Seoulscapade

The Ethics of What We Eat: Why Our Food Choices Matter

Peter Singer & Jim Mason

This study covers a lot of ground, tracing back and examining the implications of where our food comes from. Basically it is divided into three sections and each revolves around a family and their eating habits. It goes from a standard meat eating family to a semi-vegetarian or “conscientious omnivore” family to a vegan family. No prize for guessing which comes out as the best lifestyle choice for all of us, for animals and for the environment–the vegan family, of course.

This book is packed with information, more than a lot of other books I’ve read. It introduced me to a couple of things I hadn’t considered, such as the way food industries defray costs onto others, or why fish farming is just as bad as any other factory farming, or how food transportation consumes so much energy, or why buying local may not be best in all cases. It touches upon more issues than you might expect, and gives local detail before widening the perspective with broader implications. Ultimately, “agriculture indirectly affects all living creatures” and all of the detrimental effects of this are “because of our choices about what we eat.”

I was particularly interested in hard facts on labeling. They deliver on this by actually visiting so-called organic farms and detailing what they saw. As suspected, many of these farms are not what I would class as organic regardless of any official pronouncements. The authors had similar reservations. It all remains “questionable,” and while buying products with “Certified Humane” and the like is better than not, the best choice of all is not buying animal based products at all. You cannot get away from one undeniable reality: food producers seek to maximize profits and this is invariably contrary to the interests of the animals.

The book is dictated by the food choices in it, but I wonder would it have been an entirely different book if different families and foods been focused on? There’s no doubt, although given that the problems with food production are universal, many food trails would lead back to the same culprits or their equivalents. I then wonder how much was controlled by the authors and how much simply left to chance. That is not really explored, and I guess the idea was to leave much to chance, to rely on chance to deliver “averages” and make it more “objective” without their interference.

One criticism I have is that I had trouble remembering who bought what, which farmer it was traced back to, and what the findings were. Perhaps if each section paralleled others I could look back and find corresponding sections for each family, but sections do not parallel each other, and I suppose they can’t, since different issues arise for different circumstances. For example, meat and dairy are not going to be discussed in relation to the vegan family. I question the effectiveness of this structure. For me, it would have been better to structure it according to food type and discuss each family under that.

I would like to have seen more details on the families, like which family members haul around the fattest arses and what kind of education levels we are dealing with in relation to food choice. I guess that’s all getting into murky territory that would be enough to sustain another book, yet a few cholesterol stats wouldn’t have taken up much space. I did enjoy the note that although the US is somewhat slavish to Christian notions, the sin of gluttony appears to get overlooked.

Criticism there could have been sharper, and sharper too against lazy or twisted thinkers the authors touch upon. They at least took Michael Pollin to task and others who justify the raising of animals for slaughter as some kind of bizarre evolutionary bargain or “mutualism,” as if they cannot shake a dominion mentality passed on through Christian culture. As for the farmers they spoke to, I suspect they were not chewed up and spat out because of their cooperation.

One idiot they did not talk to called Joel Salatin believes humans are made in the Christian god’s image and have a soul, while animals do not. All they say to this lunacy is that religions often reflect “the speciesism of the humans who made them.” Again, dissecting Salatin would have gone beyond the scope of the book, but still I’d like to have read a few more sentences explaining in their words why he is deluded.

Overall, this is a great book to have on the shelf, one that can be returned to for reference, since I doubt the findings will be going out of date any time soon. It is heartening to see that the kind of information Singer and Mason have presented here is entering into mainstream consciousness. I expect the documentary Food, Inc. will echo many of the issues found in this book and will probably reach a wider audience, of the kind that would never pick up a book on ethics.

PETA were in Seoul for a couple of campaigns at the end of March, and one of them was to take the I’d-rather-go-naked campaign to Seoul Fashion Week. I was there helping them on behalf of KARA and my wife assisted by handing out leaflets. Here’s part of PETA’s media release:

PETA wants fashion week attendees to know that animals trapped for their fur suffer excruciating pain—often for days—before their chests are stomped on or their necks are broken by trappers. Beavers caught in underwater traps struggle frantically before they drown. On fur farms, animals spend their entire lives confined to tiny, filthy cages, where they suffer physical and psychological distress before they are poisoned, gassed, or anally or genitally electrocuted or have their necks broken. In China, which is the world’s leading fur exporter, millions of dogs and cats are killed for their fur, and animals on Chinese fur farms are frequently skinned alive. Because cat and dog fur is often deliberately mislabeled as fur from other species, it can wind up in stores anywhere in the world.

The “naked” ladies didn’t go into the Seoul Trade Exhibition Center (SETEC) where Fashion Week was being held. The terrain was too tricky and staff might have ousted them. Instead, press were alerted to wait at the intersection of Nambusunhwan-ro and Yeongdongdae-ro, or exit 1 of Hangnyeoul Station (Line 3).

The phalanx of photographers, who were the main audience for the demonstration, were waiting in force as the girls arrived.

Here they come. Not many Fashion Week patrons would have seen it except the few exiting the SETEC. I joined the photographers but tried my best not to get in their way.

They were totally surrounded at one stage:

The girl on the left, Ashley Fruno, is from PETA Asia while the others are local girls. They all made some anti-fur announcements and proclamations. Here is the blurb from the media release:

“I’ll gladly bare my skin if it will help save animals’ skins,” says PETA’s Ashley Fruno. “In the 21st century, with so many stylish, comfortable alternatives to fur available, there’s no excuse for supporting one of the most hideous industries on the planet.”

The girls next heading down the sidewalk for the last part of the demonstration while press scrambled madly to stay in front.

The press guys all seemed choreographed, the way they knew the procedure and their part in it. The girls then stopped again outside a different entrance, as pictured in the shot at the very top.

After photo ops there, they walked further up the sidewalk. This was the last part of the demo, a photo op in which the press hung back as if by some prearranged agreement.

It was a good chance to capture the girls without people getting in the way.

The girls then made their exit in a taxi. I’d often wondered how activists get away from such demonstrations, while wrapped in a banner and still trying to maintain the illusion of nakedness. Well, they simply clambered into the taxi as a group with the banner on! Now you know.

Of course, they are not naked. Underneath they are wearing skin coloured shorts and and a strapless top. Anyone could see that, as the girls were not of the same height and the banner’s nipple to crotch dimensions had little play in it for error, so sometimes the shorter girl was showing pant. Even just a little bit really dispelled the illusion, and I found myself strangely distressed about that.

Here’s one of the reports on the campaign in the Korea Times.

