The toyification of animals

Well people have been doing it for years of course… what with Crufts dog show, and those little yapper-type dogs (who are bastards) and the RSPCA finally coming out and saying that they’re boycotting Crufts from now on because the whole thing is a freak show and some of the specially bred variations are possibly a bit cruel…

(from)

But the point is we’ve been making toy animals for years. I’m quite interested in the notion that when a new technology breaks, it quit often turns up as toys first… so naturally this caught my eye… the first geneticaly engineered pets:

(Glofish : Wikipedia)

Which look like this, pre-tinkering

And the Jazz-Purists of the animal world are already expressing concern over the toyification of animals… as per this article from a hermit-crab blog with regards painting/modifying their shells which alerted me to the fact that there’s actually a severe hermit-crab shell-shortage (christ, is anything going right on this planet?) and a voluntary ban that many pet stores impose on “painting fish“, ie: injecting them with dye, which sounds slightly insane to me and the sort of thing Hitler would do, but there you go.

The toyification of weapons, the toyification of animals. I think we need a subtle redesign of our ethical systems – not that I have a problem with creating new species per se, but I think that the revolution in human dignity that has taken place over the last couple of hundred years needs to extend to animals.