There is a reason that my friend's Bulldog Baxter, spends every waking hour tearing apart a George Bush chew toy.
Hidden amidst the human beings on this planet that have suffered at the hands of the Bush administration are millions of voiceless and helpless animals. No matter what one thinks of animals and their importance in our lives, most compassionate human beings would acknowledge that they deserve to be treated humanely and and offered some modicum of protection. George Bush doesn’t fall into that camp and that's another reason to celebrate his imminent departure. I know Baxter will.
Dr. Albert Schweitzer said this,
Anyone who has accustomed himself to regard the life of any living creature as worthless is in danger of arriving also at the idea of worthless human lives.
Under the stewardship of George Bush, the U.S. has become the world's biggest butcher of mammals, while numerous governmental agencies conduct horrendous research daily on animals. His administration has promoted animal consumption in the form of government giveaways and grazing discounts to cattlemen and Bush has endorsed and promoted plans to allow trophy hunters to shoot endangered species in other countries and import the trophies and hides into the United States. It's no wonder why George Bush displays such a callous indifference to animals though, when one considers his past.
Longtime Bush friend, Terry Throckmorton, recalled George Bush’s legacy of animal cruelty when he was a young boy in Midland Texas where, among other things, he and a group of friends delighted in blowing up frogs.
We were terrible to animals. A dip behind the Bush barn turned into a small lake after a good rain, and thousands of frogs would come out. Everybody would get BB guns and shoot them, or we'd put firecrackers in the frogs and throw them and blow them up.
Years ago, George Bush was named Governor of the Year by Safari International,the world's leading trophy hunting organization which has maintained close ties to the Bush Administration. Bush even appointed a former top lobbyist of the Safari Club to be the deputy director of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, surprise, an agency promoting the plan to allow the selling off of endangered species to private interests who has generally been supportive of Safari's entire agenda. While running for President, Bush also received the most contributions of any presidential candidate from the slaughterhouse industry, factory farms and cattle ranchers.
Violent acts toward animals have long been recognized as indicators of a dangerous psychopathy that does not confine itself to animals. The progressive web site BuzzFlash says this about George Bush.
Bush is a model narcissistic sociopath, who is devoid of the ability to empathize. It is the characteristic of such people to have the ability to "appear" to be concerned about others, but that is just for show. The inner heart is empty. You can knock all you want, but you won’t find anyone home in the empathy department when it comes to sociopathic personalities.
The Bush Administration's disdain for and cruelty towards the earth's animals has been exemplified by the horrific policies and actions of his administration which are detailed here. What follows is sure to be disturbing to many, so be forewarned.
THE EPA:
Rather than working to reduce emissions and prevent human and environmental exposures to toxic chemicals, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has instead chosen to establish "acceptable" exposure levels based on the results of animal tests. In fact, the EPA requires more animal-based chemical toxicity testing than any other federal agency. In more than 10 years, the EPA has not banned a single toxic industrial chemical using its authority under the Toxic Substances Control Act, despite killing hundreds of thousands of animals and despite urgent calls to limit chemical exposures.
THE NATIONAL TOXICOLOGY PROGRAM:
For more than 25 years, the U.S. National Toxicology Program (NTP) has been using your tax dollars to poison small animals with massive doses of pesticides, drugs, and other chemicals to see if they develop cancer. Every day for up to two years, rats and mice are forced to consume food or drinking water laced with a test chemical, have the substance pumped down their throat and into their stomach, or are stuffed into inhalation-chamber restraint tubes and forced to inhale the test chemical as a vapor. And as if that weren't enough, the doses that animals are given are often so high that they cause sickness and suffering over and above that which is caused by tumor growth and disease.
THE U.S. FOOD AND DRUG ADMINISTRATION:
The marketing of drugs and other pharmaceutical products in the U.S. is controlled under the federal Food, Drug and Cosmetics Act, which empowers the FDA's Center for Drug Evaluation and Research to require extensive toxicity testing on animals before a new drug is deemed "safe" for marketing. In order to satisfy FDA data requirements, thousands of rats, mice, rabbits, dogs, and primates are killed in "pre-clinical" laboratory poisoning experiments to assess the safety of new drugs (including all ingredients and even minor differences in formulation). Commonly required animal tests include the following:
THE DEPARTMENT OF TRANSPORTATION:
The DOT has sanctioned hideously cruel skin-corrosivity experiments to test hazardous chemicals on rabbits despite the fact these tests are completely unnecessary since there is a federally approved, non-animal test called Corrositexª available.
Animal tests are a one-way street to pain and suffering. In order to test corrosive chemicals such as Savage Acid and Goodbye Graffiti, rabbit’s backs are shaved and corrosive chemicals are applied onto their raw skin and left for up to two weeks. The chemicals burn the skin, and the rabbits are given no pain relief. It's a dead end street for the rabbits who are killed after the test period. Corrositex, on the other hand, uses synthetic skin to accurately predict the effects of potentially corrosive substances on human skin, without hurting animals. The DOT is using taxpayers' money to fund barbaric experiments on animals when a humane alternative exists.
THE U.S. MILITARY:
News programs have been airing ghastly video footage from Afghanistan that shows dogs dying agonizing deaths in al-Qaeda military experiments. One tape shows a dog trapped in a room with vapor rising. The dog begins licking his lips (increased saliva is one of the first signs of poisoning), loses control of his hindquarters, and is eventually seen lying on his back, moaning. However, these cruel experiments are nothing new—nor are they confined to Afghanistan. The war on animals is an international one.
From Tel Aviv to Tehran to Texas, dogs and other animals are being poisoned and otherwise tortured in chemical, biological, and conventional warfare experiments. PETA has equally barbaric, secretly shot footage, from 1977, of Israeli soldiers injecting— and killing—dogs with what appear to be nerve agents.
No matter where you stand on international conflicts, it is a painful fact that the Israeli army has also blown up un-anesthetized pigs with Scud missile explosives and conducted other painful experiments on dogs, monkeys, doves, mice, toads, and guinea pigs. Ha'aretz, Israel’s most respected daily newspaper, reported that experiments carried out by the Israel Defense Forces on animals were so horrific that the soldiers forced to conduct the experiments had to seek psychological counseling.
One would hope that the scores of animal rights advocates that work tirelessly daily to improve animal rights and protections will have a friend in an Obama White House. Time will tell.