The following is the original version of the speech I gave today at Toastmasters (I had to cut it down a little for time):
THE LANGUAGE OF LIBERATION
Let us take a few minutes to examine language or, more specifically, the words we use every day. We use so many of them, so often without even thinking, that we forget: Words are powerful.
Well-chosen words hold the secret to liberating animals, those who cannot speak for themselves. How? Because emancipation begins in the mind. We can physically rescue as many individual nonhuman animals as we want, but the only way to truly achieve lasting liberation for all nonhuman beings is to first alter the mindset, or attitudes, of a meaningful percentage of those responsible for their exploitation. But how best to alter attitudes? By reshaping the way humans perceive nonhumans. And how do we alter perception? Language. Words.
What I'm talking about is shifting the dominant paradigm, our society's current framework for understanding the world around us. Humans develop their attitudes toward the world through the frameworks they've been taught, words and phrases that have molded their minds from a very early age to see things in a certain way, a paradigm validated solely because it has been successfully indoctrinated in such a large percentage of the population for so long.
In order bring about a more egalitarian paradigm, it is crucial that we reframe society's perceptions of nonhuman beings by challenging speciesist language in our daily lives, that is, language that fails to accord equal consideration and respect to other species. In our advocacy, it is essential for us to carefully choose words that paint a vivid impression of nonhuman animals as morally relevant, morally meaningful beings. As the use of our non-speciesist language takes root, it will expose the injustice of speciesism, and rational humans will eventually come to recognize the inherent cruelty of using other beings as resources for their own purposes.
So where do we begin? Let's focus on three scenarios in which the choice of words may influence the public's perception of our fellow beings.
The other day I was watching a CNN piece on Oscar, a cat that seems to know when terminal patients at a nursing home are going to die. During an interview, a psychologist representing the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals repeatedly referred to Oscar as "it," even though CNN's reporter had already referred to the empathic kitty as "he." Let's deconstruct this: A person brought in to represent animals knew Oscar's gender and called him "it," implicitly approving and encouraging the objectification of sentient beings.
Granted, ASPCA reps are far from animal rights activists, but surely they know that nonhuman animals are not inanimate objects. This particular rep lost an opportunity to reach hundreds of thousands--even millions--of engaged, interested television viewers with a powerful message that other animals matter, too. Moral of the story: even if you don't know the gender of another species, never refer to him or her as "it." Get people used to thinking of nonhuman beings in terms of identities, personalities… individuality.
Here's another recent scenario. At the national animal rights conference a couple of weekends ago, I heard several activists refer to chickens as "broiler hens" and cows as "livestock." Why do we let the dominant paradigm influence how we describe or advocate for nonhuman animals? Haven't we shattered that way of looking at the world for ourselves? Then why should we lend creedence to the terms "livestock" and "broiler," among others? When you use speciesist vocabulary as an advocate for nonhuman animals, you are implicitly endorsing its use by others, as well as reinforcing its validity.
Why not describe the reality behind these terms instead? Livestock and broilers are, more descriptively, cows and chickens bred and slaughtered for their flesh. If we hold up this reality in place of the usual euphemisms, we can invalidate those speciesist terms and educate the public at the same time, eventually influencing society as a whole to reject speciesism, the same way activists before us sought and continue to seek to eliminate racism and sexism. So don't be lazy--Wipe speciesist vocabulary from your speech.
My third example deals with animal disparagement: "Ugly" bugs, "dumb" cows or "stupid" chickens. How often have you heard the interests of nonhumans dismissed because they are not as attractive or intelligent as humans, as if such criteria are somehow a moral basis for dismissing the interests of any being? Do we dismiss the interests of a mentally incapacitated or conventionally ugly human? Of course not, but rarely is language like this challenged when it comes to nonhumans. And, along these lines, when animal advocates call for primate rights ahead of other animals, they further reinforce the notion that animal rights ought to be granted based on how human a given nonhuman animal is fortunate to be. We, as advocates for all animals, must shatter this anthropocentric view of the world.
Defining the value of other beings based on how much like us they are is self-serving and morally repugnant when, in fact, our morally relevant interests are the same. Despite our differences in the areas of intelligence, appearance, and other morally irrelevant traits, we do share morally significant interests in avoiding pain, seeking pleasure, and living in sync with our animal natures. By denying these interests and using nonhuman animals as resources--by evaluating species on such an arbitrary basis as human-like intelligence--we reveal our own stupidity.
Can we breathe underwater, like fish, or take flight like the hummingbird? Do we see half as well at night as the common feline? What I wouldn't give to be able to soar through sky, feel the wind in my hair, and to coast along on a current of air. But, alas, I am merely human.
While most animals may not have the intelligence that serves our ecological niche, assuming for a moment that even humans do--and there is plenty of evidence to the contrary--other animals certainly have an intelligence or other abilities that serve their ecological niche, and this is what matters. We must shatter this anthropocentric way of looking at the world. By looking at nonhuman animals and the environment as resources for us--by evaluating species on such an arbitrary basis as human-like intelligence--we reveal our own stupidity.
