GOTTA FIGHT FOR YOUR RITES

Another reason not to kill animals, at least not ritually: It starts fires. And it upsets your neighbors. Backyard goat-killing is getting banned in one N.C. town because the horrific noise "made the hair stand up on the back of your neck." So now the goat-killing can go on, but not out in the back yard. Just keep it outa my sight, OK? The article notes a similar case in another town where the "biggest industry is a Tyson chicken 'processing plant.'"
Chicken "processing" is, of course, just another sick ritual, closely related to goose processing. And with both, there's always a bunch of garbage left over, which further annoys those prissy neighbors.


These stories and the way they're reported, in addition to further illustrating how deeply conflicted our culture is about animal-kiling, are also prime examples of a favorite pro-killing argument: Hey, you do such and such (e.g. eat storebought meat, kill chickens) therefore you can't tell me not to do this (e.g. slaughter goats in backyards, shoot geese and stick them in your trash can). Of course, as an ad hominem (tu quoque) argument, it's technically invalid, but it's often enough to shut critics up. Unless they're vegan, of course, when the "logic" of it fails miserably.


Meanwhile, the ritual of terrorizing foxes with hounds and horses while wearing spiffy clothes just had few legs cut out from under it, as a study showed that Fox Hunting Does Not Cut Numbers of the Animal.
So a fave rationale of hunters, that "we're keeping the population down" is even more transparently bogus than before. Since foxes aren't "eatin' meat" for humans (soon to be the case with white-tailed deer), the only remaining excuse for this barbaric activity is, again, the ritual - the chauvinistic addiction to this moronic form of infantile pleasure. And these folks have the gall to claim they're better than monkeys?