If I were to hazard an argument as to why perfectly acceptable adoptive parents paying the mother directly to adopt a baby is illegal it is to discourage supply of additional babies, that is women having babies just to sell. That itself might not be a problem, but if the goal is to get families to adopt orphans, children who have lost parents or been abandoned, then having a supply of babies of known pedigree available might compete against that. One might fear that women with desirable traits would dominate the market by making a career of selling children while needy orphans would go wanting.
I don't know that that is a good argument, but I suspect it is one of the strongest against letting payments determine things. The assumptions that there is a larger supply of orphans relative to adopting families, as well as a very mobile market in a supply chain sense (families and orphans are evenly distributed, or travel easily) are very important to it.
Yes, you may be right. Similarly, facilitating the adoption of cats (rather than complicating the procedure and euthanizing others) can lead to the multiplication of cats which are an invasive species.
True, although usually they spay/neuter cats as a matter of course when they take them in, so it won’t increase the number as much as people going to get bred cats. In fact it probably limits it somewhat, the cat breeders being akin to the women with desirable traits in my analogy.
Well I think the undesirable parent filter can remain in place even with more efficient transactional processes occur. Normalizing selling kids might make it easier to get around the filter, but then people get around the filter in the current bad system, too. Conditional on the filter existing, making it easier for parents who pass the filter to adopt should be a gain for the kids and the parents.
That's not quite what I was getting at. I am saying keep the filter, definitely want that even though it is imperfect. The question is whether being able to pay mothers directly to adopt their unwanted child will make it easier to get around the filter and how much easier, and whether that is worse than having kids not get adopted and having good parents not be able to adopt.
I can see how there being a sort of career where women have kids to sell for adoption might make it easier to get around the filter if adoption agencies want to make use of that increased supply. However, how much more than they already do is questionable, as the agencies already make pretty good money adopting out and have lots of incentive to not be too choosy if they are going for volume. I am not sure there is a shortage of kids to adopt that are holding back pedophiles from adopting, so I suspect that if a pedophile couple wants to adopt and can find a shady adoption agency who caters (or is duped) to that, then they are going to get a kid whether the mother gets a check directly or not.
The situation is a bit more like "Locks keep honest people honest" than your example. Adding that 3rd padlock to your shed isn't going to keep serious theives out anymore than the first one does, but it does make it much harder to get the weed whacker or snow shovel.
I think adoption and guardianship relationships just end up being a little island of recalcitrant virtue ethics in the broader sea of consequentialist policy reasoning. People instinctively feel that there's something sacred in entering into a parental relationship with a child (or, to a lesser degree, an animal). It feels more like assuming a vocation or taking on a sacred trust than purchasing a product for pure self-gratification.
Accordingly, virtue-based norms (about permanence, responsibility, care, gravity, self-sacrifice, fidelity to higher ideals) are naturally felt to obtain in these cases, both for the parties directly involved and for those functionaries charged with mediating the relationship. To hint that the shelter volunteers must have been petty tyrants just because they wouldn't just sell you kittens by the pound like so much sliced ham seems... wilfully uncharitable? As a moral situation, it's just not a natural fit for standard utilitarian approaches like quantification, satisficing and contractual reasoning.
Interestingly, I suspect similar sacral instincts kick in around ideas of national guardianship. Not many people would vote for a phenomenally talented presidential candidate who confessed they felt no patriotism and just wanted the office because they enjoyed the state dinners; and most people would strongly disapprove of a President, a general, a parent or a cat owner who decided to casually abandon their role before the normal term, simply because it wasn't that fun anymore. But by your reasoning, it's hard to see the grounds for complaint there: after all, the child, the pet and the country are better off with a few years of competent guardianship than they would be otherwise, so where's the harm?
They aren't selling kittens, they are giving them away. We routinely give away drinking water, does that raise similar issues?
The pet would be better off if the owner didn't abandon it. But this is a situation of excess supply. The people giving out kittens are not making sure that more of them get adopted by responsible owners — responsible owners can adopt if they give kittens out freely. They are making sure that fewer get adopted, by both responsible people who are not willing to wait two hours for an interview and irresponsible people who are not willing to wait or wait and get rejected, more have to be killed.
