Cafe Zoo

Dear zoos, friends, and interested others,

I am cautiously optimistic about our ability to create a space for ourselves on Fedi. We are in the initial stages of moving forward.

What I want out of Fedi, though, is not a space just for us but a space for everybody where we can be sure of feeling welcome. I want us to aspire to our vision for the future of our entire society.


Thank you,
Sigma

Dear zoos, friends, and interested others,

The reason why I am late for this blog update is that I have spent the past week getting myself familiar with the Mastodon universe. There was a sudden mass migration of LGBTQ to Mastodon in the wake of Musk's takeover of Twitter.

Apparently, what attracts LGBTQ to Mastodon is really the same motive that has driven many zoos onto Telegram, which is the desire to protect their privacy and the desire to be in charge of their own moderation, having lost faith in Twitter's relatively top-down approach to moderation in an era where Twitter is controlled by a man that is openly transphobic.

I am actually liking the culture on the Mastodons that I have seen, so far. Here is my take on it: the attraction of Mastodon for me is that it lies somewhere between Telegram and these forum blogs as far as what the experience is like.

However, I am not really a security wonk, so I cannot really tell you how to evaluate Mastodon's boasts of being secure. It might be secure, or their boasts about being secure might actually be an outright fabrication, for all that I know. I would have you consult with a security wonk that is experienced with both Telegram and Mastodon to try to get a realistic picture of how far to trust it and how to get the best use out of it.

I do feel good enough about the culture there that I acknowledge being zooey right there in my profile, and nobody has commented on that either way or asked me about it. I think that we might actually be able to find a Mastodon server that is liberal enough that zoos could talk about themselves more openly, but if there is a zooey community in the Mastodon universe, I have not found them, yet.


Thank you,
Sigma

Dear people who are zooey, friends of people who are zooey, and interested others,

You get two for the price of one, today.

I need to talk to you about the anti-bestiality laws. What I am going to say might surprise you, but if you pay attention and read this in its entirety, it might at least make sense to you. I am not saying that you will agree with me, and that is okay. I want people in my life that think, not just people that agree with me. I find people that say they agree with me yet do not think to be outright embarrassing. Therefore, if you have any critique for me after reading everything I have to say here, then what I want you do is flatter me for a little while, tell me what a smart and beautiful person I am, and then explain to me carefully why you really have a subtly different point-of-view. Dragons love getting flattered, and it makes us very amenable to being reasoned with.

The place where I am, right now, is that I would like my fellow zooey activists to do me a real solid, and quit complaining about the anti-bestiality laws. Just don't anymore. What is going on, in western countries, is that they are generally trying to update their animal rights laws, and overall, I agree with this. I even agree with having the laws there to prosecute people that actually are sexually abusing their animals.

The way that I got here was by learning the difference between someone that merely disagreed with me and some asshole that was trolling me, and I was willing to actually give people that genuinely disagreed with me a chance to be understood. Once I learned how to tell them apart from trolls, the things they had to say were really very interesting and insightful.

Trolls are not real zooskeptics, but they are sociopathic assholes that have made a disgusting hobby out of recreational bullying. If you can't figure out how to reach through the screen and split open their skulls with a piece of iron rebar, you should just block them. The more you do to give those assholes the information that they can make you react, the more bold they are going to get, and the more you respond to them, the more you are contributing to the creation of an entire generation of domestic terrorists.

I said something about zooskeptics, there. I actually like talking to them because zooskeptics are those people that genuinely have concerns about the welfare of animals, and they think that, if some asshole is violently raping a non-human animal and that person's behavior just might cause the animal injuries or permanent trauma, they should be able to do something about it. I really love those people. I want that, too. Deep down, I am really in the same place they are, but I also have a little bit more knowledge than they about the diverse reality of how zoo sex happens in the real world, not just in a hypothetical bubble. If I did not have the real world knowledge that I do and all that I had to go on was a hypothetical bubble, then I would probably be in the same place as they.

When a zooskeptic sees you on social media complaining about the anti-bestiality laws, what they really hear you saying is, "I am a selfish piece of crap that would endanger an animal's health and possibly that animal's life just to prevent a very slight chance that I could get unfairly charged with a crime." When you try to tell them about ethical and consensual zooey sex, you might be able to get them to understand that concept and even agree with you that it's a real thing, but you are still not going to change their minds about the anti-bestiality laws because those laws are intended for prosecuting the kinds of lunatics that would violently rape a non-human animal. They are going to tell you that you shouldn't be complaining just because of the very nearly nonexistent chance that you could get caught in the crossfire.

We ought to agree with laws that criminalize animal-rape for the same reasons why we should deem any instance of rape whatsoever to be a crime, and damn you if you are a rape-apologist.

What we want to do for ourselves is to continue trying to get the general public to understand that there is a difference between animal-rape and the kind of ethical and consensual zooey sex that we practice in our own community. The message that we ought to deliver to the public is that, while we acknowledge that the laws should exist, we deny that those laws ought to apply to what we are doing with our own animals. That is the point where we differ from the current opinions of the public, and we differ with them because of the fact that we have real world experience, not just a hypothetical bubble, by which to understand this aspect of human sexuality. If we can keep the conversation with the public going, I think that we will eventually be able to transmit some of that experience.

I think another thing the public needs to know is that they are wrong if they believe that all zoos are rapists. That is a false stereotype, and it is harmful to spread such stereotypes. Those kinds of entitative stereotypes, which are entitative because they lead to all members of a group getting treated as if they were the same and leave no room for someone being understood as an individual and a human being, do absolutely nothing except to damage social discourse and to divide people against each other.

