A Sick Ferret, Animal Rights and Serial Killers

I'm terrified right now.  Not for myself but for my ferret.  He's getting up there in age and he's having some issues that may not be fixable.  I'm extremely attached to him - more so than any other animal I've had in my life - it will kill me when he goes.  When he was at the vet's a couple of weeks ago she noticed a lump.  She wasn't sure if it was a swollen kidney, or if it was a tumour.  He has to go back for tests to find out.  He's had a couple of really bad days since then, and even I can feel swelling, but I feel it on both sides.  It's my hope it's simply a kidney infection that can be cleared up relatively easily, assuming permanent damage hasn't been done by the time we figure out what's really wrong with him.

He got pretty weak because he stopped eating, so I had to make him a mush from his kibble and spoon-feed him.  Once he started eating, though, he didn't stop for a long time.  That gives me hope for more time with him.  He's still eating, drinking, going to the bathroom and walking around, so that means he's not ready to go just yet.  However, he's become a lot more cuddly so I know he isn't feeling good.  He's never been a lap ferret, but when he's sick he becomes one for an hour or so before returning to him own bed.  It's nice to have his company like that, but I don't like the implications.

Many people do not understand my attachment to him, and it's not something I can explain to someone who has never felt it.  I've heard people rant and rave about people saying, "They're like my children."  Usually they say it's not possible, and that people who say that obviously have never had children.  Well, that's not the case.  My pets have always been like my children to some extent, and I have a daughter so I don't make the comparison ignorantly.  My ferrets are just as precious to me as my daughter, and they're a lot more vulnerable than she is.

I'm a protector by nature.  I always have been.  I'm also a fighter.  If I hadn't been I wouldn't be alive today.  Woe betide the person who tries to hurt someone or something I love.  Hell, I'd protect a total stranger as long as I felt the situation warranted it.  I don't like seeing anyone or anything picked on or bullied.  I suppose that's part of the reason I'm such a defender of animal rights.  Animals have no voice of their own, and require people like me to stand up for them.  It might be silly to some people, but I hate seeing even an insect suffer.  If they have to be killed, it has to be done quickly or I get really pissed off.  I don't even know if they feel pain, but I so strongly empathize with the possibility of their suffering that I simply can't take the chance that they do.

It has been shown time and time again that a lot of serial killers start out by hurting animals.  A person who is capable of hurting an animal eventually moves on to "bigger" things.  I don't understand why we allow animal cruelty in our world, knowing what we do about the nature of people who are cruel to them.  If we had harsher penalties for animal cruelty, along with mandatory psychiatric evaluations and counselling, we might very well be able to cut down on the number of human predators that prey on other humans.  That's what makes sense to me anyway.  A lot of people don't seem to deal in common sense, however, so it's difficult to reason with them.

The mindset of people who hurt animals usually involves someone having no respect for life, no empathy for other living creatures, and quite often someone who is passing on to animals the abuse they experience at the hands of other humans.  Animal abusers feel powerful.  It's that whole need to control others.  These same people will most likely end up abusing their life partners, and some end up at the extreme end where they kill people.  So, again I ask, why do we tolerate this behaviour?  It's not just little boys, either.  Little girls do it, too.

There are very few case studies on female serial killers.  Women are less willing to talk about their crimes than men.  Men often enjoy the attention and some have even committed the crimes specifically for the attention.  There's a competitiveness among male serial killers.  Female serial killers are a different breed of killer.  I have read several books documenting the crimes of females SKs, but I've only found one case study where there was a decent cross-section of women that were properly interviewed and studied.  Of course, most serial killers are men anyway, which leaves fewer women to pick from when doing these studies, and their reluctance to discuss it makes it even more difficult to find answers.

The few bits of information we seem to have are that the women were almost always severely abused, sexually, emotionally and physically.  They don't sleep well at night.  They tortured animals as children.  There is a great deal of anger in them, which seems obvious given their crimes, but a lot of serial crimes are done for the thrill.  Sometimes women work that way, but it seems that a vengeful mindset is more often the case.  They're pissed off at what they went through, and who could blame them for their anger?  No, I do not think they're justified in killing people because their father had inappropriate contact with them, or their mother burned them with cigarettes.  I don't mean that at all.  I'm just looking at their motivation.

The anger displayed by male serial killers usually revolves around sex.  Granted, the history of abuse is often the same.  A lot of them were dressed in girls' clothing, many of them had mothers that were prostitutes, almost all of them were horrifically abused.  In a lot of cases the first sign that there was a problem was when pets started going missing, or dead wild animals were found that had obviously been tortured.

This is getting a little deep for a blog, and will probably find its way into an article one day, so I'm not going to go into further detail here.  I'll just say I wish people would wake up to the realization that our true personalities show in how we treat those who are weaker than us.  There have been lots of expressions, including stuff written by Nietzsche, regarding judging people by how they treat prisoners or those who are weak, and it's true.  It's a real test of someone's character.  A person who will not hurt something, even when no one is looking, is truly a good person in that respect.  How we act when not being monitored says everything about who we really are.

