I believe the real lesson here is that you shouldn't adopt your puppy from 'Peter Singer's "Dogs are People Too" Health Spa and Orphanage' if you aren't walking in there with the assumption that you're adopting a furry, four-legged human being.

Okay, that was unfair. But it does seem that, say, Heather and the rescue shelters she visited had some very different assumptions about what it means to be a pet owner. On the one hand, you have people to whom pets are, well, pets. I have two cats and, while I love them dearly, they are, as I've been known to say, 'just cats'; I don't feel guilty about swatting their furry backsides when they tear up my sofa or tossing them outside when they've decided that 2:00 in the morning is a good time to go charging around the house. And then there are people with a more protective stance: they're not just animals, they're almost little children who have to be kept safe from all possible harm and discomfort. Or at least that's the the impression that I get from the stringency with which some of these shelters vet prospective adopters.

Now, while I do think that the latter group is a bit loopy, I can't judge them too harshly, nor do I have anything against their running their shelters as they see fit. I can see how that kind of protectiveness can develop when you've cared for scads of brutally abused animals after rescuing them from their twat owners. It's pretty easy to start seeing everyone who doesn't meet a certain standard (yours) as potentially or just flat-out abusive. Still, a little tact might be appreciated. It tends to rankle a bit when you're told that you can't adopt an animal because you're inhumane monster who shouldn't be allowed within thirty feet of a dog or cat.

Point is, those of us not willing to have our lives scrutinized prior to adopting a dog or cat shouldn't necessarily expect a warm welcome at these shelters. Operating on different wavelengths and all that.

As for Ellen DeGeneres, she did break her contract with the adoption agency. It still would have been nice, though, if the situation could have been resolved without going straight to confiscating the dog. Rigid legalism (redundant?) isn't always the best policy.

I don't care how accurate your arguments are (and there's good reason to think that PETA's could use some intellectual fine tuning), you're not going to sway people to your cause by calling them a bunch of stupid hypocrites. My gut reaction to PETA is and always has been, 'Yeah? Well fuck you too.' It's a good strategy for remaining an maligned fringe group, but I rather suspect that they're too invested in being the Lone Voice of Reason in a world full of unevolved carnivores that they don't much care about making allies. Where's the hipster cred in going mainstream, eh?

But there are more important things on the table than slagging those moralizing popinjays. As for our environmental impact, I'm with those who say that, ultimately, there are just too many of us. Even assuming that, as one poster said, we all used public transportation and made more responsible eating decisions, that's really just a temporary fix. The idea that modest lifestyle changes on the part of first-worlders are going to fix all our environmental problems only holds true as long as no-one else joins our elite club; but if, say, China were to suddenly achieve a resource consumption rate comparable to what we have here in the U.S., even if we assume that by then everyone here is taking the bus, it's going to rapidly undo whatever gains we made by switching over to Priuses and locally grown veggies. Now imagine that scenario, but with the entire developing world becoming first-worlders. We better have discovered cold fusion and be driving hydrogen-powered cars by then or the whole planet's going to be in deep shit.

I'm not arguing that we shouldn't take steps to lessen our environmental impact; every little bit helps. But at the same time, it might be a good idea to at least entertain the possibility that, just maybe, we've gone and dug ourselves into a very deep hole, and that hybrid cars and vegetarianism aren't going to get us all the way back out. You can either have a large population and low resource consumption, or you can have a small population with high resource consumption; and right now we are working steadily towards a large, resource devouring population. Make of that what you will, but don't pretend that, barring the invention of some miracle technology, we can maintain our present way of life forever if we just knock half a dozen tons of greenhouse gases off our respective environmental foot prints: there are 5.5 billion people (and counting) waiting to more than make up the difference.

Maybe I'm a pessimist. Trust me, I'd be thrilled if I thought that I could maintain my present lifestyle for the cost of eating more chicken. It's just that I don't see that as being a long-term solution.

Because my first instinct upon learning that two of my friends were getting divorced would be to go post something on their MySpace pages. Maybe I'm just out of touch, but something about the idea of a divorce playing out on a social networking site strikes me as utterly bizarre.

'I just got divorced! lol!'

'Congratulations! lol!'

'You suck!'

Then, after reading a little further, my brain overloaded on all the weirdness in the article and I had to go lie down for a while. Truly, people will use any occasion as an excuse to spend money.