Submitted by Elaine Magliaro, Guest Blogger
Rep. Curtis Oda, a Republican member of the Utah House of Representatives, says he wants “to protect people from getting in trouble for doing the right thing.” And the “right thing” according to Oda is killing feral animals. Oda does not think that feral animals should be protected by a law that makes cruelty to animals a felony. He feels that feral animals can pose health risks.
Oda is chief sponsor of House Bill 210 that would change the current law in order to allow the humane killing of feral animals. Two of the killing methods that Oda considers to be humane are clubbing and decapitation.
Animal advocate Ann Davis believes that lethal injection is the only humane way to put down animals. Davis has concerns about the bill’s ramifications. “How do you differentiate a feral cat from somebody’s beloved pet? Most often you don’t put a collar on a cat.” Davis fears that if the bill is passed into law, it might open up the floodgates to the mass killings of animals.
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From The Colbert Report (1/26/2011): Mr. Smith Goes to the State Legislature Then Later Possibly Washington—Curtis Oda
Sources:
There is sincerity and there is truthfulness, and infinite sincerity may be perfectly untruthful.
As I have indicated many times, I am free of the ability to experience thought in word or picture form. I am also free of the ability to suffer because I finally have come to slightly grasp the understanding, that I would need to be able to think in words in order to begin to make any interpretation of anything which interpretation would grant me any access to the experience of suffering.
I do not, and can not, suffer because I do not an can not form any interpretation other than what is is what is. I cannot form any interpretation of the form whereby I would actually want anything to ever be other than as it is, as it changes in becoming what it is.
Most days, and, sometimes several times a day, the spasms of my ileo-rectal post-colectomy anastomosis begin to spasm. This pain readily gets so intense as to activate my pain system into full saturation, such that no more intense pain within that aspect of my pain system is possible. Yet such pain causes me no suffering.
The pain is, and is so intense that it has taken me to where I could endure the experience for only a few milliseconds, with those few milliseconds of experienced pain convolving through the entire pain episode during each such episode.
Thus, on a nearly daily basis, I experience pain system activation as intense as if I were being devoured alive. This give me a clear understanding of the mercy of the gift of the sharing of the gift of life as a collaborative process without which there would be no life whatsoever.
Having lived in rural areas, having parents who were of the frontier pioneer experience of over a century ago, my parents made sure that, were society to totally collapse, I would be fully capable of hunting, butchering, cooking, and eating any animal which made itself available to me as possible food to sustain my life. I have closely observed the slaughtering of foodstock animals, and I endorse the work of Dr. Temple Grandin in making animal food supply minimally of animal physiological distress.
Animals come with a mechanism, sometimes named “shock” which reduces the “suffering” of being eaten alive to insignificance.
Bashing feral animals because they exist where a person’s judgment makes the feral animals wrong in existing is plausibly the ultimate boundary of the human insanity of arrogantly adamant ignorance.
Bruce:
“especially when compared to the way nature does the job. (Ever see a hawk disembowel a squirrel? Not a pretty sight.)”
Shall we require predators in nature to begin using knives and forks? Less messy, donchaknow. A hawk is only doing what its nature dictates as nature dictates with all predators in nature – I thought humans were a higher species, capable of feelings, compassion and reason?
Humans are not hawks – we have the ability to recognize cruel and unusual punishment. Clubbing or decapitating feral animals is not humane.
I would have more respect for Representative Oda if he proposed working with the ASPCA and the Humane Society to spay/neuter feral animals, not beat the crap out of them as a way to reduce its numbers.
RE: Bdaman, January 30, 2011 at 12:31 pm
Utah authorities have argued that only Indians can join the church.
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Now I know my education was terribly inadequate.
I was taught that Utah was one of the United States of America.
But all of the states of the United States of America are subject to that non-establishment thing in the U.S. Constitution…
Were Utah one of the United States of America, Utah authorities would have no say in who may or may not be a member of a Native American Church.
If one of the native american Nations, say the Ho Chunk, naturalized me, I would be a naturalized native american?
Would that make me a natural person, gender not relevant?
Oh what a tangled web is deftly weaved,
When, for countless thousands of years,
Law is practiced to make the world deceived?
What would happen if, in an attempt to curtail alcohol abuse, the Utah Legislature declared that only native-born Italians could join the Catholic Church and receive the wine during Holy Communion?
First Amendment lawsuits would issue forth like crickets on Mormon crops. “Congress shall make no law” prohibiting the free exercise of religion, the First Amendment proclaims. It’s not ambiguous.
Yet that is exactly what lawmakers are considering: a rule to govern the use of peyote in religious rites by the Native American Church. House Bill 306, sponsored by Rep. Curtis Oda, would prohibit anyone other than American Indians from using peyote or participating in peyote ceremonies. The bill passed the house Monday and now advances to the Senate.
Oda, a Republican from Clearfield, said he’s sponsoring the bill at the request of the attorney general to bring Utah’s law into compliance with federal regulations on peyote. Federal law permits the use of peyote, drug harvested from cactus and classified as a hallucinogen, for ceremonial purposes by American Indians and Native American churches.
At issue is who can join the Native American Church.
Utah authorities have argued that only Indians can join the church. One local NAC leader, James Warren “Flaming Eagle” Mooney, even faced drug charges because he admitted non-American Indians into his Oklevueha Earthwalks Native American Church.
http://www.entheogen.com/forum/archive/index.php?t-3927.html
Flaming Eagle, wonder how he got that name
I used to go clubbing…..but that was the 70’s when Disco was king….not so much anymore….
