Animal Writings

Iditarod musher and veterinarian Sonny King: "These dogs love to do this."

Dogs don't love to run without rest until their paws bleed, until their lungs become inflamed and filled with mucus. They don't love penile frostbite or bleeding ulcers brought on from overmedication. They don't love to be whipped. Or tethered. Or transported in small crates. Dogs love sleep, freedom, and kindness — they get none of that in the Iditarod.

Dr King: "Doesn't your dog go in the back yard and chase squirrels?"

My nephew likes to run around in the back yard. But I don't make him run from DC to Baltimore almost nonstop. I would hope Dr. King can tell the difference between playing and torture.

Dr. King: "God didn't mean for dogs to outlive us."

What is this supposed to mean? That since dogs don't live as long as us, it's okay to run them to death? Of what relevance is life expectancy? Since dogs have fewer days on earth than we do, we should be that much more obligated to make sure that all of them are good ones. God meant for us to be merciful, not ruthless.

Dr. King's wife says that for her husband, the race is a "giant laboratory."

So are prison camps and gulags.

Dr. King: "These dogs are not dying from abuse."

No? What are they dying from? Old age? Either Dr. King is lying or he's not qualified to practice veterinary medicine. For days, a dog is forced to run far more than he ever would naturally. He suddenly dies of heart failure. Rick Swenson's dog dies after being mushed through waist-deep ice water. Dr. King sees no cause and effect. And no abuse. What about the "culled" dogs with bullet wounds in their head? Did they die of natural causes?

The outlandish remarks of Dr. King, and the fact that they go unchallenged by his fellow Iditarod veterinarians, are clear evidence that the system is corrupt.

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Veterinarians, when taking their oath, pledge to avoid harming their patients. The Iditarod is the opposite of the veterinary oath. It is an orgy of intentional, prolonged harm to animals. As currently designed, animal suffering is not an accidental consequence of the race; it is inevitable. Any veterinarian who truly cares about the health and well-being of animals should be appalled at a "sporting event" that kills at least one dog whenever it is held.

The Alaska State Veterinary Medical Association (ASVMA) has the power to help the thousands of dogs destined to be injured, sickened, overworked, and killed in future Iditarods unless the race is drastically overhauled. The ASVMA could come up with a list of reforms necessary to make the race at least somewhat humane. At a minimum: shorter overall distance; longer and more frequent rest stops; sled weight limits; minimum pack size; stringent regulations against using drugs to increase dogs' speed; mandatory and more comprehensive health evaluations at checkpoints; prohibitions against racing injured dogs; harsh penalties, including suspension, for mushers that violate the rules. The ASVMA could publicly condemn the abuse that is inherent in the Iditarod and call upon race organizers to institute much-needed changes before the next running of the event. They could force the public to re-think the Iditarod, and seriously consider its terrible toll on the dogs. They could shame Iditarod fans into demanding that the event be safe and enjoyable for dogs instead of a thousand mile death march.

The ASVMA would do all these things if they had any backbone, but they don't. Instead, veterinarians associated with the Iditarod repeat the same rah-rah spin as the race's promoters, thereby guaranteeing continued harm to the dogs. The ASVMA undoubtedly sees the tragedies from the Iditarod, but they're silent. They look the other way. What a disgrace.

At minimum, 122 dogs have died in the Iditarod. Almost every race, one or more dogs die. Causes of death include: strangulation in towlines, internal hemorrhaging after being gouged by a sled, liver injury, heart failure, and pneumonia. Some dogs have been beaten to death by mushers.

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"Punishable offenses include pulling off of the trail to sniff or to lift a leg, going too slowly, not keeping the tugline tight, disobeying a command, being aggressive to humans, or fighting with each other." "...A 'spanking' may be administered with...a birch/willow switch."

In other words, dogs are punished for being dogs.

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"Nagging a dog team is cruel and ineffective...A training device such as a whip is not cruel at all but is effective." "It is a common training device in use among dog mushers...A whip is a very humane training tool."

"Never say 'whoa' if you intend to stop to whip a dog." "So without saying 'whoa' you plant the hook, run up the side 'Fido' is on, grab the back of his harness, pull back enough so that there is slack in the tug line, say 'Fido, get up' immediately rapping his hind end with a whip..."

Has Mr. Welch ever been on the receiving end of such humane training?

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Dogs are given anti-inflammatory drugs to make them run farther and faster. It's all about speed.

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"As we came up over the sea wall onto Front Street, I reached in my sled bag and pulled out a whip just as he glanced around and saw it. So he reached in and pulled out his. And that's the way we came down the street, just driving those dogs for all there was in us."

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"I got my puppy team here. I went a little too hard, I guess. I kind of ran the legs off the dogs a little bit."


"Team?" These are slaves, pushed to exhaustion.

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"It was my first Iditarod; I had to finish the ding-dang thing. The dogs all had fevers. The vets gave them a powerful antibiotic."

"Every time I came into a checkpoint, the vets knew about me and asked how the dogs were doing." "They [the dogs] had a virus with a fever, and they were coughing mucus."

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"Around Nikolai, about 350 miles into the race, some of his dogs caught a virus." "'They had some bad discomfort'" said Swingley. "'It was hard for me to manage them.'"

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Dogs run four to six hours at a stretch, sometimes up to 10. Jeff King ran his dogs for 12 hours straight.

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"I had this little, bitty thing of a leader named Dolly. I told her to go and she looked at me as if to say, 'No.' I picked her up and tossed her in the water, and on we went."

