercion

The last stage of the domestication process is training. A domesticated animal must learn at least to behave in a controlled manner, and often to obey commands as well. This is achieved through use of positive and/or negative conditioning: 

– Positive conditioning, aka the carrot: a subject is rewarded with some form of reward, such as praise, petting, games, or food, when it performs a desired behavior. 

– Negative conditioning: a subject is punished through the removal of a reward. 

– Positive punishment, aka the whip: a subject may be beaten with a leash, momentarily choked with a collar, slapped on the head, etc.

In general, farm animals are trained using the third method exclusively. In dogs, methods two and three are often used alternatingly. For those who are quite adept at the art of domination, methods one and two are preferred, for reasons of image, as in the case of animal lovers.

The carrotis also popular for controlling people, especially in older democracies where the whipis used most often on those who do not respond to the softer means of coercion.

Ritual slaughter in the name of Yahveh and Allah is as cruel as ritual mutilations in humans and aesthetic mutilations in animals

Charles Danten

Kosher and halal slaughtering is cruel and disrespectful not only to animals but to our culture and to all self-respecting human beings.

In modern civilized societies such as ours, animals are not slaughtered without first making them unconscious with a stun gun. Bleeding to death a conscious animal by slitting its throat, the jihadist way, is an act of great barbarity that all civilized people strongly condemn.

This despicable practice, which is banned in Switzerland since 1893 - more recently in Sweden, Denmark, Slovenia, and since January 2019, in Belgium - must stop.

Mutilations

The same can be said about circumcision in humans. These religious rituals are as barbarous and cruel as aesthetic mutilations in animals such as ear cropping in dogs and declawing in cats.

In humans, this mutilation devoid of humanity is theoretically illegal in many countries. In France, for example, Article 16-3 of the Civil Code states the following:

The integrity of the human body can be impaired only in the case of a medical necessity for a person, and exceptionally, in the therapeutic interest of others. The consent of the person concerned must be obtained beforehand except when his condition necessitates a therapeutic intervention to which he is not in a position to consent.

This mutilation, which is practiced before the victims are adults - at the age of eight days for Jews and between five and eight years for Muslims - are inflicted without the informed consent of the victims. From a legal point of view, this archaic ritual can therefore be considered as child abuse. 

Doberman with cropped ears

In animals, mutilations for aesthetic purposes are now prohibited wherever the Charter of Animal Rights is applied, as in Europe, in California, and in Quebec, Canada. Are animal rights better respected than humans? Not exactly! Religious slaughter in animals and religious circumcision in humans are practiced in all secular societies that claim to be on the cutting edge of social progress. 

Yet, in a secular society such as ours, religion does not have precedence over the law, and the law must be the same for everyone. 

Those who refuse to comply can simply leave the country.

As a matter of fact, according to traditional Islam - true Islam - if Muslims are unable to practice their religion as they should, the Koran invites them to emigrate and not to put themselves in conflict with their adoptive society as do the Muslim Brotherhood, Salafi movement (Islamic fundamentalism) and other fake Islam's that thrive in our societies. (1)

As far as Jews are concerned, if they want to continue living in the Middle Ages, they can always move to Israel, the paradise of ritual circumcision, kosher slaughtering, genocide, and the killing of babies. 

And if Jews and Muslims refuse to leave, they can always change the founding credo of their religion. Dogmas are not etched in stone. In order to adjust to modernity, the Catholic Church for example has changed its fundamentals many times since 1965 (Vatican II). And if Catholics can do so, Jews and Muslims can certainly do so as well. 

Reference

Youssef Hindi (2016). Les mythes fondateurs du choc des civilisations. Comment l'islam est devenu l'ennemi de l'Occident. (The Founding Myths of the Clash of Civilizations. How Islam Became the Enemy of the West). Sigest. 