Your argument works better for babies, since at a price of zero there is a shortage not a surplus, but depends on assuming that adoption agencies can better be trusted to act in the interest of an infant than either its biological mother or future parents, which I think unlikely.
"To hint that the shelter volunteers must have been petty tyrants just because they wouldn't just sell you kittens by the pound like so much sliced ham seems... wilfully uncharitable?"
Your explanation being that they think it is better for a kitten to be killed than adopted by someone they have not vetteed?
In all fairness, even in utility terms, you can make the case that a quick painless death is preferable to various forms of suffering under neglectful owners, possibly including slow wasting from FLV you caught because your owner thought it would be cute for you to be an "outdoor" cat. (FWIW I am not a cat person and have no, er, kitty in this fight.)
But the bigger issue is that starting with the question "isn't it better for the kitten to be adopted, even by an unvetted person, than to be killed?" is presupposing a consequentialist framing from the outset, and my point was that this is just not the system of moral reasoning that humans naturally use for thinking about guardian relationships. You're citing the rules of a different game than the one that people are playing.
And again, if you feel *yourself* to be fully consequentialist in regard to parent-child relationships, I'd love to know whether you would disapprove of a cat owner that adopted a cat, then dumped it back at the shelter after getting bored?
Related: there have been times and places where child adoption was a more straightforwardly commodified affair. For instance, the pre-WWI novel _Anne of Green Gables_ is famously about a tween girl who has been adopted several times by families wanting cheap household labor, then dumped back at the orphanage when she was no longer needed. Although the book dramatizes Anne's developing a more familial bond with a new couple, this is presented as a surprising innovation to the status quo where orphans are more like household appliances. So if anything, we're moving away from, not toward, the idea of adoption as a consumer good.
People close to me have gone through the painful process of adoption in both USA and India and I was totally flabbergasted by the stories they told me.
In USA the laws vary by state but one thing struck me was that everyone wants infants and not older children. Infants are in short supply and has long wait. There is an exception however for drug babies. That is babies born to mothers with drugs in their system. If adoptive parents sign up for such babies, they have to pay more $25K or so to the agency out of which a good chunk goes to the mother of the baby. They have to also spend money for the healthcare of the drug addicted baby.
It is not clear how it works but good chance that various states have laws that after childbirth the mother is tested for drugs. If drugs are found in her system CPS by default gets custody of the child. The mother can then either fight for the child or take the money and continue with her lifestyle. I think this has created perverse incentives in the system where so called "child welfare" organizations push for taking away newborns from their mothers more aggressively in order to make money. So we get to hear stories like this [1].
In India there is a dark side and a bright side. Since it is expensive to raise a child, adoption agencies quickly place the kids in homes of adopting parents and the process is followed later. This is a trial period during which parents are made to run from post to post by the system. The final step in the process is a local judge finalizing the adoption and giving the child legal status of the child. Judges here get to set arbitrary criteria. Someone I know was asked to come around 9 times to the court which was thousand miles way. At one point judge refused to hear the case because the wife (Mother) was not dressed in traditional attire.
There is a pretty good black market to counter this in India. There is a network of Hindu gurus and also Christian Church leaders who are trusted by the local communities. If you are their faithful member, they often arrange to find a pregnant woman from some poor region of the country who in return for money hands over the baby to the adopting parents. A local doctor who is also part of the religious group writes a certificate claiming it is a biological child born which he himself delivered in a home delivery. This avoids the entire legal process. Of course often the religious leader often acts as an escrow and also someone who hides identity of both parties from each other so neither parties can change their mind later and get into a fight. Religious leaders also are connected with the political class so it is hard to pickup a fight with them. Since Indians also care deeply about caste purity, they can also offer this screening which traditional legal system does not allow. Some poor folks want a son but if a daughter is born they are happy to hand her over to someone else. So this is a pretty much free market and except the legal risks is both faster and cheaper.