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"When I got to a creek crossing, mushers Tom Daily and Barry Lee were trying to figure out what to do because it was rushing open water. There were jagged sticks sticking out." One person threw the lead dogs in the water..."

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One of the dogs that raced for Frank Sihler was 10 years old and blind in one eye.

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The dogs were "...pulling their 600-pound-plus load..."

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"Every musher's sled is too heavy from the restart to at least Nikolai. You need a truck to haul the necessities of life on the trail..."

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Common side effects to dogs that manage to finish the race include pulled muscles, stress fractures, diarrhea, dehydration, intestinal viruses, and bleeding stomach ulcers.

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"Imagine your coach signing you up for a marathon in the Alaskan hinterland. He ships you to the race in a wooden box with an opening only large enough for your snout.

Imagine running more than 1,000 miles or roughly the equivalent from Boston to St. Louis. Imagine trudging for almost two weeks over frozen terrain, jagged rocks, stumps and divots at subzero temperatures, often in the middle of the night. Your feet are raw, cracked and bloody despite wearing "booties." When you protest, your coach hands you Super Glue to affix a patch of moleskin to your oozing sores.

Limping and exhausted, perhaps running with a strength-sapping virus attacking your scrawny 45-pound body, imagine surreptitiously being given tranquilizers or opiates to mask injury or improve performance.

Imagine being tethered to 15 other runners on a 50-foot gangline while pulling 400 pounds. Imagine flipping on your back and being dragged down an icy incline.

This is the Iditarod. This is sick and stupid.

The race's death rate is 2.9 fatalities for every 1,000 competitors. That would translate into 290 deaths in the Boston Marathon during the last decade, according to the Humane Society. Three dogs died last year, and five the year before. At least one has perished every year since the race began in 1973. In 1996, five-time Iditarod winner Rick Swenson was disqualified after one of his dogs died as he mushed through a waist-deep overflow of frozen slush and water."

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"Although the fluff coverage in The Anchorage Daily News promotes the Iditarod as 'Alaska`s great race,' it is nothing more than a barbaric ritual that gives Alaskan cowboys a license to kill."

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"[The Iditarod] is the most immoral, reprehensible 'sporting event' in the USA. Thirty-eight states and the District of Columbia have anti-cruelty laws that would make the Iditarod illegal because of overworking an animal, according to helpsleddogs.org, a Web site devoted to helping our defenseless friends. Unfortunately, institutionalized animal abuse is as common in Alaska as wandering moose.

There, a sled dog is not an animal to be respected. It is to be owned, or leased, like a car. When the dog has too many miles on it, take a guess what happens. Any human being with a smidgen of decency should have nothing to do with the Iditarod. It should be outlawed. Entrenched Alaskan politicians, particularly those in Congress, don't have the guts.

They are not alone. Commerce rules, not common sense. The Iditarod benefits no one but a drooling pack of unconscionable profiteers. From race organizers to those involved in tourism -- even the newspapers from Anchorage to Fairbanks who fawn over the Iditarod as they line their pockets with advertising revenue. For 1,151 miles, sled dogs will pull their glory-seeking, money-grubbing masters through the Alaska wilderness. Even venerable PBS got suckered into glorifying the race last year."

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Alaska newspapers reap enormous financial benefits from the Iditarod. Hence, they put a positive spin on the race's tragedies and hide the brutality of the grueling, deadly event. In the make-believe news from the pro-Iditarod press, the dogs are treated with loving care and the mushers stoically grieve when a dog is hurt or dies.

"[Musher] Joy said she sat...and reflected on the things beyond human control while her dogs rested... She spent much of the day riding behind her dogs on the trail, thinking about the same thing, concluding death is a sad but inevitable companion, whether on the Iditarod (trail) or in life."

Death is inevitable, but that doesn't excuse murder. Dogs in the Iditarod die because they're worked to death. Shame on the mushers for pretending that the dogs' untimely end was a surprise; the mushers willfully, deliberately pushed the dogs to their deaths. Shame on Alaska's biggest newspaper for perpetuating this transparent lie instead of condemning the cruelty that led to the dogs' demise. Some things are beyond human control; forcing animals to run at top speed for days on end is not one of them.

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A letter to the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner that did not get published confirmed accounts of owners beating their dogs, starving them to maintain their optimum weight, and skinning them to make mittens. The letter was from a man who worked six years in a kennel that supplies dogs to the mushing industry.

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"In the Iditarod, dogs are a car tire that goes flat. Just get another one. Except a car tire was never named Lassie or Ol' Yeller. A car tire never welcomed you home at night. A car tire never took the edge off feeling lonely. A car tire never played with the kids, and a kid never cried when the car tire died.

If a dog is man's best friend, this is not how you treat your best friend. You don't push him so hard he can't even exhale to vomit but instead chokes on it while falling down.

And as he watches his dog writhe on the ground, what can the musher possibly say that would even remotely make this sight worthwhile?"

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When the Humane Society of the United States suggested that rules be changed to give dogs longer rest breaks, Iditarod official and longtime musher Joe Redington told the Wall Street Journal that he "wrote them a letter and told them to go to hell."

Tom Classen, retired Air Force colonel and Alaska resident for over forty years, on how Iditarod sled dogs are treated:

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Many husky dog kennels have more than 100 dogs. Some have as many as 200 dogs. None of the kennels is inspected or supervised by the State of Alaska. Mushers raise many dogs hoping that a few will be strong enough to run in the race.

