More information about donation of shelter supplies and/or how to become a foster parent. You can donate by clicking the donate button to the right. To date, your donations have helped hundreds of animals get a second chance at a new beginning. No portion of your donation is used to cover administration or operational expenses. Through our donation fund, we raise money for sick and injured animals so they can be rehabilitated and adopted into loving forever homes.ġ00% of your donation is used to provide extended medical procedures for the animals in our care. Thank you for considering a donation to Oshawa Animal Services! Every penny of your generous donation goes directly towards a second chance for an animal in need. This provides staff the opportunity to provide an alternative to in-person service, where possible if an alternative option is not possible, necessary arrangements will be made to serve the individual(s). Individuals who have a medical or religious exemption from wearing a mask or face covering must advise staff in advance when requesting an appointment. A handpicked selection of stories from BBC Future, Earth, Culture, Capital, and Travel, delivered to your inbox every Friday.Oshawa Animal Services is open by appointment only. If you liked this story, sign up for the weekly bbc.com features newsletter, called “If You Only Read 6 Things This Week”. Join 800,000+ Future fans by liking us on Facebook, or follow us on Twitter. This article originally appeared on The Conversation, and is republished under a Creative Commons licence. Yet it is safe to say that our personal fear of this scientific advance – the queasiness we feel in the gut – may be mostly to do with how it destabilises our perceived human uniqueness and undermines our own moral superiority than anything to do with broader concerns over hybrids themselves. Whether or not we should use animals for these purposes, or for the satisfaction of human needs more broadly, is a topic for another time. In the end, while mythical hybrid beasts may have caused alarm for the Greeks, it would seem that our own objection to growing our next heart in the breast of a pig has more to do with existential angst and a disruption of the moral order. Indeed, harvesting organs from humans conjures visions of a dystopian future ((2005_film). If confusing pets with animals we eat creates discontent, then confusing those same meat-animals with our own kind is sure to create moral and gustatory hesitation.īeyond baffling our palate, it also confounds our understanding of whether it is an animal from whom we are harvesting our next-generation organs, or some kind of sub-human entity. By keeping thoughts of our animal nature at bay, we conveniently forget that we are nothing more than mortal biological organisms waiting to fertilise the fields. Human-animal hybrids turn one’s mind to the inevitable fact that we will all be pushing up the daisies one day. Harvesting human hearts from goats can shatter this protective belief, leaving us feeling disgusted and dismayed. It gives us a sense of being superior, above or outside the biological order. The notion that humans have souls, but animals do not, was (and still is for some) a popular belief. The possibility that a pig could grow your next pancreas is a cogent reminder that humans are also animals, and this very biological reminder can create existential angst. One reason that human-pig hybrids are a source of anxiety is that they can conjure up a fear of our own death. Still, while hybrids in general can create a sense of foreboding, not all hybrids do, and it may be that mixing biology is most psychologically problematic when it comes to our own human DNA – and perhaps especially when it comes to mixing it with that of other animals. And what about the Liger, Tigon, Zonkey, Geep, or Beefalo? Mules have never been a source of alarm, yet they are the offspring of a male donkey and a female horse. Our apparent comfort with some hybrids does not stop at plants. We have little trouble consuming such hybrids for our lunch.
Take for instance the boysenberry (a cross between the raspberry, blackberry, dewberry and loganberry) or the clementine (a cross between a mandarin and an orange). While hybrids in general can sometimes create a disagreeable mixture of fear and disgust, this is not always the case.