Anti-fur?

[Archae]

A friend just sent me this, it cracked me up.

"Activists are more violently opposed to fur than
leather because it's much safer to harass rich women...
than motorcycle gangs." ~Author Unknown

[lazarus]

1. I'm not anti-fur

I think animals should be able to have fur. And I still don't understand the controversy.

[Archae]

2. Well, fur does look good on these animals.

The ones here:

www.yerf.com

[lazarus]

3. LOL

watch CSI this week?

[izzie]

4. Odd as we know leather comes from Animals usually on your plate.

Unless you are people of the northern lands of the world I will take bets that your are not eating seal, wolf, and mink, all fur liked by women and men alike. When my husband went to work on Alaska pipe line he was giving a parka with a wolf ruff. And these animals are usually trapped, not that I enjoy how your beef steak gets to your plate along with my shoes get to me.Wrong person read this, I am sorry.

[corporatewhore]

5. well leather is practical and useful and fur is just to flaunt your wealth

Chances are the bikers need that leather jacket to protect themselves if they fall

[buddhamama]

6. beef is consumed

not by me, but the majority of Americans.

it would be disrespectful to waste the animal once you have taken its life.

how often does the American consumer partake of fox, seal, mink meat?

[sweetheart]

8. I'm a bad buddhist

In scotland, i've seen a very different light. Chickens have the worst lives of the lot, crammed in to barns... and the farmed salmon is toxic.... veggies are great.

But i know several sheep and beef farmers rather well, and when you have a heard of cows, you really don't want a bull. They eat too much, like 3 times what a cow eats, bear no calfs and are a damned site more difficult to have around. Since children are about 50/50, you're very likely with a dairy herd or just a coupla cows, to get a bullock child. Usually, you keep the females and sell the bullock to the abbotoir (slaughter house). That said, a fresh free range, bullock tastes great and has a great life to boot, even if it is only a coupla years. Better are highland cows, but they take longer to mature (look like yaks/dzo's)

Sheep have a similar problem. Old sheep's teeth grind away in sandy soil, and they die naturally. It pays to have them "done" before that point, as there is no benefit to the farmer of a dead sheep, it actually costs money to take the corpse away for safe disposal under EU regulations.... and similarly, the tupp (male sheep) is not in demand, as geez, 1 tupp can service 50 ewes, and male babies are castrated shortly after birth with a rubber band round the balls... for the same problem that nobody wants a male in the hearding business.

Thus, the excess males and the old stock end up at the butcher after a good life, however long. It is nothing like the horror show of Upton sinclair's animal buthering experience... rather more humane and small scale. .. but driven by the hearders, and not by the consumers...

I would never kill an animal, as my buddhist ethics won't quite go that far, but eating a well tended dead one, is ok for moi... and wow, the taste is phenomenal... way way different than "farmed" supermarket.

[roughsatori]

9. Your not a "bad" Buddhist, just a Buddhist who eats meat.

But you're in good company. Buddha ate meat and Jesus fished for more then men's souls (nobodies perfect )

In the Mahaparinibbana Sutta, we are told that the Buddha became ill suddenly after he ate a special delicacy, Sukaramaddava, literally translated as "soft pork", which had been prepared by his generous host, Cunda Kammaraputta. The name of the cuisine has attracted the attention of many scholars, and it has been the focus of academic research on the nature of the meal or ingredients used in the cooking of this special dish.

[sweetheart]

10. Trapping mice

When i was a kid, i had a pet mouse. Yet here, they come in the house from the field in the fall and leave little shits all over the kitchen, and chew in to all the food packets, creating a hygeinic nightmare.

At first, i tried living in harmony with them, but my spouse went ballistic... as you could likely guess. Then i tried various mouse traps, ones that catch them alive. So, i caught one!! and he was wiggling away, so i took him outside and set him free... feeling all good about myself, i came back in. Well, the next time i went out side, i see puppy dog on the doorstep, chewing up the mouse she caught in the field... a gift for master... oh well, i guess when its time its time.

Another time, i found the live-catch trap on the top shelf, when i came back from being away... and discovered a dessicated mouse who had died in the trap of dehydration... i felt sooo bad, i stopped using live catch traps. Little mouse bodies are hardly food or anything... so i lied... i do kill animals sometimes. Rabbit suicide bombers who run out at the car, and mice.

Not killing animals can be hard.