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It is widely known that "culling" is common practice among breeders of Iditarod dogs. The idea being that you raise more than you need and save the best for the race. Culling is typically done by shooting the dog in the head. Of course, if the dog moves at the last second, his dying is prolonged. What is the terrible crime that these dogs have committed that warrants the death penalty? According to musher Lorraine Temple, "They (the big racing outfits) can't keep a dog who's a mile an hour too slow." (Currents, Fall, 1999).

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"'I'm definitely going to have to cull some dogs. There's no way we can keep them,' he [Charlie Campbell] said."

"The culling won't start until the mushing season begins and he and his wife can assess each dog. 'We're going to have to be ruthless about who we keep.'"

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"Teach the dogs to give you an all-out effort when you want it, not when they feel like giving it. If a dog does not have what it takes for this all-out effort, he should not be disciplined. He should be culled."

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"The Iditarod is an 'extreme sport,' and like in other extreme sports, its athletes (the dogs) are frequently injured, sometimes permanently, or die. Unlike in other extreme sports, most of the participants didn't choose to compete, they were forced into service, and they have nothing to say about it because they are dogs. For those dogs who do survive the Iditarod, for the many on the fringe of the competitive circle who aren't good enough to compete or aren't worth breeding, they will be shot when they have outlived their usefulness. They aren't even deserving of the kind of compassionate death we guarantee most convicted murderers — painless lethal injection. Those who do live, for a while, spend most of their hours tied by a short chain to a stake."

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In many kennels, dogs spend their entire lives outside chained up to their dog house. The chain may be as short as four feet long. Life on a chain is miserable and lonely. The dog is forced to violate his natural instincts by urinating and defecating near where he sleeps. Surrounded by waste, he is susceptible to parasites and disease. Robbed of mobility, he cannot escape stinging insects or attacking animals. His neck becomes raw and sore from constantly yanking on the chain. Psychologically, he is ruined. Only months of caring attention, and wide open spaces can make him forget this pain. Chaining a dog, Iditarod style, is cruel and unusual punishment.

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Mushers claim that culled dogs find good homes. I say prove it.

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The dogs are usually kept outside. Old and arthritic dogs have to withstand below-zero temperatures. In the summer, often the only shade is inside a cramped doghouse.

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"Animal control officers removed 28 dogs from the property of a Willow musher Saturday and cited him with 17 counts of animal cruelty after authorities said they found the huskies with rib, hip and tail bones protruding through their thick fur.

David Straub, a three-time Iditarod racer, was not feeding his dogs, said a Mat-Su Borough animal control officer.

Ten of the dogs were found to be emaciated, animal control officials said."

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"The complainant, Daniel Blythe, stated in writing that when he saw the dogs Oct. 10 they were starving, dazed, running in tight circles and foaming at the mouth.

Straub, who moved to Alaska from Missouri in 1996 to pursue dog-sledding, admitted one of his dogs died that day. He said it wasn't from starvation, but from the flu."

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In 2003, an Ohio man was charged with cruelty to animals for keeping and transporting 14 huskies, whom he claimed to be training for the Iditarod, chained to barrels on the back of a homemade trailer.

"...There are those who accuse campaigners for animal rights of caring more for other species than people. Do we accuse those who choose to help refugees or victims of war of not caring about their own countrymen? Or those who work for the elderly of not caring about abused children? It is nonsense. The issue is not whom we value the most, but whether it is morally justifiable to exploit and abuse sentient beings — human or non-human. Many of the most passionate advocates for animals throughout the ages have also been at the forefront of campaigns for human rights."

"Compassion, in which all ethics must take root, can only attain its full breadth and depth if it embraces all living creatures and does not limit itself to mankind."

Why not cut out the middleman, and just write a check directly to the National Cattlemen's Beef Association every April 15th? But I'm getting ahead of myself. Let me back up a step...

Here's Professor Lindsay Allen's conclusion from a recent study by the U.S. Agricultural Research Service, part of the USDA: "There's absolutely no question that it's unethical for parents to bring up their children as strict vegans."

Let's back up another step. The study was of 544 African children. The majority of their diet was corn and beans. When they were fed supplemental meat, their health significantly improved (click here for the full story). From what I can gather, this is the sole basis of Professor Allen's bold assertion.

Absolutely no question? She can't be serious. Has there been any research on vegan children in the developed world? Would a vitamin B-12 supplement and fresh greens have worked as well as (or better than) meat in the African study? Those are just the first two questions that pop into my head.

Any scientist who seriously wanted to test the hypothesis that vegan diets are unhealthy for children would start with the best-case scenario, to eliminate, as much as possible, extraneous factors that could detract from the health of the study sample. They would not choose a group of children who, along with their parents, subsist on a blatantly poor diet, and pretend that it is representative of veganism. If the pro-meat crowd has to go to that extent to have an experiment come out in their favor, they practically make my counterargument for me.

Compare Professor Allen's statement with the position of the American Dietetic Association:

"Well-planned vegan and other types of vegetarian diets are appropriate for all stages of the life cycle, including during pregnancy, lactation, infancy, childhood, and adolescence. Vegetarian diets offer a number of nutritional benefits, including lower levels of saturated fat, cholesterol, and animal protein as well as higher levels of carbohydrates, fiber, magnesium, potassium, folate, and antioxidants such as vitamins C and E and phytochemicals. Vegetarians have been reported to have lower body mass indices than nonvegetarians, as well as lower rates of death from ischemic heart disease; vegetarians also show lower blood cholesterol levels; lower blood pressure; and lower rates of hypertension, type 2 diabetes, and prostate and colon cancer."