The one adoption case I know about because I knew the adoptive parents, an ff couple, was an infant from somewhere in, I think, Central America. It took something like a year to get through the process, I think all on the American side, time after the baby was born and before her future parents got her — not something in the interest of the child. Fortunately she turned out fine, is now in or just out of college.
"A better argument is that the mother and the adoptive parents are not the only ones whose interest should be considered—there is also the child." However, this reasoning seems flawed because a child’s best interests—assuming a broad consensus on what those might be—would likely be best served by parents who can provide a more stable, nurturing, and resource-rich environment. If this were the yardstick by which adoptive parents were judged, then the smarter, wealthier members of society would move to the front of every adoption line. Whether or not you find this to be a desireable outcome, it would require a dramatic shift in public policy. As a community, we find the fiction that all people should be treated equally (fiction because all people are not treated equally) to be comforting and we want to believe that money should not be the determining factor in how much power one has to get what one wants or who gets priority in adopting children. President Musk seems like a good counterpoint to this.
I don't think I ever wrote anything on it. Is your point that it gives people an incentive to stay in a house that is now worth more to others because selling the house will wipe out the property tax advantage?
I believe that this is part of it, but the way I see it, prop 13 also disincentivizes new development, affecting the quality as well as the quantity of housing supply in California(one of the most pressing issues in the state, no doubt!), as well as(to a smaller degree) keeping empty storefronts empty for longer, as property owners would prefer just to sit on the vacant piece of property and wait for price appreciation, over finding a tenant willing to pay a lower rent, as it is easier to just foot the bill on a low property tax.
Obviously, that's my reading of the situation. Would love to hear more from you.
Unless actively and willingly detrimental, almost any filters applied by anyone will end up selecting for a better core of prospective parents. In the real world, I hear that makes ce abounds, but the sort of people who end up benefiting from it would benefit much more of only subject to a price mechanism.
I would be very surprised if an eighteen year old was sentenced to five years in prison for giving their friend of a beer. Do you have any actual examples in mind?
Checking California law, underage drinking violations are generally misdemeanors. Examples of penalties include "a fine of not more than two hundred fifty dollars ($250), or the person shall be required to perform not less than 24 hours or more than 32 hours of community service ."
Of course, an 18 year old would be violating the law buying beer, without giving it to anyone, since the drinking age is 21.
> I have and spent twenty years living in them as well from the United Kingdom to Albania to Jordan to Ethiopia to Qatar and the US is by far the most oppressive place I've ever unfortunately lived in.
Just in case anyone was still tempted to take you seriously.
It didn't take more than a visit to Italy to witness my dad catch a pickpocket and have her released because she "didn't get away with it" (maybe he'd have had better luck if this was her 22nd catch), and have $100 stolen from our hotel safe.
Meanwhile, I've never been assaulted by police, jailed, or arrested for speaking *in* America. Perhaps you would likewise benefit from living in other parts of America sometimes. Alternately, try doing more of the things in Europe that other Americans care about, rather than only the things you care about.
I have no experience in living in, or even visiting Albania, Jordan, Ethiopia or Qatar, but I am guessing you are not female if you don't find these countries more oppressive than the US. In particular, Jordan and Qatar, which apply Sharia principles in their legal systems, impose particularly restrictive conditions on women’s rights. Some might describe this disparity as a form of Feminist Legal Theory (akin to CRT but applied to women), though I’m not sure if that’s politically acceptable these days.
The folks insisting cats be kept indoors demonstrate a sad position on the safety/freedom spectrum. In my experience, cats that are forced to remain indoors are not nearly as happy as cats that get to go outside and explore the ever changing environment.
They might live a bit longer, although my 13-year-old cat with her own door would argue the point.
Now, there are folks who live in places where it's just not practical to let the cat out, but these feline-totalitarians want to deny freedom to all cats regardless of their circumstance.
The folks who think like that should have to move to some more restrictive country, like North Korea or the EU where their thinking fits with the government better.