My disgust with such entitativity, in how people talk about zoos, is one of the reasons why I have been starting to refer to myself, more often, as a "person who is zooey," rather than as a "zoo." I deserve for people to be reminded, every time I talk about myself, that I am a person, and I have a right for people to talk about me as if I were a person first, the things I have in common with them second, and my differences in the caboose where they belong. I am a person. I am an individual. I am a human being. I deserve to be understood as a human being, not just in terms of my membership in a group. There are many people who are zooey that I consider to be outright cretins, including people that do not recognize that it is wrong to actually rape an animal, and I will be damned if I will be peaceful about getting lumped in with them.

People that I am willing to defend are a very specific group of people. I defend people that are having consensual and peaceful sexual relations with their animals. If you would so much as utter a harsh word toward an animal that does not presently want to give you what you want, then you are not one of the people that I am willing to defend. I will not defend people that are entitled or selfish. Rape is wrong.

Let us always at least try to keep it consensual, and let us continue trying to educate the public about the difference between peaceful and consensual sex with animals and the kinds of violent and selfish actions that really ought to be considered to be crimes. If we could succeed at educating the public about this distinction, then we might not even have to try to get the laws changed at all because people would think that it is insane to consider peaceful and consensual sex with animals to be a crime.


Thank you,
Sigma

Dear zoos, friends, and interested others,

I did not actually buy even one of the animals that are currently in my life. One of them was adopted for free from someone that put out an ad saying they needed homes for a litter of kittens, and the other two were dumped on me by an acquaintance that was moving at the time. I could have adopted a fourth one a few weeks ago because someone had rescued a cat that was running loose in her area and seemed to be lost and scared, but I trusted her to be able to find either the cat's original home or someone willing to adopt them (I also advised her on how to safely introduce the cat to her dogs if it came to that). I just didn't have room for another one.

The truth is that you really don't need to go to either a shelter or a breeder in order to get a non-human animal. If you are even slightly social and if you are even slightly present in the world, you end up with dozens of different opportunities to just adopt a puppy or a kitten. It is just a matter of being a people person and making sure people know that you are a passionate pet-lover. If word circulates that you are a dog-fanatic, then someone who just found a litter of puppies in a drain culvert or in the crawlspace under their house will eventually call you up and ask you if you want one.

I believe that this is actually a better way to come by a dog or a cat. I don't agree with shelters because I don't want to give validation to the concept of leash laws. I don't think that people are really being "humane" by abducting free-roaming animals off the street. Those people that say "We have to round up all of these escaped pets and give them loving homes" are outright fools because they are almost universally unaware that free-roaming animals have been a part of our culture since ancient Mesopotamia. Excuse me: they have been a part of our culture since the Paleolithic Age. These people are so unbelievably stupid that they don't even seem to fully understand that the animals we keep as pets are fully capable of reproducing and even surviving and thriving without human intervention.

The idea of someone that is so hideously ignorant might sound like science fiction to you, but they are indeed real. There are people out there that literally believe that domesticated dogs are literally incapable of surviving on their own, and they literally believe that dogs are absolutely helpless on their own. They are in denial about the fact that multi-generational free-roaming dogs even exist. They have a "fur-infant" narrative of what dogs even are.

Unfortunately, there is a grain of truth to those people's thinking, but it's partly the fault of the commercial breeding of dogs. Some breeds of dog are so overbred to have a specific "show-dog look" that we have literally bred them into being incapable of surviving, at least with any real prosperity, as a street dog. This problem is reinforcing the ignorant belief, by many people, that dogs are basically fur-infants. The fact that we breed such life-threatening handicaps into the animals, all in the name of making them more profitable to sell into slavery as eunuchs, actually makes the "fur-infant" narrative of what dogs even are look almost like it makes sense.

Therefore, the problem is not that those people are stupid. They just don't have very much ability to think in the abstract. No, they are not really complete dimwits. Let's try to be accepting with the fact that someone that lacks a few elements of abstract thought might not be so truly useless to the human race that they deserve to be deleted from the breeding population. In reality, we can only blame the people so far when we actually have let the commercial breeding of dogs lead to the poor beasts being truly as helpless as babies, in some cases. Therefore, I can think of a simple alternative to beating those people blind with a piece of iron rebar.

Let's outlaw the commercial breeding of dogs. Let's make it a crime to sell a dog for a profit. That might sound extreme, but I think that selling dogs as chattel is really not better than human-trafficking. I put it on the same level as slavery. While it might be possible to do it ethically and while you can find one of the good breeders if you do extensive research, commercial breeding is nevertheless a breeding ground for abuse, and I think there is a better way.

At the same time, let's also put an end to the enforcement of strict leash laws. Instead of letting people run around hysterically waving their arms and saying "every dog must have a loving home!" let's instead embrace the idea that, at least in some areas, it's not the end of the world if dogs are running half-wild, but when they do become overpopulated, let's put them up for adoption by people that are looking for dogs to adopt. The fact that breeders are capable of selling puppies for a thousand dollars a puppy to buyers that live hundreds of miles away from them proves that people ARE willing to go to lengths in order to come into the possession of a dog. If you showed them a perfectly healthy puppy from a perfectly healthy litter by a perfectly healthy bitch, I can guarantee that many people that would otherwise pay a lot of money for a purebred would be willing to adopt a foundling, just as long as you got rid of the idea that they should have a right to buy their way into having a particular image.

Instead of selling the dogs, just charge an adoption fee that would go directly into funding local efforts at making their area safe for the local free-roaming dogs, such as the building of new wildlife overpasses or the construction of fences near freeways. Let different areas have a sense of pride in how healthy the local free-roaming dogs are. Let areas in Georgia that still have healthy populations of the native Carolina dog have a sense of pride in the fact that some of their dogs are descended from the pre-contact dogs of the Native Americans.

And instead of using the money people pay for a dog to breed more dogs in need of homes, we could use it to do more work on our cities to make sure that dogs are given safe places to roam in the areas where we also live.

