"The greatness of a nation and its moral progress can be judged by the way its animals are treated." -Gandhi
Showing posts with label NYT. Show all posts
Showing posts with label NYT. Show all posts

Tuesday, April 27, 2010

Oh, I Quit

I'm so mad about this that I can't think or write about it.

Killing animals for entertainment is a form of free speech; protesting the killing of animals for entertainment or use is domestic terrorism. You can torture a puppy to death of film but you can't stand outside the building where they torture puppies to death for "medicine" and say it's wrong.

It's such utter bullshit, so blatantly contradictory, so clear how little most people care about anything smaller than their own private interests.

This reason, this complete disregard for other lives, is the most disgusting thing that happens in the U.S. We'll deserve what we get when our narrow-mindedness finally poisons our land and water (it already poisons our food regularly--check the recalls) and there's nothing left to do but regret.

Monday, April 19, 2010

"The Canine As Canvas"

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/19/sports/19grooming.html

“People sometimes say, ‘Oh, poor dog,’ ” the M.C. Teri DiMarino told the audience that surrounded the show area at the Meadowlands Exposition Center. “But their perception is limited to their front feet. Really. All they know is that people are paying attention to them. They love it.”

Is there anyone out there who has met a standard poodle (the dog of choice for this particular medium) who they honestly thought was only self-aware to its front feet? Poodles are some of the most intelligent, perceptive, intuitive dogs--which is why they're so popular. They're problem-solvers. And these dogs apparently don't notice all the hours (25 in one case) they're required to submit to baths and dyes and standing perfectly still on a small table. No, in fact, "they love it".

When my mom was four she gave her cat an "airplane ride" like she loved her father to give her. She picked the cat up by one front foot and one back foot and spun it around in the air. She was convinced the cat loved it, and was confused and hurt when it turned around and bit her foot in thanks.

I'm not going to go as far as to say this dog-sculpting is cruelty. Hair grows back, and these dogs are arguably better off than a standard poodle locked in a kennel ten hours a day and then put out in the yard all night. And animals can grow to enjoy some pretty weird-ass things. But pretending that the dogs both don't notice and "love it" is completely unreasonable.



Oh, and they look dumb.



Tuesday, April 6, 2010

Scientific Perspectives on Animal Personalities

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/06/science/06angi.html?pagewanted=1&ref=homepage&src=me

Some critics complain that the term “animal personality” is a bit too slick, while others worry that the entire enterprise smacks of that dread golem of biology, anthropomorphism — assigning human traits to nonhuman beings. Researchers in the field, however, defend their lingo and tactics. “Some of the behavior patterns we’re talking about are similar to what we call personality in human psychology literature,” said Max Wolf of the Max Planck Institute in Germany. “So why not call it personality in other animals?”

Maybe the problem isn't anthropomorphism, but anthropocentrism: we're not "assigning human traits to animals" but assuming that we are the only animals that can have certain traits. Hence the frequent 'scientific' argument that saying animals are sensitive to their physical and social environments--basically, that they are susceptible to things like stress, pain, and emotional distress--is "anthropomorphism", when if it is considered purely through an evolutionary lens it makes perfect sense. They're not our traits; they came from somewhere, didn't they? If we share traits with monkeys then shouldn't monkeys share traits with us?

Scanning through the comments after the article, I've become even more frustrated with the piece. Reader response is pretty much unanimous: of course animals have personalities, for the exact reasons grumped about above. But 'science' pretends not to understand this, or pretends that the way we understand it is inadequate to make any arguments for compassion towards animals. It's dialogues like this that illuminate how inadequate science actually is when it comes to thinking about animals. All the concerns about anthropomorphism--tiptoeing around thinking about animal experiences to the point where the concern serves as a major roadblock to any kind of understanding or compromise--seems very clearly skewed against animals' interests. Giving science authority over how and when we use animals means we wait until science realizes that animals aren't really ours to use, and it's abundantly clear that this is not going to happen.

