#feed into your mammal brain's instinct of “I just hunted something”

[the-lady-hestia]

Pro tip

go for a run

Do you feel like shit? Anxious? Depressed? general emotional muck?

Put on some good shoes, a tee shirt and some pants, go outside, especially if its cold out, and fucking run as fast as you can for as long as you can

Humans are animals. We evolved to fight against things like lions and bears and shit. More specifically we evolved to outrun the bastards. When you run, especially when you kick it into the highest gear, your brain floods your body with adrenaline and endorphins (Da Good Stuff TM). Those chemicals react directly with stress hormones to produce serotonin and dopamine. Bad stuff gets turned into good stuff.

The key here is the running fast bit. Humans evolved into the evolutionary niche of endurance. If a mammoth tried to run away, we chased the thing until it collapsed from exhaustion. HOWEVER those little bits of genetics that say the solution to "problem" is "sprint" are still there and still have a biological reward system attached to them.

So when you're anxious, depressed, etc. use the 2000 BC cheat code of fucking bookin' it and I shit you not it works.

Edit: and for the love of god, hydrate

[laundryandtaxes]

I appreciate that you engage with vegan arguments in good faith as a meat eater. I do think you're missing part of it, though. Re: meat as a "normal part of animal life", vegans would say that something being "natural" doesn't necessarily make it ethical. Many animals kill their young, rape, and cannibalize, which humans are against because we're capable of moral reasoning and aren't driven by pure instinct. We are animals, yes, but we experience life quite differently from other animals.

I think it's pretty presumptuous of the animal experience (especially when thinking about other mammals here) to assume that we experience the world in a terribly different way than most animals do- neither you nor I can know how animals experience the world, but I'd be surprised if a wolf killing a deer fawn never saw and noticed its visibly upset mother. I think every animal that hunts is aware that its prey would like to be alive rather than dead. But my point is not about the naturalness of the behavior, it's about the real lack of moral meaning in of the behavior of killing and consuming animals.

I think the ethical implication of a lot of arguments against the eating of animals is that, for instance, if a wolf could be made aware of the fact that it doesn't need meat to survive, the ethical thing for the wolf to do would be to stop killing and eating animals- it sounds silly, but I think the notion that we know better/differently just falls incredibly flat. Take the brown bear (commonly just called a Grizzly, an animal I really really love) for instance- for the majority of the year many of them straight up eat no meat without, to my knowledge, any consequence. In fact, the way that many brown bears eat salmon would be considered deeply unsportsmanlike by human anglers. Many rip the heads off to consume the fatty tissue of the head, brain, etc, and completely discard the carcasses.

Here is where I think my point is most clarified. I think that is acceptable behavior for brown bears, but not for us, because it is not the taking of animal life that concerns me at all. It is the taking of animal life for purposes other than self defense or for the enjoyment you get out of eating the animal. Even in that case perhaps I'm being hypocritical- the bear's enjoyment is clearly in eating the heads. For another instance, mountain lions are known to kill prey, hide them somewhere, and not even eat them. It would seem some animals do in fact kill more or less for fun, or to sharpen their skills for when they need to. Many whales are known to have these hour-long chases of prey animals where they maybe take a couple bites, just for the sake of teaching their young how to hunt. While I don't think these are acceptable behaviors for us, I don't find them to be morally wrong things for animals to do. Certainly I wouldn't consider taking your child hunting and taking only the loin off a deer to be acceptable. I think the common ethics of hunters around "waste" are there for us to feel good about our behavior, but I don't think theyre moral truths. I don't support killing animals you aren't going to eat or donate with the exception of pest and population control, such as in the case of wild hogs or coyotes. But to say that an animal that is killed and left to rot has been "wasted" is not really true to the animals that live in that ecosystem. Kill a deer and leave it, and surely a coyote will come along and eat to sustain himself for a while, and turkey vultures will have something to eat, along with bugs and fungi that thrive on decomposition. So the whole notion of waste is more about what we as hunters and humans feel justifies the taking of animal life, and nothing to do with morals, and frankly nothing to do with the wasting of life. So I'll use hog hunting as an example I've thought a lot about. Again, I don't think there is anything morally wrong with killing a hog and "letting it lie" for other animals to eat. But I really dislike and find the culture around hog hunting to he morally repugnant- a lot of guys get into it just because they want to kill a lot of stuff, and that bothers me. The pigs don't give a shit. And killing them is the correct thing to do- they wreak havoc on any ecosystem as invasive animals. So there is no moral wrong being committed here. It bothers me that some people just want to kill a bunch of stuff for no reason. This has to do with human motivation. The pigs don't give a shit. The animals that would feed on a pig carcass don't give a shit.