Is that a wild vision? Yes. Does it sound almost like science fiction? Yes. It sounds completely alien from how we traditionally treat dogs. However, the way that we traditionally treat dogs is catastrophically evil.

On one hand, we breed them into near-helplessnes. On the other hand, we exterminate them like dirty mice if they can prove that they are not really helpless. Selfish love on one hand and contempt on the other. These are the twin crimes we have committed against dogs.

And while it is true that free-roaming dogs might have some environmental impact, so do humans. They have as much right as we to take part in fucking up the planet. They are not more to blame than we for fucking up the planet. They do not deserve to die more than we for fucking up the planet. Let's take the money we otherwise would have spent on murdering free-roaming dogs, and let's use the same exact resources to build amenities like wildlife overpasses and wildlife protection fences alongside freeways and other efforts at creating wildlife corridors around and through the areas where we live and work. With the same resources that we invest in what amounts to ethnic cleansing, we could create the means of peaceful coexistence.

The "fur-infant" narrative of what dogs are is dysfunctional, all the way through. There might be a grain of truth to that narrative, but we put those grains of truth there. Those grains of truth exist only because of our own greed and selfishness and short-sightedness and the shallowness with which we think about non-humans.

We zoos that are also animal rights champions are different kinds of animal rights champions. We don't have a lot of internal agreement about how to fix it, but many of us agree that the most harmful thing we do to animals is to let them get reduced to being mere cogs in the capitalist money-machine. You don't have to be a socialist to see that commercial breeding is severely problematic.

Therefore, if you agree that dogs deserve to be recognized as adults that can make their own decisions about their sexuality, I suggest trying to find a dog that was born free, rather than buying a dog from a breeder. If you want to argue that your dog should have a right to decide for themselves whether or not they should have sex with a human, it makes sense that you would also prefer a dog that was born free. Let's call it the Born Free Movement.

I am not saying that I would never pay money for a dog if I had space for one at this stage of my life, but I would want that money to go toward building a wildlife overpass or a protective fence along a highway. I would want that money to go toward making life better for those dogs that are born free. If the money I paid for a dog were buying improvements to the land that made the world safer for the free-born dogs in the area where I got them, then I would pay it with a smile.

I don't want to come across as narrow-minded about this. I want to only propose these as ideas that you might steal only one small part of and transform into a new idea of your own. I am in brainstorming mode, and because I am in brainstorming mode, I am not in a mood to propose my ideas as the only possible solution. I don't want to shoot down the creativity and intelligence and experience of others. I want others to see my ideas as possible inspiration for better ideas.

And I value feedback. I am not hard to contact. Talk to me. Let's have some friendly debate and bounce ideas off of each other. Real debate. Good faith debate. Healthy debate. The kind of debate that deserves the name. If you love animals, we are going in generally the same direction, and if we wander along different paths for a while, I am sure we will find our way, eventually, to the same place.


Thank you,
Sigma

Dear zoos, friends, and interested others,

I might sound defensive, here, but I am not just in the business of talking about my opinions about things. All that really shows here in my blog are my ever-evolving views on politics, how I would want to approach activism from an abstract standpoint, and so on. This is really intended as self-criticism, though. I feel that I do give a misleading impression that I am only interested in talking about this topic in a very abstract sort of way.

However, I am also part of a small group of zoos that have been reaching out to professional organizations in hopes of establishing a permanent rapport between their leadership and some of the leaders in our community. I am not pretending that I have played the most important role in such developments, but I am also very proud to be a part of what is going on.

It is worth it to continue trying to get involved in zooey activism. If you stay in the community for long enough and make a solid enough group of friends, then you will eventually have opportunities to leverage those connections in order to play a more pivotal sort of role in the future of the zooey community.

If you want to be a part of something real, then here is my advice in a short list.

1) Make a habit of doing what you promise that you are going to do. A solid start on that is to promise little to any given person, but just always come through whenever you do. If your word is genuinely your bond, then that makes serious people that are doing serious things want to have you in their lives.

2) Ask for the opinions of your friends before and after you do anything whatsoever. It means a lot to your friends if you submit your decisions to their judgment. This could even be whether or not you want to invite a new person into one of your groups on one of your messaging clients like Discord, Telegram, KIK, or whatever is currently popular in the zooey community. It could be the question of whether or not you should post a picture or a meme you are not sure about to a group that has moderation in its standards of decency. People that are doing real stuff really respect you if you respect other people in your life enough to ask for their opinions on actions that you are not sure about.

3) In general, behave responsibly. Don't do reckless, unnecessary shit. When people are working on an important project that involves maintaining delicate relationships with key partners in very important professional organizations or with journalists, those people have a lot on the line. If you are reckless or impulsive, then that makes you a serious liability. Act like an adult, and you will get to be a part of adult things.

4) Take part in any activity whatsoever where you get a chance to prove that you can be a part of a collaborative effort of any kind. This could be something as simple as getting together with some people on Drawpile and helping someone draw a dragon by showing them how you can just draw a circle for the head and a heart shape for the shoulder, and coach them through filling in the details. That is a simple thing that is harmless and fun and innocent, but it also does an unbelievable amount of good toward proving that you are a team-player and that you are willing to let another person play a creative role in a united effort. Doing something so simple and elementary and seemingly innocent does a tremendous amount of good toward proving that you can engage in an important aspect of adult behavior.

5) Prove that you can take feedback and put it to use. If someone says to you, "You could have done this better" or "I wish you wouldn't..." then you correct your moves, and you try again. You don't let it shut you down, but you don't get angry over the feedback, either, or blithely ignore it as if you felt their ideas or their experience were irrelevant. If you are just starting to get involved in a sensitive project, it makes them nervous if you react to feedback by either shutting down and getting depressed or by getting defensive. They have probably had very bad experiences with people that don't seem to take feedback well, so it makes them very nervous if you are not willing to learn something based on how other people perceive what you do. Showing that you can handle feedback like an adult, which means being willing to learn something new based on the knowledge and experience of others, gives them a tremendous sense of relief.