Bottom line: If you take a group of kids with a severely deficient diet and add in some nutrients, their health is going to improve. That's pretty much a given. In no way does it suggest that the particular foods chosen to deliver the missing nutrients are essential or even a wise choice in a well-balanced diet. For Professor Allen to conclude from one anomalous exercise that vegan diets are unhealthy is a preposterous leap of faith. To rule out other possibilities, when they're so immediately obvious, is flagrantly unscientific. To scare parents into believing that they must eat animal products in order to have healthy children is contemptible. The USDA, with its massive subsidies to the meat and dairy industries, is one of the reasons we have such high rates of heart disease, diabetes, and obesity in children.

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Additional resources:

- A Very Moving Letter. One man's absorbing account of how he reacted when he found out that his granddaughter was going to be raised vegan. Highly recommended.

- Coming soon in AnimalWritings.com: two great kids I know. Healthy, happy, precocious — and strictly vegan. In fact, I can probably arrange for Professor Allen to meet these two delightful "refutations" to her argument.

The Maryland Department of Agriculture has decreed that the names of chicken farms with sick birds will be kept secret from the media, ostensibly to avoid spreading disease.

I'm not buying it. The poultry industry doesn't want the public to see the severe crowding and impoverished conditions of the birds (20,000 or more of them crammed into a windowless shed, standing in their own excrement), which weaken their immune systems and invite disease. They don't want people to read about mass slaughters, the industry's standard method for containing disease outbreaks. In these operations, the birds are all incinerated, shot, gassed, or bludgeoned to death — not exactly the sort of pictures you want your customers to see while reading their morning paper, especially when your ads show happy, hearty chickens that, for all intents and purposes, don't exist in modern chicken houses.

Big Poultry is a major economic and political force in Maryland, and has consistently shown a lack of regard for the health risk of their products unless it threatens their bottom line. This is the same industry that opposes mandatory recalls of tainted meat, contributes to thousands of food poisoning deaths in the U.S. each year, and chokes the Chesapeake Bay with the waste and body parts of 600 million chickens.

Let the reporters and photographers into infested chicken farms, so that they can reveal the true health, environmental, and animal welfare costs of the poultry industry. Taxpayers that subsidize the industry and are affected by its selfish carelessness have a right to know.

"I don't eat chicken anymore. I won't eat it. I won't allow it in my house."
  --Rodney Leonard, U.S. Poultry inspection

"Based on my experience in Los Angeles, my advice to the public is not to eat meat. "
  --Gregorio Natavidad, meat inspector

"Most Americans don't have any idea how well the Department of Agriculture protects the grower at the expense of the consumer. When a chemical is banned from use, a farmer or livestock operator who has the chemical in stock has a choice: either to lose money by disposing of the product, or to use it and take the risk of getting caught breaking the law. How severe is that risk? Well, if you use a banned product in your cattle feed, you have to face the prospect that the government is going to inspect one out of every 250,000 carcasses. They will test this carcass not for all banned substances, but just for a small fraction of them. And even if they detect some residue of a banned substance, and even if they're able to trace the carcass to the ranch that produced it, the guilty rancher is likely at most to receive a stern letter with a strongly worded warning. I never met a rancher who suffered in any way from breaking any regulation meant to protect the safety of our meat. The whole procedure is, in short, a charade."
  --Howard Lyman (The "Mad Cowboy")

"Would you like to go to pasture with a chicken,cut him up, then drop him into a fresh manure pile, and eat him? That's what the product is like coming from chicken plants today."
  --Chicken Inspector

"It used to be if a bird had a severe contamination, you condemned the sucker. But nowadays my own supervising inspector says, 'There can be no more bad birds on your tally. You've had too many.'"
  --A seven-year poultry inspector

"The oath I took as an inspector said if I ever saw anything wrong I was supposted to report it. But today I can't report anything. Today, if you blow your whistle, you're in trouble with the inspection service. I feel the oath I took is violated every day I work."
  --William Freeman

"I would expect an extremely high percentage of the chickens would test positive. Our poultry industry clients wouldn't like that."
  --Brian Shelton, Pathogen Control

"I'm ashamed to even let people know I am a USDA inspector. There are thousands of diseased and unwholesome birds going right on down the line."
  --Poultry Inspector

"We always had about a week's notice of [OSHA] inspections, even though such inspections are supposed to be a surprise."
  -- Virgil Butler, former chicken slaughterhouse worker

(For examples of intentional OSHA violations and coverups during Mr. Butler's tenure at poultry plants, please visit The Cyberactivist Archives and scroll down to "Tyson Lies Addressed.")

(My strongest objection to factory farms is the severe suffering they force upon the animals. But I occasionally need to remind myself, and others, that factory farms are also an ecological nightmare...)

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has proposed that factory farms be forgiven for all previous violations of the Clean Air Act. What a sweet deal for agribusiness. Not only do they have exemptions for every imaginable form of animal cruelty, but with a wave of the magic wand, they get off scot-free for the massive pollution they've dumped into our waterways, soil, and air.