Quite simply, animals' rights are not necessitated by their worth to us. Such "rights" would only be a reflection of our own vanities. True rights for animals--all animals--are rooted in their interests, such as the enjoyment of life and liberty. These are rights that we take for granted, but which are denied other animals every single day, simply because we've been taught that they are "dumb" or "ugly". But isn't that dumb? Isn't that ugly?
Ultimately, it's our language, and it's flexible. It can be transformed. We can use this fact to our advantage as advocates for nonhuman animals within the human community. If, within our own spheres of influence--family, friends, the opinion pages--we implement the lessons of the three examples I've given, we can veganically prepare the soil, society, to receive the seeds of animal liberation.
As people adopt language that recognizes nonhuman beings as more than mere objects--and certainly not as beings below us--we will see the ground grow ever more fertile, allowing animal rights to flower into a world more favorably disposed to the interests of all beings. And there we'll find liberation.
A New York family with two foster chicken companions is spotlighted in the Home & Gardens section of The New York Times, in All Cooped Up in a Manhattan Co-op.
While it appears that the profiled chickens came from a couple that uses the eggs of their birds, the reason this article ended up at AAFL and in The New York times is the author's marvelling over how chickens defy our rather limited knowledge of their behavior and personalities:
As soon as Isabella came home from school and opened their cage, he [Chirp, actually a she, as they later discovered] would politely stand aside to let Cheep emerge. If she wandered out of his sight, he would squawk and scurry off to find her. Then Cheep would reappear with Chirp at her heels, jump up on Isabella’s arm and hold still to be scratched under the chin.
Chirp would observe these proceedings with a cocked head and a quizzical stare, but when Isabella reached down to give him equal time, he would step back — too shy, or too proud, to admit he too wanted to be touched — and make her chase him.
Whoever coined the phrase “dumb cluck” never met our chickens. All I had to do was open the refrigerator door and both would come running.
Not news to me or my constant readers, but I'm sure many of you will find the piece useful in disabusing your friends and families of their stereotypes about birds. As usual, the Times requires a free subscription, but you can use bugmenot, if you prefer.
Please send the editor your letters in support of chickens, the most abused and consumed animal in America. This is a good time to remind readers of the arbitrary distinction between animals kept as pets and those turned into food, and to recommend a vegan diet as a way to eliminate this moral schizophrenia from their diets. Don't forget to include your full name, city, state and phone number in order to increase your chance of being published, and remember that short and pithy letters receive stronger consideration due to space constraints.
I don't really like reporting favorably on research involving animals, but we can't just ignore the knowledge gained from behavioral tests. As an animal-friendly person, I'm also inclined to be more interested in information that may one day help us decide to stop breeding and keeping animals captive for research altogether.
This story gets into artificial intelligence (AI), which is a bit of a distraction for my purposes (though certainly fascinating), but the first page focuses on a behavioral test purportedly demonstrating that rats--like "higher mammals" such as rhesus monkeys and dolphins--are capable of reflecting on their internal mental states or, in other words, they are capable of knowing "when they don't know."
For a society in which most people think of the average animal as dumb as a rock, such insights could rock some ethical foundations and bolster arguments for animal rights. Still, we'll have to get past some rather insipid thinking, like the head-shaking ending of this article. Like most Newsweek stories that would seem to hold positive news for animals, it ends on a disappointing note:
As self-awareness dawns on machines and as scientists find it in animals, it may be that vegetative patients are not the only ones whose glimmers of consciousness can be dismissed as nothing special.
In other words, Newsweek science writer Sharon Begley runs the opposite direction with this information. It's ludicrous to me that she could interpret these results as meaningless, or nothing special, though I suspect this is why AI was brought into the discussion in the first place.
If a program can be aware of its own "thoughts" and we laugh at the notion of giving software rights, surely it's laughable to give animals rights on this basis, too, at least according to Begley. But it's a total straw man argument, as non-human animals have an inner life well beyond mere programming logic and, what's more, they have feelings. It is the sum total of their self awareness that impels us to recognize the rights of animals to be treated as individuals and to not treat them as things.
Articles such as this one seem strangely to be out to actually block progress toward this acceptance under the guise of detached scientific thinking. To me, it's just incomprehensible, inhumane, and inhuman to dismiss the consciousness of non-human beings as "nothing special."
When reading animal-related stories at The New York Times, I'm finding that 99% of all Dining & Wine articles raise my blood pressure. This one aggravates me more than most, since the headline says that it's possible to eat veal without feeling guilty.
I'm sorry, but the newfound availability of flesh sold from calves who actually got to spend a short span of time with their mothers and were possibly even allowed to graze on pasture (until their lives were cut brutally short), doesn't mean it's suddenly humane to kill animals just because some people like the way they taste. As long as animal-free alternatives abound--and I assure you that, in New York City, they do--killing animals for food is inhumane.
A story from the Science section offers a more animal-friendly view. Almost Human, and Sometimes Smarter looks at the "socially transmitted adjustable behavior" seen in chimpanzees that is a hallmark of culture. Unsurprisingly, the writer--and many scientists--base much of their fascination on how similar chimpanzees are to people in terms of their intelligence, pointing out that chimpanzees excel in certain mental tasks where humans have greater difficulty, using the example of a short-term memory test. These researchers seem more interested in discovering "insights into the abilities of early human ancestors." Fortunately, primatologists don't have their heads quite so far up their asses, noting that "these are sentient beings and the closest living relatives of humans, and their survival is threatened."