-: PLEASE DON’T BUY PRODUCTS THAT USE ANIMAL FUR :-

A famous animal rights activist named Henry Spira used to look upon his actions and successes as “pushing the peanut forward.” In an effort to contribute to the same, I have been working on this website for the Korea Animal Rights Advocates group, or KARA.

I suggested I build them a new English version of their site after seeing the dilapidated state of their old one. They said go for it and basically gave me free reign.

The site was put together using Joomla and bits and pieces of graphics from Joomla templates and other sites on the web. It took me about 2 months to come up with a design and put it all together. Most of the content is mine, although some of it came from one or two other people, including materal from the old English site, which I revamped.

I’m not expecting huge traffic, but at least the site is in place as one of my contributions as an animal rights activist and as yet another means of getting the word out for a more civilized world.

Skinny Bitch

Rory Freedman & Kim Barnouin

When you open this book, it grabs you by the collar and hits you over the head. These girls get right to the point in a book that’s packed full of information and goes in directions I hadn’t expected. It has its place, I guess, and I do applaud its advocacy of a vegan diet and its total rejection of the meat industry cruelty and frauds. However, what did annoy me pretty quickly was some of the crude language–not because it was crude, but because it seemed misplaced, contrived and awkward, almost embarrassing.

Members of KARA campaigning for animal rights

Last Saturday afternoon, down by Seoul’s City Hall, members of Korea Animal Rights Advocates (KARA) met for an afternoon’s campaigning. They turned up with paper-bag masks depicting the main group of land animals slaughtered for meat in Korea, including dogs. So, there were masks representing dogs, cows, chickens and pigs. The group also came with placards and ropes, which symbolized tethered subjugation and confinement, or perhaps a hanging noose, since dogs are hanged in Korea.

I was surprised at how few participants turned up. I was also surprised to see it was a women-only affair. Where were the men, I wondered? Well, I discovered that some of the male members had dropped their wives off and left. They apparently don’t like to be all that exposed, and I can understand that because when I saw the masks, I immediately thought, I don’t want to walk around with one of those things on.

It was a bit surreal in a way

This cowardly self-consciousness on my part only raised my admiration for them in seeing what they were prepared to do. They struck me as a tough, non-nonsense bunch of girls who could take anything dished out to them. They were not new to campaigning, and no doubt they had copped mockery and strange looks before and knew how to cope with it.

As a supporter of animal rights, I had turned up to met the organizers, join in and see what KARA was all about. As a newcomer, I had envisaged a large group of us marching off to some location where we would hear speeches, and with our spirits stirred, we’d loudly walk on into the heart of Myong-Dong. But it wasn’t like that. The rally was really only organized for a core group of campaigners. The only other people who showed were members of the press. They took photos and one of them conducted an interview on camera with a KARA organizer, as shown below.

Apart from them, as if on cue, a drunk also appeared and began heckling and raving on. Everyone ignored him, as he was of the harmless variety. Then he latched onto me, since he knew English and wanted to defend his thesis on how happy he was, and that made him forget that there were people standing nearby with animal masks on. I deflected any nuisance from the campaigners, but it took some time to shake him.

KARA organizer Sora Seo facing the camera.

What a courageous bunch of girls, I thought, and even more so once I learned where they were headed next. They had indeed planned to walk through the streets to Myong-Dong, but that would be later. It was going to rain and this called for a change of plans. After the press had left, they were apparently headed down into the subway, onto Green Line 2—for the next four hours!

My wife and I bailed. She was feeling tired, and I certainly wouldn’t have easily lasted another four hours traveling the subway, confined in carriages, a strange looking foreigner accompanying a bunch of girls with animal heads. It was around 3 pm or later, and the riot police were setting up, lining buses around Seoul Plaza, as you can see in the background. This was in preparation for a night of large-scale protests against the government for importing US beef. Although animal related, these protests had nothing to do with KARA’s cause, as they focused on human rather than animal welfare. We headed for home.

But I hope to support the group somehow at the next rally.

I have already offered my services to help with updating English side of the KARA website, which is found here. At the time of writing, it’s terribly out of date, some of the English is awkward, and the formatting in some parts of it is broken. They accepted my offer, and I’m going to get a new one up and running. That’s probably where I’ll be most useful.

Yet again, primitive and barbaric behavior has been directed against innocent animals at a protest demonstration in Korea. In the picture above, pheasants are being slaughtered at a rally against Japan’s reiterated claims to territorial rights of Dokdo, a small group of rocky islands between Korea and Japan. Japan had published the claims in some teaching manuals.

Here’s how Al Jazeer reported the incident:

On Thursday protesters in Seoul staged a bloody demonstration outside the Japanese embassy, slaughtering live pheasants – Japan’s national bird – on the street.

. . .

Angry protesters battered, disembowelled and beheaded live pheasants, while dozens of war veterans in military fatigues shouted “Dokdo is our territory!” as they ate the birds’ internal organs and dripped blood on Japanese flags and on pictures of present and former Japanese leaders.

There were also banners that read “Stop violating our territorial sovereignty!” and “Japan must stop distortion of history”.

In April, Japan and South Korea held their first full-fledged bilateral summit in three years.

Ties were suspended after repeated visits by earlier Japanese leaders to a Tokyo shrine honouring the country’s war dead including convicted war criminals.

How pathetic. This does little to help Korea’s already poor standing in the world community in terms of its terrible animal welfare record. Nor does it help raise the consciousness of individual Koreans about the rights of animals, and most assuredly, a great deal needs to be done in that area.

Sections of the Korean community have a habit of slaughtering innocent animals at protest rallies. Apparently they do it to “express emotion.” I reported on another incident of this nature last year. At that incident, a young pig was suspended by ropes while someone hacked it to pieces with a knife—a most disgraceful, unmanly and cruel thing to do. No animal deserves a death like that. It did not cross the minds of these sadistic butchers that they were torturing to death what is essentially the child of another mammal.

It’s not emotion they are expressing at these protests, but their own backwardness and lack of intelligence. Animals sacrificed to “express emotion” are of course entirely innocent, with no connection at all to human affairs. And to abuse and exploit them as scapegoats is truly primitive. It’s the kind of thing ignorant peasants did two thousand years ago.

The grown men in the picture above should be ashamed of themselves.

I haven’t said much about the dog eating industry in this country. It’s a disgrace, but perhaps no more of a disgrace that the rest of the meat industry. However, the other day, after I came across a blog post by someone I would call a dog eating apologist, I decided to respond.