The factory farm industry also gets an easy out for violations that occur over the next two years. Instead of paying fines, they pay a relatively miniscule one-time fee to participate in a study that will generate, in the EPA's words, "more data to determine whether operations are in violation." But Michele Merkel, a former EPA staff attorney, says that "Four years ago we already knew that facilities of a certain size were exceeding health-based standards in the Clean Air Act." Furthermore, the "study" is redundant; factory farms are already required by law to supply the data that would be gathered in the study. The so-called study is nothing more than a delaying tactic, and perhaps a payback to major political donors.

If you're thinking that this lopsided deal, which favors polluters at the expense of animals and the public, was crafted by the factory farm industry, you're probably right. According to the Humane Society of the United States (HSUS), "One of the largest factory farmers, Tyson Foods, lobbied heavily in favor of the voluntary program and contributed $100,000 to the Bush/Cheney inaugural activities the week before the program was announced."

Concentrated animal feeding operations produce an exorbitant amount of ammonia, which jeopardizes the health of animals and humans forced to be in those toxic environments. The HSUS cites an Iowa State University report which states that "nearly 60% of workers in swine confinement facilities commonly suffer respiratory effects ranging from headaches to shortness of breath. When manure pits are agitated before emptying, hydrogen sulfide levels can rise to lethal levels within seconds. Exposure to hydrogen sulfide during pit agitation has accounted for the deaths of several confinement workers." Factory farm animals breathe the poisonous mix of gases 24 hours a day.

Big agribusiness can hardly be considered free enterprise. It's more like a combination fascist and socialist wing of the government. Fascist because animals — and to a large degree, low-level workers — have to endure physical and emotional punishment with no recourse for redress. Socialist because the animal abuse and degradation of our air and water are heavily subsidized by tax dollars. Often the policies are formulated and carried out by ex-agribusiness executives and lobbyists turned government regulators (although "promoters" would be more accurate)

If you're upset that the most exploitive industry in the country gets yet another free ride, send an email to a-and-r-docket@epa.gov with Docket ID no. OAR-2004-0237 in the subject line. You have until March 2, 2005 to submit comments.

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Additional Resources:

HSUS: EPA Offers Large Producers Amnesty on Clean Air Act Violations

Veggies for Ecology

"Those who are pro-life would logically become vegetarian. Those who are pro-choice would not want to impose their wills upon the body of a cow, sheep or pig."

An article in the Washington Post yesterday talked about an informal club of area chefs. They get together and take turns cooking. At the most recent gathering, the chefs ate capon (castrated chicken), sausage, veal head, veal shanks, and pig's feet. A recipe for braised veal shanks accompanied the article. Readers were invited to direct questions to food@washpost.com. Here are my questions:


I'm awaiting my reply.

(By Rose Fyleman)

I think mice are nice.

Their tails are long
Their faces small,
They haven't any
Chins at all.
Their ears are pink,
Their teeth are white,
They run about
The house at night.
They nibble things
They shouldn't touch
And no one seems
To like them much.

But I think mice
Are nice

For years, starting long before I was involved with animal rights, I've been telling people that the easiest way to lose weight is to eat a salad before every meal. Include plenty of raw vegetables, which increases chewing time, which makes the salad last long enough for the fiber to fill you up.

Lo and behold, a recent study announced that "eating a small salad before every meal results in weight loss while still feeling full." Volunteers who ate salad as a first course consumed fewer calories overall because the salad filled them up. Pretty straightforward. By the way, we're talking green salad, not chicken salad or some other meat-laden imposter.

The findings were reported in the Journal of the American Dietetic Association.

(Atkins followers please note: an increase in healthy carbs helped people lose weight with little effort.)

I wonder if my taxes helped fund this study. I'd estimate that the Government spends a billion dollars a year proving the obvious or the irrelevant. At least in this case no animals were harmed.

An article in Best Friends magazine explains that a pigeon became a foster mother for several abandoned rabbits. The pigeon closely watches over the rabbits and is poised to defend them. Mother and babies are doing fine.

Invariably, in response to stories like this, some scientists are quick to point out that the pigeon is acting on instinct.

Question: why is altrustic behavior in animals so often chalked up to mere instinct? We humans adopt pets of other species. We bottle-feed orphaned kittens, lambs, and piglets. We form close attachments to our other-specied "kids;" they become part of our family and our hearts. We have instincts too, but it's not purely instinct that compels us to come to the aid of a helpess baby of another species. Even as our heartstrings are tugged by his tiny whimpers and awkward flailings, we're thinking: "what kind of food does he need;" "is he warm enough;" "is he hurt." Who's to say that the pigeon is not making conscious decisons even as she's moved by maternal instinct?

A common phrase these days by people who do not want to cede any rights to animals is "putting people first." But should all our needs come before all non-humans' needs?

A person's desire to wear fur is less important than the animals' desire not to be tortured.

A person's desire to eat chicken is less urgent than the chicken's desire not to suffer every minute of his 45-day life.

Animals' dire needs come before humans' trivial needs.

Let us be first in compassion, first in helping the planet and all its inhabitants. First do no harm.

Sometimes I wonder if all natural compassion and common sense has been bred out of us.

Meet Alice, a turkey who lived for many years at Poplar Spring Animal Sanctuary in Poolesville, Maryland. Alice's display of what a turkey can be is the most eloquent rebuttal to Mr. Martins' misinformed and derogatory comment. The following article about Alice's life is from the Poplar Spring newsletter, reprinted with permission of the author.