Hey, we don't want them in the EU. Send them to the US instead, where the government is already known to hassle parents who let their children venture outside unattended.
Well, I'm hoping the US will move further towards freedom on the spectrum in coming months. I was looking for places where tyrants might fit in better and throwing in the EU was a sly/perhaps mean, comment on how things seem to be going there, these days, likening it to North Korea.
With the UK throwing people in jail who mean-tweet, and other EU nations trying to pass censorship laws, it seemed to fit.
The lack of space at animal shelters is, to me, an indication that we have been in recession for multiple years now.
That's why we have 12 indoor cats and 2 outdoor (only) cats, because they adopted us. Some were clearly indoor cats that were abandoned. One just kept inviting herself in, up to the point where we just gave in and made her an inside cat.
Chickens are a free market. And indeed, we had the opposite experience.
"So I asked Cheryl where one buys two chicks, and she told me where she gets her chicks. It turns out that the minimum number of chicks you can order is 4. So instead of two, I ordered four. This is known as chicken math.
The chicks themselves were three dollars each. For an extra ten dollars each, a responsible pet owner like me can get them vaccinated. For a total of just $90, they were shipping four little chicks to the post office closest to our home, fully vaccinated and guaranteed to be 90% female. Guaranteed." https://ishayirashashem.substack.com/p/newly-hatched-chicks
If I were to hazard an argument as to why perfectly acceptable adoptive parents paying the mother directly to adopt a baby is illegal it is to discourage supply of additional babies, that is women having babies just to sell. That itself might not be a problem, but if the goal is to get families to adopt orphans, children who have lost parents or been abandoned, then having a supply of babies of known pedigree available might compete against that. One might fear that women with desirable traits would dominate the market by making a career of selling children while needy orphans would go wanting.
I don't know that that is a good argument, but I suspect it is one of the strongest against letting payments determine things. The assumptions that there is a larger supply of orphans relative to adopting families, as well as a very mobile market in a supply chain sense (families and orphans are evenly distributed, or travel easily) are very important to it.
Yes, you may be right. Similarly, facilitating the adoption of cats (rather than complicating the procedure and euthanizing others) can lead to the multiplication of cats which are an invasive species.
True, although usually they spay/neuter cats as a matter of course when they take them in, so it won’t increase the number as much as people going to get bred cats. In fact it probably limits it somewhat, the cat breeders being akin to the women with desirable traits in my analogy.
Also once an efficient market in children develops, undesirable parents, e.g., pedophiles, will have a much easier time acquiring children.
Well I think the undesirable parent filter can remain in place even with more efficient transactional processes occur. Normalizing selling kids might make it easier to get around the filter, but then people get around the filter in the current bad system, too. Conditional on the filter existing, making it easier for parents who pass the filter to adopt should be a gain for the kids and the parents.
> Normalizing selling kids might make it easier to get around the filter, but then people get around the filter in the current bad system, too.
"Crime still happens, therefore let's abolish all laws."
That's not quite what I was getting at. I am saying keep the filter, definitely want that even though it is imperfect. The question is whether being able to pay mothers directly to adopt their unwanted child will make it easier to get around the filter and how much easier, and whether that is worse than having kids not get adopted and having good parents not be able to adopt.
I can see how there being a sort of career where women have kids to sell for adoption might make it easier to get around the filter if adoption agencies want to make use of that increased supply. However, how much more than they already do is questionable, as the agencies already make pretty good money adopting out and have lots of incentive to not be too choosy if they are going for volume. I am not sure there is a shortage of kids to adopt that are holding back pedophiles from adopting, so I suspect that if a pedophile couple wants to adopt and can find a shady adoption agency who caters (or is duped) to that, then they are going to get a kid whether the mother gets a check directly or not.
The situation is a bit more like "Locks keep honest people honest" than your example. Adding that 3rd padlock to your shed isn't going to keep serious theives out anymore than the first one does, but it does make it much harder to get the weed whacker or snow shovel.
Great, now David is attracting pedophile apologists.
