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Showing posts from March 6, 2010

The jury is still out

OK, there is now some doubt about whether we are the craziest society on earth. I just read a Wall Street Journal article about a referendum that will occur tomorrow - Sunday 3/7/2010. The Swiss people will be voting on whether the government needs to provide animal lawyers - public defenders for "animal rights". Now, I think animal abuse is awful. Anyone that would purposefully harm a defenseless animal should be punished legally and by society. However, Switzerland has taken this idea to a whole new level. They already have one animal public defender that operates in one of the cantons (kind of like our states, or "super"-counties). He recently prosecuted a fisherman over the abuse of a pike. This abuse occurred while a fisherman was catching the defendant (pike). The legal argument was based on the fact that the fisherman took too long to land the defendant and caused it undue suffering. The court threw the case out, but only because the court said it had no juri