With grace and determination, Alice showed people how much they didn't know about turkeys. Every day of her life, Alice disproved the inane assertion that turkeys are void of intelligence. Visitors unfamiliar with turkeys were transformed by Alice's charm and inquisitiveness. She very effectively conveyed her moods and requests. She was like no other turkey, because each one is unique, each one finds their own way in the world. Alice's perceptiveness, unconditional friendliness, and even a certain dignity were apparent to the handicapped (who perhaps related to Alice's own disabilities) and to young children. Maybe even to New York Times op-ed writers. Turkeys and all other birds are smart and complicated and it's obvious.

But eternal shame on us for even trying to eradicate a species' mental faculties. Is there anything more despicably evil? The animals' intellect and emotions are what give form and meaning to their lives. We evidently are not content with subjecting them to extreme confinement and deprivation, and deforming their bodies. It's not enough that we remove every last shred of normalcy from their environment. It's not enough that we eliminate every opportunity for these animals to explore, discover, experience joy, accomplish tasks, be individuals, be themselves. We want to take away their innate ability to do such things. We seem intent on demoting the species to a powerless class of drones that exist only so we can eat their flesh. We are not playing God; we are playing Satan.

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In October, 2004, Newsweek ran a story that claimed fur was "fun." The subtitle asked, "Where are the protestors?" In a previous post, I wrote about anti-fur protests in Washington, D.C. that started shortly after the Newsweek article, and partly in response to it.

Since then, a worldwide anti-fur campaign has burgeoned. Movie stars, sports figures, fashion models, and TV celebrities have spoken out against making animals suffer for fashion. Each time I participate in a protest, strangers walk up and say "thank you for doing this." As for the few hecklers — the guilt is in their voice.

The protestors are everywhere. In fact, I've come to believe that most people in this country dislike fur, that a large segment of the population detests it, and that those who are ambivalent generally have no idea about how animals suffer in fur farms and indiscriminately cruel traps.

I think Newsweek should practice balanced journalism. Below is my letter to Julie Scelfo, author of the "Fur is Fun" article, asking her to acknowledge the growing opposition to fur, and to tell the animals' compelling side of the story.

From Prisoned Chickens, Poisoned Eggs, by Karen Davis, PhD, founder and president of United Poultry Concerns:

Every year, kindergarten and elementary school teachers and their students place thousands of fertilized eggs in classroom incubators to be hatched within three or four weeks...These birds are not only deprived of a mother; many grow sick and deformed because their exacting needs are not met during incubation and after hatching. Chick organs stick to the sides of shells because they are not rotated properly. Chicks are born with intestines outside their bodies. The heat may be turned off for the weekend, causing chicks to become crippled or die in the shell. Some teachers even remove an egg from the incubator every other day and open it up to look at the chick in various stages of development, thus adding killing of innocent life to the child's education.

When the project is over, the unwanted survivors are a problem to be disposed of. ...Most of them are going to be killed immediately...

In the wild, chicks don't enter the world alone. They're welcomed by their mother, who tenderly looks after them, and starts a conversation with them while they're still in the shell. Once born, chicks huddle with their sinblings each night beneath their mother's protective wing. They experience variety, novelty, discovery, and companionship under the watchful eye of a doting and proud hen. In the sterile environment of a mechanized incubator, their life starts out all wrong, and never recovers.

School hatching projects treat living animals as curious objects to be manipulated and casually discarded — in the name of "science," no doubt. The teacher also typically has to lie about the fate of the chicks. A perfect introduction, I suppose, to a culture of destruction and deception.

If you're involved in education and want to foster compassion in children, as well as teach them what a chicken is really like, you have many alternatives:

• Take a tour of a farm animal sanctuary. There, you'll see hens and rooster of different ages grouping together as flocks. You see how the they dust-bathe, forage, and interact with one another. You'll learn that some chickens like to be petted; others like to follow you around. By the time you leave, you'll know more about chickens than 99 percent of all adults in the U.S.


• The 12-minute color video Chick Chick Chick lets viewers see the world through the eyes of chicken.


• UPC recommends an exercise in which students draw various stages of a chick's development, put the pictures in the proper sequence, and explain how the process makes sense.

A friend of mind who's beginning to question his consumption of meat has been probing the various arguments for and against animal rights. "What about my right not to be bitten by a crocodile?" he wondered out loud.

He's a sharp guy, so I didn't need to go into the distinction between moral agents (e.g., sane adult humans), and those who cannot possibly be held to the same standards of responsibility (e.g., children and crocodiles). He fully understood this, as well as the ethically untenable position that one has to be a moral agent to have any rights.

I also informed him that any reasonable vegan, no matter how committed, would make allowances for someone starving to death who must eat an animal to stay alive. All of nature's obligate carnivores, such as cougars and wolves, fit into this category: they have to eat animals to remain alive. They can all claim self-defense.

"But," I told him, "imagine a hypothetical situation. Suppose someone very powerful offered me a deal. Animals — let's say mammals, birds, and reptiles, at least — that hurt people would be prosecuted as if they were adult humans. In return, animals would have the same rights as children; anyone who harmed or killed an animal could be convicted of assault or murder, respectively.

I'd take the deal. Goodbye, factory farms. Goodbye, fur. Goodbye, Ringling. Of course it would be outrageous to charge animals with crimes. But at least the coyote accused of eating livestock would finally get a fair trial. Was the defendant provoked? Did he have just cause? Even a mediocre lawyer could get the charges dropped.