Friday, April 2, 2010

from the NYT-"Can Animals Be Gay?"

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/04/magazine/04animals-t.html?src=me&ref=homepage

I found this article interesting more for the fact that everyone seems so surprised that homosexuality could exist in a "natural" state. The implication that human culture and behavior is so far removed from nature, that the human animal is so separate from our evolutionary next-of-kin that our rules and experiences are absolutely non-applicable to other animals, is, evolutionarily, ridiculous.

What animals do — what’s perceived to be “natural” — seems to carry a strange moral potency: it’s out there, irrefutably, as either a validation or a denunciation of our own behavior, depending on how you happen to feel about homosexuality and about nature. . . . “A lot of zoologists are suspicious, I think, of applying the same evolutionary principles to humans that they apply to animals,” Paul Vasey, the Japanese-macaque researcher, told me.

This bias towards regarding human experiences as something completely incomparable to the experiences of animals, even in ration-and-reason-obsessed science, is irrational and unreasonable. Humans are animals; animals with strange evolutionary adaptations, granted, but still subject to the same forces that created all forms of life. And, as such, it is silly to disregard the possibility of things like emotions, thought, sensation, and even sexual choice--for whatever reason and due to whatever complicated, controversial science-y factors that we haven't quite figured out yet (and do we really expect to find the absolute answer, really?).

The only people who should be honestly, truly surprised by the phenomena of homosexual pairings in non-human animals are people who honestly, truly don't believe homosexuality is something that happens naturally.

Wednesday, March 3, 2010

bunny bourguignon: it's not so easy

“Today is a somber day because we are going to be killing rabbits,” she said. “But I am always psyched after slaughter because I’m like, now I’m going to eat.

The New York Times today is running this piece on a "rabbit-killing seminar" held in a parking lot in Brooklyn. Full of puns and admonitions like "don't tell the kids!", it's portrayed as yet another way for people to get to know where their food comes from. The paper acknowledges that a lot of the ambivalence towards eating rabbits is due to the fact "the country never quite got past the pets-or-meat problem" with rabbits, something not as prevalent when you're talking about chicken or turkey. Rabbits are popular with kids, kept as pets, and images of Peter and Bugs are icons of childhood. And now they're the new trend on foodie menus.

The question of whether teaching a class full of nervous urbanites how to break rabbit necks in a city parking lot is a good idea is a difficult one. The article emphasizes that most rabbit isn't factory farmed since the animals themselves are so delicate and the demand for the meat is still niche. The idea is for people to raise these animals themselves as they are an "easy" one to keep in the city (anyone who has ever smelled rabbit piss might disagree), easy to kill, easy to butcher, and delicious to eat. A rabbit living in back of someone's co-op does probably live a considerably better life than a factory-farmed broiler chicken, so it's a question of degrees. If you absolutely refuse to quit eating meat, then isn't it better to take responsibility for the lives your appetite demands?

It's the theory/praxis line I come up against frequently: in theory it should never be right to kill an animal. In practice, if people are lining up to learn how to snap bunny necks they're probably pretty committed to their omnivorous diet, and this has got to be better than buying ground beef at discount prices, right?

But there's still a lot of vacillation, even in the people who participate. The idea of forcing yourself through the slaughter of an animal as a sort of trial by fire which, if you survive, absolves you of future concern for the ethical demands of your diet is the opposite of productive in my mind, because if you have ethical concerns about eating meat in the first place it means that, somewhere in you, you realize that there's probably something wrong with it. The effort and ritual of learning how to slaughter and butcher your own animals gives you something else to think about, and doesn't actually involve changing your diet.

And let's be honest: people who are "committed" to ethical meat sources don't make much of a change. Maybe you spend a bit more on the Sunday roast, but when you're out to eat, do you demand the server prove to you that the cow in your burger didn't suffer? Do you exclusively patronize establishments that exclusively serve locally-sourced, compassionately-killed meat? What about the pepperoni on that slice of pizza you're gobbling down at bar time? What about when you visit your folks in the Midwest and the only options for dinner are Outback and the Olive Garden? Are you a vegetarian then, or does your concern for the lives of the animals you eat only extend to a convenient twenty-mile radius around Manhattan?

