STOP THE STAMPEDING STUPID! Critters, Cruelty, and Creationism. And the History of World War II

Every year there is an uproar about the Calgary Stampede and the welfare of animals. One the one hand, bleeding heart liberal critter rights folk try to prevent animals from being tortured while countless more defend what is called “The Greatest Outdoor Show on Earth”.

Some guy doing something macho. Apparently.

Although in general I agree with the bleeding heart liberals about a lot of things, I do belong to P.E.T.A. Yes, I am one of those People who Eat Tasty Animals and I like to go fishing. Still, I think the Stampede is pretty awful. OK, so I’m a hypocrite. But I do think there is a difference between torturing intelligent, sentient animals, and those that a little further down on the brain scale. How many of us won’t swat a fly?

Every year at the Stampede animals die needlessly (four this year). Others are flipped on their back by some big brutes and tied up, while some other guys who think Hummers and Axe body spray are sexy™ torment poor horses, bulls, or large goats by seeing who can sit on them the longest. And they play the worst god awful country music ever. I will, however, listen to justifications for it all and I respect that there are frequent reviews of safety for the critters. But I did read of one justification yesterday morning that BENT ME THE HELL OUT OF SHAPE. You guessed it, it was religious.

This is NOT Dr. Jim

I will admit a bias against the Stampede. Dr. Jim was never really all that into cowboy imagery. Even when I was a kid, Westerns and the like took second or third place behind war movies and model airplanes. I did have some some plastic logs for making cavalry forts, toy cowboy guns and so forth, and I did like to watch F-Troop (remember that?), but really, I wasn’t an imperialistic, land grabbing cowboy, out to displace the Indians.

I was an over militarized, war mongering, carpet bomb the village to save it, ‘ha ha, I sank your battleship’, Tora Tora Tora kind of guy.

Poster for the 70s movie about the bombing of Pearl Harbour (“Tora” = “Tiger” in Japanese, the code word for the operation). Notice the big bird poop-splat on the window of the plane in the foreground. The U.S. was so ill prepared for war they tried to use gulls to stop the Japanese. They were notoriously ineffective. This led to an increase in animal cruelty in Western culture.

In retaliation for the bird poop attacks, the Japanese targeted U.S. gophers, a strategy that backfired as it saved the Americans doing it themselves that year. It did set the stage for post-war reconciliation, though.

Wow, I’m really digressing here, aren’t I? What was this post supposed to be about? Oh yeah, religion and cowboys and horses and stuff.

Some guy, just before moseying into town to visit Miss Kitty at the saloon. She didn’t just sell drinks, did she?

So, what has got my boxers in a bunch? It’s  not any rationally considered ethical position (that I may or may not disagree with), but outright claims of divine license. Yup, the Bible is being drawn into the debate about animal cruelty in a letter in the Calgary Herald. Some guy (not the guy above) from Medicine Hat wrote yesterday:

Re: “Are we having fun yet?” Letter, July 13.
My earliest recollection of the Stampede was in 1932 from our house on Scotchman’s Hill which offered a panoramic view of rodeo and midway. Livestock and the Calgary Exhibition and Stampede have always gone hand in hand. Without rodeo, there is no Calgary Stampede. In trying to make her case against rodeo, Rhonda Anderson claims, “A steer, a horse and a human being are all animals.” Not so! A check of Genesis 1:25-28 proves the unsustainability of that argument.
Bill Shaw

Hokey Dokey, Here is Genesis 1

²⁵And God made the beast of the earth after his kind, and cattle after their kind, and every thing that creepeth upon the earth after his kind: and God saw that it was good.
²⁶And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.
²⁷So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them.
²⁸And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth.

Well, that just about explains it all, doesn’t it? We can do what we what to what we want when we want because a bunch of old Israelites (actually Judeans, but that is a different story) thought that their national deity had created them as divine representatives on earth. And since they also thought that this god could do what he wanted to what he wanted whenever he wanted to, that should be good enough for us. Really? Are there no limits to this biblical sanction?

The belief that the Bible sanctions any kind of human excess is something conservative Christians have been wrestling with for a long time. Fortunately, there is a movement within evangelical Christianity to see the human relationship with creation as one of caretaker and not lord and master.

On the other hand, why look to 2500 year old models at all when trying to figure out how to live moral lives? Do we need the Bible to help think about animals? I don’t think so.

The Arrogant Worms, thinking about cows. But not in the biblical sense (I hope).

Right, where were we?  Oh yeah, the war… no, the Bible. Its so hard to tell them apart sometimes!

Noah’s ark that saved humanity and all the animals from being destroyed by some god. Notice the satanic woodpecker out to wreck this deity’s plan. This biblical story gave the Americans the idea of defending themselves by using birds. Unfortunately, they read the wrong translations which mistook the Hebrew term for “woodpecker” as “gull”. This led to the disaster at Pearl Harbor but unexpected success on the ground war when George S. Patton did his own translation, and developed his strategy that he summed up as “The best defense is a good ostrich”.

The Bible also tells of how humans pissed off God so that that almost all of the animals had to be killed. According to Biblical and Judeo-Christian tradition, it is only after the flood that humans began eating meat with God’s permission (so long as we don’t consume its blood). Apparently, any cruelty we inflict on them otherwise is fine, eh, Mr. Shaw? Of course, animals are useful, and we domesticated a lot of them. And we militarized them too, which is why no one has a right to complain about this my conflation of Stampeding Bible Thumpers and WWII history.

Inspired by medieval pictures of a gallant knights like this, the Americans tried to develop their own Ostrich Corp. in WWII.

