Screw Sharks, Think Of The Dolphins!

So I was going through the junk folder on my oldest email account, just to see if I was missing anything, and I found this petition: "The Cost of Shark Bait Soup: Dolphins Chopped Up And Skinned Alive."  The hysterical summary cries out about the sadful sadness that is the dead dolphins, butchered by those horrible fishermen.  They just don't appreciate these amazing creatures!  Also something about havoc on the ecosystem.  The dolphins, though!  The dolphins!

Seriously.  The first paragraph of the petition's description reads, "Shark fin soup comes with a price. And we're not talking the thousands people pay to eat it — we're talking the mass killing of sharks, the disruption of our oceans' ecosystem, and the brutal slaughter of hundreds of thousands of dolphins used by fishermen as shark bait."  The other two paragraphs, however, focus exclusively on the fate of the dolphins, and the petition itself is asking the Peruvian government to better enforce the ban on dolphin meat.

I didn't sign the petition.  Normally, I'm a sucker for petitions.  I know they don't actually have any real effect, most of the time, and they are an easy way for someone to pretend to be an "activist" without actually doing any real, meaningful activism.  But sadly, I'm guilted into signing them pretty easily.  A corporation has done something mean!  I must take a stand, or else I am supporting them!  An animal is being abused?  I must sign this, or else I will be as bad as the people abusing it in the first place!  Et cetera, et cetera.  But I didn't sign this one.  In fact, I was kind of offended by it.

For one thing, they don't ever mention which kind of dolphin is usually being slaughtered.  It makes me a little suspicious.  After all, while there certainly are endangered breeds out there, the bottlenose dolphin, for example, isn't endangered in the slightest.  Neither the petition nor the article it links even throws in a sentence like, all dolphins are killed, regardless of endangered status!  Also, dolphins are kind of dicks.  I admit, I've got a bit of my own personal bias going on too: dolphins are just so universally adored, but I just don't see how they are any cuter or more endearing than another type of animal, and after a lifetime of hearing about how they're so sweet and friendly and spiritual and they have such a connection to us and "My spirit animal is a dolphin because I just love dolphins" I just got kind of annoyed by them.  I don't actively dislike dolphins or anything, they just don't register as special to me the way they seem to for everyone else.  

Which leads me to what is probably the main reason I didn't sign the petition: it was just obsessed with the freaking dolphins, and it completely ignored the worse industry: shark fishing.  Even though the petition's page starts out by directly mentioning shark fin soup, which kills a huge amount of sharks annually, it's the freaking dolphins that matter.  They're as bad as dolphins, taking an industry that's explicitly about killing sharks in horrible ways and only being concerned with the way it affects the one animal that's popular and cute enough for them to stir up emotions over.  It's killing the dolphins that will ruin the ecosystem, folks! The shark killing is just a little side drama to add to this horrible dolphin tragedy!

You could probably say that sharks are my dolphins: everyone else seems to think they're just awful, but I love them to pieces, and the shark fishing industry just breaks my heart.  The dolphins are getting off easy here.  The article the petition links to even says, "the dolphin is hauled on board and almost immediately dies on the deck of the vessel."  Bleeding profusely, sure, but at least it dies right away.  Compare the poor sharks; a lot of the time, the fishermen don't even kill them before cutting off their fins, and they just toss them back into the water to sink down and die, eaten by predators or drowning without their fins propelling water through their gills.  And I can't think of any non-endangered shark breed subjected to finning off the top of my head.*  Great whites, endangered.  Hammerheads, endangered.  Mako sharks, probably endangered, I can't remember.  Whale sharks and basking sharks, both endangered and greatly sought after.  If the petition really cared about the plight of amazing creatures, it would be objecting to the entire practice of shark finning, not just the way shark finning also includes the death of "cute" animals like dolphins.
*Not to say that there aren't any; I can pretty much guarantee that there are plenty I'm not thinking of.  Just not off the top of my head, like I could with the dolphin thing.

But nope!  Hey Peru, get to work on saving those dolphins!  Those cutie-patooties are the real victims of the shark finning industry!  Assuming this is that magical unicorn petition that actually does have an effect on the real world, what would happen if it worked?  Peru would stop people from hunting dolphins, sure.  But it wouldn't stop anyone from hunting sharks, or from using a different animal as bait.  This petition isn't about animal rights, it's just about dolphins specifically, because people have decided that dolphins alone are worth protecting, but sharks aren't cute enough and "the ecosystem" is too broad and vague to have an emotional impact.  Look at Flipper!  He's always smiling!  Quick, pass a law!