Is this the best we can offer other species with whom we share the world (regardless of how closely related to us they are)? The threat of extinction in the wild or a life of providing insights in a lab? What insights have we really gained, if this is how we behave toward non-human animals?
Counterpunch has published a piece by author Jason Hribal (Cry of Nature: An Appeal to Mercy and to Justice on Behalf of the Persecuted Animals) that highlights the invaluable animal liberations efforts of... the animals themselves. It's a good, lengthy read, so I won't take up any more of your time yammering on about it. Just go read it:
Whenever I do these round-ups, I almost feel like I should just be podcasting again. Then I remember how long it takes to record, output, compress and upload the podcast, all in addition to writing up show notes. I could probably write full blog entries for each of these before I would have time to do all that.
So, in the interests of getting these links out while they're still relatively fresh, here goes another batch of news updates. I really do want to comment on them, as there is much to say. To that end, I have included very brief notes after each link, along with a sample quote from each article, but I don't have the time (a real problem lately) to dissect any of these thoroughly. I hope that my faithful readers will easily see the many issues with some of these pieces, including the first headline:
Retailers clearly see advantages in appealing to the demographic of kinder and gentler meat-eaters, according to Ron Paul, president of Technomic, a Chicago-based research and consulting firm for food suppliers. “There is a growing realization that the humane movement is a long-term movement,” he said. “It’s not going to go away.”
NOTE - Fair warning: The above quote is one of the least aggravating to be found in the article.Letters to the editor
Dairy, meat and poultry producers are urged to form a food industry "force" before activists distort even more benefits of modern production practices.
NOTE - I'm always interested to read industry newsletters and websites. It's clear from this and other recent industry reading that large-scale animal exploiters are reeling from the heightened scrutiny over their practices these past few years--including the announcements of this past week or so--putting them on the defense. It appears there is a concerted effort by some in the world of animal exploitation to stir up well-financed and unified campaigns to subvert activist campaigns with more misleading feel-good imagery. "Happy cows," anyone?
A few outlying countries continue commercial or dubiously scientific whale hunts, notably Japan, which clings to its whaling ways long past the expiration of any defensible reasons for doing so.
NOTE - The above quote is the most "vocal" criticism voiced in this New York Times editorial, which is the official (and in this case, seemingly rather guarded) opinion of the paper. I had noted not long ago that it seemed NYT was providing fairly animal-friendly coverage these days, but that it was trying to "balance" that out more lately, which the previously-linked "bacon" article would seem to corroborate.Letters to the editor
'It's untenable to talk of dividing humans and humanoid apes because there are no clear-cut criteria - neither biological, nor mental, nor social.'
NOTE - It seems just a little strange to me to give a chimp human rights, when what we ought to be doing is securing fundamental animal rights for all species, but I will be very curious indeed to see the outcome of this case. I will certainly be pleased to see rights recognized for at least one species, even as I rue the speciesist mentality that bars other animals from basic rights consideration.
Animal tests at least give a broad sense of the effects of a drug. In one famous early example, a pancreatic extract successfully tested in diabetic dogs in 1921 helped to illuminate how insulin would help people with the disease. And many experimental medications are eliminated after very serious side effects show up.
Many times, however, subtle results in animals are unclear and scientists just don't know what to make of them. In the case of the new Novartis drug Galvus, James Shannon, the company's global head of pharmaceutical development, told investors that Novartis researchers "do not understand -- do not know -- the mechanism of the skin findings" in monkeys. They do know that "humans appear to react to Galvus in a very different way."
NOTE - Yup, you read that right. This was published in The Wall Street Journal. Of course, the focus here isn't at all the rights of animals not to be treated as non-consenting experimental subjects. But, while the article falls far, far short of condemning all animal testing--in fact it ultimately concludes that we need to develop better translations (models?) to make animal research more effective--it does add a rather conservative voice to the scientifically-grounded criticisms of animal experimentation.
[Hooved Animal Humane Society] Executive Director Barbara Geittmann, who said she was disappointed Cavel sent the 200 horses back to suppliers, cheered that so many in the horse community had volunteered to help.
"I'm glad I don't have a face for those [horses] because that would make it harder for me, it would make them individuals," Geittmann said. "But it doesn't stop us. It makes us want to try harder."
NOTE - Focuses on the fall-out from the federal decision to uphold a total ban on horse slaughter in the U.S., including a note that some horses would likely be shipped to Canada for slaughter (until a federal ban on transporting horses for slaughter is passed). I can't help but remark that this would be a non-issue if horses weren't bred or "broken" for human purposes in the first place.
I always find it amusing when people discover the individuality of animals. Many of us who have lived with domesticated companion animals discovered this long ago. Evolutionarily speaking, it stands to reason that animals would have an individual identity, but it's also unsurprising that many distinctive traits are invisible to the human eye most of the time. I think this is due to not knowing what to look for (after all, they're not human), as well as a habit of regarding animals in circumstances that do not allow them to develop personalities that we are better able to recognize, i.e., animals in the wild, or caged animals. In other words, once they start interacting with us, it's easier to spot the unique characteristics of a given animal.
