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European animal lovers went too far

FeaturesEuropean animal lovers went too far

by Colin Hyde

I was watching a documentary of the 2008 Michael Vick trial for dog fighting and when I saw Vick, a black man, standing and apologizing before all those angry reporters, almost all of them white, it like made me think about the farce of white people, batting so hard for dogs after all they did over the last five hundred years. I’m not into animal cruelty. When I was out of sorts, I did use my dog as a footstool, and I did push my dog around, not too much.

Okay, I might have been out of line there, but for all the love I gave my dog, I felt he shouldn’t mind too much about me making him the sacrifice for the human animal that was the cause of my trouble. And the math made a lot of sense. If I punched the human who got on my nerves, I could go to jail, or, or the person could beat me up. I think it is a better deal for a domesticated dog to be a footstool than to be without an owner. All the zoo keepers say a domesticated animal doesn’t stand a chance in the wild.

In 2007 Vick was at the height of his football career, the owner of a $130 million contract. He would have to file for bankruptcy after what they did to him, for being in a dogfighting ring. I don’t know which cruel ancestor of the human race invented the sport, but we know that there was a time when all human beings were barbarians. If you read the story White Fang, by Jack London, you will remember the hero, White Fang, being used as a fighter, until he got mauled one day by a bulldog. The badly injured White Fang is rescued, and with his new owner he ends up enjoying the incredible life of a domesticated dog that is owned by people who can afford raw meat by the ton.

Dogfighting is a horrible sport. But really, where do our European ancestors come off so saintly? My, these are people that murdered their way to world dominance, and they are still deep in the business of making deadly weapons. Do they still run bulls in Spain? But they are against cockfighting. They eat chickens, slaughter them and fry ‘em, but cockfighting is against their law. Well, in cockfighting at least the winning cock can go eat corn, and go out and tread a few hens and pullets. What chance does a chicken in a coop have? None!

These Europeans have some face. They will teach us how to be better people. Where are their credentials? Who are they to teach? They need to be humble. Yes, they need to humble up themselves.

I know, I know we shouldn’t complain about this kinder, gentler side of this ancestor. As the Good Book says, there is joy in heaven over the salvation of every sinner. Some Europeans have indeed come a long way. Their ambition in this case was noble. But the savage way they went after Vick made dogfighting look like a sport created by the Vatican. Vick should have been shamed, exposed, his cruelty put out there for all in the world to see. He should not have been put in jail.

Fat shaming has completely been replaced by drugs

Let’s be factual here. There are ugly people who tease others to tear them down. I’ll save my ink for people who say things that might be hurtful because they love you. A mother doesn’t tell a daughter who doesn’t clean her room ‘you are a lazy slob’ because she wants to hurt her. She tells the slob ‘you are a nasty so-and-so’ because she wants, desperately needs this girl she loves to right herself, so she doesn’t get sick, and so she doesn’t shame herself and her family. A dad doesn’t tell his son to stop cursing and drinking like a rum hound because he loves to hurt his boy’s feelings. He knows that if the boy doesn’t carry himself, he’ll get his butt thrown out of school, and he’ll never get a job in the bank, where all the money is at.

Okay, we know a thin line exists; there is always a thin line. The girl could be congenitally a dormilona, or a person who gets a kick out of an unkempt bed or an unclean floor, and the boy’s only joy in this world might be, ehm, bad company.

Getting to the meat of it, we all know that human beings wouldn’t have made it to supremacy in the animal world if they were carrying extra weight. The top carnivores would have hunted and eaten us, and right there all God’s marvelous plans would have gone down the drain. Now, there are people who are fascinated by fat, fat in the pot, and fat on a person of the opposite sex. Bully, there is a niche for everyone.

Wow, there’s a lot of firsts since Covid-19, and this year for the very first time a fat tennis player stepped on a tennis court, and starred too, in the Australian Open. Jelena Ostapenko, who in her slim and trim days won the French Open back in 2017, took the court like thirty pounds over her fighting weight, and beat the tennis off young heroine, Coco Gauff. You didn’t have to be a genius to script Miss Ostapenko’s strategy. Go for broke on every shot. Yap, cut down the running; swing for the lines. But when she met a player more seasoned than the young Miss Gauff, well she ran out of gas.

By the way, I must make it clear that I checked, and it’s no condition like diabetes, or sex without contraception that put Jelena into the weight gain race.

Okay my friends, we’re really in it now. Aha, a small and aggressive clique with a membership that adored their fat, made a mighty stand. Suddenly a new term was introduced to the dictionary, fat shaming, and anyone who didn’t heed the lesson felt the weight of the establishment on their heads. Since then, parents can no longer “sweat” a child who is a food hound, and a friend can no longer gently chide a buddy about the health dangers associated with being too stout.

Enter the druggists into the vacuum, like the pharmaceutical world needed more possibilities to rake in the people’s money. Now that fat shaming is no longer a rival, the drug-makers own the world. One report I have is that the business is presently worth nearly US$2 billion annually, and it is expected to more than quintuple in the next ten years. A story on Yahoo by Mike Bebernes, “Are new weight loss drugs really an obesity ‘game changer’?” says the new drugs they’re making are very popular with celebrities.

According to Bebernes’ story, the American CDC states that more than 40% of Americans qualify as obese, and the diseases associated with it are estimated to cost the US medical system upwards of US$170 billion per year. Enter the new drugs which, “typically injected once a week, can help medically obese people lose as much as 15% of their body weight and keep it off.” One of the hot drugs, ozempic, is only approved for diabetes control in the US, but doctors are still prescribing it for obesity. And that has caused a run on ozempic, which has led to a shortage of it for diabetics. The story says a big drawback for the drug is cost, as much as US$1,300 per month. Hmm, I bet some generic will come along soon to take care of that.

Continuing with Bebernes’ story, he says some believe the new drugs will “mark a turning point where the medical field – and society at large – starts treating obesity as a disease, rather than the results of personal shortcomings, like lack of willpower”, while some say the focus should be on life-threatening conditions, that getting people to lose weight shouldn’t be a priority because growing research says weight isn’t that strong a marker for health.

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