Ronald Goldman (1997). Circumcision, the hidden trauma: How an american cultural practice affects infants and ultimately us all. Vanguard.

www. circumcision.org

Krishnamurti and the Compassionate Face of Animal Cruelty

Charles Danten, former veterinarian

Virtue-signaling: expression or promotion of viewpoints, behaviours or actions, that are especially valued within the social group, done primarily to enhance the social standing of the person employing them.

Affection-slavery: The weaponization of animals for entertainment, therapeutic, sentimental, and virtue-signalling reasons.

***

Beware of false prophets, which come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly they are ravening wolves. 

Matthew 7:17

Krishnamurti with one of his pets

My whole trajectory in the years that led up to my book, Slaves of Our Affection. The Myth of the Happy Pet, was very much driven by Krishnamurti's philosophy in the spirit of the following quote, which was intended to be the opening exert of my book: “When you negate that which is not love, then you know what love is.” 

So writing my book was basically a process of negation whereby I enumerated chapter after chapter why the human-pet bond everybody is so proud of is as cruel if not more by its hypocrisy and sophistication than factory farming or vivisection. After going through this process of elimination, my reader, I hoped, would be left naked like in Danish author, Hans Christian Andersen’s tale, “The Emperor's New Clothes.”

Unfortunately, I found out later that Krishnamurti did not live up to his own principles, in a big way, as you can see in the attached picture. Although he professed kindness and love towards animals, saying things like, ”animals are man’s slaves,” he was an avid pet owner and animal buff all his life. 

I don’t know what he did with his pets when he left on one of his numerous and lengthy globalist propaganda trips around the world, but it seems odd that someone like him, a true vegetarian - with a major sweet tooth that killed him eventually, he died of a pancreatic cancer - would be a proponent of affection-slavery or of domestication for that matter when you know that domestication is by definition the negation of the true love he claimed to embody. Seeing a dog tethered at his feet seems completely out of character if you know a bit about his philosophy and the contradictions inherent in having a pet (1)(2)(3)(4)(5)(6)(7)(8)(9)(10)(11)(12).  

Proud pet owner and Affection-Slavery advocate
Gary Francine virtue-signaling with his pets.

The same can be said about Gary L. Francione, the leader of the animal abolition movement. He’s not only the happy owner of one or two dogs like most normal people, but of five. Unfortunately, even though he gets his pets from a shelter, by displaying himself in public with his beloved animals, he is implicitly condoning and promoting what he purports to abolish: All forms of animal exploitation and abuse. Which makes him part of the problem rather than the solution. 

The same thing can be said about all the leaders of the animal liberation movement, Peter Singer, Ingrid Newkirk, Oprah Winfrey, Pamela Anderson, Brigitte Bardot, and Paul McCartney, to name but a few. By embracing the pet culture with all their might, they are all accessories to the fact. 

I must admit, the stifling nature of the human-animal bond is not obvious for several reasons:

Dissociation between cruelty, pleasure, and affection

In our culture, we usually keep cruelty and domination dissociated from pleasure and affection, and this, more than anything else, makes the connection hard to see. (13) 

Yet, manifest or hard cruelty is not the only form of abuse and cruelty especially in more democratic societies, where hard violence is severely punished. The cruelty in a person cuddling a pet is much less apparent, but its effects on animals and nature in general are nevertheless as devastating if not more so than the more visible types of cruelty such as vivisection or industrial farming.  

Hard cruelty is episodic and punctual, it can be stopped as soon as

Deceased Animal Rights ideologue Tom Regan 
virtue-signaling with his obese cat and two dogs

 it’s detected, but not so with soft cruelty, precisely because its effects are not immediately obvious. To see them, reason, a special revealing agent, is mandatory. Thanks to this special “flashlight,” it becomes possible to see through cruelty declawed by affection, a form of soft cruelty much more perverse by its subtlety and hypocrisy than the more obvious forms of cruelty which are the bread and butter of animal advocacy.