As Michael Pollan (very revealingly) says in The Omnivore's Dilemma, "How far do I take this... before it ruins my meal?"

Articles like this seem to be appearing more and more often--in the NYT particularly--and they seem to universally end on a note that acknowledges the sense of ambivalence that's almost inevitable to this kind of facing-the-animal-you-eat endeavor. This one is no different.

“When I was the first person to volunteer to break the neck, it all seemed so easy and emotionless that I didn’t realize until after I’d done it that I was shaking,” she said.

But she recovered quickly. After all, there was a rabbit to dress.

Ms. Lippert still has the pelt, the head and the feet. They’re in her freezer, awaiting the taxidermist. But she doesn’t have the boyfriend.

“He ended up leaving me for a vegetarian,” she said.

Friday, February 19, 2010

the animal machine

The New York Times today ran this op-ed on changing the way farmed animals experience pain. By genetically engineering animals whose brains, while experiencing the sensation of pain, don't experience it as something altogether unpleasant, they are, in a way, numb: they become the animal machines that Descartes so foolishly claimed them to be. This purportedly would remove much of our guilt in perpetuating the awful methods we use in industrial farming. The piece concludes:

If we cannot avoid factory farms altogether, the least we can do is eliminate the unpleasantness of pain in the animals that must live and die on them. It would be far better than doing nothing at all.

This is an interesting path to pursue, and it's hard to disagree with innovations that lessen the suffering of animals (which is my whole motivation for writing this blog, after all). I've thought about this before. If we can engineer animals that grow at unnatural rates, whose flesh we manipulate so that the majority of the animal is our preferred lean breast meat, then why not engineer animals that are almost entirely insensate, both physically and mentally? Since we have the technology to turn sensitive creatures into meat-making machines, why not take the last step and make them completely senseless? It is, after all, for their own good.

I think the barrier to pursuing this to its "rational" end is the fact that these animals must be heavily genetically modified. People are afraid of genetically modified organisms (GMOs), despite the fact that they consume them all the time without really noticing. Those chickens that are mostly lean breast meat? Do you think those happened naturally? I've done some research in the past on genetic modification, and came to the confident conclusion that tinkering with genes in a lab is, practically, no different than breeding turkeys to the point where they can no longer naturally reproduce (because of those big, lean, white-meat breasts). But where "natural" breeding is unquestioned, GMOs scare the pants off of us because it's new and because chimeras have always been objects of fascination and repulsion. We eat GMO corn and soybeans but talking about GM animals is too much for our delicate sensibilities to handle.

I have two reactions to this and I'm not sure which of them is "correct". Let's start with the practical one:

Get over it! If GMOs are scary because they're unnatural, what do you call confining a genetically fucked-up animal to a space where she can't move a step in any direction? What do you call chickens producing abnormally gigantic eggs in total darkness at a rate four times that of what their normal, non-modified cousins in the barnyard did? Animals who never inhabit the world they were evolved for, whose basic needs to bathe, stretch, forage, create community and care for their young are completely thwarted, who are fed diets of their ground-up compatriots and never touch the ground or breathe unfiltered air--is that natural? Oh hell no it isn't. If we've already messed with these genetics for our benefit, why not finish the job for their benefit? They live and die for our preferences and tastes; it's hard to deny them this one small thing simply because we're scared it might not be natural.

And then the ethically consistent response: These creatures aren't ours, we shouldn't have messed with them in the first place, so what right do we have to take away any opportunity for an actual life?

The thing that really bothers me, though, is this: at one point, the author (a neuroscience grad student) states:

We are most likely stuck with factory farms, given that they produce most of the beef and pork Americans consume.

