I have zero information on this other than they appear to be monitor lizards (update: found a video that labels them as such and replaced it below) and I’m going to take a wild stab in the dark and suggest that this didn’t take place in America (though you never really know… I’m lookin at you, Florida).
https://youtu.be/K_9u-KF3BqI
Sorry the news reports about the Pope’s comment on dog-afterlife got your hopes up. Here I am to dash them: Dogs don’t have souls and when they die, they are gone forever. As with all the bad news I am duty bound to deliver, I say this not to bum you out, but to make you better prepared for reality. Enjoy your pets while they’re alive. Because the series of algorithms from their genetics and outside stimuli that made them unique is going to be gone forever.
But before I get to the meat of this story, I have to get this piece of clipart out of the way:
There… I did it. The most easy, most obvious hack reference to make on this story: use of the 1989 Don Bluth animated feature All Dogs Go To Heaven.
DO YOU SEE WHAT I DID THERE??????
Now that that obligatory nonsense is out of the way, I can go back to crushing your dreams. First the background:
Recently reports claimed that the current hippie Pope said otherwise. but only kindov. Kindov because Catholics believe the Pope is infallible because God talks directly to him so if he says something then its basically God saying it. But that only counts in official Popey Speeches, of which this was not. So…. this is more “the guy who is the Pope” said it than it is “the Pope said…” if you’re following me here. Then the reports clarified that it wasn’t even this hippie Pope who made the claim but rather the Pope from the Hippie 60s…
The original report claimed that a kid was sad about his deceased pet and the Pontiff made him feel better with something silly. From the New York Times:
Citing biblical passages that assert that animals not only go to heaven, but get along with one another when they get there, Francis was quoted by the Italian news media as saying: “One day, we will see our animals again in the eternity of Christ. Paradise is open to all of God’s creatures.”
Theologians cautioned that Francis had spoken casually, not made a doctrinal statement.
The Rev. James Martin, a Jesuit priest and editor at large of America, the Catholic magazine, said he believed that Francis was at least asserting that “God loves and Christ redeems all of creation,” even though conservative theologians have said paradise is not for animals.
“He said paradise is open to all creatures,” Father Martin said. “That sounds pretty clear to me.”
This is nice to say to children, but not appropriate for adults to believe.
Also, not accurate. As the above text no longer appears on that NY Times link which has been correct-edited (corrected+edited). It now reads:
Italy’s Corriere della Sera newspaper, analyzing the pope’s remarks, concluded he believed animals have a place in the afterlife. It drew an analogy to comforting words that Pope Paul VI was said to have once told a distraught boy whose dog had died: “One day, we will see our animals again in the eternity of Christ. Paradise is open to all of God’s creatures.”
This is PETA nonsense. If animals have souls then killing animals is murder. And Surprise: PETA of course feels validated. From the same NYTimes piece:
Sarah Withrow King, director of Christian outreach and engagement at PETA, one of the most activist anti-slaughterhouse groups, said the pope’s remarks vindicated the biblical portrayal of heaven as peaceful and loving, and could influence eating habits, moving Catholics away from consuming meat — which she asserted had already been happening anyway. “It’s a vegan world, life over death and peace between species,” she said. “I’m not a Catholic historian, but PETA’s motto is that animals aren’t ours, and Christians agree. Animals aren’t ours, they’re God’s.”
Whether the pope’s remarks will prove to be a persuasive new reason not to eat meat, a potentially worrisome development to the multibillion-dollar beef, pork, poultry and seafood industries, remains unclear at best. But they did cause discussion.
Gotta love the hippie bias of the Times rubbing its hands over how multibillion-dollar industries might be negatively affected by this non-news.
How did this fable spread across news sources and social media as fact? ReligionNews.com tracks its spread:
Part of the answer may be the topic of the pope’s talk to the crowd that day, which centered on the End Times and the transformation of all creation into a “new heaven” and a “new earth.” Citing St. Paul in the New Testament, Francis said that is not “the annihilation of the cosmos and of everything around us, but the bringing of all things into the fullness of being.”