In his book, Dominance and Affection: The Making of Pets, Professor Yi-Fu Tuan of Yale University shows how affection, a latent form of domination, is used as an instrument of power: 

Love is not what makes the world go around. […] There remains affection. However, affection is not the opposite of dominance: rather it is dominance’s anodyne – it is dominance with a human face. Dominance may be cruel and exploitative, with no hint of affection in it. What it produces is the victim. On the other hand, dominance may be combined with affection, and what it produces is the pet. […] Affection mitigates domination, making it softer and more acceptable, but affection itself is possible only in relationships of inequality. It is the warm and superior feeling one has towards things that one can care for and patronize. The word care so exudes humaneness that we tend to forget its almost inevitable tainting by patronage and condescension. (14)

Slave descendant, Oprah Winfrey, loves affection-slavery:
“What dogs? These are my children, little people with fur
who make my heart a little wider.”

In more explicit terms, here is how Italian ethnologist, Sergio Dalla Bernardina, sees this barbarism with a smiley face:

If slavery was abolished a long time ago, a large portion of the population keeps in their homes completely servile creatures. Through this relationship, any one, even the humblest and most self-conscious individual, can bath in the pleasure of being a master […] Those who like total submission prefer dogs or horses. Proponents of light submission prefer cats. (15)

In her disturbing book, The Dreaded Comparison: Human and Animal Slavery, Marjorie Spiegel, even more to the point, says the following:

We might look at the relationship between a dog and his master as just one example of what is sometimes a modern slave/slave-owner relationship. The dog is considered by his owner to be a “good dog” if he walks to heel, displays no great interest when nearing other dogs, doesn’t run except when allowed, doesn’t bark except when required, and has no emotional needs except when desired by his master. Many dogs spend their entire lives in isolation, chained to a slab of concrete or a tree in their master’s backyard. If a dog wished to do something other than what pleases his master – play with other dogs (socialize), for instance – he may be beaten or otherwise punished. All independent actions are thus discouraged, and the dog learns that he will win approval – and avoid future beatings and other punishments – by suppressing his own desires and conforming to those of the omnipotent human who legally owns him. If at any point, the master grows tired of his slave, he can simply be turned over to “the pound,” which euphemistically means that he will be quietly and secretly killed.” […] In short, “the owner of a slave destroys two freedoms - that of his slave and that of himself. (16) 

A way of seeing things – allow me to insist, perceptions are so

Pamela Anderson:  “I love something soft and warm
to touch anytime I want. I'm such an affectionate person.
I like to have something loveable around me all the time.”

 difficult to change – shared by psychiatrist Hubert Montagner, from the French Institute of Medical Research (INSERM):

Man does not hesitate to control every aspect of his animal’s existence. He tampers with its appearance. He confines it to spaces under his control, imposing exclusive or near-exclusive proximity. He limits his communication with others like it. He selects for behaviors that meet his expectations and conditions his animal to follow rituals. He imposes his whims and self-serving decisions. He encloses it within his own emotions and projections. (17)

And beautifying this unpleasant truth with various shows of affection, such as hiring a professional dog walker, using high-sounding words like companion, love, and child, getting your pet vaccinated each year, having it treated for cancer, defending it, putting boots and a coat on it, decorating it with jewels and ribbons, giving it rights, lifting them all onto the podium of humanity whether they like it or not, does not make things right. The problem is in the very concept of pet.

Brigitte Bardot exercising her right of compassion.

The use of animals as pets, massively condoned by groups like PETA, which have become the ultra-sophisticated promotional instruments of the pet industry, is thus a soft form of domination of the same essence as the harder forms which are practiced on other categories of animals like farm animals. 

This domination, which takes on various forms within these two poles, hard and soft, but of the same nature, is thus the negation of true love and empathy. Judging by the popularity of pets in Western societies, love is not the dominant sentiment but various forms of cruelty, its negation.

