“The most popular Ebola-related petition currently on the change.org website is not one calling for an end to the suffering of men, women and children in west Africa.
It is a petition calling for Excalibur, the pet dog belonging to Teresa Romero Ramos, the Spanish nurse infected with Ebola, to be saved from euthanasia. Officials want to put it down for fear that it may spread the disease.
Whilst Excalibur’s petition has more than 300,000 supporters at the time of writing, the nearest petition relating to human sufferers of the virus, calling for vaccine research to be fast-tracked, has half that number.” *
Cenk Uygur (http://www.twitter.com/cenkuygur) and Ana Kasparian (http://www.twitter.com/AnaKasparian) break it down on The Young Turks.
*Read more here from http://www.channel4.com/news/ebola-dog-africa-spain-nurse-excalibur-petition-save
Comments
Ana, I can’t believe that you would just hand over your little dog if she had just been near someone with Ebola. Lets say you were taking care of a sick family member who passed away. Now not only do you have to deal with that, but your dog must also die for being a loyal companion. Could you leave the house and hand over your dog to be euthanized without having any kind of proof that dogs can even contract Ebola? I hope you would at least try to save her life, like you know she would try to save yours.
Cenk, you are completely wrong about this! Enough with proclaiming ourselves better than others! When people can’t claim superiority over someone else because they’re both the same skin color, then they go to culture. If that is the same, then its religion, if they have that in common then it’s gender. If same gender then one is better “looking”. There are some humans (like yourself) who have evolved to see that all this is BS! But yet you still get stuck at thinking that you are better than other animals. What do you base this on? I know that you cannot relate to them or feel empathy because they are different from you. But if they can feel pain, loneliness, fear, love and happiness, they should be given some compassion. Recently MRI tests showed that the same parts of their brain lights up, in the same exact place as humans when we feel emotions.Those of us who grew up around pets, don’t need tests to see this. But you should learn more about them before you sentence them to death out of fear. Just take about 20 seconds to think about what we are doing to them. I mean.. what if you are wrong?
Ok, now I’m going to have to go Cenko unchained on you both!!
You all almost made me cancel my membership after this!!! Not so much because of your opinion (although that did start the whole thing), but because I couldn’t login to reply to it on your website! I have held back up to now.. but WHEN ARE YOU GOING TO FIX YOUR WEBSITE!!!??!! I try to login to reply and it sends me to another page. I couldn’t get back to this original video until I closed the page and came back in. Then I would get logged out again. It was a crazy loop! I hate your website! Its so hard to just watch the 2 hour show! You have to click on one button, which takes you to another page that you click on to take you to a 3rd, then you have to scroll down to the bottom to finally play the video!! Oh, then you have to go back and start over from the beginning to watch the 2nd half! Don’t get me started on your mobile app!! I cannot believe you don’t have a working app for IOS 8!!! Your iPhone apps have not been working since IOS 5!!! FOR THE LOVE OF GOD that I don’t believe in, WHEN ARE YOU GOING TO FIX IT!!??? I came (this) close to cancelling my membership today!!! If I hadn’t thought about .. “Well.. how am I going to see the whole show then?”.. I would have been gone! So.. I’m still a member, But please fix all this. I gave you all donations for a new studio, and I was really hoping that you would spend some on your website and mobile apps! Please make it easier for us paying customers to see your show and to post comments when we completely disagree with you, even for the first time! Seriously, please make it more user friendly. Maybe you can get some help from Square Space. I hear there is some sort of contest going on. ;0)
It makes more sense to euthanize the husband as he is far more likely to spread ebola than the dog. Killing the dog was a knee jerk hysteria and a missed opportunity to study if dogs can carry ebola. No good came of killing the dog except giving the health officials an excuse to feel like they were doing something usefull.
May they be exposed to ebola and be euthanized.
Human life (what you call people) has no intrinsic value any more than any other life. Each being is referenced to its context. The fact that more people signed the petition to save the dog than to advance ebola research is a measure of the value humans give to dogs as companions, though I dare say as many would have signed it if the animal in question had been a lion, for example.
I completely agree! There is no “like” button here, but thank you for putting that so well.
You guys do great work but you’re 100% wrong on this. You rightfully rail against all sorts of “-isms” but now it turns out that you’re in favor of speciesism? How disgusting and hypocritical is that???
And btw, a petition to take concrete action to assist a specific creature (whether human or animal) will ALWAYS gain more support than a general petition to help “people in general”. The success of the petition of had nothing to do with people vs. dogs.
Great points! Well said!
You got the facts wrong on this subject. The dog was not sick and there was no evidence that he was shedding virus. Also the nurse’s husband strenuously objected to the euthanasia that was performed. As with many topics in veterinary medicine, there is no conclusive study that shows that dogs can shed Ebola virus. The dog (and his master) were yet more victims of Ebola hysteria.
Absolutely right!