Cabuto was over last night talking about what he called "midget cats" and what turned out to be officially called "Munchkin Cats". I was not aware of this new breed. Basically they're the weiner dog equivalent of cats, taking advantage of a genetic mutation/deformity that makes them teeny tiny and squeezable.

The big hoopla about these cats is the fact that we're breeding into them a deformity. Of course, all purebreds are really inbred and all purebred characteristics are genetic mutations. But weiner dogs have been around since before we were born, and midget cats have only started to be bred on purpose (the mutation popping up now and then throughout the years), so we must face the fact that these things are funny looking because of us. Not because of nature, like the platypus, but because we made a living being that's deformed on purpose.

I myself, of course, don't really think life's all that sacred, and I think a big jump in the development of our species will come when we realize how plastic life is. That is to say, I don't believe a single soul should ever have to suffer and die, but I do believe that we as people OWN our bodies, and they are NOT temples, they are ours to do with as we wish. Thus my tattoos and piercings, hair dye, and less extreme body modification such as avoiding sunlight and working on musculature.

As a moral society, our taboos and mores don't advance as fast as our technology does. So when something like cloning comes along, it really freaks people out, and for good reason. As it stands, I guess, the judeo-christian model is that human life is precious, the image of God, and the reason for the universe's existence. Animal life is disposable, there for our use, and no matter how nice a kitty or monkey is, it's not getting into heaven.

As a society, we like to ignore troublesome issues of "playing god". We ignore the fact that in vitro fertilization results in viable, but unused, embryos. Until stem-cell research becomes a huge issue, and now we're all concerned that we not experiment with those blastocytes and we go back to pitching them. I guess that's the conservative stance. Does anybody know? Nobody's against in vitro, but we're against doing anything with the leftovers EXCEPT flushing them. We try to avoid thinking about this. Same with abortion. Fertilized eggs, more often than not, don't take in the uterine lining. Yet "life begins at conception". A sticky wicket indeed.

I read a great article by Stephen Jay Gould once about whether or not conjoined twins are two people or one. Most people seem to think that you just count the heads. But what if they share part of a brain? Stiiicky wicket. Now The Advocate is talking about scientists who are working on allowing same-sex parents to have children who represent a mix of their individual DNA! It's not too crazy if you think about it (fertilize one's egg with the nucleus of another for example) and definitely not as risky as cloning. Sheeit, they invent that shit, and David Crosby's out of a job!

Another one is euthanasia. "Playing God" the opponents scream. They like to ignore the fact that without our meddling, the terminally ill patient would have been dead long ago. This guy has a good point when talking about the parents of conjoined twins who decided to have them even though early tests showed that they'd be monstrously deformed, saying they were placing it in the hands of God: "God plays cruel tricks like this on the world all the time, and the end is never pleasant."

So now we get to play cruel tricks too. Midget cats. Sinus-troubled bulldogs. Weiner dogs with back troubles. And what about stupidity? Is it cruel to purebreed a dog, knowing how dumb it will be? At least it will never notice! At least midget cats suffer no disabilities, unlike the diamond eye to the right here. Here's a cat we breed for a disease that causes blindness and horrible pain! But hey, it's good luck!

And these are just the animals we care about! The ones we eat have it worse. Heck, they were brought into this world expressly to become a chicken-fried steak or stick-style fish chunklet. I have no problem with this. I believe that we should be neither the slaves of nature nor its rapists, but rather, custodians. At times in our history there have been cultures who consumed meat with a great deal of respect for the spirit of the animal or its totem, and I think we can return to that attitude. So with a lot of these issues I think our morals are out of whack but not totally wrong, and we need to seriously reevaluate our role on this planet. Issues of what is life, and creating life, are really just the beginning.