It's interesting for instance to note the differences between a house cat and a feral cat. A feral cat tends to be a prototypical cat: stealthy, skittish and swift, a quiet stalker. A domesticated cat will occasionally exhibit these traits, often in play with other cats. Adult house cats tend to exhibit an amount of play generally seen only in feral kittens, and they are much more talkative than other cats, a learned behavior in response to living among humans.
Much like the animals in Jon Katz's story, they simply do not have the pressures of nature forcing their evolutionarily-designed traits to express themselves so fully, and so they have a protected opportunity to express themselves more individually, just as we humans do. I can only imagine how we would behave if we didn't have all the trappings of civilization to remove these natural pressures from our own daily lives.
Many of our notions of fairness and how to treat one another stem from our continual growth as a society, and our evolving views as to what constitutes civilized behavior, but this can only happen within the construct of a civilized society. One only has to look at our own history to see the progress we've made in this regard. Hopefully we can be humble enough to realize there is still much further we can go, as in our view of non-human animals.
So much of our current approach to non-human animals is to consider them on a species level, when in fact animals are individuals, too. While all animals exhibit certain traits shared by other members of their species, humans included, when given the opportunity to do more than sleep, find food, procreate, and otherwise simply survive, many of them will express distinct personalities that even we humans can identify. Once our civilization tunes into this reality, we can make a better case for animal rights, because rights are directly related to personhood.
When you see an animal as an individual, you are able to recognize the 'personhood' of that animal. There is much debate over this notion of personhood in animals, but there is also strong support for it. For instance, Wikipedia starts out its definition of "person" with "A person is an entity having a distinct identity with certain distinguishable and persistent characteristics."
Of course, reading further into the Wikipedia entry, you will find the other (perhaps self-serving) criteria for personhood that have been suggested as the meaning has shifted with time and social context. Some of those criteria are what make this issue so contentious, like "a sense of self that persists through time." But, sticking to the core definition of a person, Jon Katz's Henrietta, and pretty much any companion animal any of us has ever gotten to know has "a distinct identity with certain distinguishable and persistent characteristics."
Regardless of whether non-human animals are as sophisticated in their personhood as, say, cetaceans (dolphins and killer whales) and primates like the great apes, or even elephants, it would should be apparent to a civilized society that, at a fundamental level, any autonomous being is an individual worthy of rights that will protect that being's interests, regardless of species.
It's time for humankind to wake up and realize that our fellow creatures are more than mere flesh machines. They are individuals that merit our respect, concern, and rights to protect them from being treated as objects.
With all that in mind, check out the story and laugh to yourself as this guy waxes on in amazement over a hen that rules the roost.
This popular front page article from the L.A. Times raises so many interesting issues, I could deconstruct it for a week. But my time is limited, so I will briefly make two points that leaped directly to mind when I saw it:
1) First and foremost, it's not enough that certain human cultures produce millions of psychologically damaged people; these cultures have also created a class of non-humans so dependent on humans that they too develop psychological problems, to say nothing of the neuroses we instigate by caging animals in zoos, which are also examined by the article. Then we rely on our own twisted remedies (yay, more money for drug companies!) to hide the symptoms of these ills, rather than curing the illness that we ourselves perpetrate (that is, bringing forth animals into a world in which they are not psychologically adapted to thrive).
2) The diagnoses of these psychological disorders, and the efficacy of these drugs should remove any lingering doubt that animals have complex psyches, though it's just so sad, sorry, and pathetic... I have an Animal Farm-like image of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest in my mind when I consider this state of affairs.
Allow me to elaborate on the roots of this problem.
When I first went vegan, I barely appreciated the implications of that decision. There was sort of a ripple effect from that first connection, when I realized emotionally and logically that the animals I ate and wore were not meaningfully different from the animals I considered family. Ironically, this connection led ultimately to the understanding that we should not be breeding animals or taking them from the wild and domesticating them for any purpose, leading to no more companion animals...
Some people consider companion animal ownership to be a rather benign form of animal exploitation, if not downright symbiotic, but this forgets the point that many animals are bred for our use, and have no say in the matter. Those of us who rescue animals from certain death to care for and bond with them can make a fairer case for symbiosis, but try selling this notion to the animals who endure puppy mill conditions and inbreeding in order to satisfy the commercial marketplace, only to be dumped and possibly put to death when the novelty wears off. Indeed, were there no puppy mills, there would be far fewer animals to rescue in the first place.
Over-crowded animal shelters kill countless unwanted companion animals every year, and this shameful practice would end rather quickly if pet breeding were banned altogether. Yet this proposal shocks many people. As someone whose introduction to animal rights was facilitated by emotional relationships with animal companions, I can understand the resistance to such an idea. But, as the linked article suggests, our affection for companion animals can actually be harmful to them, and they would be better off not being bred for our purposes in the first place. If we truly care about them, we will do what's best for them and end commercial breeding altogether.