6) Make it known that you are interested in making a plus in the world. "Making a plus" just means "making a positive difference." While it is true that you have to walk the walk, talking the talk is important, too. Make people aware that you realize that something needs to change.

I am good at following some of these principles, and I am not so good at following others. I am not a perfect person. However, I do try my best, and I am actually proud of myself for the ways that I actually have succeeded at proving myself to the people that matter. I really feel overwhelmed that some people have chosen to extend a little bit of trust toward me. That trust is something that matters to me. I don't really think that I deserved their trust when I first met them, but I also believe that I have grown into that trust a little bit. They have grown, too, and I am proud of them.

Real stuff is going on. This is not all abstract philosophy chat. Philosophy chat is a part of it, but that is the tip of the iceberg. I want to see more people getting involved in a positive and proactive way, though. I think that the principles that I delineated here are sound ones.

You might enjoy getting a dog dick shoved up your butt, or you might enjoy the feeling of a warm, slick dog-pussy snuggling your love-pole. Well, almost everybody--except people that are either asexual or suffering from an otherwise harmless prolactin-secreting tumor--has sex in one form or another. If having a sexuality meant that you could not also behave like a responsible adult, then the human race would be doomed. The human race might already be doomed because the people that can't really behave like responsible adults, regardless of their sexual orientations, are one too many. If you are not ready to give up on the human race, though, then keep on making friends in the zooey community, and just follow a few simple protocols to try to prove that you are a level-headed, mature individual. You WILL eventually have an opportunity to get involved in something special and cool and history-making.

Getting involved can also lead to you making friends that will still matter to you half a lifetime from now. When people have done something special and cool together, they tend to stay in touch. Knowing that there is someone in your life that feels closer to you than family is a very good feeling. When you and another person get together and do something truly meaningful, you tend to become kith. Kith are a kind of friend that is more than a friend. It's what people mean when they say that a close friend feels like a brother to them or a sister.

It's not even hard. Just be consistent in making sound decisions about how you behave and treat other people, and make sure that other people in your life know that you want to do something meaningful. Make the sun shine a little brighter for us all.


Thank you,
Sigma

Dear zoos, friends, and interested others,

I want to be clear on a few things.

First, I really do not think that the biggest threat to zoos is the government of any western country. I think that there is a possible risk of some zoos getting caught in the crossfire as several countries struggle to update their animal rights protections, but this is really nothing to be afraid of.

The truth about prosecutors is that the majority of prosecutors do not launch their careers dreaming of how they are going to wreck the lives of innocent people, regardless of what statutory law says. Even most of the ones that do agree with the laws that could theoretically be used against zoos are really a lot more likely to target somebody that also has a substantial amount of gore porn and crushing videos and underage content in their possession. If you want to come to those people's defense, then go ahead and embarrass yourself.

The same prosecutors are actually a lot more likely to help you stop some guy from spreading around your personal information and using it to threaten you, or they might do something else to help protect you from actual criminals, including criminals that might believe they have the right to hurt you based on your sexual orientation alone.

I am the only anarchist you will ever meet that is also a defender of the rule of law and the governments of most western countries. The reason why I see the government as an ally is that I really see domestic terrorist groups and hate groups as a more serious form of authoritarianism. Furthermore, I also believe that criminal gangs can often become agents of authoritarianism. A state is really any group of people that can succeed at establishing a monopoly on the legitimate use of violence. Because of that monopoly, there is really less legitimate use of violence going on, and whatever is leftover is usually easy to avoid. I don't believe that governments should be authoritarian, either, but the most important thing that most governments do is to prevent bullies and other bad guys from running your life and making you live in fear. As long as they do that job even a little bit, I regard them generally as an ally.

I have tried to talk about this before, but when I talk about zooey liberation, I am talking about social liberation. I am talking about liberation in the sense of establishing such a rapport, with our society, that we can feel free to talk about this part of our lives with our friends and our communities. That has to be done by connecting with people and by forming allies in our society. That has to be done by building up alliances with professional organizations that provide services that we need in order to have a good quality of life throughout our lives. Liberation is not just an act of the government, but it is a general movement in society.

I am a supporter of statutory reform, but the very hope that we could ever pursue such statutory reform depends heavily on defending the basic principles of our government and the process by which we choose the leaders of our government. We cannot continue living in a world where misguided statutes can be appealed if the government itself does not generally have the sense of transparency, fairness, and due process that makes such appeals possible.

Under a good government, a misguided statute is not really the end of the world if you are genuinely not hurting anybody. Even if a prosecutor were either vicious enough or dumb enough to pursue a case against a person that had not really done anything seriously harmful, modern governments have a process that gives the good guys, which I hope are most of us, plenty of opportunities to go through the appeals process, and through that process, we can seek reform.

That process is just very slow. Again, it is seriously unusual for a prosecutor to go through all of the horrendous trouble and drama of getting admitted to the bar and getting into their position in the government if that person's first priority is not to protect the safety and liberty of decent people. Most people that do get arrested on charges related to having sex with animals are probably either cut some serious breaks or allowed to plea to lesser charges like "disturbing the peace." If you look around in your community, very few of us have actually gotten into trouble with the law BECAUSE WE ARE MOSTLY LAW ABIDING AND RESPECTFUL CITIZENS.

And as imperfect as police are, the police are not peeping in through your blinds to catch you having animal sex. The only time they ever hear of someone having sex with an animal is if a fence-hopping drug-addict is getting into some farmer's pastures and making a nuisance of himself, and those assholes are probably not even as much zooey as they are just bored and on enough drugs to make themselves sexually flexible. If you are an educated and literate person and you told a cop that you are a zoo and that you have sex with your dogs on an everyday basis, they probably would not believe you unless you could prove you were missing a few teeth or showed other signs that you had a truly impaired mind. The cops are working-class people. They are dealing with real problems, most of them small but almost all of them genuine aspects of public safety.

