Animal Writings

Hot Damn! Austin's Veg Firehouse

Excerpt:


The article points out that "the number-one cause of death for on-duty firefighters isn't burns or smoke inhalation. It's heart attacks." One of the vegan firefighters, James "J.R." Rae, saw his cholesterol drop from 344 to 199 in one month on his new diet. His colleague in the firehouse said he told Rae, "We go into a fire and you go down, I'm going to have to risk my life dragging you out. And if I go into a fire with you, I've got to trust that your ticker is good enough to get me out."

As well as your child and your dog.

I have a whole bunch of quotes from various sources -- books, magazines, newspapers, web sites, speeches -- that have been accumulating, seemingly on their own, for the last two years, and I figure now's a good time to unload a bunch of them on the blog. Sometimes with added commentary, more often without. Everything from hard-core animal rights stuff to cute sayings and anecdotes about companion animals. Factory farms, vivisection, animals in so-called "entertainment," religion, ethics, the law, practical advice -- everything. Plus this will clear some clutter off my desk.

In the 19th century in Europe, Louis Pasteur, through science, discovered the germ theory of disease. Meanwhile, the Dogon people in Africa believed the earth was made from two disks connected by a tree. But their art was magnificent and filled with spirit. Who was more knowledgeable?

We've made great strides in medical research. But are we any healthier? Our rates of heart disease, diabetes, and cancer are through the roof. We're so obese, we have to widen everything. And germ theory wasn't quite right, after all. We're constantly covered in germs but usually not sick. And a germ may make one person—or animal—sick but not the other. So who is more intelligent, more wise — we in the West, or the Dogon people of Mali?

Perhaps there are many ways to grasp the truth. And perhaps there are many truths. And perhaps those truths are linked by larger, more encompassing truths.

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Note: I'm not too sure how much stock Ted Nugent puts in Ted Nugent quotes. In an interview with "Fave Foods of the Famous," when asked what foods he has backstage, he replied, "free range roast chicken after the show is standard fare."

In the same article, he has a recipe calling for eight slices of "boiled deli ham." It's a safe bet that most people following that recipe will buy a product of intense confinement and cruelty.

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I'll have another, and somewhat amusing, Ted Nugent-related post coming up in the next few weeks.

I'll bet lots of non-animal rights advocates would save their companion animals before human strangers from a fire.

Here's the "home run" of commercials I saw repeatedly during the Major League Baseball all-star game on TV a few weeks ago: Taco Bell, KFC, Burger King, Pepcid.

And note that the antacid commercials never say: "Maybe have one less slice of pizza, and a green salad instead." They say "Pop a pill. Now you can go back to your pepperonni." If you got too well, through good eating habits, they'd lose money.

150 years ago the most highly regarded scientists in the land considered cats and dogs to be automatons, incapable of feeling pain. 25 years ago, a disturbingly high percentage of scientists still were doubtful that animals could feel pain. Only in the last 10-15 years have scientists in any number acknowledged that chickens, with far smaller and simpler brains than humans, not only have impressive cognitive skills and a sense of the past and future, but a rich emotional life. Only in the last few years could a lay person talk about farm animals' emotions in the company of a group of scientists and not be dismissed as "sentimental" or accused of "anthropomorphism." I'm not so sure scientists are the best judge of animals' sensitivities.

Science consistently underestimates the intelligence, capacity for pain, and emotions in animals. Every year the scientific community has to ratchet up its estimations of animals' capabilities in these areas. There is no reason to believe that this trend will abate any time soon. It may go on for centuries. So it is prudent to expect that even if we cannot definitively measure emotions in lobsters now, we may be able to next year or ten years from now.

Our gut-level instincts may be more reliable than scientific measurement at detecting animal emotions—especially when we befriend the animals, which may heighten our awareness of their emotional qualities. Non-scientists determined that dogs are happy when they wag their tails and sad when they mope and hang their heads thousands of years before we had the means to measure hormones, neurotransmitters, and so forth. And I'll still take a caring guardian's assessment of their companion animal's emotional state over a bank of numbers or the report of a detached scientist any day. In one species after another, our recognition of animal emotions based on observation, common sense, and kinship are eventually "validated" by scientific studies. With that in mind, lobsters certainly appear to show fear—if not intense fear—when they run from the lobster pot, and when they frantically try to escape the boiling water that cooks their flesh. It's also reasonable to presume that lobsters crowded in the grocery store tank, with no room to move and their claws rendered useless, experience a sort of sadness and despair. They're prevented from doing any of their most basic physical and social activities. Such severe deprivation causes depression in a wide range of species, and it's not difficult to imagine why.