Anyway, after the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbour, the Americans thought they needed bigger birds. National emergencies are often the cause of new biblical translations and this inspired to Patton to make the “New Refeathered Version for American Patriots.” Thus inspired, Patton rounded up some of the best rodeo riders in Brooklyn to lasso some ostriches at the zoo and press them into service. The results were a truly terrifying weapon that could win the war, but at what cost, to both man and bird?

One of the first draftees for America’s new Ostrich cavalry unit, the somewhat reluctant FU Troop.

As it turned out, the ostriches were horribly outclassed by the far bigger German tigers, which weren’t real tigers at all, but #*%#!^*#% TANKS! They were almost completely ostrich proof! Bloody cheaters!

Tiger Tanks on the prowl. Like the Japanese bomber pilots in the Tora Tora Tora raid, the Germans could laugh off any amount of bird poop. The British response to the Tiger Tank was also far less than adequate.

British Field Marshal Meowgomery

But soon, the allies tried new tactics that capitalized on their army’s speed. The U.S. forces, for example, began employing stealth tactics, and that won the day!

Now, what the hell has any of this to do with the Calgary stampede and dipwit’s letter to the Calgary Herald? Isn’t it obvious? Since he thinks we must take a literalistic view of Genesis, we are led to the following realization, realized in the following representation.

A Middle Eastern carpenter on his way to work.

Acknowledging the co-existence of humans and dinosaurs of course, necessarily leads us to several conclusions about how we know what we know about the very ancient world. This ends all doubt about that famous reality T.V. series,

… the Flintstones. We now know this is the only biblical accurate™  show ever to be on the telly. Notice how family friendly it is compared to the image that precedes it, though. Why, it actually has a family in it. Not like that Christian picture. That Jesus guy probably wasn’t even married.

Now, this actually brings us back to the stampede. It’s supposed to be family fun. This is what it looks like NOW:

Evil Nature is ritually subjugated once again.

But, that is not the BIBLICALLY ACCURATE™ way of doing it! No, not at all! Just look at these prehistorical line drawings that look astoundingly like the modern, colour picures in the Flintstones (this proves the historicity of the Flintstones). Here is the original rodeo for you!

 

Now compare the two. Isn’t the second pair a whole lot more fun, mutually supportive and generally nice? No one gets hurt. We have lost our way, we have, and our Preacher from Medicine Hat is all messed up. He’s got it ass backwards.

Animals we keep and care for should have fun living with us, at least until we eat them! People characterize themselves and each other as animals; animal imagery helps form our identity, so we shouldn’t mistreat them. This is easy to demonstrate by reference to the audio visual, televised Arts™.

“Miss Kitty” in a tank (Amanda Blake, 1929-89), a still from the TV series Gunsmoke. She ran the “saloon”, but let’s face it, there were no Western saloons that weren’t also cat houses. Miss Kitty should have been purring for pay. If Patton would have read up on the wild West, he may have invented the militarized tiger tank before the Germans!

A cowboy relaxes in the water park of a frontier “saloon”. Tired of “cow” pokin’ he wants to take a tiger (or three) by the tail and have a real rodeo. See reference above to biblical knowing. Tigers are no longer used in rodeos in North America. As the old saying goes, “another one bites the dusty cowboy on the old saddle horn.”

Wrangler Jane, (Melody Patterson), F-Troop

Now then, while we are on the subject of special relationships between humans and animals, not to mention ropin’, ridin’, and ranglin’, get a load of this! It is way better than watching some yahoo with too much body spray chase a cow around an arena, ain’t it?

Yvonne Craig as Bat Girl, Eartha Kitt as Catwoman from the 60s TV show.
Notice the tiger skin jacket on one one of the hench persons.

The  video is of poor quality so here is a still of Yvonne Craig as Bat Girl. I’m not showing it for any prurient reasons or anything like that, it is just that I feel a responsibility to my audience, such as it is.

hmmmmm, purple…

Now, just to show that everyone here at Dr. Jim’s has respect for tradition, lets go back before Eartha Kitt made her debut on TV as Catwoman. There we find this fine feminine feline:

Julie Newmar, Catwoman during the 1966-67 series.

And, then the movie was released with a different actress playing Catwoman.  And then more movies, with more actresses…Hmmmm, more actresses….

Lee Ann Meriwether, from the 1966 Batman movie.

Michelle Pfeiffer as Catwoman in 1992 Batman Returns.

Halle Berry in 2004′s Catwoman
Should I have a poll as to the best Catwoman?

Halle Berry does seem to have something about cats, which is, of course, fine by me. Notice the nice leopard skin in her appearance in, you guessed it, the Flintstones!

Notice the primitive, hammer like “gopher bopper”.

Now, ALSO in the Flintstones film (the first successful big screen historical epic) were three of the four members of the rock group, the B-52s. For the purposes of the movie, they renamed themselves the B.C. 52s, and that, of course, implies “Christ”. But where does that leave us? Of course, back the aftermath of WWII, and the need for America to have dominion over the earth and to subdue stuff.

A B-52 bomber on a dangerous, biblically apocalyptic and predicted anti-gopher sortie.
Little buggers just won’t stay subdued.

Notice the fine synchronicity here, and the way all the loose threads are coming together. Obviously, this is a well thought out and coherent discussion of animal rights that makes way more sense than Mr. Shaw’s letter could ever hope to. So let’s end it off with a song or two!

B.C. 52s, “Bedrock Twist”

Eartha Kitt (1927-2008), “I Want to be Evil”. Notice the dead tiger.

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