My ire was raised partly because this guy’s attitude toward the dog meat industry is typical of foreigners in Korea. I also lost patience with the cliches he was coming out with, along with the attempt to be judiciously enlightened on the subject. His post smacked of such self-satisfied complacency, I could not leave it alone.

But let’s backtrack a little. The blog poster, Seoul Buffoon, as he goes by, was writing about the latest controversies surrounding the dog meat industry in Korea. The government in an attempt to clean up the industry will be inspecting dog restaurants to ensure they meet hygiene standards. It is also likely to designate dogs as livestock to ensure more regulation and hygiene.

You can read more background on it in the Wall Street Journal.

Of course, these moves are to protect public health only. Forget improved conditions for dogs and the sorrowful lives they lead in such cages as shown above. I doubt much will change there. An article about the dog industry and what goes on in it can be found here. But this article is a gloss and hardly goes into the brutalities and evils that are committed, even by ordinary Koreans, as you see below.

Here is Seoul Buffoon’s whitewash on the subject:

Now before I continue with my personal opinion about this whole matter, I have to inform readers that I keep three adorable dogs at home. Two of them are Miniature Schnauzers and one is a Yorkshire Terrier. They truly are mans best friend and are “givers” not “takers”.

I am a dog-lover, having always had atleast one to keep me company for the past 20 years…. also, for the record, I am a non-vegetarian who relishes beef, pork and seafood….

That does not stop me from saying that all this “international” furore and concerns of “civic groups” over eating dog meat is just crap. I can understand vegetarians arguing about it, not the international community or Korean civic groups, who relish beef, pork, seafood and poultry products, but have an issue with dog meat.

It is part of the tradition in East Asian societies and one cannot force them to give it up. One can argue about the way these dogs are killed and the hygiene aspects, but not that Koreans or Chinese should stop eating dogs.

I have personally not eaten dog meat, but do not have any issue with people who relish the dish. It is their personal choice and just because I am a dog-lover, I should not be forcing my opinion on them. For this reason, I fully support the initiative of the Seoul Government. Now at least the dog meat industry will be regulated, just like it is for other livestock.

I can draw a parallel here to the situation in my own country, India, where beef is banned in most provinces. Cows are a religious symbol for Hindus and people shudder when they think of others killing them for food. By the same logic, shouldn’t the wishes of a billion-strong country be respected and beef banned across the world? No. But it is regulated and thats the way it should be. Let individuals decide what they want to eat!

And here is what two commenters had to say about it:

Way to go buffoon…one of your best posts I have read to date. I fully agree.

Hit the nail on the head buddy!

Morons. How easily they are satisfied with platitudes and calming jargon. When the reality is this:

And this:

And this (notice the dog in the cage at the back who has to witness it all):

And this:

There you have it, from a torturous life through to a tortuous death.

Well, after encountering that blather I quoted above, and once I had ceased rubbing my eyes as if waking from a dream, I put together the following and dropped it in Mr. Buffoon’s comment box:

Ah, yes, one buffoon and some clowns to pat him on the back. It’s like watching politicians.

It always annoys me to come across complacency disguised as a self-righteous “live and let live” argument. You are just issuing platitudes here, Mr. Buffoon. You sit back comforted that the government is taking care of things. Your thinking is not troubled by the human tendency to cut corners and shirk responsibility. The word regulation appears to give you peace of mind. You are easily pleased, Mr. Buffoon, but then most apologists are.

From all this, and from your confession that you are a meat eater, I gather that you just don’t get the point about what is wrong with the meat industry. Hygiene? Is that all that matters? I urge you, Mr. Buffoon, to seek further education in the areas of the meat industry, animal rights, ethics, and reality, at your earliest convenience. Perhaps then you will not be so soft in your views.

But it was not complacency that drove me to register a response. What bugged me enough to do so was you citing tradition as a justification for shrugging and accepting the status quo. What a convenient cliché. Let me make something plain: tradition justifies nothing. What more pathetic argument can there be than tradition, when so much of it is based on delusion, fallacy, money grabbing and power mongering?

To hell with tradition. Suffering and the welfare of other living things supersedes it. Why not stop Koreans or Chinese eating dogs? Why not force our opinion on them against the practice? You give no valid reason why we should not. No law exists to say we should not. Throughout history, if human beings had not asserted opinion against what they find appalling, how would we have ended up? Better or worse?

Isn’t is curious that base self-interests are often behind the myths of tradition. And isn’t it peculiar how things like traditions or regulations are circumvented, should even they stand in the way of self interests? The meat industry gets away with abuses all the time. Tradition or not, regulation or not, the evils are still committed.

And what about India, where as you say cows are supposed to be sacred. How is it that much of the world’s leather comes from that country? Clearly, it cannot be a “billion strong” that are concerned with the welfare of cattle there. From what I have seen, cattle are subjected to lengthy torturous journeys to slaughterhouses. Chilies are rubbed into their eyes to drive them on, even as they have collapsed from exhaustion. I’ve seen the footage. Is this barbarism still happening there? Is that practice in the regulations you so glowingly proclaim?

So much for what is sacred, Mr. Buffoon, when animal welfare stands in the way of human self interest and profit taking. In future societies, this age will be looked upon as barbaric due to the hell on earth we perpetuate for other living creatures. People will one day view us as we now view those in the era of slavery. That is because slavery, deprivation and torture is what humans still subject animals to daily.

Is this really the best that humans can do? It is most certainly not what I would call civilized behavior. But apparently, it is good enough for you, as it is for the knuckleheads commenting in support.

Let me leave you with this: “When a man has pity on all living creatures, then only, is he noble.” (Buddha Siddhartha Gautama)

That ought to stir things up. I’ll post back if there is any response.

Meanwhile, one of the lies bandied about concerning the dog trade—another lie that placates the gullible like buffoon and the kinds of clowns that would agree with him—is how only a certain kind of dog is bred for consumption. It’s an “eating dog,” you’ll hear people say, as if it’s genetically predisposed or ordained by some god to be a livestock animal, classed with a chicken, for example. (The Prince of Denmark, an eccentric old git and dog eater, has actually compared a dog to a chicken.)

The reality, once again, is not so easily whitewashed with easy labels. In the photo above are dogs of all breeds awaiting a buyer and their inevitable slaughter. They don’t even have water to drink. None of them deserved such a horrific end. Many were perhaps betrayed and abandoned by scumbag owners.