In spite of the government's many flaws, the government is not a threat. That does not make me authoritarian, but on the contrary, I have confidence in the government to protect us against people that actually are authoritarian. There are some seriously dangerous hate groups out there, and the main thing that stops them from using physical violence to punish people they deem, in their perception, to be sinners or blasphemers is the legitimate government that we put there in order to make sure they don't have any such right.

For an example of how much you need the legitimate government there in order to protect you against people that actually are authoritarian, I would point you to places in the Middle East where large territories are run by what amounts to criminal gangs that claim they have the authority of their violent interpretation of God behind them. The Islamic State militants and the Taliban and other dangerous groups there that effectively amount to criminal gangs are the kinds of people that take the place of the legitimate government when the legitimate government falls apart, and once that happens, it can take centuries for anything to improve. The problems that are currently going on in the Middle East can be traced back to the Mongol invasions of the 1400's, followed by the corrupted and incompetent domination of the Ottomans and vicious exploitation of their land's wealth by the globally dominant civilizations. It might not be their fault that they are the way that they are, but they stand out as an example of how little it does to make you free when it is unclear who is really in charge.

Once the rule of law has fallen apart, that doesn't make you free. It doesn't lead to a land of milk and honey where you can do anything you want. It doesn't lead to a libertarian paradise. It leads to a vicious game of thrones that can drag on for centuries. A power vacuum does not make you free, but it makes you a slave to whoever in your presence has the biggest club. It's not really a type of life that you would ever really want if you value your freedom.

For people that truly want to leave others in peace, the government is really a potent ally for those of us that love our liberty, even when the same government is passing well-meaning but truly misguided statutes that could theoretically be used to harm us. There are actual safeguards, in a legitimate government, that make it extremely unlikely that you can become prisoner based on a single stroke of a pen due to your political supporters striking out for a few too many years. It is very difficult to become a prosecutor if you care more about hurting people you disagree with than actually making your society safe and protecting people's freedom. Even when they do make mistakes, the court system has an appeals process that you should absolutely feel prepared to take advantage of.

Eventually, we are going to have a textbook case where a perfectly reasonable, educated zoo that has the support and esteem of the zooey community actually has gotten into trouble with the law and succeeded at reaching out to the community, and we are going to calmly get that person through the appeals process while showing due respect for the same system that also protects us against the aggression of dangerous vigilantes. It might take us a few tries, but through persistent and organized effort, we can do it.

We will behave soberly, rationally, and reasonably, and when society notices the stark contrast between our own community's leaders and the hysterical bastards that are out there howling for our blood, they will eventually start to rethink the wisdom of giving those hysterical bastards such ammunition to make such pretensions of legitimacy. Society might never really approve of you having sex with your dog, but our society also has a lot of respect for people that show respect toward the legitimate government of their countries and not very much respect at all for hysterical vigilantes that don't. If they see that they have given false airs of moral authority to people that truly do not respect due process, they will eventually think about repealing some of the more horrifically misguided statutes, not because they ever really want to hear about the lurid details of your deviant sexuality but because they have perceived that it is generally dangerous to the stability of their society to give vigilante lunatics fuel for their false airs of moral authority. They don't have to love your sexuality to understand that you are an ally of law and order and due process and the many safeguards that protect everybody's freedom and security.

It is true that I refer to myself as an anarchist, but the reason why I call myself an anarchist is that the people that call themselves libertarians falsely believe that the only people in the world that can ever be authoritarian are the people in their government. Authoritarianism comes from many sources. It comes from mismanaged social media apps that give more credence to trolling gangs that use report-brigades as their source of power. It comes from vigilante groups that threaten you and spread your private information in spaces that are frequented by the most dangerous monsters in the country. It comes from corporations that believe that they have a right to treat me like a slave. It comes from economic systems that lead to artificial resource shortages that thereby lead to me being forced to choose between either working in such oppressive jobs or going hungry, and I am really no more to blame for such artificial resource shortages than the people of Ukraine were to blame for the Holodomor. Yes, the welfare state is anti-authoritarian because it prevents corporations from using artificial resource shortages to force me to work in shitty mismanaged mills and get treated as if I had no more human soul or thought in me than a machine, and without that welfare state, the corporates would have as much power to break my spirit as Stalin had to break the spirit of Ukraine in the early 20th Century.

While the government is imperfect at protecting my liberty and sometimes it makes me angry or even furious, I overall respect what it does. There is a difference between being anti-authoritarian and being anti-government. It is possible for the government to be anti-authoritarian, and for the most part, the governments of modern affluent western countries are more remedies for authoritarianism than culprits. They are not perfect. They sometimes make me weep with rage, even, but those are the tears of a disappointed friend, not the tears of a frustrated enemy. For the most part, I see the government as our best ally against all tyranny.

And the best chance that we zoos have is going to be to get our fellow zoos to have faith that the system works, and it is worthwhile for us to invest the time and effort that it takes to build up a case that could eventually lead to statutory reform. It takes time, and it takes a strong community. We can do this, though. It's going to take keeping the faith that the system was put there in order to protect the good guys, and if we are not really trying to hurt anybody, non-human or otherwise, or bother anybody, non-human or otherwise, or get in anybody's way, non-human or otherwise, and we are people that generally show respect for the system that helps to protect everyone, then, forsooth, we are undeniably the good guys.

