Hello again, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to another episode of Freedom's Creed. It's Friday, it's the end of the week, and I hope that your work week has been great and that you're looking forward to the weekend. One of the things that really puzzles me about our society is that there seems to be a lack of responsibility when it comes to the way that we conduct ourselves sometimes. In fact, I'd go so far as to say that some people want to actually redefine what it means to be responsible. And I think the reason for that is so that they can then justify their behavior, justify the things that they do. And please understand that by my saying this, I'm not somehow pointing at the crowd and saying, oh, look at you idiots. You can't be responsible for yourselves and your actions. I'm with you. Personally, I don't want to redefine responsibility. I want to accept the responsibility for my own life and the choices that I make. And I think that that's what we all should do. I'm simply saying that there are people who want to redefine responsibility so that they get out from underneath any consequences of their behavior. The bottom line for me is that there is such a thing as using freedom wisely. I mean, what does it mean to be responsible? I've talked about this before, and I will talk about it, I know, in the future, and probably quite often, simply because it is an integral part of living in a free society where we have the laws that we do and the expectations for conduct which each of us are under. We simply cannot do what we please when we please with the expectation that we can escape any consequences of those choices. And all we have to do is look at society. Look at the way that the lives of people are impacted because of the choices that they make and how that impacts their family, their friends, their loved ones. We have prisons that are full of people who made bad choices, who did not use their freedom responsibly. This podcast is dedicated to the principles of freedom, and it's clear that the name of the podcast embraces this idea. There are virtually no aspects of our lives that liberty and freedom do not touch. Everything that we do has the basis or the foundation of our constitutional government, meaning that we have the right to do what we want to do in pursuing our own happiness. And a very important aspect or point in that is that we use the freedoms that we have in a responsible manner so that we don't lose those freedoms and the ability to do the things that we want to bring about, the happiness for ourselves and for those that we love. And since the beginning of the podcast, I've made it clear that there would virtually be no topic that would be off limits. It may be that you have a strong antipathy regarding a topic that I'm discussing, and that's okay. That's what makes America work, and that's what is the basis of our free society. That is, the right to disagree. But just because someone has a strong dislike for what I talk about doesn't mean that I'm not going to talk about it, and that may apply today. And let me just preface what I'm going to talk about by saying that in no way am I making a comparison between the animal kingdom and human beings. What I'll be doing is actually contrasting that difference between how we treat animals and the animal kingdom in general, and then I'll make some specific points regarding pets and people. First of all, let me just say that I do love animals for all you animal lovers out there. We have had pets in the past in my upbringing. We had pets when my kids were younger, specifically dogs and cats. We don't have any pets now, primarily because my wife has more than her share of allergies. And the bottom line is having a pet anymore at this stage in my life is like having a perpetual two-year-old so that whenever you want to go somewhere, you've got to find somebody to take care of the pet. You've got to find all these. Well, you know what I mean if you have pets. Now, the comparison of a two-year-old and pets is by no means equating the two as the same. You know what I mean. If you've had kids and you've had pets, you know exactly what I'm talking about. You know that you need to do something to plan for your pet to be taken care of while you're away. You don't necessarily do the same thing with your two-year-old. Usually you take your two-year-old with you because he or she is part of the family, or in other words, a person, whereas your pet is not a person. And oh, geez. Okay, you see where this is going. This is this perpetual rabbit hole that I'm gonna go down if I keep talking about this, so I'm just gonna leave it at that, okay? So what do we do in our society with dogs and cats? Well, we should, if we're responsible, take care of our animals so that they don't reproduce. Unless, of course, we're in the breeding business, that's an entirely different animal, pun intended. So we should have our female animals spayed and our male animals neutered. Now, for you city folk, when you have a dog or cat spayed, it means that you are removing her ovaries and oftentimes the uterus as well. And for your male animals, what you're doing is you are having the testicles removed. Of course, we refer to this as castration. And when I say you're having this or that done, I don't necessarily mean you, unless, of course, you're a veterinarian. If that's the case, then have at it. I'm saying you take the animal to the vet and they take care of it snip snip. And of course, if you neuter a male dog, it just simply means they're unable to reproduce. And for the little guy, he may not uh have that breeding instinct like humping, so I suppose he won't know the difference. I mean, the little guy will probably just continue doing what male dogs do, just won't be able to reproduce anyway. Uh he'll be no worse for the wear, I suppose. I actually often think about uh if we did the same thing with people. Okay, okay, I know. I know what you're thinking. Try to stay with me for a second. If men and women do not want to procreate, then they could opt out and do the same thing that we do with animals, except do the people version of it, of course, by getting themselves fixed. And of course, some people do that, and I could go further into this topic, but I probably won't for now. Suffice it to say that the instinct to want to mate is strong in not only animals, but people as well. And in all seriousness, if a man or a woman have no desire to bring a child into the world, then by all means get yourself fixed so that you're not putting the life of the child at risk by doing something that you might regret down the road. In other words, be a responsible