BWSS: Teacup Puppies

Have you guys ever seen or heard of these? They are puppies that have been bred inside teacups. You know, to meet mankind's unceasing demand for tiny things.

Aww.

(That's Nick in the background if you were wondering. This was actually his senior yearbook photo.)

But guess what. It turns out that "cuteness" as an aesthetic value can lead to practices that are morally -- wait for it -- questionable.

The Family of Man: Our love of the tiny unites us all.

Anyway, Teacup Puppies equal total genetic messes. Apprarently their bones are so brittle that sometimes they will just fall apart. They were not meant for this earth. It's sad and awful. It's a lot like Benjamin Button.

“Fuck you, Darwin.”

So, in short: we are tampering with nature in order to make it harmonize with our aesthetic values. But in so doing -- in our unceasing quest to produce a better, more beautiful product -- we are left with something frail and maladptive, something fundamentally broken, something whose very existence is an act violence.

In other words:

B.

W.

S.

S.

Or, I guess, BWSM (Busy Writing Scholarly Monograph)