This of course on the heels of this discovery.
People in North America were breeding- and eating- domestic dogs as early as 9,400 years ago, according to new analysis of a bone fragment discovered in a Texas cave.
Scientists were able to identify the bone- about the size of an adult’s pinkie nail- as a piece of the right occipital condyle of a canine. Occiptal condyles are parts of vertebrate skulls where the skull meets the spine.
Genetic tests later proved that the bone comes from a dog and not a wolf, coyote, or fox.
http://www.archaeologydaily.com/news/201101185954/Oldest-Domesticated-Dog-in-Americas-Found-Was-Human-Food.html
How does he feel about the methods for disposing
If he gets his way I wouldn’t order Chinese on any visit to Utah 🙂
Bruce in Jersey,
In addition to the inhumane killing methods, animal advocates like Ann Davis and the Humane Society of Utah are concerned that people’s pets may be killed.
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From The Humane Society of Utah
Humane Society Opposes Animal Cruelty Amendments
http://www.utahhumane.org/about%20us/news/Humane%20Society%20Opposes%20Animal%20Cruelty%20Amendments
Excerpt:
The Humane Society takes issue with language in the proposed legislation “allowing the humane shooting or killing of an animal if the person doing the shooting or killing has a reasonable belief the animal is feral.” The Humane Society questions what constitutes “reasonable belief” and whether anyone can “guarantee” these animals would be killed “humanely.”
HSU Executive Director Gene Baierschmidt claims “the public is not trained to determine whether an animal is feral. Thereʼs going to be situations where people could be accidentally killing other peopleʼs pets. It gives alot of of leeway and opens the door for alot of abuse to take place. We believe this bill, as written, is archaic and inhumane. If passed, the amendments called for in this bill would declare ʻopen seasonʼ on Utahʼs feral cat population. Many have worked tirelessly to develop trap, neuter and release programs which allow these cats to live out their lives without reproducing.”
Bruce in Jersey: “Nor am I persuaded that shooting, clubbing and decapitation aren’t at least as humane as other methods of killing nuisance animals”
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I can. If clubbing to death is no less humane than any other method why not just club death row prisoners to death instead of using lethal injection? Given the choice which would you prefer to have used on you? I’ll go with the needle for $400 Alex.
This bill is aimed at cats and dogs and that is obvious by including clubbing and decapitation. Any animal that you can get close enough to, or call to you, to beat to death or hold down and decapitate can be captured and euthanized humanely if there’s a need for them to die a all. Clubbing and decapitation is a nod toward sadists and nothing more.
I know a bow hunter that used a bow on small animals, (rabbits and squirrels) not for the meat, which he left, but just as ‘practice’. Are there bow hunters in Utah perhaps? Is Rep. Oda a bow hunter? Is Rep. Oda pandering to the sadist vote?
This actually looks like the Republican penchant for looking behind instead of forward. The article states that a law to prevent cruelty to animals, domestic animals primarily, was passed in 2008 after some years of lobbying effort by various groups. Now a new law is being proposed that would in major part reverse that law.
People, before you go nuts on this post read the AP story at the Salt Lake Tribune link. It’s not at all clear that Rep. Oda’s bill is unreasonable. I’m not going to assume that Utah doesn’t have a problem with feral animals that warrants culling them, not from my vantage point in New jersey, anyway. Nor am I persuaded that shooting, clubbing and decapitation aren’t at least as humane as other methods of killing nuisance animals – especially when compared to the way nature does the job. (Ever see a hawk disembowel a squirrel? Not a pretty sight.)
Dogfighting is cruelty to animals. Puppy mills are cruel. Factory farms are cruel. Starving a pet is cruel. A quick kill is not cruel; the appropriate measure of cruelty is the duration and intensity of the animal’s suffering.
Mocking Rep. Oda’s bill without knowledge of its language and motivations, and the balance of harms and benefits before the legislature considering it, is the kind of knee-jerk PC that gives the Right Wing ammunition against liberals. Jeez, we can’t even enact enough gun control to save thousands of human lives each year. Do we want to waste efforts on saving feral animals?
I have decided to classify all members of the species homo sapiens sapiens as feral animals.
Sure does fit with what I find in the news, and that isn’t news.
i’d pay to see curtis go up against a feral pitbull mix with a club
Honest to god, the world is going mad … or maybe it’s just Utah
Wonder if Representative Oda is the “domesticared individual” of what the definintion speaks?
“The term feral refers to any type of animal or plant that was once domesticated but has now reverted to the wild. Domesticated animals become feral when they are released, abandoned or if they escape from human captivity. A feral animal not only include the once ***domesticated individual*** but also any offspring the animals may have or will produce after they have become feral.
Most feral animals in any particular region arrive there due to human activity. In order for them to become feral they must be able to survive in the habitat independently. For this reason exotic pets do not normally survive long enough to be deemed feral.
What a disgusting and barbaric state.
Buddha,
Those feral politicians are getting way out of control. Maybe they can be humanely kept under control at Gitmo.
How does he feel about the methods for disposing of feral politicians?
I wonder who he is a puppet for.
rafflaw,
“He is going to make Michele Bachmann look intelligent!”
That would be quite an accomplishment, wouldn’t it?
Clubbing and decapitation are humane ways to kill feral animals in Utah??? I think that this state Rep. needs some counseling as to why that is one of the most ridiculous statements that I have heard. He is going to make Michele Bachmann look intelligent!