I'm assuming this is a coincidence, but law professor and animal rights philosopher Gary L. Francione today posted a blog entry that explicates more fully this logical extension of animal rights theory, basically arguing that ending the breeding and ownership of animals for food, clothing and entertainment also necessitates the end of breeding and owning animals for companionship. To paraphrase Francione, it makes no sense for us to create these problems by bringing domesticated non-humans into existence in the first place.
In other words, if we didn't breed and keep animals, they wouldn't be experiencing these types of emotional problems. Obviously rescued animals will need our assistance for some time to come even after breeding is ended, and it would be nice if they could be kept in circumstances better-suited to their natural behaviors. But, until we can let go of our desire to keep the cute little creatures around for our amusement and companionship, we'll be doing more harm than good.
Choice quote from Fido's little helper:
"What have we done to our animals? In the last 30 years, we've kept them inside, we've made multiple-cat households. A border collie, 20 years ago, was living on a ranch in Colorado, and now he's living in downtown San Francisco. So he can't do his typical behavior."
...as if more evidence were needed at this point. (And let's not go into how they got this information to begin with today, shall we?)
The violent, unnecessary killing of any animal is barbaric. The more we learn about whales, the more it becomes apparent that whaling itself is particularly egregious, owing to what appears to be a heightened sense of self-awareness seen only in big-brained mammals like cetaceans and great apes (perhaps in some elephants, too?).
Some weeks the animal stories seem to tumble forth with far greater frequency...
I've missed posting on some, due to commitments with The Artivist Film Festival, but with so many articles in major news media these past few days you'll not want for reading material and letters to write after this post.
I'm particularly fond of Colleen Patrick-Goudreau's October 31st piece at Common Dreams, From Cradle to Grave, in which she targets the considerations often missed by those busy patting themselves on the back for providing or eating "humane meat": That is, even organic, grass fed, "free range" animals live truncated lives, at the end of which they are trucked many miles to USDA-licensed slaughterhouses, where their demise is no better than that of any of the machine-reared beings with whom they share an identical fate.
With "compassionate carnivores" positioned as the next big market after organics, these points need to be raised ubiquitously, especially in response to compassionate people who've allowed mere window dressing to cloud their view of the issue.
Hat tip to reader for Christopher Jones for making sure we saw this.
In response to the numerous stories referred to YESTERDAY regarding the self-awareness studies on elephants at the Bronx Zoo, the editors of The New York Times have published a surprising editorial called Horton Sees an Image.
While much of the buzz surrounding these tests focused on how elephants joined the ranks of the self-aware, lifting them "above" most other animals, the editors of The New York Times argue
...what they really do is raise questions about the value we attribute to consciousness and our inevitably human definition of it. It is always us setting the rules.
How many tests set by elephants could we pass?
My jaw just about dropped to the floor when I read that. This sounds like something I'd hear when talking to one of my animal advocate friends, not the editorial board of The New York Times. Could it be that an editorial like this might persuade some people to look at animals differently?
There's no way to be sure, but the very existence of this editorial gives me hope. With an ending like this, how can it not?:
There is every reason to value other life-forms as much for their difference from us as for their similarity, and to act accordingly. That may be the only intelligence test worthy of the name.
They don't tell anyone what acting accordingly means, but the implication is that our treatment of animals is a sort of intelligence test, and one would imagine that the better we treat them, the better it reflects on us, and that's a sentiment I'm happy to share.
Please, please, please, please take a moment to write a letter to the editors of The New York Times, thanking them for this insightful, compassionate editorial, and ask them for more of the same going forward. Remember to keep your praise below 250 words, and to include your full name, contact number, city and state in order to be considered for publication.
Bob Barker, friend to Los Angeles Zoos' imprisoned elephants (and all animals), announced that he is finally retiring from the long-running game show The Price is Right, and plans to spend his time focusing on animal rights causes. Go, Bob!!!
Sticking with pachyderms for the moment, Deb posted a comment at an earlier post that I wanted to bring to your attention.
She tells us that In Defense of Animals is campaigning to have animal-friendly people sign a petition and send their comments to the USDA. Deadline is December 11, and you can find more information on how to help elephants at HelpElephants.com. Deb also points out that we can submit comments to USA Today here. December 11th sounds like a long time from now, but the weeks go by fast, so please start working on your letter today.
On to Japan, I've postednumeroustimes about the annual dolphin slaughter in Taiji. Activists around the world have been working hard to force the issue into the limelight, where Japanese authorities least want to see it.
Yesterday, The Japan Times covered the story on the front page in an article by Genesis Award-winning writer Boyd Harnell, titled Dolphin kill dogged by mercury, activists.
As he did in his previous piece on the subject, Harnell looks unflinchingly at the horror of the annual dolphin slaughter in Taiji, but you must see this slaughter for yourselves to truly comprehend it:
Please write a letter to the editors of The Japan Times to support them for putting this issue on the front page, and to express your dismay/outrage/disgust at this cruel, barbaric slaughter, during which randomly-stabbed dolphins have been seen dying an excruciating, prolonged death.
