Notes from Evil Bender

I’ve long thought that you should be extremely cautious of trusting anyone who willingly inflicts pain on animals. The kind of person who kicks a dog or tries to tip a cow is someone you should not leave alone with people you care about. *

If you agree with that thesis, then what do you make of this little gem from Ken Ham?

[Creationist Ken] Ham argued that poodles are the result of a downward process. They did not just develop from dog genes, but from cursed copies of dog genes.

“Dogs like poodles are the result of the Curse!” Ham wrote in his essay. “Each time I arrive home and our pet Bichon races to the door to meet me, I am reminded of my sin, that I, in Adam, sinned and ushered in the Fall.”

Ham doesn’t say “and then I kick the cursed beast,” and I doubt he does. Like many people with twisted ideas, he probably actually acts as would someone with a less twisted ideology: basic decency restrains much evil. But if what he says is true, Ham looks at a pet as evidence of his own evil. (No word yet on whether the incredibly useful Working and Shepherd breeds, say, are supposed to be twisted mutants, or indeed of what breed of dog was the only one to come off the Ark.) No one needs tell most of us of the utility of breeding, or the the strong evidence it gives for the role of selective pressures in evolution. But beyond Ham’s Creationist idiocy is something deeper: he sees his pet as evidence of sin, not as a loyal companion. Ken Ham looks at his dog as evidence of a fallen world. I don’t know a thousand pages of refutations could speak so strongly to his pathologies as does that simple fact.

[h/t to Pat Hayes of always-wonderful Red State Rabble]

*no, this isn’t a knock on everyone who’s ever been in the meat industry–but you can kill an animal for food and still be humane