At 7:29 AM -0400 10/14/98, Steve Kurtz wrote:
>... pet keeping is a voluntary
>luxury/leisure activity that consumes resources. I suppose the
>judgement is
>implied that pet keeping is immoral. Put those pets to "work" to provide
>some "economic benefit" for the planet!
>
One of the better established 'facts' of psychology is that in this
world of social atomization and anomie, pets provide an essential
emotional connection for millions of people. They are almost certainly
more useful and cost effective than psychotherapists. Perhaps a more
useful question would be how much do we spend feeding and housing
psycohtherapists, neo-classical economists, currency speculators,
rentiers and other socially dubious people- let alone the tens or
hundreds of thousands of petty drug dealers whom we support in prisons,
whose the chief accomplishment is teaching their inmates to be more
bitter and more effective criminals.
I suspect that paying all of the above a modest but adequate stipend in
exchange for their desisting from their harmful or dubious pursuits
would free up enough resources to provide an adequate guaranteed income
for all- especially since the list includes most of the tiny fraction
who have appropriated the majority of the world's resources.
Caspar Davis
Victoria, B.C., Canada
A wall of infinite dimension stands before the course of human evolution.
It is the finitude of the earth and its resources.
--Steve Morningthunder