[roughsatori]

12. I gave my parents some electronic device to keep the mice and spiders out

My dad had 5 traps set in the kitchen alone. The ones I gave them send a signal through the walls via the wiring. It makes it so mice, spiders, etc. don't make it their home. It does not hurt them.

My parents laughed when I plugged them in, but they WORK for them. Now my 76 year old father brags about his "de-micer." And wants to know if they have them for Chipmunks because he doesn't like the smell of their decaying bodies under the house if he poisons them.

But my funny thing is that if I am visiting people and see a spider I will say: "Kill it, I don't kill bugs." LOL Hypocrisy can be funny.

[buddhamama]

11. no, you're not a bad buddhist

i buy and prepare meat for my SO.

my not eating meat goes beyond the not wanting to take a life and the brutality involved; i'm not a Jains.

my opposition entails concerns for the enviroment and consumerism.
i am not opposed to hunting if it is not for sport.

a disconnect exists that disturbs me.

and that disconnect presents itself in the lack of respect shown to
animals, and their suffering.

free range organic is the more humane and respectful way to go.
yeah it will cost more but, you'll eat less of it, which isn't an entirely bad thing.

[roughsatori]

13. I'm with you. Hunting is fine if for food

I come from a family of hunters and fisherman. I was given my first rifle to hunt with at 13. By the time I was 14 I would fish without a hook, and miss the deer and pheasant on purpose due to not feeling right about taking life. No one in the family realized I did this. They just thought I was a jinx to take hunting.

The amount of plant protein it takes to produce animal protein for humans to eat is wasteful and filthy. Actually it is gluttonous of our culture.

[sweetheart]

15. poaching deer

This wild part of scotland is filled with hunters. I was walking with the dogs a few days ago, and the dogs are busy chewing on something (a usual... on the beach, usually its a dead bird or a dead seal) This time i was inland, so i discovered deer skins and guts... POACHERS! There are red deer heards and roe deer heards all around, and i have a collection of the antlers that fall off... just the hunters come and shoot deer illegally, then they take them home to their sheds, skin and gut them, and then take the results out and dump them in the middle of nowhere a mile from where i live, not knowing anyone lives round the parts.

Hunting keeps the deer populations manageable, but you know, I felt like throwing up when confronted with the guts and the skin. (smell!) I don't think i could do it unless i was really starving... and then it is sooo much easier to fish and garden.

I agree that the animal food industry is soo wasteful and is part of the sustainability problem of our western economics... and i'm not less than peeved to discover my taxes going towards subsidizing meat production...

A true green soul would have to not pay taxes, as one way or another one ends up in their trap.

[roughsatori]

16. It sounds like you live in a beautiful area

Poachers are vile thieves. The other day I showed my brother how to keep his drains open by using generic, cheap, and harmless, baking soda and vinegar instead of Draino. He loved it. Not for its environmental impact but for its cost and the fact that he thinks Draino gives him headaches.

(I too am off on a tangent (due to your post) thinking what is a good or bad Buddhist). If may sound like a cliché but if I substitute "asleep" for "bad," and "awake" for "good" if helps me stay on track.

[buddhamama]

20. excellent !

asleep and awake are more in tune with me.

[sweetheart]

22. good bad and awake

Mindful of this moment, and surrendering all attachment to previous identities and selves of a previous moment, but yet writing and engaging the mind-identity that knows past and future to complete a sentence is tantric art indeed, and what IS a good buddhist.

In a world of motherless adult children in terrible states of suffering, someone who's had the blessings of samadhi, surely is sorely needed in the public common to help facilitate awakening. You and buddhamama are very wise, and i imagine how many people could benefit if you were able to share that wisdom openly as teachers, as in truth, you are teachers.. following the bodhisattva vow to bring light to others, even in your words, no?

[roughsatori]

26. Catherine Aird wrote:

"If you can't be a good example, then you'll just have to be a horrible warning." Sweetheart, I am the consummate horrible example.

[sweetheart]

28. LOL !

I am one horrible warning indeed.

[buddhamama]

14. your post sweetheart,

has me asking myself, who or what is a bad buddhist?

PM me if you have any ideas.

[sweetheart]

19. A bad buddhist

is inappropriate language, but a lovely sort of koan...

I think a bad buddhist is a buddhist not in samadhi, making karmic waves and wagging their tongue instead of meditating or teaching meditation... those who know don't say and those who say don't know and all that stuff.