individual and don't do the things that are going to bring a baby into the equation. You know, there are many people who seem to care more for the treatment of animals than they do about human beings. And not just pets, but all animals. In preparing for this episode, I looked at various articles that highlighted the way some people actually seem to really care for animals more so than they do people. And I think some people would be perfectly content to see that no more animals were consumed by people. But in researching these different articles, I came to the conclusion that I did not want to dignify people who are like that. Not that I dislike them or anything like that. I just don't want to share names or sources where I obtained this information. I just didn't want to give it the light of day. So take that for what it's worth. In the time remaining, I want to take a look at some numbers. I'm kind of a numbers guy and I like the way numbers explain things and show things in uh perhaps greater detail than we might be able to see otherwise. According to a website called aspca.org, in 2011 there were approximately 7.2 million animals entering animal shelters. And perhaps the saddest number from that is that they say approximately 1.5 million shelter animals are euthanized every year. And that's a decline, according to this website, from 2.6 million, which took place in 2011. This is why Bob Barker always ended each episode of The Price Is Right by saying, Help control the pet population, have your pet spayed or neutered. Now, if you ask me, that's using freedom responsibly. And God bless Bob Barker, I think he's pushing 97 years old. The man definitely used his platform to do his part to control the pet population, that's for sure. It seems to me that there have been some public service announcements over the years, probably over the last couple of decades anyway, that has gotten the word out to people that you can adopt a dog or a cat at your local humane society. So to me, that's a good way to get a pet and to keep a pet from being uh euthanized. But let's shift gears and talk about the adoption of children. And this information comes from the childwelfare.gov website, and it's the latest numbers that I could find, and it's an article entitled Trends in U.S. Adoptions 2008 to 2012. They have this to say quote, there is no single source for the total number of children adopted in the United States, and there's currently no straightforward way of determining the total number of adoptions, even when multiple data sources are used. Data for this report were collected primarily from the following sources State Courts, State Departments of Social Services, State Bureaus of Vital Records, the Adoption and Foster Care Analysis and Reporting System of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, and the U.S. Department of States Bureau of Consular Affairs, close quote. Isn't it interesting that animal rights groups, perhaps like the Humane Society, if you can call them an animal rights group, are able to get pretty reliable numbers when it comes to animals that are euthanized and so forth, yet we can't get really accurate numbers when it comes to adoptions in the US using a multitude of different agencies? That seems strange to me. And certainly I don't want to read anything into that. They do say that there is no single source for the total number of children adopted, but can you not collectively add together the various sources and then come up with a number of children that are adopted in the United States and have that be fairly accurate? According to another source I found, this is a website called baby.com. There are roughly 110,000 children who are adopted every single year, and that's uh according to numbers in 2014. And they also report the numbers of babies adopted every year, and that's kind of what I want to focus on for a minute. They say that 18,000 babies are adopted every single year. They also go on to report that only about half a percent, half a percent of all live births in the U.S. resulted in the adoption of a baby, and that's according to the National Council for Adoption. So they say that roughly 18,000 babies are adopted each and every year. I'm not able to provide any real context for these numbers, primarily because I don't know how many families in the United States who actually want to adopt, but who cannot, and have to indeed go outside the country to adopt. I know that the laws regarding adoption here in the United States are much more stringent than perhaps they are in other countries, and that probably has something to do with it. Like I said earlier, I'm kind of a numbers guy, so what I did look at is that in the 48 years roughly since 1973, when Roe v. Wade became law, there have been approximately 60 million abortions in the United States. So if you break that down for each year since 1973, that's 1,250,000 abortions that take place every year. Based on that, I would think that any family who wanted to adopt, who could not have or who cannot have children of their own, that presumably there would have been ample opportunity, and in fact is ample opportunity each and every year for those families to be able to adopt a baby right here in the United States if the circumstances would be different. Ladies and gentlemen, I hope I've given you some things to ponder and think about by your having listened to this episode. And the positive thought that I want to leave with you today comes from the Bible. Now, I realize that not everyone is religious. Perhaps there are people who want nothing to do with religion, and that's fine. I respect that. But even if you don't have any basis or foundation in religion, you could look at the Bible certainly as a historical document that actually does have some pretty wise counsel that each of us can live by. I certainly believe in a divine creation. I believe that there is a God that created this earth and all of us in it, to include the animals. And in fact, in the Bible it says in Genesis, quote, and God said, Let us make man in our image after our likeness, and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth. To me, this word dominion does not mean that we just are reckless with the way that we treat animals, or each other for that matter, but that with that dominion comes responsibility. And we live in a society blessed by the Constitution that gives us that liberty and that freedom to be able to choose how we can best be happy. Indeed, it is my hope and prayer that we'll be able to use the liberty and freedom that we have in a responsible way. And with that, if you can think it, you can plan it. If you can plan it, you can do it.