Remember also that there's more you can do. If you care about animals, please never give your money to a business that exploits marine mammals for entertainment, and do your best to dissuade friends and family from doing so, either. Many marine animals currently captive around the United States were taken from the wild, which is where they really belong. Regrettably, animals sold live for entertainment are worth around $20,000, whereas dead dolphins are only worth about $600 each, which means that marine park demand is a major factor in the annual drive fisheries in Taiji, so boycotts could have a meaningful on this practice.
Speaking of slaughter, Willie Nelson -- "Special to CNN," heh-heh -- followed up an open letter to congress with a commentary encouraging Americans to contact their senators and ask them to support the American Horse Slaughter Prevention Act, and to consider adopting rescued horses.
Foie gras continues to receive frequent coverage, including this lengthy piece in the Milford Daily News that gives some time to PETA's opposition, but lends most of its column inches to the American Veterinary Medical Association and chefs who serve foie gras, both of whom come out strongly in favor of allowing ducks to be force fed, slaughtered, and cut up for their livers, "an ingredient people enjoy."
Not this person.
Finally, The Scotsman published a story taking officials to task for a 4.5 increase in animal testing over the last year, despite government assurances that the "controversial practice" would be reduced:
The figures also reveal that Scotland is carrying out a disproportionate amount of animal testing in the UK, with tests north of the border making up 14.1 per cent of the UK's 2.91 million procedures even though Scots make up only around 8 per cent of the total population.
And testing is rising in Scotland much more quickly than in the rest of the UK. Total British animal testing in 2005 was 2.91 million, up from 2.8 million the year before, an annual rise of only 1.4 per cent.
Lest people assume these animals are all "unimportant" species like rats, the article puts things into perspective:
Among the animals used in the research in Scotland were: 910 monkeys, 1,308 dogs, 5,294 sheep, 3,016 rabbits, 941 pigs, 69 horses. 267,960 mice, 49,284 rats, 2,944 guinea pigs and four cats. Tests were also conducted on 7,854 birds, 238 amphibians and 56,993 fish.
Sure the vast majority are rodents, but what makes them so undeserving of our compassion, and what about the dogs, cats, monkeys, horses and pigs, among others? Everyone needs to know what is happening to all these innocent animals caged to satisfy human curiosity in a speculative quest for financial gain... Oh, yeah, and tantalizing possibility that such research could somehow provide clues for curing life-threatening diseases (forgetting for a moment all the testing done on drugs for sex enhancers, cosmetics, and other vanities). Bear in mind that 11,048 of these tests in Scotland involved animals with a harmful genetic defect, and think about whether that's something an animal-friendly person would ever find acceptable.
The article provides a number of other details, including specifics as to why certain animals are used in research, as well as comments from a researcher and an activist that don't shed much new light on the subject. That said, the article certainly merits your attention, so I hope you'll check it out. It's important for animal lovers to learn as much as they can about animal experimentation, because it's ignorance that allows it to continue and even grow like this.
This Op-Ed complains about a recent piece that I objected to as well, in which a South African scientist named Paul Manger said that dolphins’ relatively large brains are due simply to preponderance of fatty glial cells, which supposedly indicated that the intelligence of dolphins was overrated. This flew in the face of all we know about dolphins, and Frans de Waal does a great job of countering that view:
If we skip the technicalities — such as that glial cells are not simply insulation, that they add connectivity to the brain, and that humans, too, have many more glial cells than neurons — the question remains why the prospect of animal intelligence sets off such controversy. Could it be that the huge size of the dolphin brain, which exceeds ours by 15 percent or more, threatens the human ego? Are we to ignore the billions and billions of neurons that dolphins do possess?
The goldfish remark reminded me of a common strategy of those who play down animal intelligence. They love to “demonstrate” remarkable cognitive feats in small-brained species: if a rat or pigeon can do it, it can’t be that special. Thus, some pigeons have been trained to use “symbolic communication” by pecking a key marked “thank you!” that delivered food to another pigeon. And they have also been conditioned to peck at their own bodies in front of a mirror, supporting the claim that they are “self-aware.”
Clearly, pigeons are trainable. But is this truly comparable to the actions of Presley, a dolphin at the New York Aquarium, who, without any rewards, reacted to being marked with paint by taking off at high speed to a distant part of his tank where a mirror was mounted? There he spun round and round, the way we do in a dressing room, appearing to check himself out.
de Waal gets to the heart of these discussions, asking why it is so upsetting to some people that animal and human intelligence can be so close, much less animal and human emotions:
Just saying that animals can learn from each other, and hence have rudimentary cultures, or that they can be jealous or empathic is taken by some as a personal affront. Accusations of anthropomorphism will fly, and we’ll be urged to be parsimonious in our explanations.
Despite our own irrational concerns, often by allegedly rational people, there is much logic in the notion that other species are highly intelligent, like us. After all, we're animals, too:
Is it so outlandish, from an evolutionary standpoint, to assume that if a large-brained mammal acts similarly to us under similar circumstances, the psychology behind its behavior is probably similar, too? This is true parsimony in the scientific sense, the idea that the simplest explanation is often the best. Those who resist this framework are in “anthropodenial” — they cling to unproven differences.
de Waal sketches several quick observations, representing only the tip of the iceberg. As I heard this weekend, with enough anecdotes, you end up with data:
There are tons of such observations, which is why most of us believe in dolphin intelligence — glia or no glia. It also explains why the slaughter of dolphins, as still occurs every year in Japan, arouses such strong emotions and controversy.
