Yep, the "meaningful consent" bit is what I'm talking about as being pat-yourself-on-the-back overkill. It's intellectualism trying to future-proof feelings, because people can't get their heads around the fact that feelings changing in the future doesn't affect the validity of their form in the past. And, again, it has nothing to do with goats.

And I do think I'll be done with this thread soon. You're a human supremicist, and don't seem to be willing to challenge that. You can look at a dog bouncing and excited to go for a walk but whimpering and lagging behind to go to the vet and say they can't communicate, they can't have input into decisions. You think that any reaction a non-human expresses is just training and mental automation rules, because they certainly can't come up with emotions and opinions themself. (Except when their reactions support your thesis of the moment, when you'll temporarily forget all that to point gleefully at the same communication you dismiss otherwise to crow "See? They are so much happier in the forest glade than the cage!")

This was the country; for fun we'd set up hay bales and plank bridges in the side yard, and see if we could communicate with the goats well enough to let them figure out how we were imagining the obstacle course going. Sometimes they were feeling playful or were just in the mood to climb on things, and they'd run the course beside us -- sometimes with the human scrabbling to keep up. Sometimes they rejected the idea entirely, dug their hooves in, and told us in no uncertain terms to go see if anyone else was more willing to put up with our tomfoolery. Sometimes they were disinterested and just wandered off to graze aimlessly.

If any goat actually didn't want to be milked on a given day, there'd be no way we'd get her onto the stand without an outright wrestling match, and no way she'd stay up there through the whole rigamarole. (We wouldn't have bothered trying, just let her go back to the herd.) First-time mothers did have to learn the process, since it involves a number of non-obvious steps and an unfamiliar metalic ringing when the milk hits the bottom of an empty bucket. But you know what they almost universally weren't, even the first few times? Distressed. They didn't have to be "trained to accept milking", they just had to familiarize themselves with the setup surrounding getting milked.

It's your comparison to wild goats which seals the whole thing, though. Wild goats are prey, with limited interaction with humans because their instincts read humans as "predator". These were goats who grew up from birth around humans, who were able to ignore the vague undercurrent of their instincts because they knew better that we were harmless -- and in fact were often beneficial (and gave good shoulder scritches). Of course beings with entirely different life experiences will act differently! But, no, that shared understanding of another species is entirely the evil farmers exploiting the poor innocent goats, corrupting their poor natural instincts, which alone determine the entirety of non-human animals' behavior, and which must be held sacred since those instincts are blessed by evolution and apply equally well to every domestic situation every non-human ever finds itself in. Except when they're human instincts since we are the only species with the capacity for abstract thought and for rising above the mandate of our baser nature.

I'm tired of y'all. You position yourselves as abolitionists, and maybe you are -- but only an abolition of the worst atrocities while enthusiastically perpetuating the idea of "inherent superiority" that underlies it, seeing the ideal goal being one of segregation, patronization, and autocracy.

re: @queermunist@lemmy.ml