Source background
In
"Tortoise taken by bin men found after thermal camera search," the spokesperson for a London garbage processing company has said that they were happy that staff using modern imaging technology could save a tortoise, its owners pet for the past 40 years, after it had crawled into her bin and was accidentally collected with the garbage (2016).
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My Yes/No question is:
Should we protect animals?
My answer is:
Yes, but I'm not sure how or why.
For such a short article, it took me longer than usual to write the Source background section at the start of this blog post. Two sentences seemed excessive, and it took some effort, and revision, to get the important bits into one reasonably smooth sentence. It was easy to ignore the rubbish.
 |
| Zuma with his sick human owner |
It's a silly story really. But as I'm having my morning coffee, it did catch my attention. I guess it was the use of high tech. equipment. I was expecting the technology to play a bigger role, but as I read the story, it was clear that the company had diverted considerable manpower (person power?) to the search and rescue mission for the woman's pet tortoise. And some of the details in the article really annoyed me: why is it relevan that the wandering pet's owner suffers from multiple sclerosis? And why was it written with capital first letters? It looks like someone at the BBC was trying to fill space, and the result is an unusually rubbishy article for the generally well-written
BBC News.
 |
Butman's all nature photo attracts me
more than tnan the tortoise with human |
As I was thinking of what Yes/No qusetion to ask with a series of coffee sips, I was also reminded of the
New York Times article I chose to link to in part 1 of our exercise writing reference citations yesterday. In
"Against 'Sustainability,'" Jeremy Butman (2016) presents some thought-provoking ideas about the modern obsession with "sustainability," with his catchy title rightly using "quotation marks" for the suspect noun. And that reminds of the even wierder notion that goes under the title of "sufficiency," as preached by the extraordinarily rich and extravagant! It was probably Butman's ideas, even though I've only read them once and quickly, that caused the uncertainty in my answer to the Yes/No title question of this response post. Why should we humans care about animals? Why should nature be "sustained"? Should we care or sustain competing species of animals, plants, bacteria and so on? And the non-living world?
But my half-litre of invigorating morning coffee is coming to an end. I might follow up Butman in a new response later. And there are always the comments.
Butman, J. (2016, August 8). Against ‘Sustainability’.
The New York Times. Retrieved from
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/08/opinion/against-sustainability.html Tortoise taken by bin men found after thermal camera search. (2016, August 9).
BBC News. Retrieved from
http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-london-37022688
As you can see, when I tried to add the unplanned 2nd reference citation above the tortoise article's entry, my formatting got messed up. I decided to use the Remove formatting tool, which also removed the hanging first line.
ReplyDeleteOn a blog post, this is not a problem. Don't worry if your reference citation does not have a hanging first line. In Google Docs, MS Word, and the similar word prcessing programs, it's easy to set a hanging indent using the ruler tool or more direct paragraph formatting, but it's not so easy on this blog.