RUSH: Here is Steve in La Costa, California. It’s nice to have you with us here on Open Line Friday.
CALLER: Hi, chief!
RUSH: Hey.
CALLER: Precise News dittoes from the left coast.
RUSH: Thank you, sir.
CALLER: We’ve got the most enlightening animal rights video posted on the weblog today, and I’m also following up on some sentiments you expressed a couple months ago about conservatives driving cutting edge technology. But apparently the animal rights wackos are trying to shut down a rodeo in Texas that features diving mules.
RUSH: They do this every year. The diving mules is a traveling road show. I remember the diving mules. I first saw video of the mule diving in…gee, it had to be in the late 80s.
CALLER: I guess it dates back. They’ve done this with different animals, but the AP reporter on this video, interviewed the Texas rodeo operator and I thought his explanation was so wonderful. He said, ‘The mules are willing to do it. They do it freely on their own. They like to do it! If they didn’t, people need to stop and think. We need to give the animals a little bit of credit for being intelligent.’
RUSH: We’re talking about mules here.
CALLER: (Laughing.) But I think conservatives at large, we love the environment. We love animals. And I think we actually give a lot more credence to theories like evolution as far as the dynamics of the environment than liberals do, who tend to look at things as very static you know, ‘How can a bridge fall?’ like that.
RUSH: No, the liberals look at animals — all of them, every one damn one of them, even the ones that would eat you if you got close — as victims.
CALLER: (Laughing.)
RUSH: Even the predators are victims. They’re victims. Just like the earth is a victim of our existence, so are animals. They look at them as harmless, helpless, hopeless. We were watching a YouTube video the other day in here where a bunch of lions — I guess this was in Africa, yeah, because there aren’t any tigers in Africa. Lions, a whole pride of lions trying to pull a water buffalo calf out of this lake, and the video was going on and on and on. It was just fascinating to watch these lions, an dthere was nothing stopping them. There was no human around to stop them. It was nature on display. It was animal rights right in front of your eyes, and then out of the blue, here came a whole herd of water buffalo to rescue that one calf and they succeeded and the lions retreated. (interruption) The alligator tried to get in there. Yeah, I forgot that the alligator tried to get in there and get his portion of the water buffalo calf. But then all of a sudden, I don’t know what happened, but the whole herd found out that something was going on. Maybe they did ahead count and found out one was missing. Bam! They came back. To hell with the lions! To hell with the crocodile! They saved their little baby. A whole herd of them! It had to be 30 or 40 we saw in the frame, and maybe more. The point is, we don’t know half of it about animals and why they do what they do. We chalk it up to evolution or whatever. For example, this is a little thing that I observe. I have, as you know, my little cat Punkin, and I put her food out. I feed her twice a day, sometimes three if she really hassles me. She never eats it all, what’s left in the bowl, and then with her right front paw, she’ll start scratching the carpet. I’m saying, ‘Why is this?’
I finally figured out! She’s trying to cover it up to hide it from other animals. I look and say, Punkin, I’m not going to take your food. Nobody here is going to take your food — and there’s no dirt anyway!’ If the cat had half a brain, she would see that she’s not moving anything and that the food is not covered. So what’s going on here? What’s going on is obviously you can call it evolution or what have you. I didn’t train her to do this. Every cat does it! Well most. Some are too lazy. Some have figured it out. She doesn’t do it all the time. But most of the time she starts scratching the carpet, and you know she’s trying to cover up the food with nothing. So it’s a reflex, and I don’t pretend to understand it. I figured God did it, and I’ll find out why…some other time. As for the diving mules, the rodeo guy says they want to do it. (Laughing.) I don’t know about that. I’ve seen video tapes of diving mules, but you put them on a platform where there’s nowhere else to go but down and then tell everybody they want to do it, that’s pretty clever. (Laughing.) But they do do it. I mean, they do do it — and they obviously go back up there. Or they’re taken back up there or whatever. Look, a mule is a mule. If they didn’t want to dive… What the guy is saying is: if it didn’t want to it wouldn’t, and they’re not going to stand up there and push the thing off with an audience there. They’re not stupid enough to do that. So these things obviously… Who knows how they’re being trained to do this? Who knows what’s in the pool or what they’ve been led to believe is in the pool? It is a funny looking thing, because it’s something you would never see in nature. You know, a mule is not going to find a cliff and dive into a lake. (Laughing.) They want to do it is maybe the result of they’ve been trained to.