h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

http://www.bbc.co.uk/h2g2/guide/A540893

This piece is reasonably complete, but it may be contentious. The one subject I've avoided is cruelty - would it be better to tell the reader I'm avoiding it?

Hey Mund!

I liked and agreed with the sentiments expressed,

BUT,

If you want to put this entry in the guide, you gotta remove the first person way of writing, they don't do that in the guide!

Encouragement tho!

Z.

Thanks for the support and the observation. Going third-person could be reasonably easy, but it would run the risk of over-generalisation. I'm talking about MOST pets, not ALL pets, and I don't want all pet-owners to feel attacked. But then the good ones may well understand anyway. I'll give it a go.

On the other hand - there's a lot of first-person in the newly edited article on synaesthesia. Maybe my stuff will get through after all. Who will really tell me?

Hi Mund,

If/when your article gets to Peer review and/or the subs, they'll either tell you, or they'll take it upon themselves to re-write it in non-first-person. Obviously it's better to do it yourself - and less work for us subs!

I really like your article, though - it brings up many interesting points about the ethical consideration in keeping pets. If I were to change anything (accepting the first-person view), I would try to make it less emphatically negative: the title alone gives rather more of an opinion based on your experience than a set of general facts or guidelines. I would change it to something like "The ethical considerations of keeping pets" (or something a little les dry, perhaps

I think you ought to emphasise the fact that animals just 'do what they do' - rats breed at a heck of a rate, cats kill native wildlife, etc. and aim the article towards informing people of these facts to make it clear that it's *their* responsibility to decide whether keeping certain types of pets is ethically sound. If they think birds in cages might not be happy, they must choose not to buy them. Some people keep pets in better environments than others, some people hate the idea of cages, etc. In the end it's up to *people* to control how their pets' lives are lived out. There's unavoidable anthropomorphisation going on, of course, but that's the only way for people to decide how 'happy' their pets really are.

I liked the slant towards parenting and acquiescing to children's demands for pets: this is as stronger message as any to get across - that childred need to be taught that pets need a lot of thought and care - you have to think about *them* before your own happiness - harder for kids than practically anything!

I think there's not too much to change in your article, but those are my thoughts on it. Hope they help.

A particle of worry starts at the back of my mind. What are guide entries supposed to be? Expressions of unalloyed fact? Statements which are so bland that they brook no contradiction?

An article should not be a slice of a chat room - occasionally illuminating but almost always vacuous meandering. But can it not be an expression of opinion? Please don't try to tell me that all entries are absolutely objective; that would kill the guide.

I'll try to cut the first-person syntax, and I might change the title to "Should I buy that cute ickle rat?" but "the ethical considerations..." makes me despair. I want to inform, involve and incite! I want to tell the truth, but it will always be the truth as I see it.

I expressly forbid anyone to rewrite this article "for" me. As explained by h2g2 support (http://www.bbc.co.uk/h2g2/guide/FFM38459?thread=111547&skip=0&show=20#p961775), I own the copyright to everything I write. They explain other things as well, but if anybody edits it to do more that correct spelling or the odd, obvious typo, then they are changing what I wrote, it is no longer what I wrote and I feel I could sue them for plagiarism before they try to do the same to me.

The Guide is about facts and guidelines gained through personal experience. That is quite different from opinion. Opinions can be neither right nor wrong - they are just what you happen to think about something, which might differ considerably from what others think.

Your article is rich in facts and has a number of excellent points for thought in it. What I believe would work best is if you use your experiences to illustrate how one's choices turn out when buying pets - mention that people should consider carefully before breeding animals because they may breed, then use your experience to show how that happened to you, and what you did about it. That's fine - you could probably get away with using first person for just that reason.

The Guide really is trying to be as objective as possible. Most of what you say in your article *is* fact - they are points that everyone really *should* consider when buying pets. It would make a great article from that perspective - it's something that benefits everyone who reads it. Personally speaking, I think it's important too - I share a lot of your opinions. Only by presenting the facts to people in articles like yours can we get them to form their *own* opinions. That's the important bit.

And unfortunately you can't "expressly forbid anyone to rewrite [your] article". You agreed to this when you registered. From that same thread you just linked to: "You retain the copyright over your material, but you grant us permission to do various things with your material too." One of those things is sub-editing.

And therefore there's absolutely no chance that the BBC would attempt to sue you for plagiarism - they already have the original you gave them.

Specifically, Mund, you give the BBC licence to create "derivative works", and you waive your "moral right" to require that your contribution be unaltered. If this is unacceptable, then you should not publish your material on h2g2. The ability to do these things is pretty central, and is unlikely to be changed.

In practice, the italics will always make a *copy* of your entry before editing it, and will modify the copy, rather than your original. In this way you retain full control over the original version.
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According to the http://www.h2g2.com/writing-guidelines , an Edited guide entry should be "balanced, factual, informative". It should also be written in the third person. Here's an example of the sort of change you might want to make:

> "As I said, I like animals, but are we honest with ourselves about why we keep them, and what we do to them?"

goes to:

> "Are we honest with ourselves about why we keep animals, and what we do with them?" {question, not opinion}

Similarly:

> "Not many people see me as an animal lover, but I really do value our non-human companions. That's why I think most pets should never have been born."

goes to:

> "Some animal lovers think it would have been better if most pets had never been born" {factual reporting of some people's opinion".

As a title, perhaps "Should we keep pets?" or "Are pets happy?" and so on - that's a bit snappier, maybe...
--

This is really good stuff, and an important topic. I hope you don't see it as too big a deal to work round the h2g2 guidelines...

I thought Mund was saying that people in the Writing Workshop weren't to go off and start rewriting this article for themselves, and submitting it separately to the Guide. Anyway, we're all a pretty decent bunch, so we don't tend to do things without asking first.

I'll shrug off the fear of editors - they don't have time to do all the terrible things we suspect them of. I'll switch it to a more objective mood, but there will still be the whiff of polemic. Thanks to all for the advice.

Um, does anyone else suspect subeditors of 'doing terrible things'? :-o I thought they were supposed to be helping make people's entries better, or more suited to the Guide's style...

The piece may be contentious, but it has a ways to go before it catches up with (for instance) "Why Do We Hate Foreigners?" or "A Working Description of Paganism".

I think you could also explore a few other subjects:

* How many of the world's natural resources go to support pets. How many cows die to make leather collars? How many horses die to make dog food? Surely there is surplus horsemeat and leather in the world (see entry on "Cowskin Rugs"), but how many pet owners have considered where their dog food and collars come from?

* How many pets get unnaturally treated like humans. How many pet owners think about making their dogs "part of the family" (instead of themselves "head of the pack")? How natural is it to train a dog *not* to roll in s**t?

* How many pets hurt humans. Pet dog attacks on humans are becoming common, sometimes fatal. Plus, haven't we all had to put up with someone's barking dog at night? Lack of sleep is hurtful too.

* How conceited it may be considered for humans to own pets. Such humans are in effect saying, "I can control how this animal lives", or "I can give it a better life than it could give itself".

Can you tell, I'm not a pet owner?

But aren't you a subeditor?

And don't *you*, in fact, do terrible things??

ithankyou

> "does anyone else suspect subeditors of 'doing terrible things'?"

It's happened. People really don't like it. Some sub-editors learn. Some don't. So it goes.

On a different note - I quite like this entry - it'd be suitable for the AWW, assuming the author isn't going to try and rip its heart out to make it impartial and suchlike. It's good to see people caring about this kind of thing, even if I might not agree completely with them...

Swimming back in from dark regions, it's good to see a few people expressing strong opinions. Just get me started on house rabbits.