Moreover, fear, pleasure, and other core emotions are primitive and primal, not Johnny-come-lately traits. They may be a key to survival, and extend to far more species than we currently realize. Our shared capacity to experience common emotions is likely one of our deepest and most pervasive bonds with the animal kingdom.

Basic moral principles dictate that we err on the side of caution if there is more than a remote chance that a purely discretionary activity may cause pain and suffering in others. Better to give up a luxury we can easily live without than to find out that we've been making lobsters suffer all this time.

But we should not be looking at our relationship with lobsters in terms of determining how we may be excused for exploiting them. That sort of self-centeredness crowds out compassion for others. We should be striving to be as kind and sympathetic as possible. That would inevitably lead one to not only give up lobster, but toward a vegan diet. By shifting our relationship with animals so that we see them not primarily as resources but as fellow beings for whom we have sympathy and goodwill, we will be motivated to make their lives as good as possible, rather than finagling ways to get around possible moral barriers to killing them, as if such morals were inconvenient obstacles. Giving up lobster won't feel like "giving up" anything. Our enjoyment from being peaceful toward those less powerful than us and from knowing that we're doing our best not to harm these wondrous creatures will be far more profound than the momentary self-indulgence of eating their flesh.

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Related links:

I found out about this article — Lobster tank has no place in our stores — on An Animal-Friendly Life. It's written by Liz Soares, a Maine native who realizes that lobster tanks are cruelty on display. Eric's accompanying comments are spot-on—and concise (unlike mine).

Ms. Soares admits up front that she is not quite vegetarian. In some ways I like that the messenger isn't perfect. It shows that it's not just vegans who take pity on the victims of our cruelty. Non-vegetarians are starting to take notice, too, and are questioning the morality of their food choices. This is progress.

Ms. Soares points out that showcasing the lobsters before they're killed, as sort of still-life curiosities, may only desensitize us to their pain rather than make us more sympathetic to their plight:


Sir Paul McCartney once said that if slaughterhouses had glass walls, everyone would be vegetarian. Well, maybe for three months, until they became inured to the horrors and went back to eating flesh, and the animals became invisible again, right before their eyes. Consider that many of us conduct a heinous form of animal slaughter—boiling lobsters—right in our kitchens; and while the lobsters are suffering a torturous death, we're breaking out the wine. Or maybe we commission a grocery store employee to boil the lobsters, after picking out the victims and looking them in the eye. Not one thought is given to the life the lobster left in the sea; not one second is spent considering what it's like to have the lid close on you as the boiling water starts to soften your flesh and re-color your skin. Well, maybe one second— a brief wince, quickly put out of mind.

What's needed is not glass walls, or "knowing our food" before we kill it, or decentralizing slaughter, or ritualizing it, or giving it a fake aura of respectability by couching it in tradition or heritage or religious ceremony. What's needed is to end it. To make it taboo and despised. To remove it from society. To become un-used to it. To make it a distant, dark memory. To relegate it to obscurity.


I could not have said it better.

Typically, when using a purely "science-based" approach to determining animals' physical and emotional response to our exploitation of them, we see what we want to see, and avert our eyes from—or deny, or rationalize—things we'd don't want to see—or that are incriminating. When we know the science is insufficient and incomplete, and use that as rationalization for avoidable cruelty, that's a cop-out. In the Boiling Point article, the author points to some evidence that lobsters' sense of smell is desensitized when crowded next to other lobsters, and that in the highly confined and unnatural environment of the tank, the lobsters don't fight with each other because they "settle down" in the cold water. He concludes that the situation is thus not so bad. This is the contorted reasoning of someone seeking to justify unnecessary cruelty. "They don't mind" is a classic self-deception used by perpetrators of violence and domination. Many slaveowners claimed that their slaves were "happy;" they had their self-serving rationales, too. Today most slaves are animals.

