RUSH: No, well, that’s cold here. You gotta understand. With a north wind and no humidity, we have to break out the polar bear coats.
CALLER: I know, but I’m sure you feel some guilt for basking in palatial luxury in sunny south Florida.
RUSH: None at all.
CALLER: (Chuckles.) Good.
RUSH: None whatsoever. I’m very smug about it in fact.
CALLER: Yeah, I’m in the audiology field. I’ll get to the horse meat in just a second, but you said something a couple months ago about new hope for your hearing, possibly. Is the House Institute doing something new?
RUSH: Well, no, there isn’t new hope. What you heard me saying was that I changed my mind on embryonic stem cells. To hell with the aborted babies, to hell with the children, because the libs are out there saying, ‘People need hope.’ Michael J. Fox needs hope and the people with spinal injuries need hope. I do, too. I’m deaf.
CALLER: That’s right.
RUSH: And if killing babies could restore my hearing, I’ll change my mind on doing it. I was doing it to illustrate a point. You’re in audiology, so you understand. The House people told me when I had my cochlear implant put in that they were working on a cure. My inner ear hair cells have just lied down, dead.
CALLER: I know.
RUSH: And they’re working on a cure for that. They thought it might happen in ten years but they haven’t made much progress. That’s tough. That’s the cure for baldness, essentially, and there’s no progress on that.
CALLER: Yeah. Well, anyway, you understand how lucky you are that you’ve got the great results you did with your cochlear implant.
RUSH: Yes, I know. A lot of people who have these are not even able to engage in speech communication for three months. Some people, it just connects to their environment. Some people never able to use the phone. They don’t know why some people do better than others. That’s one of the mysteries.
CALLER: I know, it kills you. But, anyway, have you read about this proposed ban on slaughtering horses to send the meat overseas to Asia and to Europe where it is legal to eat horse meat?
RUSH: Yeah, I know it’s legal to eat horse meat in Europe, but I did not know there was a proposed ban on slaughtering horses to send the meat overseas.
CALLER: Oh, yeah. There’s some bill being proposed.
RUSH: Is that because we need them for the glue?
CALLER: (Laughing.) What do you want to do with dead horses? You want to build mausoleums for them? I mean, what’s so much different from slaughtering a steer or slaughtering a horse?
RUSH: Well, you know, a horse is a horse — of course, of course — and a steer is a steer. We don’t ride steers, you know? They get in bull fights. Those things are predators — and girls love horses. I mean, look, the girls love horses. In addition to the men, girls love horses. They’re cute. They don’t eat you, any of that sort of stuff. I’ve got a companion story here.
CALLER: Yeah?
RUSH: It’s from Staffordsville, Kentucky, since you brought up horses. The bidding for the black pony started at $500, then took a nosedive. There were no takers for $300, $200, even $100. With a high bid of just $75, the auctioneer gave the seller the choice of taking the animal off the auction block. But the seller said, ‘No, I can’t feed a horse. I can’t even feed myself.” Now, Kentucky is the horse capital of the world, obviously. It’s being overrun with thousands of horses nobody wants. Some of them perfectly healthy, but many of them starving, broken down NAGs. Other parts of the country are overwhelmed, too, and that’s because of what you say, growing opposition in America to the slaughter of horses for human consumption overseas. So rather than at the end of their productive lives, slaughtering them to feed the hungry people of Europe, and wherever else, we’re letting them starve to death and become NAGs and get all haggard and look ugly and stuff out there in the pasture.
CALLER: Yeah, and, of course, if you wanted to equate the value of slaughtering one animal over another, the horses are the dumbest of animals. Pigs are smart.
RUSH: Oh, here we go.
CALLER: We slaughter them right and left.
RUSH: Oh, no, I was afraid this was going to happen. I first saw this debate take place on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson. Pigs are smarter than horses and it was an ongoing joke. The intelligence of an animal, according to a compassionate society, shouldn’t have anything to do with what we do to it. We have an excess cat population, excess dog population. It would be the same reaction if we euthanize them and people are okay with that. What if we slaughtered them and sent them, say, to North Korea for food? There wouldn’t be an outcry over this? As to this intelligence business, I remember one of my first ever talk shows. I was a guest host for an FM music station in Kansas City. I had never done a talk show, I always wanted to, but it had a producer, had to do guests, and he got me some author who claimed that pigs are smarter than human beings. I don’t remember the details of the conversation.
I just remember that these debates have gone on and I’ve heard people say, ‘Horses have to be stupid, for this reason alone. Look at how big they are and yet look at what they allow us to do to them. Rope ’em, chain ’em, ride ’em around, make ’em beasts of burden. If a horse wanted to, it could wipe out every human being that tried to capture it. Simple knee up, fall down, that’s it. Horse doesn’t even have to eat you.’ Some wild horses act this way, but others don’t. Somebody said to me that horses don’t realize how much bigger they are than human beings because their eyes make everything look bigger than it is. I don’t have the slightest clue if that’s accurate. These stories have been bandied about, but when you start debating the relative intelligence of an animal, most people think dogs are smarter than cats. The reason for that is that cats don’t respond when you call them. Now, I know you cat owners, ‘My cat does!’ I have a cat and when the cat’s hungry and I say her name, she’ll look to me.
She’s an Abyssinian, and they’re a little friendlier, you know, than other breeds, ‘Come here Punky, come here.’ She’ll make a move. But not all the time, it’s very rare. She’ll just look to me like I’m an idiot, ‘Don’t you know I’m a cat and can’t understand what you are saying?’ You call a dog and it slobbers and licks you all over the place. It has what people consider unconditional love, and people think, ‘That’s brilliant. Dog can learn the language. Dogs can even bark the language if they’re good enough, smart enough.’ See, I think the cat has to be smarter than the dog. There’s no other possible conclusion. Cats have staff. Dogs have masters. We always refer to the dog’s human as its master, and orders it around. Dog’s ordered into the water to go get the duck that you just shot into the muck. Try getting a cat to do that. A cat’s not going to get himself dirty for you. A cat’s not going to catch any food for you, cat’s not going to do diddly-squat. Cat’s going to make you do all that for it. And they succeed.
There’s no such thing as a seeing eye cat. They don’t care. You get run over, car, it’s your problem. They sit around, and they are superb royalty. They’ve got it set up. Everybody waits on them and dotes on them. They don’t have to do diddly-squat. If you don’t, they’ll come head butt you and all this to let you know. But all this debate about animal intelligence is relative anyway, because when you get right down to it in terms of human IQ, all animals are idiots.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: I have a question for fellow cat lovers, since I am one, too. Want to trade recipes? Send yours in via e-mail.