[The Lizard of Oz]

The following piece, entitled "Dogs Are People, Too", appears in the NY Times today. It is not a joke or a parody.

Some freak, a "professor of neuroeconomics" (whatever the fuck that is) at Emory, decided to put some dawgs into an MRI scanner and look at what is going on in their brains. He got their consent first

Quote:

From the beginning, we treated the dogs as persons. We had a consent form, which was modeled after a child’s consent form but signed by the dog’s owner. We emphasized that participation was voluntary, and that the dog had the right to quit the study. We used only positive training methods. No sedation. No restraints. If the dogs didn’t want to be in the M.R.I. scanner, they could leave. Same as any human volunteer.

Strangely enough, he found that there is stuff going on in the dawgs' brains. I'm not really sure what he was supposed to find, that there is nothing there at all? In particular, in some part of the brain called the caudate nucleus which apparently is present in both dawgs and people

Quote:

Although we are just beginning to answer basic questions about the canine brain, we cannot ignore the striking similarity between dogs and humans in both the structure and function of a key brain region: the caudate nucleus.

What did they find there?

Quote:

In dogs, we found that activity in the caudate increased in response to hand signals indicating food. The caudate also activated to the smells of familiar humans. And in preliminary tests, it activated to the return of an owner who had momentarily stepped out of view

Unbelievable, I mean who would have thought, right?

So what is the conclusion from these insights about the dawgs' cawdate nucleus?

Quote:

The ability to experience positive emotions, like love and attachment, would mean that dogs have a level of sentience comparable to that of a human child. And this ability suggests a rethinking of how we treat dogs.

DOGS have long been considered property. Though the Animal Welfare Act of 1966 and state laws raised the bar for the treatment of animals, they solidified the view that animals are things — objects that can be disposed of as long as reasonable care is taken to minimize their suffering.

But now, by using the M.R.I. to push away the limitations of behaviorism, we can no longer hide from the evidence. Dogs, and probably many other animals (especially our closest primate relatives), seem to have emotions just like us. And this means we must reconsider their treatment as property.

So because some areas lit up on some meaningless scan this "would mean" that dawgs have some entirely hypothetical "level of sentience", which "suggests" a "rethinking". They "seem" to have emotions "just like us" which means, at the end of the day, we "MUST reconsider their treatment". Makes perfect sense.

******************************

It is truly incredible to what lengths these freaks will go and what grim nonsense they will spout to rhetoricize their utter hatred of the human being under the guise of "animal rights".

This is no joke, there is a real darkness here. This repeated empty ceremony of solemnly conducting completely pointless scans of these dogs, after having those terrible "consent forms" signed, is something that I find scary and sinister. I think what these people really want to do, whether they know it or not, is to torture human beings because unlike dogs we know that life is meaningless.

Attached to the article is a cant picture of a dawg just standing there amid the truth of nihilism, waiting for its personhood to be recognized. Scary stuff.