My mahayana school says the buddha only exists in communion with others, helping them person to person to come to awakening... and certainly my teacher never spent time writing on a BBS (not that they existed before his death). My master meditated with people and transmitted direct samadhi.

Rather than taking that hard path, which would involve holding meditation classes for all people, free of charge in a culture of prodestant christians... and taking all the profile of that, i shirk away on to the internet and wag my tongue.

The advise of the enlightened, is that i am wasting my time, yet i can't seem to help it... i like writing... and the advise of economics says to focus on my book instead of putting my intent in to winning back the presidency, as an anonymous writer, hours spent earning no coin, chatterboxing in internet irrelevancy.

I tell my ego-self that this does some good, but i know that were i to put the time i spend on DU in to meditation... but that choice is made... so its my freudian moral conundrum. My ego guilt at its reinforcing itself rather than making something more (or less) of what this life is.

I had a dream not long ago with Adida, the california guru master whom i have never met. As i came to his place, my heart melted and on awakening, was profoundly moved for days. To me, that is a "good" buddhist. I am the very opposite of my moniker. I am a heartless ego bulshitting away precious life.

I know it does not matter and that there is no judge. Yet in my hearts love of the whole magesty of enlightenment, and its wish that all people could melt in to the samadhi that i myself rarely surrender to, in denial of silence... a bad buddhist.

[roughsatori]

23. My Chogyam Trungpa "quote a day" that I have emailed

brought up the same thoughts that you now post. I have been considering aesthetics and Buddhism obsessively (and joyfully). Is it wrong that I write poem? No. Can I be awake and write? I try.

I have noticed that in poetry some Buddhist concepts have intersected with modern and post modern verse in the Euro/American tradition. I do think it has hit a dead end. Much of the writing in that vein lacks spunk: "I see this, I see that."

When I do sitting practice today I will be labeling many thoughts to be sure.

[buddhamama]

25. i had to laugh at this

"...my freudian moral conundrum."

you begrudge yourself for being here wasting precious time, and chattering away, but what of the path? there does not exist one but many. for me, the quiet leads you to the next step but it is not the last step; not a destination but a journey.

if we must be the change we wish to create
then do we not have to engage ourselves?
and by engageing i am enriching myself, that is selfish,no?
i am an ego maniac if i were to judge myself realistically.
creating ripples of understanding and love, fulfills me.
if it happens here then i am made 'happy'.

[sweetheart]

27. What path do i know

I have a vague recollection of the ecstatic joy i felt continuously i the presence of my master. There was nothing but love oh such profound love oozing from every pore of life, every moment that now i'm crying to recall that wonder.

I've had some contact with more evolved souls who also had the company of my master since his passing, and they, from thousands of miles away, slapped me into samadhi as if my master was alive again and giving me his blessing. Yet I am a leaky vessel, sometimes half full and sometimes half empty.

The aspiration of my heart to melt away in to the light is forgotten too often, and the harsh and unforgiving world only says that the ecstatic joy of samdhi is a lie and that i am but a dreamer and a wish nancy. Had i my hearts deepest wish, life would be nothing but samadhi and this dream would speak louder than words on DU.

I did pay for and support free meditation classes for several months in edinburgh before september 11th rearranged my career and life. Even when just a few people came, the blissful meditation was ecstatic electric, and for a short time, i did not miss my master. I took the bodhisattva vow to him, as he spent his own life uplifting folks like me in to awakening without self. It was a great sacrifice for him to take such time, and geez, for all the abuse i gave him over those many years.

[roughsatori]

7. I do NOT eat meat/fish/chicken or WEAR leather shoes or clothes

I do not harass anyone regarding their inability to take the suffering of other sentient beings seriously.

BTW: I used to hang out with the "Soul on Wheels" motorcycle club and they would kick your "unknown authors" ass for using the word "gang," as it is a "club."

You could rewrite it: "Snide "liberals" would rather attack the easy target of animal rights activists over the Bush* misadministration."

[RebelOne]

17. I do not eat anything with hair, fur or feathers.

But I do wear leather.

[trof]

18. Nor do I.

I make sure all hair, fur, or feathers are removed.

[roughsatori]

21. I was waiting for one of you humorous carnivores to jump in

I actually first typed: "I was waiting for one of you humorous cannibals to jump in."

[INTELBYTES]

24. I'm not anti-fur...but it sticks to your tongue when your eating the meat.