W00t! It's time for our collaboration with the ever-awesome What Is It? blog - this week's mystery object is this gun: can you tell us what it is for? (It has a very specific function)
Place your guess in the comment section - the first to guess correctly will get a Free Neatorama T-Shirt. If no one got it, then the funniest guess will win. One guess per comment, please, though you can enter as many times as you wish.
For more clues, check out the What is it? Blog - good luck!
Update 2/20/09 - The answer is A Rokuoh-Sha Type 89 machine gun camera, used to train Japanese aviators in aerial gunnery. The first guess that's specific enough was #15, by "Give the shirt to the funniest answer :)" So, per that request, the free shirt goes to: Melphistopheles for his guess of early colonoscopy device!Congrats Mel - and thank you to everybody for their awesome guesses. That was fun!
Comments (71)
User aims at the cows head, and hits it with a bolt, knocking the cow unconscous. this way the animals throat can be split and it won't feel any pain (except that of being hit by a heavy bolt). user reels in the bolt and waits for the next animal to come along.
i've never seen a slaughterhouse bolt gun, but the guy who wrote Fast Food Nation gives a good description, and that thing above is exactly what i imagined!
This is the discrepancy caused by speciesism and my hope is that in 250 years we'll look back in the same way that we not look back at slavery, nazism, sexism etc - we'll be horrified how we could pay money to have someone killed to be put in a glass jar, at a time when the world could use that money for doing lots and lots more good.
As for humans, look up Gunther von Hagens and plastination. While no humans are killed specifically to be put on display, he uses real dead people in his art. Most cultures in the world are fascinated with life, and are often just as fascinated with death. It's why art like this exists.
Fish are caught and killed in their millions, and the people who do it make money, and their profits and taxes do 'lots and lots of good'. My point? A shark is a fish. It's a big one, yes, but still a species of fish. Why should we give a big fish any more (or less) respect than a small one? Why do we eat cows but not dogs or dolphins? There simply is no good reason. Presumably dogs are tasty (I wouldn't know), but we all choose to be 'speciesist' to some degree, and rather than scorn it the majority (every non-veggie in the world) accepts that certain animals are treated differently.
Next time you use an insect spray, be sure to think about your speciesism against insects. Don't they have a right to life too? Or if you think it's okay to kill them, do you also eat insects as part of your daily diet?
I think my rant is over, but the words 'double standards' spring to mind, or even 'people in glass houses shouldn't throw stones'.