Tag Archives: quotes

Charlie Chaplin on Tragedy and Comedy

Chaplin, Charlie (A Dog's Life)_01“At the end of our street was a slaughterhouse, and sheep would pass our house on their way to be butchered. I remember one escaped and ran down the street, to the amusement of onlookers. Some tried to grab it and others tripped over themselves. I giggled with delight at its lambent capering and panic, it seemed so comic. But when it was caught and carried back into the slaughterhouse, the reality of the tragedy came over me and I ran indoors, screaming and weeping to Mother, “They’re going to kill it! They’re going to kill it!” That stark, spring afternoon and that comedy chase stayed with me for days; and I wonder if that episode did not establish the premise of my future films – the combination of the tragic and the comic.” 

— Charlie Chaplin (My Autobiography, p. 41)

Letter from an Anonymous Shelter Manager Rings True

This has been traveling around with no reference of source:

“I think our society needs a huge “Wake-up” call. As a shelter manager, I am going to share a little insight with you all…a view from the inside if you will.

First off, all of you breeders/sellers should be made to work in the “back” of an animal shelter for just one day. Maybe if you saw the life drain from a few sad, lost, confused eyes, you would change your mind about breeding and selling to people you don’t even know.”

….click here for the rest.

Speaking as someone who has worked with rescue people, and interviewed (if not worked) and volunteered at multiple animal shelters, I’d just like to second this, and point out that, while the language is a bit emphatic and there may be slight exaggeration for emphasis, the exaggeration is slight.  And the picture of the pile of cats?  Absolutely, 100% true to life, or, rather, true to death.  That’s a full-size walk in freezer, and imagine how many animals the pictured facility must “handle” per year that they needed to purchase such a thing.  And that’s one facility.

Does this piss you off?  Scare you?  Make you want to hug your kitties?  Do something about it.  Donate to your local shelter so it can keep animals longer or pay for kennel cough treatment.  Ask how you can help educate people about adoption and encourage people to adopt.  Above all, don’t get mad at the shelters…they are just dealing, as best they can, with the problem.  They didn’t cause it.  Does this photo, this article, make you sick?  Help your local animal shelter.  Help fix the problem.

Good Advice on a Lot of Levels

“My advice to you: Get several books. When you get confused, if all of the books tell you to do the same thing, believe it. If they tell you to do completely different things, someone if not everyone is talking out their ass.”

via The Story About the Baby, Volume 2.

This is posted on a blog about raising an infant human, but, honestly, this is good advice on any front.

Quote: Critical Thinking

“…train yourself to get suspicious every time you see simplicity. Any claim that the root of a problem is simple should be treated the same as a claim that the root of a problem is Bigfoot. Simplicity and Bigfoot are found in the real world with about the same frequency.”

— David Wong, What is the Monkeysphere?

So Much To Write and So Few Pages

One thing learned from the initiation of video auditing on a large scale is that some people should not be handling livestock. — Temple Grandin

I recently picked up a book about slaughterhouses, and have had my hair standing on end reading it, realizing how much that process is like the processing of laboratory animals that I experienced.  I want to say more about that — I have a lot to say about that book — but in the meantime, I was doing some background research on the book itself and ended up on the web site of Temple Grandin, a PhD who has dedicated herself to improving the welfare of animals in slaughter plants, with some hopeful results.

Since the book I am reading was written in 1997, I skimmed Dr. Grandin’s web site, which had some up to date slaughterhouse audits (as recent as 2010), to see how things might be going nowadays.  Apparently they are now employing video monitoring in slaughter plants, which, depending on how exactly that is achieved, and who exactly is doing the monitoring, is a huge step forward for the conditions of both animals and humans there.  However, if the quote above is anything to go by, conditions haven’t really changed all that much since the book was written.