If you want more of a dose of reality, please visit this site, from which some of the above pictures were taken: http://www.yellowdog.or.kr

Update:

As expected, a response came to my comment above, and here it is:

That was a passionate argument, and I respect our opinion.
But I have to mention here that I made it very clear in my post: ” I can understand vegetarians complaining about dog meat….
not people who eat beef and pork.”
I can understand from your response that you are obviously a vegetarian….a PETA advocate (?)
Read my post carefully without getting agitated.
I agree with many of your staements. Also that “The meat industry gets away with abuses all the time. Tradition or not, regulation or not, the evils are still committed.”…but think a bit. Has that stopped people from eating meat? No.
My argument as simple, if you cannot ban it, control it!

Oh, dear, I don’t think I got my point across, or it didn’t sink in. I probably should have stated that the issue is with the suffering that animals have to endure, with the endemic speciesism—a legacy of tradition–still pervading human cultures. After agreeing that evils are committed, even with controlling regulation, he immediately returns to complacency with a contradictory “control it” as a solution. At this point, he seems to have lost his reasoning powers.

Essentially, his comment is another whitewash, as much as the new law will be. I suspect his eyes were glazed over while writing it. The same for when alluding to PETA, which is what usually jumps in peoples’ minds, who know nothing else of the animal rights movement. For most people, it’s a kind of acronym for a world whose philosophy is only understood at a level equivalent to a bumper sticker slogan. No, I’m not affiliated with any organization in particular.

Another commenter was also moved to show his or her allegiance with the complacent Buffoon, saying my opinion was:

a bit too rude and harsh on you….I found your post very sensible. Obviously he is emotional and not rational like u.

Thanks for the compliment at the beginning. Emotional? Yes, it’s required to wake people up. Not rational? Make that one buffoon and three knucklehead clown commenters in total.

Rattling the Cage: Toward Legal Rights for Animals

Steven M. Wise

It’s all just common sense, really. People might get bogged down in the legal jargon and concepts in this book, and that is what disappointed me—not the text but the fact that it might have turned other readers off the important message. However, there’s no doubt this is the future. What this book advocates will happen. It’s just a matter of time, and it will extend to many other creatures, too.

It was a case of double take when I saw this image from a recent suicide attack in Afghanistan. You will see what I mean after reading the caption that went with it.

An Afghan police man stands guard near the damaged police vehicles at the site of a suicide attack on the western edge of Kandahar, south of Kabul, Afghanistan on Sunday, Feb. 17. 2008. A suicide bombing at an outdoor dog fighting competition killed 80 people and wounded dozens more Sunday, a governor said. It appeared to be the deadliest attack in Afghanistan since the fall of the Taliban in 2001.

OK, here’s what I have a problem with, well, besides people blowing each other up. First, the bomb went off where dog fighting was being held, an activity which in most civilized countries is banned, the last I heard. More than that, the police were at the event. In this picture are two damaged police vehicles, presumably damaged when the bomb went off. So, either they had just arrived before the bomb went off to arrest event participants, or they were at the dog fighting event because it is legally condoned. I’d say the latter is the case.

What a sad country.

I couldn’t resist noting an article I stumbled across that had me both despairing and chuckling at the same time. It relates to another report from earlier this year, as found here.

Animal cruelty-accused cites man’s ‘dominion’

By Vikki Campion
December 21, 2007 04:00am

A CANADIAN zookeeper who imprisoned a kangaroo in a tiny cage has drawn on the Bible to declare her own “dominion over animals” in court.

Shirley McElroy, owner of Ontario’s Lickety-Split Ranch and Zoo, outraged Australia when The Daily Telegraph exposed images of Tyson, a red kangaroo penned in a barren shed too small to jump in.

OK, for a start, I don’t know why Australians were so outraged when they apparently condone a huge roo-meat industry. Roos are shot in vast numbers, not just for pet meat but for supermarkets too, where you can find roo meat alongside beef and pork. If the shooter is good, perhaps it’s a better way to go for the roo than the torture of a life sacrificed to industrial agriculture prior to a trip to the slaughterhouse. But I digress.

In the onslaught of bad press that followed, McElroy temporarily closed her private, backyard zoo and Tyson has not been seen since.

McElroy faced court in London, Ontario yesterday charged with possession of native wildlife without a licence and faces a $CAN25,000 ($29,000) fine if convicted.

Sounds fair enough to me, except that I would have liked to see some jail time thrown in for good measure. Now, here is where despair is mixed with chuckling, a rolling of the eyes, a sigh.

In her defence she attempted to turn the dock into a pulpit.

Representing herself in court, McElroy read Genesis 1:26, which refers to humans ruling over all animals, from a paperback edition of The Bible.

Justice Helen Gale told McElroy: “This court is not a podium.”

After attempting to interrupt McElroy, Justice Gale left the court, telling the clerk she would return “when she’s finished”.

McElroy soldiered on, saying the court wanted her to give up her “God-given right”.

When Justice Gale returned, she told the court: “With the greatest respect to Ms McElroy, this is not the appropriate forum for scripture to be recited.”

What a moron. This was not part of McElroy’s strategy of building up to an insanity plea. No, she was not that smart. She was actually serious. I do applaud the Judge here, first by actually leaving the room! I found that hilarious. Then the judge’s expression “With the greatest respect to Ms McElroy” is icing on the cake, since we understand it to really mean “Enough of the excreta you retard.”

Outside, activists from Friends of Captive Animals held placards reading: “Where is Tyson?”, “What is Lickety-Split Zoo hiding?” and “Zoos should not be prisons.”

The group has offered a reward for information on the kangaroo’s condition.

Spokeswoman Vicki Van Linden said the group feared Tyson was dead.

“If he’s buried somewhere, if there are any remains, we think his life should count for something,” she said. “He certainly suffered and he has become a flag-bearer for many other animals in Ontario we know are suffering just as much.”

Lickety-Split keeps lions, other big cats, ostriches, primates and monkeys as well as native species.

Zoos in Canada only have regulations for native animals such as bears or coyotes. Keepers have no rules for exotic animals, including lions, tigers or kangaroos.

The World Society for the Protection of Animals and Zoocheck Canada this year found Lickety-Split was one of the nation’s worst private zoos.

Right there, you have it, where it says “no rules.” When no rules exist like this, as is the case all over the world, that’s when you get the ignorant and the greedy doing whatever they like. Christians have for centuries have been using ideology to justify the cruelty and exploitation of animals. And it is still continuing because there are not enough rules and because morons are still breeding. When you put an idiot like McElroy together with “no rules,” you are asking for abuse.

