• Paris to build memorial for WWI animal heroes
    15 replies, posted
https://www.france24.com/en/20181002-france-paris-build-memorial-animals-killed-during-wwi-war
Neat, hopefully it's a nice looking memorial.
Maybe we should have a monument that expresses the fact that innocent animals were used as labour in violent human affairs. I'd rather that than claim a messenger pigeon as a hero. Would it be the same if we strapped a paraplegic kid to an electric wheelchair with an envelope sellotaped to their forehead and wheeled them through artillery to deliver a message. Is that kid a hero or a victim, you tell me. Nothing heroic about it, it's cult like patriotism dressed in a fursuit.
it's an heroic victim
what do you think the monuments are about?
Thanking the animals for their deaths in the war effort.
Well they're generally not. For example, the linked tweet in the article mentions the Animals in War Memorial in the UK. Which reads This monument is dedicated to all the animals that served and died alongside British and allied forces in wars and campaigns throughout time. They had no choice." but even then we have to look at the historical reality for why animals were used, and that in many cases there was no other viable alternative. often times those animals did save human lives.
Really have to congratulate the Bogdanoffs on their ability to rapidly construct projects around paris that serve niche but important purposes. Unparalleled in political craftsmanship. Why can't we have them come to the United States and lobby for reform policy?
Whether they saved human lives or not isn't my point. They were fighting over borders and religions and ethics that had nothing to do with them, they had no concept what so ever of what they were doing as a whole. My main point comes from this photo from OP. Literally some bitch showing a photo of a "war hero" to pigeons. Jesus fucking christ. https://twitter.com/aerhooiseaux/status/1046825917333540864 I'm not a radical animal lover, but this is stupidity at a maximum. We should feel nothing but guilt for what we did to those animals. Whether they changed the human world or not is irrelevant to them.
looks to me like she's interacting with the pigeons while holding the photo, rather than showing the picture to the pigeons specifically. they're on this ride too my man, we're not divorced from nature. we're a part of it as much as they are. while they may not see the world the same way humanity does, that doesn't really matter. the human world, and the world, is one and the same. where i'd say always tragic, but sometimes necessity.
Of course I'm not accusing her of promoting pigeon propaganda on the french pigeon masses. It's a symbolic photo considering the topic though. I'll disagree absolutely there, who owns the land the animals live on at any point is irrelevant to them, we captured. and brainwashed them for our bidding, can't really avoid that. Regardless of any human suffering, we are sharing a planet and you'd be naive to think our matters in WW2 were relevant to anything but death for anything but a human.
Which was my point, and it's that fact alone that makes human matters relevant to them. While it's not like animals can really understand us, what we do to this planet and how we act on it effects them. who is in charge and how they treat the environment, or how the environment gets treated in that bid for power, directly effects them.
If the Nazi's were a doomsday cult I might be inclined to agree with you, but they weren't and whether they won or not wasn't in the minds of the animals when using them as tools. We simply found it hard to pull heavy objects and send messages reliably at the time so we roped them in. It's nice to give this meaning to them, but it's avoiding our own responsibility for what we did to them to save members of our own species. I would rather we moved forward with a monument of guilt to ensure it doesn't happen again than to glorify it in any way, regardless if regret partially comes into play like you pointed out.
Animals have been used in wars for all of humanity. Only recently have we no longer been dependent on them due to industrialization. Yeah it's cruel that birds were used to deliver messages but what other options did they have back then? You can't fault them for not having cell phones or radios. Yeah it sucks that animals died because of human conflict - that's just a part of history you have to accept because times were different back then. Human survival largely depended on using animals for a long, long time - for agriculture and transport especially. Using animals today would be unethical - but again, they really didn't have a choice back then. Humanity was very barbaric even only 100 years ago.
Need memories for the WWII Armour. Matilda deserves a statue.
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