Seriously. Anyone who puts abused in scare quotes like that needs to stay well the hell away from kids.
Keep talking. You are making the case for me every bit as well as I could.
I think adoption and guardianship relationships just end up being a little island of recalcitrant virtue ethics in the broader sea of consequentialist policy reasoning. People instinctively feel that there's something sacred in entering into a parental relationship with a child (or, to a lesser degree, an animal). It feels more like assuming a vocation or taking on a sacred trust than purchasing a product for pure self-gratification.
Accordingly, virtue-based norms (about permanence, responsibility, care, gravity, self-sacrifice, fidelity to higher ideals) are naturally felt to obtain in these cases, both for the parties directly involved and for those functionaries charged with mediating the relationship. To hint that the shelter volunteers must have been petty tyrants just because they wouldn't just sell you kittens by the pound like so much sliced ham seems... wilfully uncharitable? As a moral situation, it's just not a natural fit for standard utilitarian approaches like quantification, satisficing and contractual reasoning.
Interestingly, I suspect similar sacral instincts kick in around ideas of national guardianship. Not many people would vote for a phenomenally talented presidential candidate who confessed they felt no patriotism and just wanted the office because they enjoyed the state dinners; and most people would strongly disapprove of a President, a general, a parent or a cat owner who decided to casually abandon their role before the normal term, simply because it wasn't that fun anymore. But by your reasoning, it's hard to see the grounds for complaint there: after all, the child, the pet and the country are better off with a few years of competent guardianship than they would be otherwise, so where's the harm?
They aren't selling kittens, they are giving them away. We routinely give away drinking water, does that raise similar issues?
The pet would be better off if the owner didn't abandon it. But this is a situation of excess supply. The people giving out kittens are not making sure that more of them get adopted by responsible owners — responsible owners can adopt if they give kittens out freely. They are making sure that fewer get adopted, by both responsible people who are not willing to wait two hours for an interview and irresponsible people who are not willing to wait or wait and get rejected, more have to be killed.
Your argument works better for babies, since at a price of zero there is a shortage not a surplus, but depends on assuming that adoption agencies can better be trusted to act in the interest of an infant than either its biological mother or future parents, which I think unlikely.
"To hint that the shelter volunteers must have been petty tyrants just because they wouldn't just sell you kittens by the pound like so much sliced ham seems... wilfully uncharitable?"
Your explanation being that they think it is better for a kitten to be killed than adopted by someone they have not vetteed?
In all fairness, even in utility terms, you can make the case that a quick painless death is preferable to various forms of suffering under neglectful owners, possibly including slow wasting from FLV you caught because your owner thought it would be cute for you to be an "outdoor" cat. (FWIW I am not a cat person and have no, er, kitty in this fight.)
But the bigger issue is that starting with the question "isn't it better for the kitten to be adopted, even by an unvetted person, than to be killed?" is presupposing a consequentialist framing from the outset, and my point was that this is just not the system of moral reasoning that humans naturally use for thinking about guardian relationships. You're citing the rules of a different game than the one that people are playing.
And again, if you feel *yourself* to be fully consequentialist in regard to parent-child relationships, I'd love to know whether you would disapprove of a cat owner that adopted a cat, then dumped it back at the shelter after getting bored?
Related: there have been times and places where child adoption was a more straightforwardly commodified affair. For instance, the pre-WWI novel _Anne of Green Gables_ is famously about a tween girl who has been adopted several times by families wanting cheap household labor, then dumped back at the orphanage when she was no longer needed. Although the book dramatizes Anne's developing a more familial bond with a new couple, this is presented as a surprising innovation to the status quo where orphans are more like household appliances. So if anything, we're moving away from, not toward, the idea of adoption as a consumer good.
People close to me have gone through the painful process of adoption in both USA and India and I was totally flabbergasted by the stories they told me.
In USA the laws vary by state but one thing struck me was that everyone wants infants and not older children. Infants are in short supply and has long wait. There is an exception however for drug babies. That is babies born to mothers with drugs in their system. If adoptive parents sign up for such babies, they have to pay more $25K or so to the agency out of which a good chunk goes to the mother of the baby. They have to also spend money for the healthcare of the drug addicted baby.