The youngest activist, nine-year-old George Evans, made an impassioned plea to McElroy: “I want the animals to have more room to move around, to have good food and a happy life.”

WSPA spokeswoman Melissa Tkachyk said the group would continue the crusade for rights laws for exotic animals.

“McElroy was brought to court for her manner with native animals and unfortunately it has nothing to do with Tyson’s well-being,” she said.

“We are working to ensure the animals of Australia are protected and treated fairly.

“Whether Tyson is alive or not, there are animals kept in similarly terrible conditions. We are going to keep up the crusade until their rights are protected.”

Thank goodness there are people like this out there, on the spot and getting some action. Thanks to their efforts, there is cause for hope, as reported here.

The McGuinty government announced Friday (Aug. 31) it would toughen Ontario’s animal protection laws, a move animal activists are calling an “historic commitment.”

. . .

In an Ontario Government press release, officials said the government recognizes the need to modernize the Ontario Society for the Protection of Cruelty to Animals Act to regulate premises such as roadside zoos, make cruelty to animals a provincial offence and ensure there are serious consequences for people who abuse animals.

Yes, “modernize” is what it’s about, moving on from the dark ages, working towards the civilization we have yet to achieve.

“At the moment our human world is based on the suffering and destruction of millions of non-humans. To perceive this and to do something to change it in personal and public ways is to undergo a change of perception akin to a religious conversion. Nothing can ever be seen in quite the same way again because once you have admitted the terror and pain of other species you will, unless you resist conversion, be always aware of the endless permutations of suffering that support our society.

Sir ARTHUR CONAN-DOYLE
English physician, author of Sherlock Holmes

* * *

J.M. Coetzee won the Nobel Prize for literature in 2003. This is an edited version of a speech he gave February 22, 2007, in Australia.

To any thinking person, it must be obvious there is something terribly wrong with relations between human beings and the animals they rely on for food. It must also be obvious that in the past 100 or 150 years, whatever is wrong has become wrong on a huge scale, as traditional animal husbandry has been turned into an industry using industrial methods of production.

There are many other ways in which our relationship with animals is wrong (to name two: the fur trade and experimentation on animals in laboratories), but the food industry, which turns living animals into what it euphemistically calls animal products and by-products, dwarfs all others in the number of individual animal lives it affects.

The vast majority of the public has an equivocal attitude to the industrial use of animals: they make use of the products of that industry, but are nevertheless a little sickened, a little queasy, when they think of what happens on factory farms and abattoirs. Therefore they arrange their lives in such a way that they need be reminded of farms and abattoirs as little as possible, and they do their best to ensure their children are kept in the dark too, because children have tender hearts and are easily moved.

The transformation of animals into production units dates back to the late 19th century, and since that time we have already had one warning on the grandest scale that there is something deeply, cosmically wrong with regarding and treating fellow beings as mere units of any kind.

This warning came so loud and clear that one would have thought it impossible to ignore. It came when, in the 20th century, a group of powerful and bloody-minded men in Germany hit on the idea of adapting the methods of the industrial stockyard, as pioneered and perfected in Chicago, to the slaughter – or what they preferred to call the processing – of human beings.

Of course we cried out in horror when we found out what they had been up to. What a terrible crime to treat human beings like cattle – if we had only known beforehand. But our cry should more accurately have been: what a terrible crime to treat human beings like units in an industrial process. And that cry should have had a postscript: what a terrible crime – come to think of it, a crime against nature – to treat any living being like a unit in an industrial process.

It would be a mistake to idealise traditional animal husbandry as the standard by which the animal products industry falls short. Traditional animal husbandry is brutal enough, just on a smaller scale. A better standard by which to judge both practices would be the simple standard of humanity: is this truly the best that humans are capable of?
The efforts of the animal rights movement – the broad movement that situates itself on the spectrum somewhere between the meliorism of the animal welfare bodies and the radicalism of animal liberation – are rightly directed at decent people who both know and don’t know that there is something going on that stinks to high heaven.

These are people who will say: “Yes, it’s terrible what lives brood sows live; it’s terrible what lives veal calves live,” but who will add, with a helpless shrug of the shoulders – “what can I do about it?”

The task of the movement is to offer such people imaginative but practical options for what to do next after they have been revolted by a glimpse of the lives factory animals live and the deaths they die. People need to see that there are alternatives to supporting the animal products industry.

These alternatives need not involve any sacrifice in health or nutrition, and there is no reason why these alternatives need be costly. Furthermore, what are commonly called sacrifices are not sacrifices at all. The only sacrifices in the whole picture, in fact, are being made by non-human animals.

In this respect, children provide the brightest hope. Children have tender hearts – that is to say children have hearts that have not yet been hardened by years of cruel and unnatural battering. Given half a chance, children see through the lies with which advertisers bombard them (the happy chooks that are transformed painlessly into succulent nuggets, the smiling moo-cow that donates to us the bounty of her milk). It takes but one glance into a slaughterhouse to turn a child into a lifelong vegetarian.

Factory farming is a new phenomenon – very new indeed in the history of animal husbandry. The good news is that after a couple of decades of what the businessmen behind it must have regarded as free and unlimited expansion, the industry has been forced onto the defensive.

The activities of animals-rights organisations have shifted the onus onto the industry to justify its practices, and because they are indefensible and unjustifiable except on the most narrow economic grounds (”Do you want to pay $1.50 more for a dozen eggs?”), the industry is battening down hatches and hoping the storm will blow itself out. Insofar as there was a public relations war, the industry has already lost that war.

A final note. The campaign of human beings for animal rights is curious in one respect: the creatures on whose behalf human beings are acting are unaware of what their benefactors are up to and, if they succeed, are unlikely to thank them. There is even a sense in which animals do not know what is wrong – they do certainly not know what is wrong in the same way that humans do.

Thus, however close the well-meaning benefactor may feel to animals, the animal rights campaign remains a human project from beginning to end.

We are all animals of evolution:

Australopithecines first walked upright: 3.5+ million years ago.

First appearance of Homo: about 2 million years ago.

First stone tools/weapons: about 2 million years ago.

First handaxes: about 1.6 million years ago.

First appearance of Homo sapiens: about 100,000 years ago.

First hafted weapons: 25-100,000 years ago.

First known migration by boat (Australia colonised): 50,000 years ago.

Sungir graves: 22,000+ years ago

First colonisation of America: 12,000 years ago (perhaps earlier)

Large mammals extinct: mostly by 10,000 years ago.

First known agriculture: around 10,000 years ago.