This kind of thinking is not productive, nor is it healthy. We've overcome some awful habits in our past as humans. I believe this exact reasoning justified the perpetuation of slavery in the United States for a good fifty years past the rest of the Atlantic community. It's bad reasoning, it's lazy morality, and we can do better.

Saturday, February 13, 2010

a whole new exciting way to avoid admitting that eating meat is wrong!

An article from October in the New York Times addresses the new "foodie" trend of butchering as art. The classes and seminars (only for the rich, it seems--one internship is 10,000$) feature people who want to know where their food is coming from, what happened to it, and ensure its purity. It seems that these are mostly people who recognize the ethical issues inherent to the killing of sentient beings for their flesh, and are trying to avoid actually confronting the problem. One girl says:

“I feel like if I’m going to eat meat... I don’t want to eat stuff that I haven’t had to work for.”

Does "working for" something you find morally questionable make it any better? Or does it just distract you from the fact that the practice does not sit well with you? The sense of having come through an ordeal--challenging oneself--can be reward enough to overlook the initial problem entirely. Simply proving you can watch an animal die doesn't change the fact that the animal dies.

Killing someone with your hands doesn't change the fact that you're killing someone. No matter how humane you are, you're still taking something of theirs--their most important of all somethings, everything they have--for the minor human pleasure of bacon.

One participant wrote, powerfully:

Animals do not want to die... They can feel pain and fear, and, just like us, will struggle to breathe for even one single more second. If you’re about to run 250 volts through a pig, do not look it in the eyes. It is not going to absolve you.

Wednesday, February 3, 2010

"debarking losing favor"

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/03/nyregion/03debark.html?em

I was not even aware that debarking was a legitimate procedure to use on companion animals. I had heard of animals in experimental labs being debarked (and the dogs in question were beagles, so I can see why the lab technicians simply accepted it as a reasonable thing to do) but I had no idea, no idea that a person who purportedly loved their dog would take away his or her voice.


“I probably spend more time and money on my dogs in one year than they have in a whole lifetime,” said Paul, a breeder and dog handler in Catskill, N.Y., who asked that his last name not be used because he did not want to be singled out by activists. “I just hate being labeled as someone who’s cruel because I debark.”

Paul usually has more than a dozen dogs at a time, many of them Shetland sheepdogs, a breed known for excessive barking. He said he has had most of them debarked, and requires his clients to debark theirs before sending them to him for dog shows. He said his dogs have lived long, happy lives, and “none of them are any sadder after being debarked.”

I find it terribly interesting that this man justifies his disabling of his dogs with the argument that he spends a lot of money on them.

I, of all people, know how inconvenient animal habits can be. I live with a floor-pooper. I love my floor-pooper, knew what I was getting into, and have decided that he is worth it. All animals come with some animal still left in them; your choice is to either make that a problem or to accept that what you have is not a human but another form of being altogether, and that there will be miscommunications and certain situations where you have no choice but to accept their otherness.

Thinking about this also brings up debate about cats and declawing. I have one declawed cat; I had no say in that decision. I lived with my mother, and the procedure was a requirement for having a cat in the house. I didn't think much of it as all of our childhood cats had been declawed. The way my mother framed it, clawed cats would result in the complete, unmitigated destruction of our home. Now that I have Mal, whose claws are intact, it's clear that this is not always the case. Sure, his high-speed halts have marked up the sofa, and he's caught me once or twice with a sharp one, but for the most part it hasn't been an issue. Monster, however, still seems to realize her loss nine years later; she has the occasional nervous twitch in her paws that seems to be a momentary shock of nerve pain only quieted by furious licking. And her toes seem sensitive, too; when it's chilly or if she's sitting on something uninsulated she very, very meticulously positions her front paws on the tip of her tail, cushioning them. Amputees get ghost pains, so why wouldn't that happen to cats whose fingertips are amputated?


