A Thinking Reed

"Man is but a reed, the most feeble thing in nature, but he is a thinking reed" – Blaise Pascal

Animal Rights and Issues

  • Circuses are animal abuse

    I don’t know about St. Patrick, but I can’t imagine St. Francis would approve. Read more

  • Carrie vs. the hunters

    I figure that any overlap, however tenuous, between heavy metal and animal rights falls under this blog’s purview, so I will link to this story about former American Idol-turned-country superstar Carrie Underwood. Carrie’s latest single is a remake of the immortal Mötley Crüe ballad “Home Sweet Home” and is being used as the soundtrack for Read more

  • By (almost) any means necessary

    I thought this interview with Paul Watson of the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society. They’re like Greenpeace on steroids: they do everything short of harming people to stop whalers. In fact, Watson calls Greenpeace the “Avon Ladies” of environmentalism and compares their philosophy of “bearing witness” to standing idly by while someone’s attacked: They have this Read more

  • Michael Pollan interviewed in Mother Jones

    Here. I do take issue with this, though: MJ: When you first wrote the mantra “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants,” did you have any idea what kind of reaction you’d get? MP: Well, I studied my poetry in school, and I knew there was something about the way it sounded that made it Read more

  • “Christian Ethics and Nonhuman Animals”

    It doesn’t break much new ground, but this essay in the online journal of Orthodox Theology Theandros nicely brings together several strands of thought about re-evaluating Christian attitudes toward animals. Read more

  • Primates are not pets

    Or at least they shouldn’t be. Read more

  • Chew the right thing

    I’m surprised I never came across this before, but philosophers David Edmonds and Nigel Warburton have a terrific series of podcasts called Philosophy Bites, which consist of relatively short interviews with philosophers on various topics of interest. The site is here; it’s also available as a free download on iTunes. So far I’ve listened to Read more

  • How Ira Glass went veggie

    Here’s the host of NPR’s “This American Life” explaining to David Letterman. The funny thing is that throughout the clip Letterman and the audience are chuckling at the wacky “poultry activist”* who protested Glass’s show because of some feature they had called “Poultry Slam” (full disclosure: I’ve never listened to the show). The audience is Read more

  • “Radical animal rights agenda” in the White House?

    The “Center for Consumer Freedom” has a hysterical (in both senses of the word) article about the looming threat posed by “radical animal rights activist” Cass Sunstein in his new capacity as President Obama’s “regulatory czar” in the Office of Management and Budget’s Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs. I knew but had forgotten that Read more

  • Animals and Good Samaritans

    This is in interesting article about the dilemmas that the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association faces concerning whether and when to help marine animals in distress. Dilemmas like this are sometimes used as a reductio ad absurdum of animal rights. For instance, people will sometimes ask, if we have an obligation not to wantonly kill Read more