It is not clear how it works but good chance that various states have laws that after childbirth the mother is tested for drugs. If drugs are found in her system CPS by default gets custody of the child. The mother can then either fight for the child or take the money and continue with her lifestyle. I think this has created perverse incentives in the system where so called "child welfare" organizations push for taking away newborns from their mothers more aggressively in order to make money. So we get to hear stories like this [1].
In India there is a dark side and a bright side. Since it is expensive to raise a child, adoption agencies quickly place the kids in homes of adopting parents and the process is followed later. This is a trial period during which parents are made to run from post to post by the system. The final step in the process is a local judge finalizing the adoption and giving the child legal status of the child. Judges here get to set arbitrary criteria. Someone I know was asked to come around 9 times to the court which was thousand miles way. At one point judge refused to hear the case because the wife (Mother) was not dressed in traditional attire.
There is a pretty good black market to counter this in India. There is a network of Hindu gurus and also Christian Church leaders who are trusted by the local communities. If you are their faithful member, they often arrange to find a pregnant woman from some poor region of the country who in return for money hands over the baby to the adopting parents. A local doctor who is also part of the religious group writes a certificate claiming it is a biological child born which he himself delivered in a home delivery. This avoids the entire legal process. Of course often the religious leader often acts as an escrow and also someone who hides identity of both parties from each other so neither parties can change their mind later and get into a fight. Religious leaders also are connected with the political class so it is hard to pickup a fight with them. Since Indians also care deeply about caste purity, they can also offer this screening which traditional legal system does not allow. Some poor folks want a son but if a daughter is born they are happy to hand her over to someone else. So this is a pretty much free market and except the legal risks is both faster and cheaper.
[1] https://reason.com/2024/12/13/hospitals-are-giving-pregnant-women-drugs-then-reporting-them-to-cps-when-they-test-positive/
Thanks. That is very interesting.
The one adoption case I know about because I knew the adoptive parents, an ff couple, was an infant from somewhere in, I think, Central America. It took something like a year to get through the process, I think all on the American side, time after the baby was born and before her future parents got her — not something in the interest of the child. Fortunately she turned out fine, is now in or just out of college.
"A better argument is that the mother and the adoptive parents are not the only ones whose interest should be considered—there is also the child." However, this reasoning seems flawed because a child’s best interests—assuming a broad consensus on what those might be—would likely be best served by parents who can provide a more stable, nurturing, and resource-rich environment. If this were the yardstick by which adoptive parents were judged, then the smarter, wealthier members of society would move to the front of every adoption line. Whether or not you find this to be a desireable outcome, it would require a dramatic shift in public policy. As a community, we find the fiction that all people should be treated equally (fiction because all people are not treated equally) to be comforting and we want to believe that money should not be the determining factor in how much power one has to get what one wants or who gets priority in adopting children. President Musk seems like a good counterpoint to this.
On a different note:
Did you ever write anything on Prop 13?
Your father was in favor of it, and many still use his name to justify it as a "libertarian" or "pro market" approach.
Many fail to see how it has affected the supply of housing in California, given the incentives that it creates.
I don't think I ever wrote anything on it. Is your point that it gives people an incentive to stay in a house that is now worth more to others because selling the house will wipe out the property tax advantage?
I believe that this is part of it, but the way I see it, prop 13 also disincentivizes new development, affecting the quality as well as the quantity of housing supply in California(one of the most pressing issues in the state, no doubt!), as well as(to a smaller degree) keeping empty storefronts empty for longer, as property owners would prefer just to sit on the vacant piece of property and wait for price appreciation, over finding a tenant willing to pay a lower rent, as it is easier to just foot the bill on a low property tax.
Obviously, that's my reading of the situation. Would love to hear more from you.
Unless actively and willingly detrimental, almost any filters applied by anyone will end up selecting for a better core of prospective parents. In the real world, I hear that makes ce abounds, but the sort of people who end up benefiting from it would benefit much more of only subject to a price mechanism.