My brother's cat, though, is another case entirely. Caspian kept his claws for almost two years. He is malicious and violent and temperamental. The family cringes when he jumps on a lap. After constant complaining, my mother finally convinced my brother and had him declawed ("disarmed"). And I have to say: he's changed, and not for the worse. People are more willing to interact with him since the chance of getting mauled is much lower. The other animals aren't afraid to approach him. He actually seems to be happier, now, too, which doesn't make any sense at all. But he's lost his flab and become more talkative, playful and social. He's still sneaky and temperamental, but he's no longer a menace. So does that justify taking away his fingertips?

Despite the occasional cases where these disabling procedures seem to improve relations, I think a NYT reader comment sums up the best thinking on this topic: "Folks, no matter how well intentioned you think you are, please do not take an animal into your life if you cannot accept complete responsibility for it - claws, messes, barks and all." HC, Texas

Wednesday, September 23, 2009

agricultural runoff poisons northern wisconsin

I am way pissed:

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/18/us/18dairy.html?pagewanted=2&em

Cow shit is contaminating the water table in northern Wisconsin. Why? Because there are so many goddamn cows crammed into unnaturally small areas that there is no way the ecosystem could possibly absorb that much waste.

“One cow produces as much waste as 18 people”... In Brown County, part of one of the nation’s largest milk-producing regions, agriculture brings in $3 billion a year. But the dairies collectively also create as much as a million gallons of waste each day. Many cows are fed a high-protein diet, which creates a more liquid manure that is easier to spray on fields.

Leeeet's take this apart, shall we? Who exactly has the power to make an industry that brings in 3$ billion a year in a place like Brown County (whose other major industries include paper mills and the Green Bay Packers and not a whole lot else) do anything but what they want to do? It's the backbone of local production, probably the most lucrative thing to come out of that area since French-Canadian fur trappers took all of the beaver pelts back to French-Canada. It's major industry, major agribusiness, and major agribusiness does what it wants with its shit. The other major problem here is that nobody knows what ELSE to do with the shit.

To fix the problem of agricultural runoff, “I don’t think there’s a solution in my head yet that I could say, right now, write this piece of legislation, this will get it done,” Ms. Jackson [head of the EPA] said in an interview.

Despite the fact that "Agricultural runoff is the single largest source of water pollution in the nation’s rivers and streams," there is no solution in the current system, because the current system demands enormous amounts of dairy and beef for a populous convinced that milk is absolutely necessary for both young and old alike and that beef is inevitably What's For Dinner. (You can, of course, replace beef with chicken or pork in this context--all of the agribusiness surrounding animal products creates unmanageable amounts of waste. Cows just happen to be the biggest and gassiest.) Nobody is addressing the actual underlying problem: our food system is unsustainable. The evidence is everywhere: eastern tomato crops failing from the effects of monocropping, skyrocketed obesity and diabetes rates tied to cheap food made from government-sponsored and -encouraged overproduction of corn and soy, constant panic over food poisoning outbreaks linked to huge production plants, and (largely overlooked) scandalous conditions for the living, thinking, feeling creatures we cultivate for food.

Of course there's no ready solution.

And can we go back to that first quote? I'm not done yet:

Many cows are fed a high-protein diet, which creates a more liquid manure that is easier to spray on fields.

When was the last time you, yourself, produced a "liquid manure"? Was it because your body was happy and feeling great? Or was it because you ate something poisonous or unhealthy, or were otherwise ill, and your body was cramped and burning inside? Think for a moment how these cows producing the "liquid manure" felt about their "high-protein diet", they being animals who can't even digest corn, but evolved multiple stomachs so they could digest grasses?

Other farmers receive fees to cover their land with slaughterhouse waste and treated sewage.

The article doesn't state who pays the fees to cover land with slaughterhouse waste and treated sewage (need I point out that these people are growing your food in this slop?), but it's safe to assume that it's either the powers behind the production of the waste and sewage, or the government, which is cowed (no pun intended) by the financial might of an industry that is poisoning human and animal bodies, as well as the earth, water, and air around it.

End rant. I'm going to go smother myself with my cats and hope I wake up in a different universe.