I'm glad the dolphin slaughter was referenced here. The more people can be made aware of it, especially in a context that convincingly conveys dolphin intelligence and emotion, the better.
It's great that The New York Times published two pieces in two days, and I think that deserves your attention for a couple of minutes of praise directed to the editor. As always, include your full name, address, and daytime phone number with your letter, and keep it short and to the point to give it a better shot at being published.
This is a wild and wonderful piece that I simply didn't have the time to break out for you in a useful way due to my attendance at The Strength of Many this weekend. Since Karen Dawn did such a great job in her recent DawnWatch report, I'll simply post that here un-reformatted and encourage you to subscribe to her list as well:
The cover of the Sunday, October 8, New York Times Magazine has a close-up photo of an elephant face and the headline, "Are We Driving Elephants Crazy?" The subheading reads, "Their behavior in the wild has grown strange and violent in recent years. Researchers say our encroachment on their way of life is to blame."
The article inside is by Genesis Award winner Charles Siebert. (See www.hsus.org/ace/14849 for more on the Genesis Awards) Siebert won for his July 4, 2005, NY Times Magazine cover story "Planet of the Retired Apes." Now he explores the effect that poaching, culling and captivity have had on elephants.
In "An Elephant Crackup?" (pg 42) we learn: "All across Africa, India and parts of Southeast Asia, from within and around whatever patches and corridors of their natural habitat remain, elephants have been striking out, destroying villages and crops, attacking and killing human beings.... In the Indian state Jharkhand near the western border of Bangladesh, 300 people were killed by elephants between 2000 and 2004. In the past 12 years, elephants have killed 605 people in Assam, a state in northeastern India, 239 of them since 2001...In Africa, reports of human-elephant conflicts appear almost daily, from Zambia to Tanzania, from Uganda to Sierra Leone, where 300 villagers evacuated their homes last year because of unprovoked elephant attacks."
We also learn that "young male elephants in Pilanesberg National Park and the Hluhluwe-Umfolozi Game Reserve in South Africa have been raping and killing rhinoceroses..." And "In Addo Elephant National Park, also in South Africa, up to 90 percent of male elephant deaths are now attributable to other male elephants, compared with a rate of 6 percent in more stable elephant communities."
We read about the work of Gay Bradshaw, a psychologist at the environmental-sciences program at Oregon State University:
"In 'Elephant Breakdown,' a 2005 essay in the journal Nature, Bradshaw and several colleagues argued that today’s elephant populations are suffering from a form of chronic stress, a kind of species-wide trauma. Decades of poaching and culling and habitat loss, they claim, have so disrupted the intricate web of familial and societal relations by which young elephants have traditionally been raised in the wild, and by which established elephant herds are governed, that what we are now witnessing is nothing less than a precipitous collapse of elephant culture.
Siebert continues: "It has long been apparent that every large, land-based animal on this planet is ultimately fighting a losing battle with humankind. And yet entirely befitting of an animal with such a highly developed sensibility, a deep-rooted sense of family and, yes, such a good long-term memory, the elephant is not going out quietly. It is not leaving without making some kind of statement, one to which scientists from a variety of disciplines, including human psychology, are now beginning to pay close attention."
We read that Bradshaw has sought "to combine traditional research into elephant behavior with insights about trauma drawn from human neuroscience."
Siebert writes about elephant matriarchal societies, about their intense mourning and burial rituals including weeklong vigils over the body and their elaborate communication systems.
The we read, "This fabric of elephant society, Bradshaw and her colleagues concluded, had effectively been frayed by years of habitat loss and poaching, along with systematic culling by government agencies to control elephant numbers and translocations of herds to different habitats. The number of older matriarchs and female caregivers (or 'allomothers') had drastically fallen, as had the number of elder bulls, who play a significant role in keeping younger males in line. In parts of Zambia and Tanzania, a number of the elephant groups studied contained no adult females whatsoever....As a result of such social upheaval, calves are now being born to and raised by ever younger and inexperienced mothers. Young orphaned elephants, meanwhile, that have witnessed the death of a parent at the hands of poachers are coming of age in the absence of the support system that defines traditional elephant life.
Bradshaw says: "The loss of elephants elders and the traumatic experience of witnessing the massacres of their family, impairs normal brain and behavior development in young elephants."
We read: "The elephants of decimated herds, especially orphans who've watched the death of their parents and elders from poaching and culling, exhibit behavior typically associated with post-traumatic stress disorder and other trauma-related disorders in humans: abnormal startle response, unpredictable asocial behavior, inattentive mothering and hyperaggression. Studies of the various assaults on the rhinos in South Africa, meanwhile, have determined that the perpetrators were in all cases adolescent males that had witnessed their families being shot down in cullings. It was common for these elephants to have been tethered to the bodies of their dead and dying relatives until they could be rounded up for translocation to, as Bradshaw and Schore describe them, 'locales lacking traditional social hierarchy of older bulls and intact natal family structures.'"