But also keep in mind that statutory reform is not even our most important goal. It is indeed a high priority, but if you stop and think clearly, the worst threats to your liberty are actually the dangerous vigilante cads out there that would use threats of violence and intimidation and invasion of your privacy as their means of getting their way, not the government. When it comes to protecting ourselves against those pieces of puke, the government is quite clearly our ally, even without statutory reform. I am absolutely confident that the overwhelming majority of prosecutors, in affluent western countries, would say that it's more important to stop those kinds of dangerous vigilantes than it is to harass people like us. There might be exceptions, but all that one of those dopes is going to do is give us a case that we can take all the way through the appeals process.

Again, being anti-authoritarian is not the same thing as being anti-government. Most people that style themselves as anti-authoritarian don't think deeply enough to understand this important nuance, but it is an important nuance.


Thank you,
Sigma

Dear zoos, friends, and interested others,

Efforts to challenge the anti-bestiality laws were part of the early discussions of the modern zooey community. I have been shy about addressing this subject because it can lead to fallacious thinking.

For instance, it can lead to the fallacious thinking that it is only worthwhile to have a zooey community or zooey advocacy at all if we can succeed at changing those laws within a reasonable time-frame, preferably while some of us that are late middle-age still have libidos to speak of. I would challenge that for several reasons.

The foremost of those reasons is that I barely care a jot what statutes are on the books. Laws are nothing more than the opinions of politicians, and those that care too much about the opinions of politicians, either way, are invariably outright morons. Most real cops, with some notable exceptions, genuinely have substantially better things to do than to enforce statutes that pertain to victimless crimes. Fear cuts deeper than swords. Fear makes us act in irrational ways that actually endanger us and weaken us. Fear isolates us from each other, and being isolated from each other makes it impossible for us to organize in any meaningful way to address the object of that fear. Immoderate fearful behavior is just as bad as any other immoderate behavior.

The second of those reasons is that we gain a great deal from the zooey community besides just statutory reform. Statutory reform is only the least of the benefits that we gain by networking with other zoos and by trying to reach out to non-zoos in a positive way. It is true that some zoos find the zooey community, and they find it wanting, but many of us actually find it comforting to be able to share a part of our experience that it is really harder to share with others. Furthermore, many of us really do want to get better at talking honestly with the non-zoos in our lives about our feelings because we are not the kinds of people that like to keep secrets from our kith and kin.

A third reason why we should care, beyond just statutory reform, is that communicating more clearly with the public can help reduce the problem of vigilantism. Unfortunately, there are still a lot of people out there that harbor the false belief that zoos are violent toward animals, and they literally believe that we are using animals as practice dummies in preparation to hurt humans later. Most people in law-enforcement, with some exceptions, have enough training and experience to realize that this is bullshit, and they are taught profiling techniques that would pretty quickly lead to most of us being dismissed as potential threats to human safety. Vigilantism stemming from mass hysteria is a much bigger problem for you, and you can't curb it unless you can establish a counter-narrative that can deflate it.

With all of that out of the way, I still think that statutory reform can be a good long-term goal, and I also think that the zooey community is getting closer to a point where we might actually be able to successfully challenge one of these statutes. If you are inerested, here are my views on how we can move forward.

For one thing, we need to try to persuade zoos that actually have gotten into legal trouble to stay connected with the zooey community. Whenever they get into trouble, what happens most often is that they delete all of their accounts, and they make hopeless attempts at trying to make it look like they really never had any connections with the zooey community. To a certain extent, this is necessary in order to protect themselves. However, this presents us with a serious problem.

If we don't know anybody that has been convicted based on the anti-bestiality laws, then it is not going to be possible for us to challenge those laws. Unfortunately, a part of how our system works is that if you have not been convicted of a crime, you are not really considered to have any grounds for saying that the statute that justified that conviction was really unconstitutional or in conflict with stronger statutes that might protect you. In other words, you can't protest against an unjust law unless you've already been imprisoned or fined.

Fortunately, I think that we are getting better at persuading people to stay in contact with us or get into contact with us again later after they have gotten into trouble. If you know anybody that has gotten into trouble or is currently in trouble or at risk of getting into trouble, it is imperative that you try to keep them in contact with some of the zooey community's leadership. The more people we know that have actually been injured legally by these statutes, the more opportunities we are going to have to mount a challenge in the courts. In other words, be a loyal friend: stay there to support your friends whenever they are going through such a crisis. It might benefit you, eventually.

It might take us years because the courts are very slow institutions. However, that just means that starting our work as immediately as possible is something we really have to do. We have to gather as many people around us as possible that have genuinely been injured by these statutes. Even if all we can do, in the short-term, is comfort them as they recover from the trauma of such a crisis, even that little table-scrap of comfort that you can offer with a few words of text just might be the secret ingredient that helps them get through and also persuades them to reconnect with us when they have reached a more stable period in their lives. Anything you can do that might keep them in the community or willing to come back to the community in the future helps.

We CAN eventually pursue statutory reform, BUT all of our hopes of pursuing statutory reform really depend on us succeeding at all of those OTHER things that I think are more fundamental to our well-being. I talked about those things, before I even discussed the possibility of statutory reform, for very good reason: if we can't cover those bases first, then it's a joke to even talk about statutory reform. The very possibility of statutory reform hinges directly on fulfilling those more fundamental goals.

Therefore, yes to future statutory reform, but don't make it about statutory reform when you are doing the things you know are necessary for future statutory reform. First, we have to break the myth that a statute has some kind of magical power to harm us because this can make us act with the kind of immoderate fearful behavior that paradoxically endangers us and weakens us. Second, it might be true that we need to come together as a community if we hope to challenge those statutes, but we should still come together as a community even if we did not care piss either way about those statutes because networking and making friends is good for most people's health. Third, vigilantism is always going to disrupt us until we can succeed at establishing a counter-narrative, and as long as that problem is there, it is always going to stymie our efforts to build the kind of safe community that we would need in order to get serious about helping ourselves. All of this stuff has to happen first before statutory reform is even a meaningful discussion, for zoos, outside of stand-up comedy.