I look at Stimpy, my little 2-pound ball of fur, and wonder every time how any person could harm such a sweet creature, but it happens all the time.  As for me, I'll just be grateful to have any time I can get with him.  I'd fight to the death to protect him, but there are some things I just can't protect him from and this is one of them.  If he's suffering and there's no cure I will let him go, no matter how painful it might be for me to do so.  Keeping him alive if there's a lot of pain and no way to help him would be selfish in the extreme, and I couldn't bear to watch him suffer.  I will continue to appreciate the times he curls up in my lap to sleep, knowing there might not be too many of those times left.

The Religion Bludgeon

I am sick to death of people using their religion as a cudgel.  It's disgusting, and the worst perpetrators are those who have no idea what they're talking about.  For instance, I had another verbal altercation with a woman who thinks gay marriage is the same as paedophilia and incest.  Seriously.  She wrote an article saying that if it was okay for people of the same sex to get married, then it should be okay for a father to molest his daughter.  Excuse me?

The worst part is that she uses the bible to back up her claims.  Here's the thing.  According to the English translation of the bible, the bible was not supposed to be translated from its original form...ever.  So, by that measure the English-language bible should not be available to anyone.  Unless this woman is capable of reading the ancient texts in their original language, she has no business quoting anything.  The second portion of that issue is the reason why the bible was not supposed to be translated.  Things lose their meaning.  Think about it.  Do you really think "chew the fat" would translate very well, or "I was canned"?  If they were translated literally, they would make absolutely no sense.  People have had their expressions as long as there has been formal language, and every language and culture has different expressions.

For example, the term cribbing has no meaning in North America that I'm aware of, but in India it means complaining.  This is an English word that is used by people in India.  How would we translate something like that?  A person would have to be fully immersed in multiple cultures in order to do a proper translation of anything, and I have to say it's very unlikely that the bible was translated by anyone who was open-minded enough to be well-versed in any culture other than their own.  The bible was translated by people with a specific religious bent, and everything translated by them would have had that slant.  Not just a biased opinion, but also a specific cultural mindset about what something means.  If a term made no sense, they would have to improvise.  Not a good thing when it comes to judging the morality of others, based on the supposed word of God.  Never mind the whole, "Judge not lest ye be judged" thing.

Of course, the bible was not written by God.  The bible was written by people.  Even the account of Jesus and the crucifixion was written about fifty years after Jesus had supposedly 'died for our sins'.  Back then, contrary to what bible-thumpers believe, people simply did not live that long.  After fifty years there wouldn't likely have been anyone alive who had been around at the time the crucifixion story takes place.  That relegates the story to the equivalent of our urban legends, if that.  These days we have the internet to check up on facts and figures.  Back then stories were told verbally.  If you remember your bedtime stories even, there is a great deal of embellishment from our parents, let alone the stories being told back then about someone who was long dead.

Every tale that wasn't written by the person it happened to, is hearsay, and then you have to be skeptical regarding the ones who supposedly had these things happen, because people lie all the time.  They lied back then, and they lie today.  In fact, it's a lot harder to get away with a lie now, than it used to be.  Communication is constant and instant now.  We don't have to wait for a traveller to bring word to us of our loved ones, hoping that the words are at least similar to what was actually said.  No, we have e-mail and cell phones where we get the information "directly from the horse's mouth" (another phrase that wouldn't translate well I imagine) so to speak, and we get it as it's being told.  Even then the information is only as reliable as its source.

The sad fact is, there is no real truth in the world.  There is only perspective.  My viewpoint, even if my morals and beliefs are similar to someone else's, will be completely different from that of another person.  The information we take in and absorb will be different.  Look at eyewitness accounts of criminal activity.  Every account will be different, even when nobody is lying.  We take in different information from the event than the information taken in by the person standing next to us.

Applying these principals to the stories of the bible, you can see where it's not exactly reliable.  I'm not saying belief in God is wrong, or even necessarily belonging to a structured religion.  I'm just saying we can't believe everything we read, even in the bible.  Mistranslations, slanted beliefs, different cultural perspectives, hearsay, distortion from information passed through word-of-mouth (check the gossip mill for that one), embellishment by people wanting to entertain, and then the intake of differing information regarding an event - these things all add up to a confusing morass of nothing.

We can take the bible as a morality tale, if we like, but whose morality?  It certainly isn't God's morality, seeing as the words were not written by God, and the translation itself forbidden.  No, the morality we find in the bible is the morality found in the human beings who wrote the stories a couple thousand years ago.  Are we supposed to compare ourselves to those people?  We have nothing in common with them, except possibly our range of emotions and other human traits.  Their lives looked nothing like ours.

They lived in times with a completely different governmental, social, and religious structure.  The people then would have no idea how to cope with the lives we live now, and the reverse is true as well.  After all, how many of us would survive in a time of disease-ridden filth in the streets, a complete lack of indoor plumbing, food we had to grow ourselves, and absolutely no protection from our governments?  A time when most people were basically slaves to the various royalties.