If we were stuck against our wills in the middle of intense smells, our noses would probably shut down, too. The fact that our organs, like those of the lobsters, employ coping mechanisms when confronted with harsh environments over which we have no control is a sign of trauma, not relaxation. Maybe the lobsters in the tank don't fight because they are weak from no food. Maybe they don't fight because their claws are tied together with thick rubber bands. Maybe since their habitat has been reduced to a tiny barren cage, their spirit is broken. Maybe they realize with so little room to maneuver, with nothing to fight over anyway, it's just not worth it. Maybe their enemy at that point is not each other.

I'm reminded of a picture I saw in a United Poultry Concerns newsletter: two battery-caged hens, de-beaked, in the dark, without food or water, abandoned when the egg operation shut down. In these wretched, hopeless conditions, the two hens rested against one another, one hen with her wing around the other.

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While you're at An Animal-Friendly Life, I highly recommend this post. And this one. And this one, just added.

Below is my letter to the editor of Boston magazine in response to their article Boiling Point.

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Preview for next post (a more generic response to the article):

Thoughts while mowing the lawn...

We don't have a gentle, compassionate, humble interpretation of "dominion." We rule with an iron fist.

We write laws to protect cruelty. We increasingly treat the earth and all the creatures in it as one big resource to use however we want.

We have a tendency to call those not like us "stupid." We are always finding some basis on which to selfishly dominate others. Then we call ourselves "morally superior." Anyone see the inherent contradiction?

We called blacks, Indians, women, and animals "irrational" (and worse). Wrong on all counts. We prop ourselves up by putting others down. We have been so persistent and obstinate in those wrongheaded, demeaning views that it has often required long, violent struggles to get us to relent. That's irrational.

Our predilection to call those whom we do not understand, or do not want to understand, or want to control, "stupid," is, among other things...stupid. It hinders compassion. It impedes our ability to see the full wonder, splendor, and capabilities of those with whom we share the earth. It destroys bonds. It's conceited.

When I hear, in these exact words, or in so many words, "stupid animal" or "it's just a stupid..." it makes me shake my head; makes me a little angry. Here's why:

Even if true...Does being stupid relegate one to servant status? To slave status? To rightless status? Throughout most of our Western history we have been callous and cruel to the mentally and physically impaired within our own species. We have also typically called those different from us — again, within our same species — "stupid," and used that as an excuse to mistreat, oppress, or enslave them. That selfish and discompassionate mindset still pervades our relationship with animals.

How are we judging "stupid"? Gorillas' use of face language? Whales' memorization of 30-minute songs? Birds meeting in the same exact spot each year at the same time with no map? Sheep's ability to recognize 50 distinct sheep months later? Cats in hospices knowing before the nurses and doctors that a patient is about to die — and keeping a purring vigil beside them until they go? What about other skills...Is our divorce rate as low as that of geese? Are our leaders as benevolent and responsible and dedicated as a rooster? Would we starve ourselves to avoid harming a brethren, as both monkeys and rats do in tests? Or would we shock a stranger and cause him to recoil in pain because a scientist told us to — as we have done in tests? Would we learn to trust others as quickly as formerly abused farm animals (beaten, kicked, starved, literally tied in knots) when they are rescued and brought to farm sanctuaries?

Not that every animal is an angel, but objectively speaking when it comes to "getting along" skills we have nothing to crow about. Skeptical? Drive the DC Beltway during rush hour.

If a creature needs our help and we can help her, her presumed stupidity should be immaterial. Our compassion toward other creatures should not be based on their SAT scores. In fact, I have pity on those who may not know something that could help them. The butterfly didn't know enough to get out of the way of the lawnmower. I didn't hold that against her. I gently lifted her out of the way and continued. (If we're to be morally superior we can best do that by a) being of service, b) not being concerned with who's morally superior.)

But really how much better am I at analytical reasoning and "higher-level" skills than she is? I know the Pythagorean Theorem and she doesn't. I can play the guitar and she can't. From an anthropocentric, sun-revolves-around-the-earth standpoint, I'm a genius. But from the viewpoint of an omniscient, omnipotent being, the difference in knowledge and intelligence between the butterfly and me is a rounding error.