Where this comes full circle is that I think humans have very similarly nonsensical ideas about our place in the animal kingdom and our place as these really somehow special animals who just know better than other animals what is right and what is wrong, but the codes we do have are most often not really about ethics- the right and wrong here is entirely about our feelings, not actually whether it is right or wrong to take an action. Few people would find it acceptable to rip a pig apart limb from limb even if you were going to eat it, but that's how coyotes regularly hunt. My thinking is that, even if the coyote had some presence of mind that we are assuming he doesn't have (and I think it would be wildly incorrect for us to think that hunting animals don't know that prey animals want to continue to be alive) about the suffering of his prey, there would not really be any moral obligation for him to stop hunting. Morality is functionally how we make sense of and code interactions between people, how we regulate our own social systems, how it frankly makes us feel best and most just to live. None of this makes a difference to an animal that doesn't want to die. I just think the idea that humans are such different animals that we have this higher moral responsibility to other animals than any other animals is on its face kind of absurd. Because we live in societies where all of us rely on and, theoretically, value each other, there are certain things we do not do to other people because they violate some form of our basic human social contract- basic bodily autonomy in the case of sexual assault, the basic right to live free from undue physical harm in the case of child abuse, etc. I think the idea that morality is a thing that broadly exists among human and nonhuman animals alike is incorrect- it is our creation, and our set of rules. Maybe this will clear things up for you- it's not something I haven't considered and frankly it is not really easy to articulate fully what I'm trying to get at, especially at what is for me 7:21 am, but hopefully it gives you an idea of the kind of things knocking around in my head.

[marakama]

hc- vampiric lore - physical

[mrreuben]

The Lasallian Reflection Framework

As a former student of the great Dr. Teehankee, he never fails to emphasize the Lasallian Reflection Framework. In order to become an effective Lasallian Business Leader, you must know this cycle by heart by assessing the situations in your life by reflecting through this framework.

There are a lot of other frameworks available all over the world. Different institutions like universities, hospitals, government offices, and departments, among others, have different processes of reflection embedded in their organizations. But as a future Lasallian Alumni, I must commit to this framework and apply it to my everyday life so I can truly become a true Lasallian Business Leader.

The first step that we are going to discuss is “See-Experience”. As a mammal, we are naturally born with instincts which saved us from many threats to our species in the past thousand to millions of years. Like a pack of wolves who hunts a buffalo in order to feed the whole family, we prioritized our survival in almost our whole history so that we may survive, but even though we are in the same category as a mammal, we are still human beings. We are capable of critical and ethical thinking. We are blessed with the ability to know which is right and which is wrong. As the history of civilization progresses, also does the ability of the human brain to create a more just and humane society. People from the past, even though the culture is based on their own survival of each individual, has learned that people who stand and stick together, rather than compete for survivability, they started creating laws that favored equality, fairness, ethics, and morality. Before creating those laws, people first experienced the step “See-Experience”, they saw the chaos and violence that has governed our survival instinct for thousand of years, and with this experience, they’ve realized that something needs to be done.

 After the first step, the people from our history “Analaysis-Refllection”. As I’ve said before, we are capable of critical thinking and analysis, these people who saw the condition of our society, started to analyze what can they do to improve the lives of the civilization. They thought of ways to make life easier for people, and also to increase the chance of survivability of the population。

 After realizing actions that need to be done, people did the third step, they took “Commitment-Action”. They implemented the laws that they’ve thought of and analyzed it further if it is effective in making the community more engaging, just, and humane. The first and second step is irrelevant if we won’t act on it, for, in the end, the most critical part of the process is taking action in your realizations and observations. If we don’t act on it, it will still amount to nothing.

 During the American Slave Trade, a lot of people, even white people, for hundreds of years, shared compassion and pity for the African American slaves that were being brought from continental Africa, but no one act on pursuing their rights, liberty, and freedom until Abraham Lincoln during the American civil war, proposed law in banning slavery in The United States of America.

 After the “Commitment-Action”, we go back to the first step again. We “See-Experience” the implementation that we did, and asses if what better things and processes could be done in order to make it more efficient and effective.

 This Lasallian Reflection Framework helps we recall the most obvious thing that people need in order to make a better society, which is CARE. I hope that I may apply this every day of my life so that I may learn what I should prioritize and how I must observe and act in fighting injustice, and giving my community more optimism.