Conspicuous compassion

Love of animals, a sentiment that expresses itself in various forms of vegetarianism, animal activism, animal rights, anti-specism, veterinary care, or the mere ownership of a pet is a source of pride for most people. It was Thomas Paine in The Age of Reason who said: “Everything of cruelty to animals is a violation of moral duty.” (18)(19) For the Christian Church of the 19^th century, to love animals as did the saints St. Francis of Assisi and St. Cuthbert was perceived as a way “to establish the pure reign of charity among men,” says French sociologist, Éric Baratay.  The idea was to eradicate “the taste for blood and cruelty, to improve Man for his brothers and thus to protect humanity itself.” (20) 

Slaughterhouse designer Temple Grandin: 

“Animals make us more human.”

Many influential people such as Temple Grandin believe to this day that pets make us more human. (21)(22)(23) Even Steven Pinker, one of Harvard’s brightest stars, sees in Animal Rights and America’s historically unprecedented fondness for pets a giant moral step for humanity. (24) 

Bad Boy Waka Flocka loves animals

Many more people wrongly presume animals to be better judges of human character than humans themselves. As a result, some people want to love and be seen loving animals specifically for the purpose of showing off their moral superiority. Celebrities, salesmen, bad boys and girls, and politicians are especially good at using animals, and children, too, for that matter, to boost their public image and to compel prospective donors, fans, clients, or voters to trust them. What they are really saying through this public virtue-signaling is the following: “trust me, I’m a good person, you see, I love animals.” (25) 

To question this love is a serious attack on the social progress associated with it, as well as an attack on those who have made a career out of defending animals for egocentric reasons. This explains in part why there is so much denial, anger, and resistance every time you even mention this topic. 

Scotoma

To paraphrase Upton Sinclair, it is difficult to get a man to understand something when his job or self-esteem depends on not

Animal liberation advocate
Pau McCartney virtue-signaling with his pet

understanding it. We have a built-in ideological immune system that automatically protects us from ideas that can put our survival or self-confidence at risk. While our eyes capture the world as is on our retinas, our brain performs an editing job in the shadows, a cut-and-paste operation, to adjust reality to fit our pre-existing ideas of it. Anything we see, read, or hear is unconsciously revised to accommodate notions we already have and take for granted. This phenomenon called “scotoma” is the unconscious exclusion of a reality exterior to the field of consciousness; a denial of reality; a psychic mechanism by which unacceptable representations are rejected even before being integrated into the subconscious of the subject, unlike psychological repression, which deals with something which is already embedded in the mind. This is another reason why some of the most absurd and destructive traditions are so hard to change. 

I say “absurd” because you don’t become a better person simply by “loving” an animal or being loved by one. Children raised with animals, for example, are not necessarily destined to become better human beings for it. At least one decent study has shown the contrary. (26) Many serious authors have also debunked this notion. (27)(28)(29) This is a touchy subject matter, so much so that many animal lovers consider it taboo to even mention the fact that many a hardened criminal has also been an animal lover. So I won’t mention Charles Manson, Pol Pot, and Jim Jones for fear of being pilloried and dismissed completely. 

PETA CEO Ingrid Newkirk

Sometimes, it is indeed cruel to be kind. As stated by Ingrid Newkirk, the CEO of PETA, all forms of exploitation and abuse are wrong, but even she fails to acknowledge that having pets is one such form. (30) As the following quotes demonstrate, she did when she first started off but when she realized that her donors were pet owners, she changed her mind radically:

Let us allow the dog to disappear from our brick and concrete jungles – from our firesides, from the leather nooses and chains by which we enslave it. (31) 

The bottom line is that people don't have the right to manipulate or to breed dogs and cats ... If people want toys, they should buy inanimate objects. If they want companionship, they should seek it with their own kind. (32)

Ignorance

Few people know enough about animals to be aware of the harm being done to them under the guise of love and compassion. As reported in animal behaviourist Karen Overall’s textbook on the subject, only 1% of the public is versed in the biological needs and normal behaviors of the animals in their care. (33) 

How then can anyone see beyond appearances? Many people have written about the toll on animals, every animal lover has heard of puppy mills and pounds, but few people have seen the Big Picture. (34) When you finally put all the pieces together, the whole pet business is bleak, very bleak, not only for animals and nature but for people as well, as they are all interlinked. 

