Undercoming Bias
(posted by Jim Henley)
At Cafe Hayek, Don Boudreaux muses.
Reading this morning these opening words in a report at Yahoo Sports — “Wimbledon came under fire from animal activists on Tuesday for using marksmen to shoot down dive-bombing pigeons” — reminds me yet again that our society is extraordinarily wealthy. That ordinary people are sufficiently and securely fed, clothed, shod, and sheltered to enable some of them to devote substantial stores of their emotional energies to the care of pigeons is a sure sign of deep and widespread prosperity.
I dunno, man. I’m thinking Wimbledon itself is a prior marker of extraordinary wealth. When our hunting-gathering ancestors wanted to stage globally televised tennis matches they had to drive the pigeons away with rocks.
Megan McArdle quotes Nozick, which is cool, but commenter “ad” makes a more important point: most of India has been desperately poor for most of time, but it has evolved cultures - Hinduism and Jainism - that show extraordinary devotion to animal welfare. I suspect that some forms of animal cruelty, such as contemporary factory farming, only arise once “society is extraordinarily wealthy,” too.
June 25th, 2008 at 9:36 pm
[...] AOTP, Sympathy for the Pigeons. Kind of. For the record, shooting the pigeons above Wimbledon doesn’t strike me as an [...]