If we care about statutory reform, the people that we need the most, in order to make that happen, are the people that have already been hurt by the anti-bestiality laws, and we can't persuade them to stick with us and help us out unless we are doing something more fundamentally necessary to make their lives and their mental health better than they would have been without having met us. They have suffered a serious trauma, and they are not going to feel justified in sticking their necks out for us unless we can be something generally positive in their lives. Having a positive and friendly community is where that has to start.


Thank you,
Sigma

Dear zoos, friends, and interested others,

Since this is the month of the Halloween holiday, which has pagan parallels including Samhain, I want to talk about the idea of mourning and honoring the dead.

It is thought to be a unique attribute of humans, cetaceans, and elephants to ritually mourn the dead. I think that other animals do mourn in their way, and I think they miss other animals that have been in their lives in the past. A bereaved cat may express mourning by running frantically around the house, seeking a companion that is no longer there, and this can periodically go on for months or sometimes years whenever they become anxious.

Some people might look upon mourning as a negative experience, but I really disagree. Mourning is the single most humanizing experience that a person can have. It gives us a sense of pride in who we are and why we exist. As hard as the experience of mourning is, the experience is an important part of restoring the dignity of someone that has lost something precious.

I often turn to literature to help me understand the world, and this is no exception. I believe it was significant that, in Marie Brennan's title character from A Natural History of Dragons: A Memoir by Lady Trent, it was the fact that dragons engaged in the ritual mourning of their dead that moved Lady Trent to become a truly devoted champion of the preservation of dragons for the remainder of her natural life. "They mourn her dead!" she cried, horrified that she would have treated them as nothing more than common brutes. Mourning was what took the dragons from being just an interesting animal to being something that it was an outrage to harm unnecessarily. Marie Brennan really made me think because of that part of her story.

There is some research that shows that people are more likely to object to being compared with animals whenever they have been reminded of their mortality. In fact, nearly everybody is more likely to condone violence toward animals, whenever it has occurred to them that they are mortal. Something about the thought of our own demise makes us humans feel more than usual like we want to put some distance between ourselves and our animals.

That phenomenon is unsurprising to me. In the human world, we might enjoy having cute and cuddly animals near us as long as they are alive, but when they die, they are just a mess to be cleaned up, in most households. We learn quickly during childhood that, when we express anxiety over a lost pet, we are told almost immediately, "we will get another one," as if getting another dog and naming him Sergeant would make him the same animal as the one that has disappeared from our lives. Animals, although we enjoy them, are not to be valued in the way that humans are.

Wait...some of us never really learn that lesson. Does it make you feel like an outsider, too?

Mourning is not about feeling horrible over the loss of something precious, but mourning is about the affirmation of a creature's dignity. Mourning makes them a person on your family tree, not just a fungible fluff-ball that can be replaced by another. Mourning makes it a fact that that creature's life was something that mattered in the world. If death is the ultimate mortification of a creature, then mourning banishes that mortification, and mourning tells the world that taking that creature's life away does not make that creature less worthy of our respect. Mourning is a message to the world that the world does not have the power to take away the meaning of that creature's life and what that creature stood for. It's really empowering.

When we mourn, it might be true that we are acknowledging the loss of someone's living flesh, but we are also acknowledging that the purpose that they had in living is still alive, and it is up to us that remember to carry on what they started, even if the prospect of taking on such a responsibility terrifies us.

I hope that I can set a good example, here. I had a little kitten named Neal Stephenson, and he died early due to an illness that he was born with. Here is how I mourn.

Neal Stephenson, I name you. I remember how you wanted to be strong and brave. You were not afraid of anything. You were always willing to try new things, and you were always eager to meet new people. I never saw any fear in you. Sometimes, when I woke up in the morning, the first thing you did was start leaping and spinning in the air over and over again, so you could land on the bed with your claws outstretched. I joked that you might have been saying, over and over, "I pounce! I pounce! I pounce! I pounce!" I also remember how you would climb up my pant leg from the floor, your eyes blazing with determination to make it all the way up to my shoulder. Did you know that I go out every single day with a smile on my face, just so I can keep a part of you alive? I never did that before I met you. The courageous joy that I saw in you meant something to me, and I won't let that part of you die, Neal Stephenson.


Thank you,
Sigma

Dear zoos, friends, and interested others,

I have just started on the Game of Thrones series, and the reason why I was so late to the party was that there was so much preliminary material that I wanted to cover. A Game of Thrones is not bad, but it does recycle a lot of familiar themes from fantasy. Most particularly, George R. R. Martin does the same basic thing that Robin Hobb did in Realm of the Elderlings. Apparently, the combination of magically bonded wolves and dragons that really seem to be living nature gods seemed to become popular in the 1990's, and this is the second time that I have seen them appear together in the same storyline.

Before I took time to look at the publication dates, I was tempted to think that the idea had originated with Robin Hobb's Realm of the Elderlings series, and George R. R. Martin recycled the same idea. However, I was being a douche canoe to not look at publication dates. What I think is the more likely explanation is that both of them were drawing from the same roots, and while one might have taken some inspiration from the other at some point, I think that it is much more likely that both of them were really following the trends of their time. Further proof that they are drawing from the same roots is that they also use a lot of the same terminology.

The cool thing about A Game of Thrones is that the book actually had multiple rather flagrant mentions of sex with animals at several points in the series, and in one case, a woman actually claimed that she had lost her virginity to a mare, which was really just a cheeky way of her saying that bouncing in the saddle had stretched her there. Nevertheless, the author clearly has a pretty easygoing sense of humor regarding sex with animals.