The trail of digital bread crumbs then appears to lead to an Italian news report that extended Francis’ discussion of a renewed creation to the wider question of whether animals too will go to heaven, and what previous popes have said.
“One day we will see our pets in the eternity of Christ,” the report quoted Paul VI as telling a disconsolate boy years ago.
The story was titled, somewhat misleadingly: “Paradise for animals? The Pope doesn’t rule it out.” It wasn’t clear which pope the writer meant, however.
The next day, Nov. 27, a story in the Italian daily Corriere della Sera by veteran Vaticanista Gian Guido Vecchi pushed the headline further: “The Pope and pets: ‘Paradise is open to all creatures.’”
Their full following of the false story is worth reading for insight of how news and false news spreads across sources, alone. But the fact is that to our scientific and religious knowledge, animals don’t have souls.
If you think that only dogs have souls then you’re letting your personal attachment to something rewrite your religious doctrine (or dog-ma).
Don’t blame the messenger, kids….
Animal Planet makes it’s case that humans and animals are more similar than perhaps they think their viewers think.
and the best one…
Not a hard choice. The rat is cute and that is it’s entire worth to the world. The girl has more to offer, even if you don’t believe in an inherent or divinely given worth to humans.
It’s not all lab rats of course. There is testing on beagles and chimps and other mammals. But if it saves human lives, there is no argument.
You want passion and truth? Okay. Teller and I would personally kill EVERY chimp in the world, with our bare hands, to save ONE street junkie…with AIDS.
-Penn Jillette
Recently a video of a teenager chucking a bucket load of newborn puppies one by one into what was later identified as the Vrbas River appeared on the internet. It’s disturbing and really puts the lameness of the outrage over that lady in England who put a cat in a trash bin several weeks ago (as the UK Sun summarizes: bank worker Mary Bale caused worldwide outrage when she was caught on CCTV dumping a cat in a wheelie bin). Watch if you dare….
The river is in Bosnia and apparently the Bosian police are now investigating this incident and have identified the girl but the suspect is apparently NOT named Katja Puschnik as was previously posted online. She’s a minor so her info hasn’t been publicly released.
The girl’s parents were ordered to attend a police station near their hometown in Bogojno. From the Sun:
“Her parents will be responsible, and then her school, and then the entire society. The girl’s education was not a good one.”
Meanwhile, a German girl who was wrongly suspected of being behind the sick stunt has received death threats despite being cleared by police.
The 19-year-old – identified only as Claudia P, for her own safety – was named on a Facebook group as the girl in the film.
Her phone number and address were published on the page.
German police spokesman Peter Reichl said: “She received several hundred calls and even death threats.
“But she is not the girl shown in the clip.”
Damn this photography crew from only having still shot cameras on this expedition. Video of this event would have been fascinating. You can relive the experience however as the photographer involved in this story retells what happened when a giant ass leopard seal swam up to him with its jaws wide open in an attack stance while he was collecting shots of the animal in Antarctica. what happened afterward is at least 3 levels of “whoah”.
As you can see in the picture below, these leopard seals are like small killer whales. this particular one was bigger than most says the photographer, but the size of the head and the sharp teeth alone were what made me make that comparison. He compares it to a bear, which is, I’m sure more accurate.
The creature seemed to think the eye of the camera was the photographers mouth, which made for some great photographs. In the video, Paul Nicklen describes his most amazing experience as a National Geographic photographer – coming face-to-face with one of the Arctic’s most vicious predators.
This story is so awesome that I recommend you think about it a little after watching the video and then watch it again.
Horror of horrors… When they said this lady had her face ripped off by that chimpanzee, they meant she had her FACE. ripped, fkking, OFF. ug.. awful times a million.
Had to remove her eyes due to infection, no nose, no hands.and all because Travis the chimp felt threatened by a middle aged woman just standing there, so he naturally had to incapacitate her.
and to top it all off, Oprah has ballooned back up to previous overweightness.
“You know when my client’s chimpanzee ripped your face off? It was on the job, and is therefore a worker’s comp claim. Your argument is invalid”.