Allan Schore a UCLA psychologist and neuroscientist who has focused his research on early human brain development and the negative impact of trauma on it is quoted:
"We know that these mechanisms cut across species. In the first years of humans as well as elephants, development of the emotional brain is impacted by these attachment mechanisms, by the interaction that the infant has with the primary caregiver, especially the mother. When these early experiences go in a positive way, it leads to greater resilience in things like affect regulation, stress regulation, social communication and empathy. But when these early experiences go awry in cases of abuse and neglect, there is a literal thinning down of the essential circuits in the brain, especially in the emotion-processing areas."
Siebert describes a visit to The Elephant Sanctuary in Tennessee, writing that it is "a kind of asylum for some of the more emotionally and psychologically disturbed former zoo and circus elephants in the United States — cases so bad that the people who profited from them were eager to let them go."
We learn that some of the elephants there have histories of striking out at trainers, even lethally. He describes what has historically happened in this country to elephants who killed humans -- the public electrocution of Topsy who killed a trainer who tried to feed her a lit cigarette, and the public hanging of Mary who killed a keeper after he jabbed her behind the ear with a bullhook.
Of the sad history of captive elephants in the US and elsewhere we read: "Wild-caught elephants often witness as young calves the slaughter of their parents, just about the only way, shy of a far more costly tranquilization procedure, to wrest a calf from elephant parents, especially the mothers. The young captives are then dispatched to a foreign environment to work either as performers or laborers, all the while being kept in relative confinement and isolation, a kind of living death for an animal as socially developed and dependent as we now know elephants to be."
We read, however:
"And yet just as we now understand that elephants hurt like us, we’re learning that they can heal like us as well." The elephant sanctuary uses a system of "passive control," a therapy similar to those used to treat humans suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder. We later read, however, about the killing at the sanctuary of loving caretaker Joanna Burke. Just as in humans, sometimes the trauma is not erased -- there is an "indelible etching."
It is explained that elephants suffer, "not simply because of us, but because they are, by and large, us. If as recently as the end of the Vietnam War people were still balking at the idea that a soldier, for example, could be physically disabled by a psychological harm — the idea, in other words, that the mind is not an entity apart from the body and therefore just as woundable as any limb — we now find ourselves having to make an equally profound and, for many, even more difficult leap: that a fellow creature as ostensibly unlike us in every way as an elephant is as precisely and intricately woundable as we are."
The article suggests we need to develop "interspecies empathy" and that "involves taking what has been learned about elephant society, psychology and emotion and inculcating that knowledge into the conservation schemes of researchers and park rangers. This includes doing things like expanding elephant habitat to what it used to be historically and avoiding the use of culling and translocations as conservation tools."
That empathy is expected to change the way we care for captive elephants. We read that the Bronx Zoo announced plans to phase out its elephant exhibit on social-behavioral grounds. Carol Buckley from The Elephant Sanctuary is quoted:
"They’re really taking the lead. Zoos don’t want to concede the inappropriateness of keeping elephants in such confines. But if we as a society determine that an animal like this suffers in captivity, if the information shows us that they do, hey, we are the stewards. You'd think we'd want to do the right thing."
I have given a relatively brief summary of a lengthy and rich article that I hope you will read. You'll find it on line at http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/08/magazine/08elephant.html
Please send an appreciative letter to the editor, discussing some aspect of our relationships with other species -- perhaps the holding captive of wild animals for human entertainment.
The Magazine section takes letters at magazine@nytimes.com
Always include your full name, address, and daytime phone number when sending a letter to the editor. Shorter letters are more likely to be published.
Yours and the animals', Karen Dawn
(DawnWatch is an animal advocacy media watch that looks at animal issues in the media and facilitates one-click responses to the relevant media outlets. You can learn more about it, and sign up for alerts at http://www.DawnWatch.com. To unsubscribe, go to http://www.dawnwatch.com/cgi-bin/dada/dawnwatch_unsubscribe.cgi You are encouraged to forward or reprint DawnWatch alerts but please do so unedited -- leave DawnWatch in the title and include this tag line.)
I'm pleased with the Tribune, of course, for running it, and I'm always happy to see a piece of writing in a major city newspaper that argues for our moral obligation to animals not just because we don't want them to suffer, but because we want them to have the most full life they are capable of enjoying!
What are the implications for humankind's relationship to animals when we acknowledge and embrace the richness of their sensory experiences? It is sometimes convenient to exclude animals from our sphere of moral concern - as we do, for example, in the making of foie gras or lobster salad or in the meat industry in general. But is it right?
Because animals can enjoy life, our moral obligations to them are greater. We may not have an obligation to provide pleasure to animals, but actively depriving them of the opportunity to fulfill natural pleasures - as we do when we cage or kill them - is another matter. As we awaken to the rich landscapes of animal sentience, it only follows that lobster tanks and foie gras are on their way out.
RELATED LINK: A new blog on animal intelligence, emotions, and so on. Should be interesting.