From: http://evolution-of-man.info/combined.htm

On Ethics and the New Animal Liberation Movement

PETER SINGER

This book provides a platform for the new animal liberation movement. A diverse group of people share this platform: university philosophers, a zoologist, a lawyer, militant activists who are ready to break the law to further their cause, and respected political lobbyists who are entirely at home in parliamentary offices. Their common ground is that they are all, in their very different ways, taking part in the struggle for animal liberation. This struggle is a new phenomenon. Its an expansion of our moral horizons beyond our own species and is thus a significant stage in the development of human ethics. The aim of this introduction is to show why the movement is so significant, first by contrasting it with earlier movements against cruelty for animals, and then by setting out the distinctive ethical stance which lies behind the new movement.

Although there were one or two nineteenth-century thinkers who asserted that animals have rights, the serious political movement for animal liberation is very young, a product of the 1970s. Its aims are quite distinct from the efforts of the more traditional organizations, like the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, to stop people from treating animals cruelly. Even these traditional concerns, however, are relatively recent when seen in the context of 3,000 years of Western civilization, as a brief glance at the historical background to the contemporary animal liberation movement will show.

Concern for animal suffering can be found in Hindu thought, and the Buddhist idea of compassion is a universal one, extending to animals as well as humans, but our Western traditions are very different. Our intellectual roots lie in Ancient Greece and in the Judeo- Christian tradition. Neither is kind to those not of our species.

In the conflict between rival schools of thought in Ancient Greece, it was the school of Aristotle that eventually became dominant. Aristotle held the view that nature is a hierarchy in which those with less reasoning ability exist for the sake of those with more reasoning ability. Thus plants, he said, exist for the sake of animals, and animals for the sake of man, to provide him with food and clothing. Indeed, Aristotle took his logic a step further- the barbarian tribes, which he considered obviously less rational than the Greeks, existed in order to serve as slaves to the more rational Greeks. He did not quite have the nerve to add that philosophers, being supremely rational, should be served by everyone else!

Nowadays we have rejected Aristotle’s idea that less rational human beings exist in order to serve more rational ones, but to some extent we still retain that attitude towards non-human animals. The social reformer Henry Salt tells a story in his autobiography, Seventy Years Among Savages (an account of a life lived entirely in England), of how, when he was a master at Eton, he first broached the topic of vegetarianism with a colleague, a distinguished science teacher. With some trepidation he awaited the verdict of the scientific mind on his new beliefs. It was: ‘But don’t you think that animals were sent to us for food?’ That response is not far from what Aristotle might have said. It is even closer to the other great intellectual tradition of the West — a tradition in which the following words from Genesis stand as a foundation for everything else:

And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have domination over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth. So God created man in his own image ….

And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth.

(In PETER SINGER (ed), In Defense of Animals, New York: Basil Blackwell, 1985, pp. 1-10.)

Here is a myth to make human beings feel their supremacy and their power. Man alone is made in the image of God. Man alone is given dominion over all the animals and told to subdue the earth. One may debate, as environmentally concerned Jews and Christians have done, whether this grant of dominion entitles human beings to rule as petty despots, doing as they please with the unfortunate subjects placed under their jurisdiction, or whether it was not rather a kind of stewardship, in which humans are responsible to their Lord for the proper care and use of what has been placed in their custody. One can point to one or two Christian figures, like John Chrysostom and Francis of Assisi, who have shown compassion and concern for non-human Creation. (Though even the stories about Francis are conflicting. There is one episode in which a disciple is said to have cut a trotter off a living pig in order to give it to a sick companion. According to the narrator, Francis rebuked the disciple – but for damaging the property of the pig owner, not for cruelty to the pig!) So far as the history of Western attitudes to animals is concerned, however, the ‘dominion’ versus ’stewardship’ debate and that over the true nature of the teachings of Francis are both beside the point. It is beyond dispute that mainstream Christianity, for its first 1,800 years, put non-human animals outside its sphere of concern. On this issue the key figures in early Christianity were unequivocal. Paul scornfully rejected the thought that God might care about the welfare of oxen, and the incident of the Gadarene swine, in which Jesus is described as sending devils into a herd of pigs and making them drown themselves in the sea, is explained by Augustine as having been intended to teach us that we have no duties towards animals. This interpretation was accepted by Thomas Aquinas, who stated that the only possible objection to cruelty to animals was that it might lead to cruelty to humans – according to Aquinas, there was nothing wrong in itself with making animals suffer. This became the official view of the Roman Catholic Church to such good — or bad — effect that as late as the middle of the nineteenth century Pope Pius IX refused permission for the founding of a Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals in Rome, on the grounds that to grant permission would imply that human beings have duties to the lower creatures.

Even in England, which has a reputation for being dotty about animals, the first efforts to obtain legal protection for members of other species were made only 180 years ago. They were greeted with derision. The Times was so dismissive of the idea that the suffering of animals ought to be prevented that it attacked proposed legislation that would stop the ’sport’ of bull- baiting. Said that august newspaper: ‘Whatever meddles with the private personal disposition of man’s time or property is tyranny.’ Animals, clearly, were just property.

That was in 1800, and that Bill was defeated. It took another twenty years to get the first anti- cruelty law on to the British statute books. That any consideration at all should be given to the interests of animals was a significant step beyond the idea that the boundary of our species is also the boundary of morality. Yet the step was a restricted one because it did not challenge our right to make whatever use we chose of other species. Only cruelty – causing pain when there was no reason for doing so but sheer sadism or callous indifference – was prohibited. The farmer who deprives his pigs of room to move does not offend against this concept of cruelty, for he is considered to be doing only what he thinks necessary to produce bacon. Similarly, the scientist who poisons a hundred rats in order to determine the lethal dose of some new flavouring agent for toothpaste is not regarded as cruel, merely as concerned to follow the accepted procedures for testing the safety of new products.

The nineteenth-century anti-cruelty movement was built on the assumption that the interests of non-human animals deserve protection only when serious human interests are not at stake. Animals remained very clearly ‘lower creatures’ whose interests must be sacrificed to our own in the event of conflict.