An attorney representing the owner of a chimpanzee that mauled and blinded a woman is calling the attack a work-related incident and said her family’s case should be treated like a workers’ compensation claim.
The strategy, if successful, would severely limit potential damages in the case and insulate the chimp owner from personal liability.
The 200-pound chimpanzee named Travis went berserk in February when his owner, Sandra Herold, asked her friend and employee Charla Nash to help lure him back into her house in Stamford. The animal ripped off Nash’s hands, nose, lips and eyelids, and she remains in stable condition at the Cleveland Clinic.
Nash’s family filed a $50 million lawsuit against Herold, saying she was negligent and reckless for lacking the ability to control “a wild animal with violent propensities.”
Due to a pending legal battle with a gang of underage prostitutes vs community action group ACORN, I am unable to take this case at this time, however i will comment that “violent and unspeakably horrible life threatening and disfiguring attacks by a domesticated primate” *was* in fact in the job description listed under “hazards and acknowledged risks” in the alleged “victims” employment in her former role of “friend who stops by the house to say hello from time to time”.
Deep in the jungles, 2 BBC nature reporters find the rare kakapo, which you’ll all recognize as of course “the old night parrot of New Zealand”, whatever the hell that means. At first I read that as the “only night parrot” and that appeared to make sense. but. nope. its the “old” one.
Old or not, the dude likes rough sex, complete with clawing and face slapping. hot.
Fry and zoologist Mark Carwardine have been tracking down some of the most endangered animals on the planet in a six-part series.
Glenn Beck, in a segment explaining why, despite his being a staunch critic of Barack Obama’s, he thinks John McCain would have been worse for the country if he had won the 2008 election, used a decidedly controversial visual aid: He tossed a frog into a boiling pot of water on his set.
The stunt was not only an effective attention grabber (had me on the edge of my seat when I watched it at home) but a clever illustration to the warning not to believe everything you hear. Beck was debunking the anecdote that “if you put a frog in boiling water, it will notice the danger and jump out, but if you put it in room temperature water and slowly boil it, it won’t notice and will die”. So Beck goes to a little childrens case of tiny pet frogs and throws one in, expecting it to jump right out and it doesn’t – to which Beck reacts by telling you to “forget about the Republicans, because most of them are fake. forget about the Democrats, because most of THEM are fake. and forget about the frog, because IT was fake”. Then after a commercial break, he fished the plastic frog out of the pot and verified that no animals were harmed during the segment.
Okay. weird. interesting. kinda cute. right?
F*ck no. There was shock and outrage – OUTRAGE I SAY!! – over Beck murdering one of these tiny little spitwads. And these are not vegan sources, thus making their outrage more than a lot hypocritical since, uh – what exactly makes killing an amphibian to illustrate a political point servicing millions of viewers worse than killing a mammal to eat or wear in service to 1? dumbdumbs…
Most of these blogs were relying on an edited youtube video of the segment that cut out Beck stating that the frog was fake. tsk tsk bloggers… Beck gladly accepted the win on his show today:
Charles Johnson of LittleGreenFootballs.com was unhappy about getting the attention over his dubious headline titled “Glenn Beck: Frog Killer” and responded to Beck showing this oops-post of his on air with an impossibly worse/more embarrassing claim: “Beck Lies about LGF“… oy… the “lie” being that Beck didn’t include that Johnson had mentioned in the LGF post that falsely call Beck a “Frog Killer” that there was a possibility that it was a trick. Charles seems to be going through a tough time in his online life as his former admirers start piling on him as he goes through a recent change of calling former colleagues and like-minds racists, liars, kooks, and more and I feel kinda bad for him but… dude… it’s not a “lie” to show that you made a false claim based on edited video you didn’t bother investigating. Ya, it would have been nice for Beck to bail Johnson out a tad and include that Johnson, after stating the false claim as fact, also showed his openness to the possibility that it was a gag, but Johnson has no reason to expect such a pass.
Wtf is wrong with this world when its right-wing leaning bloggers that erroneously freak out over animal cruelty that didn’t take place and PETA is the sane voice of calmness and reason?… yikes.