However, I have to say that George R. R. Martin does not have as much of a zooey vibe to me as Robin Hobb. In Realm of the Elderlings, the relationship between Night Eyes and Fitz was really a lot sexier. In A Game of Thrones, it is more like one of the characters inhabits the body of animals as a so-called "skin-changer," and the intimacy therefore is not as much there. While Martin is clearly aware that some people actually do have sexual relations with animals, he has a lighthearted, if not necessarily respectful, toleration for it, rather than any real empathy for how it feels to be in love with a non-human. He does not really devote a whole lot of the storytelling to talking about interactions with the non-human characters.

The court intrigues are nevertheless more sophisticated and interesting in A Game of Thrones. Rather than having a clear villain in the story, Martin's approach to the story was discussing how good people can feel torn between different loyalties, which relates well to how good people often feel.

This theme of people feeling torn between different rights, rather than just between right and wrong, is actually an old idea, in the study of ethics. In How Good People Make Tough Choices: Resolving Dilemmas in Ethical Living, Rushworth M. Kidder takes the stance that moral decision-making is harder, rather than easier, for people that have highly developed morals. People that have highly developed morals have also learned different types of moral thinking, and they understand many different moral points-of-view. Where a person with less developed morals uses only one type of moral reasoning and therefore never thinks about a moral decision for very long, a person with more highly developed morals tends to weigh several different types of ideas against each other, and they are often at odds within themselves for a long time before they act, which also gives them more time to bring themselves around to a better decision.

Regardless of the reason why, though, internal moral conflict can lead to a very powerful means of building a story, and I think that Martin uses the concept at least reasonably well. He is very good at what he does.

Anyhow, the story has dire wolves, dragons, and lots of horses in it, so I am totally there.


Peace,
Sigma

Dear zoos, friends, and interested others,

I finally got done with the Realm of the Elderlings series, by Robin Hobb. It is a rather long series, and I recommend it for someone that is a really avid reader that enjoys melancholy heroes and antiheroes. I think that I missed two blog entries mostly because I was so engrossed in it.

The series is so morbid that many people get turned off by it, and a few people that I have mentioned it to have been a little bit outraged over the fact that Hobb would not create a warm, sunny, simple happy ending for her primary protagonist.

The protagonist does have happy endings throughout his role in the series, but you have to think outside the box in order to see them. Just accept what kind of person the hero is. A wolf is not a tame animal, and the world of court intrigues is more of a burden, to such an animal, than it is a boon.

As a matter of fact, Prince FitzChivalry Farseer takes pains, at times, to protect his kin from getting sucked into court life, and he looks upon the notion of his offspring getting recognized, in the royal succession, with wild-eyed horror. We are talking about a man that is so deeply suspicious and distrustful of the world that his primary accomplishment, as a father, is that he taught one of his daughters how to fight with a knife.

Therefore, if you accept Fitz for what he is, rather than judging him based on what he is not, then the endings he gets, in the novels, actually make quite an amazing amount of sense.

I am not telling this to spoil the story for you, but I am telling you this to avoid letting you spoil the story for yourself. Accept the man for what he is, and everything else will make sense.

Nevertheless, the only unmitigatedly uplifting section of the entire series is the Rain Wilds Chronicles, which is a quartet of books about the journey of the dragons, which have been abandoned in despair by the last two full-grown dragons in the world because of their serious deformities.

Ah, so you might ask me, "How could you claim that that is uplifting?" It is uplifting to see any character overcome adversity. That is why we are so endlessly sadistic toward our protagonists. I will not spoil the story too much for you, but the ending is unmitigatedly a happy one, for the dragons. It works well as a stand-alone read, in my opinion. KELSINGRA!

Nevertheless, the role of the dragons, in the series, is also rather grim, insofar as why they have to make this journey. The last of the dragons are actually the survivors of a horrifyingly evil sort of genocide.

In fact, it seems like any story about dragons is secretly a story about the genocide or the deadly persecution of any minority group. The reason why dragons are so magnificently appropriate, for this purpose, is that the people that have been to blame for every deadly genocide in history have looked upon themselves as "heroic crusaders for justice" of some kind. The medieval Christians would routinely destroy every small pagan colony they found anywhere, and they would call themselves the heroic champions of virtue. The Russians that murdered the Circassians went to their graves smiling with the certainty that they were "holy warriors." Those brutes that marched in the Crusades were certain that they raped and plundered in the name of divine justice, and they never felt a twinge of guilt for their uncountable crimes. They were blissfully and happily unaware that they committed some of the most seriously evil crimes that have ever been committed for any reason, and while many of those crimes remain undocumented and unprovable, the evil that medieval Christians were capable of is beyond dispute in light of their crimes during the Crusades. The symbol of everything in the world that the medieval Christians hated and feared, though, was the dragon.

If you are a dragon in modern literature, I am afraid that this is the reason why we are constantly getting driven to the brink of extinction in truly horrendous genocides and dragged, sometimes rather ignominiously, back from it. Complain about it all that you like, but the authors have decided that they rather like using us for this purpose. How many times has our kind gotten driven to the brink of extinction, again?

We need more books where dragons are just charming middle-class dads. For a change, let's create a world where dragons are numerous and well-established as accepted and beloved and productive members of society. Let us have one great epic fantasy where we do something besides desperately clawing our way back from oblivion and obscurity.

In sum, the Realm of the Elderlings series is all about the aftermath of a serious genocide against dragons and how the toil and sacrifice of a melancholy hero, who makes Hamlet look like a ray of sunshine, and the instinctive benevolence of a would-be priest-turned-pirate, succeeded at dragging them back from the brink of extinction.

While the Realm of the Elderlings is a bit of a long read, I also think that this series is the single zooiest fantasy series that I have ever read. The rather hot romantic chemistry, between Fitz and Night Eyes, makes the hero's otherwise unbearably melancholic temperament worth tolerating. The invincible love, between Fitz and Night Eyes, was always the glow of warmth that kept me reading. As long as that love was strong, I knew that nothing could truly be too terrible.


Thank you,
Sigma