The significance of the new animal liberation movement is its challenge to this assumption. Taken in itself, say the animal liberationists, membership of the human species is not morally relevant. Other creatures on our planet also have interests. We have always assumed that we are justified in overriding their interests, but this bald assumption is simply species-selfishness. If we assert that to have rights one must be a member of the human race, and that is all there is to it, then what are we to say to the racist who contends that to have rights you have to be a member of the Caucasian race, and that is all there is to it? Conversely, once we agree that race is not, in itself, morally significant, how can species be? As Jeremy Bentham put it some 200 years ago:

The day may come when the rest of the animal creation may acquire those rights which never could have been withholden from them but by the hand of tyranny. The French have already discovered that the blackness of the skin is no reason why a human being should be abandoned without redress to the caprice of a tormentor. It may one day come to be recognized that the number of the legs, the villosity of the skin, or the termination of the os sacrum are reasons equally insufficient for abandoning a sensitive being to the same fate.

Someone might say: ‘It is not because we are members of the human species that we are justified in overriding the interests of other animals; it is because we are rational and they are not.’ Someone else might argue that it is because we are autonomous beings, or because we can use language, or because we are self-conscious, or because we have a sense of justice. All these contentions and more have been invoked to justify us in sacrificing the interests of other animals to our own.

One way of replying would be to consider whether non-human animals really do lack these allegedly important characteristics. The more we learn of some non-human animals, particularly chimpanzees but also many other species, the less able we are to defend the claim that we humans are unique because we are the only ones capable of reasoning, or of autonomous action or of the use of language, or because we possess a sense of justice. I shall not go into this reply here because it would take a long time and it would do nothing for the many species of animals who could not be said to meet whatever test was being proposed.

There is a much shorter rejoinder. Let us return to the passage I have quoted from Bentham, for he anticipated the objection. After dismissing the idea that number of legs, roughness of skin or fine details of bone formation should ‘trace the insuperable line’ between those who have moral standing and those who do not, Bentham goes on to ask what else might this boundary:

Is it the faculty of reason, or perhaps the faculty of discourse? But a full-grown horse or dog is beyond comparison a more rational, as well as a more conversable animal, than an infant of a day or a week or even a month, old. But suppose they were otherwise, what would it avail? The question is not, Can they reason? nor Can they talk? but, Can they suffer?

Bentham is clearly right. Whatever the test we propose as a means of separating human from non-human animals, it is plain that if all non-human animals are going to fail it, some humans will fail as well. Infants are neither rational nor autonomous. They do not use language and they do not possess a sense of justice. Are they therefore to be treated like non-human animals, to be fattened for the table, if we should fancy the taste of their flesh, or to be used to find out if some new shampoo will blister human eyeballs?

Ah, but infants, though not rational, autonomous or able to talk, have the potential to become adult humans — so the defender of human supremacy will reply to Bentham. The relevance of potential is another complicated argument that I shall avoid by the stratagem of focusing your attention on another class of humans who would fail the proposed test: those unfortunate enough to have been born with brain damage so severe that they will never be able to reason, or talk or do any of the other things that are often said to distinguish us from non-human animals. The fact that we do not use them as means to our ends indicates that we do not really see decisive moral significance in rationality, or autonomy, or language, or a sense of justice, or any of the other criteria said to distinguish us from other animals. Why do we lock up chimpanzees in appalling primate research centres and use them in experiments that range from the uncomfortable to the agonising and lethal, yet would never think of doing the same to a retarded human being at a much lower mental level? The only possible answer is that the chimpanzee, no matter how bright, is not human, while the retarded human, no matter how dull, is.

This is speciesism, pure and simple, and it is as indefensible as the most blatant racism. There is no ethical basis for elevating membership of one particular species into a morally crucial characteristic. From an ethical point of view, we all stand on an equal footing -whether we stand on two feet, or four, or none at all.

That is the crux of the philosophy of the animal liberation movement, but to forestall misunderstanding I had better say something immediately about this notion of equality.

It does not mean that animals have all the same rights as you and I have. Animal liberationists do not minimize the obvious differences between most members of our species and members of other species. The rights to vote, freedom of speech, freedom of worship — none of these can apply to other animals. Similarly, what harms humans may cause much less harm, or even no harm at all, to some animals. If I were to confine a herd of cows within the boundaries of the county of, say, Devon, I do not think I would be doing them any harm at all; if, on the other hand, I were to take a group of people and restrict them to the same county, I am sure many would protest that I had harmed them considerably, even if they were allowed to bring their families and friends, and notwithstanding the many undoubted attractions of that particular county. Humans have interests in mountain-climbing and skiing, in seeing the world and in sampling foreign cultures. Cows like lush pastures and shelter from harsh weather. Hence to deny humans the right to travel outside Devon would be to restrict their rights significantly; it would not be a significant restriction of the rights of cows.

Here is another example, more relevant to real problems about our treatment of animals. Suppose we decided to perform lethal scientific experiments on normal adult humans, kidnapped at random from public parks for this purpose. Soon every adult who entered a park would become fearful of being kidnapped. The resultant terror would be a form of suffering additional to whatever pain was involved in the experiments themselves. The same experiments carried out on non-human animals would cause less suffering overall, for the non- human animals would not have the same anticipatory dread. This does not mean, I hasten to add, that it is all right to experiment on animals as we please, but only that if the experiment is to be done at all, there is some reason, compatible with the equal consideration of interests, for preferring to use non-human animals rather than normal adult humans.

There is one point that needs to be added to this example. Nothing in it depends on the fact that normal adult humans are members of ~ our species. It is their capacity for knowledge of what may happen to them that is crucial. If they were not normal adults but severely brain- damaged humans – orphans perhaps, or children abandoned by their parents – then they would be in the same position as non-human animals at a similar mental level. If we use the argument I have put forward to justify experiments on non-human animals, we have to ask ourselves whether we are also prepared to allow similar experiments on human beings with a similar degree of awareness of what is happening to them. If we say that we will perform an experiment on monkeys but not on brain-damaged human orphans, we are giving preference to the humans just because they are members of our own species, which is a violation of the principle of equal consideration of interests.

In the example I have just given the superior mental powers of normal adult humans would make them suffer more. It is important to recognize that in other circumstances the non- human animal may suffer more because it cannot understand what is happening. If we capture a wild animal, intending to release it later, it may not be able to distinguish our relatively benign intentions from a threat to its life: general terror may be all it experiences.

The moral significances of taking life is more complex still. There is furious controversy about the circumstances in which it is legitimate to kill human beings, so it is no wonder that it should be difficult to decide whether non-human animals have any right to life. Here I would say, once again, that species in itself cannot make a difference. If it is wrong to take the life of a severely brain-damaged abandoned human infant, it must be equally wrong to take the life of a dog or a pig at a comparable mental level. On the other hand, perhaps it is not wrong to take the life of a brain-damaged human infant – after all, many people think such infants should be allowed to die, and an infant who is ‘allowed to die’ ends up just as dead as one that is killed. Indeed, one could argue that our readiness to put a hopelessly ill non-human animal out of its misery is the one and only respect in which we treat animals better than we treat people.