Disclaimer: I'd just like to say, for the record, that I'm not an animal rights activist.  I strongly disapprove of animal abuse, and I love just about any critter that isn't a bug.  I absolutely think there should be laws in place to protect animals, especially endangered ones like the various sharks and dolphins mentioned in this post.  But I also approve of keeping animals as pets, and of using them when it's convenient, I approve of animal testing (look, it's sad that animals get hurt over it but I want to know that my makeup and medicine is safe for living things before it starts getting tested on humans!), and I approve of hunting.  In fact, I think hunting is more humane than animal farming.  At least my moose had the space and freedom to run around and live, and it's not stuffed to the moosey gills with steroids and hormones.  Basically, just because I disagree with how limited this petition is, don't lump me in with those Peta freaks.  

Update: I was on Wikipedia and remembered this article, so I looked up shark finning!  Turns out that of the dozen or so species listed on the page as being commonly fished, only about three of them are non-threatened: blacktips, blues, and tigers.  Well.  They're "near-threatened," so still not great that they are being hunted, but they're still classified as "least concern."  

BREAKING news.

I know it's a dumb thing to be amused by, but I had to laugh when I saw this in my RSS reader.

"BREAKING news.  The 12-person jury in the David Folker murder trial has reached a decision at Newfoundland and Labrador Supreme Court."  First, it's hilarious that the BREAKINGnews. picture is so much bigger than the actual news it's breaking -- and that it's got that period at the end of news.  Breaking news -- sorry, BREAKING news is not exciting enough for an exclamation point, it must be read in perfect monotone!  I mean, perfect monotone.  And after that, you notice the second hilarious thing: there's no information here.  The jury has reached a decision!  What was the decision?  Iunno.  Does it matter what they decided, as long as they decide anything?  Aw shucks, who cares!  BREAKING NEWS what news BREAKING NEWS it was second-degree murder BREAKING NEWWWWS.

um

BREAKING! NEWS.

The words "breaking" and "news" no longer mean anything to me D:

Phoque Bardot Murder Burger

Apparently there is a restaurant (a terrible terrible restaurant of filth and hate!) in Quebec called Côté-Est that has shocked and horrified millions by - how dare they - selling a burger.  Awful, right?  I mean really!

This is such a heinous crime that of course righteous and civic-minded individuals have informed the restaurant of their opinions regarding the burger, in the form of hate mail and death threats.  Nothing extreme or anything, of course -- I mean, how else are they supposed to spread their message of love and non-violence?  The only way to share your belief that killing and eating animals is wrong is by threatening to kill humans.  For some reason, some people have been objecting to this?  I don't get it, really.  They aren't saying the restaurant owners should be eaten, like they do to those poor innocent baby seals!  Just that they should be killed!  Which, really, is a fair expectation, don't you think?

All kidding aside, why the hell are the animal rights nutjobs only now getting freaked out by this place.  It's not like they were a vegan place that started selling seal burgers in a moment of madness.  They had beef burgers before this, presumably.  They had chicken on the menu.  They have been selling meat the entire time.  Are cows worth less than seals now?  Is there a hierarchy of animals, where it becomes less and less offensive to eat them?  How come pigs are lower than seals on that hierarchy?  Pigs are adorable.  Look at this guy.  How is this little babykins worth fewer points than a boring old seal not eating ice cream.

Raise them on ice cream for extra deliciousness

Oh, wait, I figured it out!  Clearly, up until now the restaurant hasn't been selling meat made of animals.  They've been selling meat that was not made of animals.  Beef is not made of cows, it is grown on a farm somewhere, and this seal burger is the first time any animals have ever been made into meat for this restaurant.  All the rest they got was made at the supermarket, where as we all know, no animals were harmed.  It's the only thing that makes sense, really.

NOT THE BEES

I should not be awake right now.  I only went to sleep like, three hours ago.  But there's this goddamn bee somewhere in my room, and I swear to god, it is the loudest fucking bee in history.  I can sleep through like four alarms, but this bee woke me up.  All I want to do is curl up and go back to sleep, but no, I can't, because this freaking bee just won't shut up.  I can't sleep while it's buzzing around, but I can't find it to get rid of it.  I think I hear it buzzing against paper or something?  It might have fallen behind one of my sagging wall posters.  Fucking bees.  I just want to go back to sleep.

Also, I'm blogging about bees, of course I'm going to use this video.

I Shouldn't Be So Quick To Judge

I was going to write a post about how I've been trying to find a new blog reader ever since Google announced the retirement of Google Reader, and that the one I ended up trying out kinda sucked.  But then I realized that most of my complaints seem to be "It's slightly different from the real Google Reader!" and "It doesn't show blog updates as quickly!"  The last one might be legitimate, but I vaguely remember reading somewhere that they're working on that.  And for the first one, well, it was a dumb way to react to a new site.  Of course some things are going to be slightly different, but that doesn't mean those different things are flaws.  They're just...different.  I need to stop seeing every slight change as the end of the world.  You'd think we'd all have learned that from Facebook by now -- they change their site constantly, but everybody manages to get used to it enough that when they change it again they start demanding that Facebook revert to the old new version.