We then discussed some other animal rights issues. I could tell he was sort of testing the theory. Did it have holes? Was it misguided? Was it compelling? Could one find ethical defenses for eating animals out of preference, not need? Was he just delaying the inevitable? He was doing fine exploring these areas on his own; I didn't say much.

Why am I reporting this? My friend is taking a familiar path. He has a conscience; a moral code. He has standards of decency to which he holds himself accountable, ideals to which he aspires. He eats meat. He knows quite a lot by now about factory farms and animal intelligence. How does his participation in an enterprise that indisputably causes great suffering square up with his sense of good and evil, his desire to do the right thing?

Society practically begs him to eat meat. Of 18 sandwiches on the cafeteria menu, 16 have meat. Signs up and down the road promote chicken, turkey, lamb, and beef. TV commercials every ten minutes advertise meat; sponsors use every trick in the book to make the food look tantalizing - and to take your mind off how the food was made.

And yet there are disturbing images that won't go away. Chicken houses with twenty to eighty thousand birds, none of whom ever see the light of day. Deformed broiler chickens that fall over dead because their heart can't keep pace with their massive weight. Ducks raised in crowded pens with no water in which to swim. Pigs standing in metal cages, never once turning around.

And there's me. Speaking judiciously, sparingly, but firmly on behalf of the animals. And giving him samples of tasty meat substitutes like Primal Strips jerky and Gardenburger Meatless Herb-Crusted Chicken Patties.

We'll see what happens.

The title is a paraphrase of a recent remark by an avowed meat-eater to an animal advocate.

My first thought is: is it not possible to worry about our soldiers and be a vegetarian at the same time? I do it without any problem. (I have two relatives who are active military and could be called up at any moment.)

I'm also curious, Mr. Worrier of One Thing...Suppose I revealed that I was an advocate for, say, handicapped children (please see link to Easter Seals at right). Would that elicit the same "I'd rather worry about our soldiers in Iraq" line? Probably not, because you're not complicit in the children's' predicament. However, the blame for the animals' suffering rests squarely on you. No wonder you want to change the subject.

Readers probably realize by now that these sorts of provocations are defense mechanisms; "kill the messenger" diversions. I appreciate anyone worrying about our soldiers. They're risking their lives for our freedom and they do a magnificent job, and they deserve our praise and prayers. But that should make us cherish the innocent lives of animals more, not less. Let the animals have their freedom. Don't lock them up like prisoners and slaughter them by brutal methods often favored by terrorists. At least our soldiers take great pains to avoid harming innocents.

Make peace with the animals, and you'll have less to worry about.

Otherwise intelligent people sometimes assuage their guilt for partaking in animal cruelty with this absurd excuse: "Well, the animals were raised for food (or fur); that's their purpose."

No, that's their cruel master's purpose, not their purpose.

The fox and mink and rabbits in their tiny, floorless cages who can barely move suffer terribly during every minute of their confinement. They desperately want to escape. They want nothing more than to return to normalcy, or experience it for the first time. The mink want to swim; the foxes want to run; the rabbits want to hop.

A modern egg-laying hen, the result of intensive breeding and a totally artificial environment, may be the world's saddest animal. Her life in a mechanized food factory bears almost no resemblance to anything natural. Her wings were designed to flap and lift her into flight; she has no room to spread them. Her feet were designed to stand on solid ground but her floor is a wire grating. Her beak was designed to forage and clean, but it is severed. Her motherly instincts compel her to build a nest, watch over her egg, softly cluck to her chick growing inside it, and provide comfort and encouragement to her offspring; instead her eggs roll down a conveyer belt. Her body is designed to move but she lives in a space smaller than a sheet of notebook paper. Her feathers fall off from constantly rubbing against the metal bars of the oppressively small cage. Her nose is assaulted by the strong stench of ammonia. Her energy is drained and her hope of accomplishing any of the tasks that she once was so strongly motivated to pursue withers away month after monotonous month. Every attempt to be a normal hen is in vain.

After suffering non-stop for a year, the hens' reward is a brutal and grossly undignified death. Like all creatures whose lives are subjugated for our "purposes."

We have deconstructed nature's inhabitants in an attempt to turn them into chimerical drones that have absolutely no chance of fulfilling any of their desires because every function of their body has been distorted, channeled, and manipulated to suit our "purposes." We squeeze these genetically deformed creatures into tiny unnatural habitats that turn their lives into empty, joyless Hells but maximize production of flesh, eggs, and fur. In the developed world, we have no need to eat or wear animals; it's a thoroughly non-essential indulgence. Which makes our crimes against nature all the more merciless and meaningless.

Let the animals that have suffered for our selfishness return to their purposes: walking freely, seeking companionship, raising their young, enjoying their life. Let us fulfill our purpose: to be kindhearted and benevolent stewards of Creation -- including the animals that benefit greatly from our compassion or suffer mightily from our cruel designs.

---

"A human being is a part of the whole that we call the universe, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings, as something separated from the rest—a kind of optical illusion of his consciousness. This illusion is a prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for only the few people nearest us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living beings and all of nature."

"...And what does the Lord require of you, but to do justice, to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God."

Please take two minutes and let CareerBuilder.com know that you won't be using their services as long as they support animal cruelty. Each of their Super Bowl commercials used chimpanzees that almost certainly were badly mistreated — perhaps violently so. (Read the Chimpanzee Collaboratory Report for a littany of abuses at one of the leading chimpanzee "actor" suppliers.)