There is no winner in affection-slavery. 

References

1. Michael Schaffer (2009). One Nation Under Dog. Henry Holt: 41.

2. Charles Danten (2015). Slaves of Our Affection. The Myth of the Happy Pet. Amazon. 

3. Stuart Spencer (2006). History and Ethics of Keeping Pets: Comparison with Farm Animals. Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics; 19: 17-25. 

4. Leslie Irvine (2004). Pampered or Enslaved? The Moral Dilemmas of Pets. International Journal of Sociology and Social Policy; 24 (4): 5-16.

5. Swabe Joanna (1998). Animals as a Natural Resource: Ambivalence in the Human-Animal Relationship in a Veterinary Practice. Animals, Disease, and Human Society. Human-animal Relations and the Rise of Veterinary Medicine. Routledge. 

6. Marjory Spiegel (1996). The Dreaded Comparison: Human and Animal Slavery. Mirror Books.

7. J. L. Vadakarn (1994). Parle à mon chien, ma tête est malade. Albin Michel.

8. Michael W. Fox (1990).Inhumane Society: The American Way of Exploiting Animals. St. Martin’s Press.

9. Yi-Fu Tuan (1984). Dominance and Affection: The Making of Pets. Yale University Press.

10. S. Wolfensohn (1981). The things we do to dogs. New Scientist: 404-407.

11. Yi-Fu Tuan. Animal Pets: Cruelty and Affection. Dominance and Affection. Work cited.

12. Sergio Dalla Bernardina (2006). L’éloquence des bêtes. Métailié. 

13. Yi-Fu Tuan (1998) Escapism. The John Hopkins University Press.

14. Yi-Fu Tuan. Dominance and Affection. Work cited.

15. Sergio Dalla Bernardina (2006). Work cited. 

16. Marjorie Spiegel. Work Cited.

17. Hubert Montagner (1998). Un élément de qualité de vie. Rencontres à Nantes, éditions AFIRAC: 5. In Talin, Christian (2000). Anthropologie de l’animal de compagnie: L’animal autre figure de l’altérité. Paris: L’Atelier de L’Archet.

18. Katherine C. Grier (2006). Pets in America. A History. Harcourt. 

19. Kathleen Kete (1994). The Beast in the Boudoir: Petkeeping in Nineteenth-Century France. University of California Press.

20. Éric Baratay (1995). Respect de l’animal et respect de l’autre, l’exemple de la zoophilie catholique à l’époque contemporaine. Des bêtes et des hommes : un jeu sur la distance; p. 255-265. 

21. Temple Grandin and Catherine Johnson (2009). Animals Make us Human. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. 

22. Nathan J. Winograd (2007). Redemption.  

23. Karine-Lou Matignon (2000). Sans les animaux, le monde ne serait pas humain. Albin Michel. 

24. Steven Pinker (2009). The rights movement. The better angels of our nature. Vicking: 462.

25. Patrick West (2004). Conspicuous Compassion. Why Sometimes it Really is Cruel to be Kind. Civitas. 

26. Beth Daly and L. L. Morton (2003). Children with Pets Do Not Show Higher Empathy: A Challenge to Current Views. Anthrozoös, 16(4): 298.

27. Yi-Fu Tuan. Work Cited. 

28. Sergio Dalla Bernardina. Work Cited.

29. S. Wolfensohn. Art. Cited.

30. Ingrid Newkirk. Wikipedia. The Free Encyclopedia.

31. Bryant, John (1983). Fettered Kingdoms: An Examination of a Changing Ethic. PETA.

32. Newkirk, Ingrid. PETA. (These quotes are available on the Internet.)

33. Karen L. Overall (1997). Clinical Behavioral Medicine for Small Animals. Mosby.

34. Charles Danten (2015). Work cited.