Frankly this article is a perfect example of the kind of idiocy that makes it impossible for libertarians to be taken seriously.
> Libertarians aren't generally taken seriously because Americans are overwhelming neo-Puritans
Have you seen most other countries?
I would be very surprised if an eighteen year old was sentenced to five years in prison for giving their friend of a beer. Do you have any actual examples in mind?
Checking California law, underage drinking violations are generally misdemeanors. Examples of penalties include "a fine of not more than two hundred fifty dollars ($250), or the person shall be required to perform not less than 24 hours or more than 32 hours of community service ."
Of course, an 18 year old would be violating the law buying beer, without giving it to anyone, since the drinking age is 21.
> I have and spent twenty years living in them as well from the United Kingdom to Albania to Jordan to Ethiopia to Qatar and the US is by far the most oppressive place I've ever unfortunately lived in.
Just in case anyone was still tempted to take you seriously.
It didn't take more than a visit to Italy to witness my dad catch a pickpocket and have her released because she "didn't get away with it" (maybe he'd have had better luck if this was her 22nd catch), and have $100 stolen from our hotel safe.
Meanwhile, I've never been assaulted by police, jailed, or arrested for speaking *in* America. Perhaps you would likewise benefit from living in other parts of America sometimes. Alternately, try doing more of the things in Europe that other Americans care about, rather than only the things you care about.
I have no experience in living in, or even visiting Albania, Jordan, Ethiopia or Qatar, but I am guessing you are not female if you don't find these countries more oppressive than the US. In particular, Jordan and Qatar, which apply Sharia principles in their legal systems, impose particularly restrictive conditions on women’s rights. Some might describe this disparity as a form of Feminist Legal Theory (akin to CRT but applied to women), though I’m not sure if that’s politically acceptable these days.
David, I think the final paragraph in this blog post is repeated.
Yes. Fixed. Thanks.
The folks insisting cats be kept indoors demonstrate a sad position on the safety/freedom spectrum. In my experience, cats that are forced to remain indoors are not nearly as happy as cats that get to go outside and explore the ever changing environment.
They might live a bit longer, although my 13-year-old cat with her own door would argue the point.
Now, there are folks who live in places where it's just not practical to let the cat out, but these feline-totalitarians want to deny freedom to all cats regardless of their circumstance.
The folks who think like that should have to move to some more restrictive country, like North Korea or the EU where their thinking fits with the government better.
Hey, we don't want them in the EU. Send them to the US instead, where the government is already known to hassle parents who let their children venture outside unattended.
Well, I'm hoping the US will move further towards freedom on the spectrum in coming months. I was looking for places where tyrants might fit in better and throwing in the EU was a sly/perhaps mean, comment on how things seem to be going there, these days, likening it to North Korea.
With the UK throwing people in jail who mean-tweet, and other EU nations trying to pass censorship laws, it seemed to fit.
The lack of space at animal shelters is, to me, an indication that we have been in recession for multiple years now.
That's why we have 12 indoor cats and 2 outdoor (only) cats, because they adopted us. Some were clearly indoor cats that were abandoned. One just kept inviting herself in, up to the point where we just gave in and made her an inside cat.
Chickens are a free market. And indeed, we had the opposite experience.
"So I asked Cheryl where one buys two chicks, and she told me where she gets her chicks. It turns out that the minimum number of chicks you can order is 4. So instead of two, I ordered four. This is known as chicken math.
The chicks themselves were three dollars each. For an extra ten dollars each, a responsible pet owner like me can get them vaccinated. For a total of just $90, they were shipping four little chicks to the post office closest to our home, fully vaccinated and guaranteed to be 90% female. Guaranteed." https://ishayirashashem.substack.com/p/newly-hatched-chicks
Are they sold as pets or as egg layers? I expect the rules are different, with the latter more likely to be treated as an ordinary market transaction.
https://www.mthealthy.com/categories/all-chickens
This is where we ordered from