Maybe if we can survive another 70 million years — as butterflies have done — and manage not to blow up, burn up, or use up the earth, we can bring up the subject of superiority with the rather gentle and peaceful butterflies again.

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Related links:

Beauty With Brains


Excerpts:


Butterfly Gardening

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(Addendum: One of my projects -- on which I'm behind as usual -- is to gradually replace most of the lawn with native, lower maintenance flowers, ground covers, shrubs, and, in summer, annuals. And give the lawnmower a rest. And watch more butterflies instead.)

"To my mind the life of a lamb is no less precious than that of a human being. I should be unwilling to take the life of a lamb for the sake of the human body. I hold that, the more helpless a creature, the more entitled it is to the protection by man from the cruelty of man."

  -- Mahatma Gandhi

A white butterfly
Navigates a busy road
Between SUVs

From a 2005 SHARK newsletter:


This is the progeny of rodeo. This is what rodeo produces when adults show that it is fun to abuse baby animals. This is why rodeo must be stopped.

Here's one thing you can do right now. SHARK is one of the most efficient and effective animal protection groups you'll find. It's almost all volunteer. Not a cent is wasted. You can donate from any page on their web site.

Be bold and correct friends, family members, co-workers, anyone who thinks rodeo is glamorous or a "sport." It's none of those things. If anyone mentions tradition, point out that it's an ugly and cruel tradition that we should be ashamed of and condemn, and outlaw—immediately and forever. Good riddance. Eric in his comment had the perfect and concise summation of rodeo: it's barbaric.

Labels: animal cruelty, rodeo

From SHARK (SHowing Animals Respect and Kindness)

How Manly Is Rodeo Anyway?

This op-ed piece about the Cloverdale Rodeo, by Mike Rogozinski in the Coquitlam (British Columbia) Now starts off: "Yeehaw, it's time to beat up some animals!" Right on the money.

It's such a good piece, I have to excerpt a lot of it:

How rodeo fans and participants defend themselves. They're as elegant, honest, and accurate in their writing as they are in their so-called "sport." You really have to read these. The defenses of rodeo are not only self-incriminating but ridiculous.

From an editorial by Debra Probert of the Vancouver Humane Society in the Vancouver Sun, urging the city council to ban rodeos in the city:

Electric Horsemen

OC Weekly (Orange County, California), February 13, 2003

Excerpts:


In the article, Rosser says "If we injure an animal, who’s the loser? We are. Our veterinary bills are awfully high, as high as a regular doctor. We need to take care of these animals, not torture them."

Wrong. Injured and killed animals are part of the "cost of doing business" in rodeo. Calves don't naturally bolt at top speed — on command, no less. "Bucking" broncos are tame when a bucking strap isn't squeezing their sensitive flanks. Visit a farm sanctuary to see these animals' true behaviors. Rosser's comment is self-serving nonsense; the rodeo is built on abusing animals, to get them to buck and writhe and flail, and bolt in pain and terror, to put on a show, to provide "entertainment." Economically speaking, to lose animals now and then to death is a small cost compared to the industry-demolishing amount of revenue that would be lost if the animals were not abused, if they were left alone to act according to their natural preferences. (As reported in a previous post, when Pittsburgh outlawed the bucking strap, the bronco riding event had to be discontinued.) Besides, all it takes is one look at a calf slamming head-first into the ground a high speed to see that Rosser's claim is ludicrous. Harming animals is built into rodeo.

From a 2003 SHARK newsletter:

From SHARK (SHowing Animals Respect and Kindness)


There are countless stories like this. The rodeo habitually lies about the suffering it causes.

From Mercy for Animals:

Labels: rodeo

So the rodeo animals are abused until they're killed.

You have to see this to believe it, to grasp its meanness and brutality.

(Note: the videos may take up to a minute to download.)

www.sharkonline.org/rodeocrueltywildhorserace04.mov

Labels: animal cruelty, rodeo

Labels: animal cruelty, rodeo

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Related Links:

The videos and descriptions below are from SHARK.


Note: on some computers, the movies may take a little while to load.