I was going to find a picture mocking new-new facebook, but it's three-thirty in the morning and I can't be bothered.  Have a tiny speckled lizard on a tiny golden tricycle instead.  It's adorable.

At least one of the things I was going to complain about wasn't even the site's fault, it was me not noticing that I could change that setting.  So not only is it dumb to complain just because something is new and different, if you start complaining before you give yourself a chance to get used to the new thing, you might just end up looking like a complete moron.

Basically, I need to work harder on not deciding that things are The Most Awful as soon as I start using them.  I gotta learn to give stuff a chance before I turn into a judgy jerkface about it just because it's not exactly the same as the other thing.  Again, you'd think I'd have learned this by now with Facebook.  I guess I'm just really slow at personal growth.

Deep sleeper

I wake up at the oddest things.  Normally I would say I'm a deep sleeper, because I can sleep through a lot.  To date I have slept through countless very loud, very persistent alarm clocks, I have slept through thunder and lightning, I have slept through the phone ringing right next to my head, I have slept through people talking to me and shaking me, I have slept through video games my brother is playing on a projector with the boom box hooked up for maximum authenticity when the artillary starts dropping, I have slept through fire alarms, I have slept through my great-grandmother falling and breaking her hip and being rushed to the hospital in an ambulance.  I can sleep through a lot of stuff.  So that would make me a deep sleeper, right?

Except sometimes I wake up at the oddest things, too.  Like somebody talking in another room.  Not even very loudly, or to me.  This morning I woke up because Dad answered the phone in his bedroom and told Mom who it was.  I didn't wake up at the phone ringing, but I jerked awake as soon as he spoke to my mother about it.  And whenever I'm having a hard time waking up in the morning, all I gotta do is put on my glasses and suddenly I'm wide awake.   It's like an on-switch or something.

Basically, sometimes waking up is weird and for some reason I thought it was important to broadcast this to the world at large.  Go back to your regularly scheduled morning.

Things I Hate On Facebook

You know what the worst part of Facebook is?  It isn't the constantly-changing layouts or the sketchy privacy settings or the aggravating app and game invites.  It's the people.  What is it about Facebook that turns pleasant, reasonable people into self-righteous, judgmental, pointlessly manipulative douchebags?  They seemed like perfectly fine people when I met them and said "Hey, you seem cool, you should add me to Facebook."

But nope.  Every day I look at my Facebook feed and find another half-dozen bullshit photo or status memes to hate.  Just look at this shit.

"Vapid pseudo-inspirational bullshit with poor grammar!  You're beautiful!  And skinny!  You'd better be skinny, because that's what I meant when I said you're beautiful.  Don't you dare be overweight when you step on that scale.  Or be happy with your fat.  EVERYBODY WANTS TO BE SKINNY!  You're reading this on a phone, right?  Haha, of course you are."

"It's wrong to call her a slut, because she's actually a virgin! Shame on you for mistaking one of the Pure and Untainted for someone who has sex.  The problem was clearly where you thought she was not Virginal, rather than the idea that slut-shaming anyone regardless of their sexual activity is inherently wrong.  Like the pregnant girl walking down the street!  She was raped!  She doesn't deserve to be bullied for her pregnancy, unlike another pregnant girl who got pregnant from consensual sex.  She has it coming, so I'm not going to even try to defend her.  You don't know ANYBODY!  Not really!  Isn't that mind blowing?  People have lives completely unrelated to you!  If you don't re-post this then you endorse bullying and I bet 99% of you are terrible, terrible people who want kids to be bullied until they kill themselves, because that's what it means if you don't re-post this.  Love!"

"Hey everybody, let's play a game that tests who is paying attention to me so you all think about me and tell me a meaningless fact relating to how you know me because I need to feel like the center of attention and bask in how my four hundred Facebook friends talk about how they met me!  And I can do the same for you, but you'd better not pay attention to me when I'm making this desperate bid for attention without re-posting this idiotic game on your own wall, because I don't care about you if you don't play petty attention-seeking games like me."

"Everybody except for me is shallow and self-centred for only thinking about themselves and what they want, because if they ever express any desire for themselves then they have been permanently disqualified from ever being able to think about other people.  If you want anything for yourself, anything at all, then you are a terrible human being.  I am the most thoughtful, caring, gracious person who has ever existed. Let's see how many people re-post this, I bet it will be hardly anyone because I am just so inconceivably good when everybody else is so unbelievably shallow!"

Just....fuck you.  Fuck all of you dick-biting shit chutes.  I'm going to bed.