If we took the bible at its word, we would also have to assume all people came from Adam and Eve.  If that's the case, then their children were banging each other and producing offspring from that incestuous coupling.  Right.  If we are all the descendants of Adam and Eve, our DNA should be similar.  Siblings have specific markers that show them to be siblings.  Alleles, they're called.  The same thing is found in parent-child relationships.  If a child is born of two people with DNA that close, they share even more alleles.  Our genetic structure would bear out the fact that we're related to everyone else.  So, not only is the idea repugnant, but it's patently false at a genetic level.

I do find it funny when people go searching for the Ark.  Noah's, I mean, not the Ark of the Covenant.  Why would anyone think there would be any portion of that Ark remaining, assuming it existed in the first place?  It was made of wood, for crying out loud.  Wood does not last thousands of years, with the exception of petrified wood which can last for millions of years.  If the Ark had been petrified, it would have been found by now.

Faith in the ancient, and grossly inaccurate, stories is typical of the ignorant mindset I encounter with regards to these religious twits.  I'm not saying they're all twits - just the ones who choose to remain woefully uninformed, blinding themselves to scientific facts.  If you want other people to believe what you believe, then you have to be able to present it to them in a form that's believable.  Logic would be of great assistance here.

As I've said before, the more I learn about science and anatomy, the more miraculous I think we are, and that science is not the enemy of religion.  I'm agnostic, but I lean toward a belief in a supreme being of some sort simply because it makes more sense to me as I go.  The complex structure of our bodies makes me feel there's a lot we do not know about our origins, and there's a lot we have to learn.

Our evolution into our current form is miraculous in itself.  The various addresses/codes embedded into our stem cells that tell the cells exactly where to go and what to create when they get there, is beyond amazing to me.  Embryonic stem cells are capable of anything.  They start out identical, and then are routed to where they need to be.  Once they're there they create the part of us that's supposed to be in that exact spot.  The embryonic stem cells that create our hearts are the exact same as the ones that create our skin, and what the scientists are trying to figure out now, is how the hell they know the difference.

I think, if people would allow themselves to move beyond blind faith into a world of knowledge, they would find even more faith.  Faith based on reality and not stories told by uneducated, illiterate masses.  Ignorance may be bliss for the ignorant, but it pisses off everyone else.

Hated by My Left Side & Right Brain

It is absolutely ridiculous that the left half of my body hates me.  It's the right half of my brain that controls the left half of my body, so obviously the right hemisphere of my brain is having issues.  Almost every injury I've ever had has been to the left side of my body.  I broke three bones in my left foot many years ago, it's my left ankle that got damaged in my skydiving accident, I got a crack in my left wrist along with a ganglion cyst that needed to be drained and a shot of cortisone administered, I've dropped a one-litre shampoo bottle on my left foot which ruptured a vein, my left knee is the one I injured as a teenager and damaged the meniscus, and even though I need surgery on both my hips, my left is by far the worst.

Now, in the span of about 12 hours I have managed to burn both my left foot and my left hand, in two completely separate incidents.  The first time I spilled boiling water on my foot, and the second was hours later when I burned myself on the toaster.  So, I think it's time I took a serious gander at my brain.  Sawing open the skull is not an option, so I'll have to just think things through using the logical, left hemisphere of my brain.

 To begin with, the right hemisphere controls the non-linear, more creative thought processes.  It also processes spatial information.  There's definitely a malfunction somewhere in there, because obviously it is not processing spatial relationships very well at all.  It's supposed to be the big-picture side of the brain, and it's not working.

There are a couple other things I need to consider here.  For one, my fine motor skills are currently not working as well for two reasons.  The first is that I'm on medication.  The second is that I'm not as physical as I once was, and I've lost some muscle.  I recently read an article on proprioception, which has to do with understanding the positioning of our bodies.  The more we practice doing movements, the better we are at them, and the better we are at recovering our balance.  If we twist our ankles when we have been sitting idle for a long time, we really hurt ourselves, and the reverse is true, too, because we're out of practice with understanding our body positioning.  If we've been using our bodies we don't hurt ourselves as badly.  It's not the same as muscles, but it works in conjunction with them.  I was thrilled to read that article, actually, because it explained a lot regarding my general state of physical ineptitude.

The second thing to consider is that I'm right-handed.  That means the left side of my body is never going to be as graceful as the right, and that's saying something because the right side of my body is a klutz, too.  It also means my left half isn't as strong because I don't use the muscles as often.

(I have to say, every time I think about anatomy I keep feeling like we're all missing out on the miracle our bodies are.  The more I know, scientifically about everything around me, the more miraculous it all appears to me.)

This doesn't change a damn thing for me, though.  I'm still a klutz, and I still keep hurting my left side.  What I really need to do is figure out what to do about it.  I don't think there's much I can do right now.  Being on medication makes it a bad idea to do serious exercise, even if it were physically okay for me to do it.  I'm already giving the creative part of my brain a workout every day, now that I'm constantly writing again, so I'm doing what I can there.  I guess, like everything else, I'll just have to wait until the day comes when all is right with my body again and I can move on with my life.  Limbo sucks!