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Channel: john muir – The Smart Set

Emotional Animals

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Legislation has recently been proposed in Spain to give monkeys the full legal rights of human beings. The bill calls specifically for, “the immediate inclusion of (simians) in the category of persons, and that they be given the moral and legal protection that currently are only enjoyed by human beings.” Somewhere the ghost of William Jennings Bryan is smiling or crying or both. (H.L. Mencken, a steely atheist to the end, doesn’t get to have a ghost.)

I’m fully in favor of the bill, although I admit that it stimulates that tingly feeling in the brain and belly that only comes about when one’s basic assumptions are being tested. The fact is, animals are a problem for us and always have been. We don’t know quite where to put them, how to treat them, or where our ideas apply to them and where they don’t. Perhaps this is because we... More...


Wild Life

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The last earthly home of the mystic-naturalist John Muir was a 14-bedroom Victorian mansion on the fringes of Martinez, California. Before that Muir’s home had been the wilds of America, days spent roaming the peaks and valleys of the West. But in 1878, when Muir turned 40, his friends urged him to leave the mountain life and rejoin civilization. “John Muir! The great prophet of the American wilderness!” they would say at dinner parties and in print, and then remind Muir in private that his way of living was impossible.

By all accounts, John Muir became a good husband and a good father after he came down from the mountain. He wrote books about his experiences in the wild, and tended the enormous fruit ranch that belonged to his father-in-law. Every so often, Muir’s wife would find him gazing into the air. She would send him off for a mountain... More...

Emotional Animals

0
0

Legislation has recently been proposed in Spain to give monkeys the full legal rights of human beings. The bill calls specifically for, “the immediate inclusion of (simians) in the category of persons, and that they be given the moral and legal protection that currently are only enjoyed by human beings.” Somewhere the ghost of William Jennings Bryan is smiling or crying or both. (H.L. Mencken, a steely atheist to the end, doesn’t get to have a ghost.)

I’m fully in favor of the bill, although I admit that it stimulates that tingly feeling in the brain and belly that only comes about when one’s basic assumptions are being tested. The fact is, animals are a problem for us and always have been. We don’t know quite where to put them, how to treat them, or where our ideas apply to them and where they don’t. Perhaps this is because we... More...

Wild Life

0
0

The last earthly home of the mystic-naturalist John Muir was a 14-bedroom Victorian mansion on the fringes of Martinez, California. Before that Muir’s home had been the wilds of America, days spent roaming the peaks and valleys of the West. But in 1878, when Muir turned 40, his friends urged him to leave the mountain life and rejoin civilization. “John Muir! The great prophet of the American wilderness!” they would say at dinner parties and in print, and then remind Muir in private that his way of living was impossible.

By all accounts, John Muir became a good husband and a good father after he came down from the mountain. He wrote books about his experiences in the wild, and tended the enormous fruit ranch that belonged to his father-in-law. Every so often, Muir’s wife would find him gazing into the air. She would send him off for a mountain... More...

Emotional Animals

0
0
Legislation has recently been proposed in Spain to give monkeys the full legal rights of human beings. The bill calls specifically for, “the immediate inclusion of (simians) in the category of persons, and that they be given the moral and legal protection that currently are only enjoyed by human beings.” Somewhere the ghost of William […]

Wild Life

0
0
The last earthly home of the mystic-naturalist John Muir was a 14-bedroom Victorian mansion on the fringes of Martinez, California. Before that Muir’s home had been the wilds of America, days spent roaming the peaks and valleys of the West. But in 1878, when Muir turned 40, his friends urged him to leave the mountain […]




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