Blogging-This post is long and semi-aggressive. Oh well.

I've been asked by my co-workers to spare the life of the squirrels in my attic. Apparently squirrels are cute and fuzzy. And they are convinced that if I just wait for the weather to change they will leave in peace.

H: They'll probably stay there anyway. I bet your attic would make a good storage place for nuts.
M: Yup.

Question? Am I somehow held to a higher standard by virtue of being a higher order of being? If your answer is, no, you're just another animal amongst animals, then I see no reason to allow the squirrels to live. In fact, (mental experiment) imagine that the situation is reversed, and I'm a small human being living in the attic of a giant squirrel. What does the squirrel do? Does he wait for me to leave in peace and stop scrambling around in the attic or does he come upstairs and crack my brain open like it's an acorn and eat it. If you guessed the latter I'm agreeing with you. If you think that squirrels possess the higher sort of mental faculties that would allow them to distinguish between killing for need and killing for want, then you need to talk with someone.

Point. The squirrels would definitely exterminate me. So, why shouldn't I exterminate them? Besides which, (and I hope that image of giant squirrels cracking skulls is still with you) if animals don't possess the capacity for immorality, then what of their death. It's just putting them in one state as opposed to another. It is only if you believe that life itself is more worthy (And here I mean better, the best state, et al) than death, that you'd have any interest in squirrels.

The offshoot argument is that killing squirrels might create some sort of moral turpitude for me, and perhaps that would be of greater interest. The sidebar to the previous argument is the charismatic mini-fauna argument. I eat vegetarian about 96 percent of the time. Ergo; I'm entitled to my fair share of squirrel deaths. Unless, you can entirely disconnect the chicken breast on a sub from the exceedingly violent death of a chicken on a factory farm. (Never fear. I still have dreams about this bacon burger I had for brunch a couple of weeks ago).

The other path to take would be to present an argument that squirrels are more worthy than chickens. We'd probably take this tact by assigning them some sort of virtue due to their unwillingness to be tamed. Maybe not. That's just the sort of thing that I'd do. The chicken, in a way, has chosen to be domesticated because it is adventitious for the propagation of the species, while the squirrel has just chosen to live in my damn attic! The chicken vs. squirrel argument is a rather slippery slope because when you start assigning value to different forms of life anything can be up for grabs.

If this all seems like a long and drawn out way to justify the death of cute little furry creatures you might be right. I'm just trying to point out that our morality is surprisingly fluid when it comes to the death of animals. And hell, if the above seems poorly reasoned don't worry about it. The blog format is designed to just sort of spew, which in my mind, makes it inferior to something that I craft like a piece of fiction. And if that sounds like an excuse, it is.

In fact, in order to honor the squirrels as the indigenous Americans did, (and other ancient cultures. The kinship with animals upon taking their life didn't actually start with Avatar, its roots can be traced back roughly 19,000 years, which is why, when someone says, "Oh the movie was simple. Connect with nature, yadayadayada," that I might ask them to consider the movie more carefully. Perhaps you walk out of that movie and go have a delicious bacon, and egg burger. My god it was tasty! And have a discussion about how simple the message of the movie was without realizing how radically disconnected we are now from our food chain and that it's not simple. It's a rather complicated system we've worked out to avoid being remotely near the slaughterhouse. This cognitive dissonance is really quite stunning, mostly because we don't even identify that any dissonance exists.

Likely because we've decided that we abhor things like pain and boredom, and that the pursuit of a person's life should be to achieve a maximum amount of pleasure even if this means tacitly accepting all sorts of social structures that might make it harder to make choices on a day to day basis. I'm sort of ranting now, I know. Wasn't this about squirrels? I think what I'm getting at is that sometimes the simple truths, presented simply, are worthy of being mulled over, perhaps because we might find the consequences of such thought worthy as well. Is a movie about (I know, wasn't this about squirrels?) the exploitation of resources all that simple? Well shit, we continue to exploit resources. Why? (Insert incredibly nuanced reason that results in a sort of paralyzing idea, "What can I do." Answer to paralyzing conundrum: nothing.) Answer to the simple question. Maybe I can eat less meat or drive a smaller car or pay attention the next time an election comes and really consider all the issues, I mean, reading about them, dealing with the boring shit, so that I can be an informed citizen rather than a citizen who is informed.

Ah screw it. I'm calling the wildlife specialist to kill these damn squirrels. They are driving me nuts.