Go to http://careerbuilder.com/share/AboutUs/ and scroll down to "feedback" on the right part of the page. Two minutes to send a message that abusing animals is a bad career move.

The hubris of humanity is wrapped up in that one statement.

Should we roll back all animal cruelty laws and let people starve their dogs and cats, or throw them off balconies? Should torture of animals be legal?

One of the main reason we have governments is to place limits on what people can do to living creatures that have feelings and the capacity to suffer; that feel the brunt of our actions. Protections for animals, like protections for humans, have to be encoded in law, rather than dependent on goodwill, because of people like Mr. Seale, for whom self-interest is all that matters.

Restrictions on what we can do to animals — at least the "higher" animals — are essentially animal rights from the other side. Animals deserve a basic set of rights because they have interests that are of dire importance to them, and because they can suffer. That's why plants and rocks don't need rights.

It's not hard to figure out animals' primary interests and greatest fears. They're the same as ours. Animals go to extreme lengths to avoid pain and death. They suffer severe psychological stress — and this has been measured — when they are relentlessly pursued or when they cannot escape the source of pain or terror; canned hunts (in which the hunted are fenced in) inflict both kinds of torment on their victims.

Canned hunts trespass upon animals' most fundamental needs. Hunting an animal that cannot escape, that only wants to live in peace, is unconscionably cruel, unless done out of unavoidable necessity. Totally disregarding an animal's most fervent yet modest wish — to remain alive — while terrifying him, just to get a thrill, is despicable. It is wrong by any standard, and there are not too many things that are more wrong. One definition of evil is getting pleasure from causing others to suffer. If we can't have laws against that, then we may as well throw in the towel.

Animals are not property, they are not things, they are not insentient objects. Shame on Mr. Seale — a direct descendant of King Midas — for treating them as though they were. I applaud and encourage every effort by animal rights groups and by government at the local, state, and national levels to ensure that people who should know better do not wantonly violate animals' vital interests. Otherwise, the animals are slaves.

 

"A significant number of animals remained conscious during skinning and were struggling and trying to defend themselves to the very end. Even after their skin had been stripped off, breathing, heart beat, directional body and eyelid movements were evident for five minutes."

-- Dr. Barbara Maas, CEO of Care for the Wild International, reporting on a year-long investigation of Chinese fur "farms." China is the world’s largest exporter of fur clothing.

Below is the summary of a report from The Chimpanzee Collaboratory that lists findings from an undercover investigator at "Sid Yost's Amazing Animal Actors." Abuses like the ones in the report go on all the time in the animal entertainment industry. They're well documented and there is no shortage of eyewitness accounts. "Animal Actors?" Give me a break. These animals perform because they're petrified. Their cruel masters should be the ones behind bars.

All cruelty springs from weakness. --Seneca

When a tiger attacks a trainer in retaliation for being kidnapped, confined, chained, whipped, beaten, dragged along the ground, forced to perform unnatural acts night after night, and robbed of a life, I would call it...justified.

What else can the tiger do to get out of his man-made Hell? What would you do? If you were taken from your family, isolated, locked up, repeatedly forced to put on a show and physically punished whenever you didn't comply, would you not feel rage toward your captor? Would you not take advantage of the first opportunity to escape, especially if you knew you could outpower your overseer who beat you mercilessly for years? Would you be able to keep your temper in check indefinitely?

Are we not satisfied with being awed by the tiger's God-given beauty? Must we break his spirit, subvert his desire to be free? Is our craving to see him jump through hoops so out of control that we refuse to acknowledge that we are destroying him in the process? Must we reduce such magnificence to such triteness?

Click on the picture below to see how lions and tigers are "trained" for the circus. In the film clips, the animals are hit over and over for the duration of the video. Imagine that continuing day after day. Put yourself in the tiger's position. How would you feel? Would you just take it? Would you remain passive while they punch you in the face and restrain your paws so you can't defend yourself? How long could you hold back the rage? You're a mighty tiger. You have two tools by which to break free of unending abuse: your teeth and your claws. You would use them. And you would be justified. The blame for the debacle would rest squarely on the oppressors, who work for Ringling, Carson & Barnes, Clyde Beatty-Cole Brothers — companies that profit by charging spectators to see the victims of their cruelty.

The squirrel that you kill in jest, dies in earnest.

Pro-hunting and trapping groups have co-opted the terms "environmentalism," "conservation," and "sustainability;" turning them into euphemisms for keeping a steady supply of animals to kill.

We need to redefine these terms so that they are pro-life, not pro-death; so that they reflect communion rather than exploitation.

Environmentalism is the plural of animal rights. We grant rights to an animal so that his fundamental needs are not violated. We protect the environment so that the animals' homes are not destroyed.

Conservation is the plural of compassion. We show compassion toward an individual so that she may know happiness. We practice conservation so that countless individuals may know happiness.

Sustainability should not be about mere numbers. Producing ten billion birds just to lock them in tiny cages is sustainable cruelty. Breeding tigers to hunt them down when they are fenced in is sustainable terrorism. Let us sustain peace with our fellow creatures.

Animal rights protect individuals. Environmentalism, conservation, and sustainability protect populations, which are comprised of individuals. Each of these doctrines should be motivated by a reverence for God's handiwork, and by sympathy for His sentient beings that truly feel the warmth of our kindness or the misery of our callous indifference.