The influence of the Judeo-Christian insistence on the God-like nature of human beings is nowhere more apparent than in the standard Western doctrine of the sanctity of human life: a doctrine that puts the life of the most hopelessly and irreparably brain damaged human being — of the kind whose level of awareness is not underestimated by the term ‘human vegetable’ – above the life of a chimpanzee. The sole reason for this strange priority is, of course, the fact that the chimpanzee is not a member of our species, and the human vegetable is biologically human. This doctrine is now starting to be eroded by the acceptance of abortion, which is the killing of a being that is indisputably a member of the human species, and by the questioning of the value of applying all the power of modern medical technology to saving human life in all cases.

I think we will emerge from the present decade with a significantly different attitude towards the sanctity of human life, an attitude which considers the quality of the life at stake rather than the simple matter of whether the life is or is not that of a member of the species Homo sapiens. Once this happens, we shall be ready to take a much broader view of the wrongness of killing, one in which the capacities of the being in question will play a central role. Such a view will not discriminate on the basis of species alone but will still draw a distinction between the seriousness of killing beings with the mental capacities of normal human adults and killing beings who do not possess, and never have possessed, these mental capacities. It is not a bias in favour of our own species that leads us to think that there is greater moral significance in taking the life of a normal human than there is in taking the life of, for example, a fish. To give just one reason for this distinction, a normal human has hopes and plans for the future: to take the life of a normal human is therefore to cut off these plans and to prevent them from ever being fulfilled. Fish, I expect, do not have as clear a conception of themselves as beings with a past and a future. Consequently, to kill a fish is not to prevent the fulfillment of any plans, or at least not of any long-range future plans. This does not, I stress, mean that it is all right, or morally trivial, to kill fish. If fish are capable of enjoying their lives, as I believe they are, we do better when we let them continue to live than when we needlessly end their lives, though when we cut short the life of a fish, we are not doing something as bad as when we needlessly end the life of a normal human adult.

The animal liberation movement, therefore, is not saying that all lives are of equal worth or that all interests of humans and other animals are to be given equal weight, no matter what those interests may be. It is saying that where animals and humans have similar interests – we might take the interest in avoiding physical pain as an example, for it is an interest that humans clearly share with other animals — those interests are to be counted equally, with no automatic discount just because one of the beings is not human. A simple point, no doubt, but nevertheless part of a far-reaching ethical revolution.

This revolution is the culmination of a long line of ethical development. I cannot do better than quote the words of that splendid nineteenth century historian of ideas, W. E. H. Lecky. In his History of European Morals Lecky wrote: ‘At one time the benevolent affections embrace merely the family, soon the circle expanding includes first a class, then a nation, then a coalition of nations, then all humanity, and finally, its influence is felt in the dealings of man with the animal world.’ Lecky anticipated what the animal liberationists are now saying. In an earlier stage of our development most human groups held to a tribal ethic. Members of the tribe were protected, but people of other tribes could be robbed or killed as one pleased.

Gradually the circle of protection expanded, but as recently as 150 years ago we did not include blacks. So African human beings could be captured, shipped to America and sold. In Australia white settlers regarded Aborigines as a pest and hunted them down, much as kangaroos are hunted down today. Just as we have progressed beyond the blatantly racist ethic of the era of slavery and colonialism, so we must now progress beyond the speciesist ethic of the era of factory farming, of the use of animals as mere research tools, of whaling, seal hunting, kangaroo slaughter and the destruction of wilderness. We must take the final step in expanding the circle of ethics. The essays which follow show how this can be done, both in theory and in practice.

Further to the argument against dominion over animals. . .

Just below you will see a depressing set of statistics that has left me a bit dumbfounded. Can it really be possible, I mean, really, that huge numbers of people on this planet are stuck in a kind of mental time warp, where they insist on uninformed thinking patterns that began to seem silly even 300 years ago? With all the information people have at their disposal, how can this result be possible. And what does this hierarchy of shame tell us? Are we to assume that education is seriously lacking in the countries at the bottom of the list? Or are we to assume that the humans there possess lower intelligence?

Need I have asked that last question when the US is at the bottom of the list? These statics came from an article in New Scientist on a survey conducted by Jon Miller at Michigan State University. And I quote:

Miller’s report makes for grim reading for adherents of evolutionary theory. Even though the average American has more years of education than when Miller began his surveys 20 years ago, the percentage of people in the country who accept the idea of evolution has declined from 45 in 1985 to 40 in 2005 (Science, vol 313, p 765). That’s despite a series of widely publicised advances in genetics, including genetic sequencing, which shows strong overlap of the human genome with those of chimpanzees and mice. “We don’t seem to be going in the right direction,” Miller says.

OK, so it’s not for lack of education, or to clarify, not for lack of the length of time people spend allegedly receiving an education.

There is some cause for hope. Team member Eugenie Scott of the National Center for Science Education in Oakland, California, finds solace in the finding that the percentage of adults overtly rejecting evolution has dropped from 48 to 39 in the same time. Meanwhile the fraction of Americans unsure about evolution has soared, from 7 per cent in 1985 to 21 per cent last year. “That is a group of people that can be reached,” says Scott.

For “group of people” read mindless zombies.

The main opposition to evolution comes from fundamentalist Christians, who are much more abundant in the US than in Europe. While Catholics, European Protestants and so-called mainstream US Protestants consider the biblical account of creation as a metaphor, fundamentalists take the Bible literally, leading them to believe that the Earth and humans were created only 6000 years ago.

Behold, the culprits exposed! So, my second proposition, lower intelligence, was on the money. At the top of the hierarchy of the Great Chain of Dummies sit fundamentalists, dragging their country down in “signs of intelligence” charts. What is it about the US that makes fundamentalist Christians more abundant there? Is it the legacy of a Puritan past and the laughable belief that their country has a manifest destiny? Probably, but how do we sort out this debacle? Education, as always, is the solution–only, since it has increased over the years, it needs to be of a higher quality, perhaps of the sort Icelanders enjoy.

Miller thinks more genetics should be on the syllabus to reinforce the idea of evolution. American adults may be harder to reach: nearly two-thirds don’t agree that more than half of human genes are common to chimpanzees. How would these people respond when told that humans and chimps share 99 per cent of their genes?

Well, no, that isn’t the main issue here. It’s how are chimps going to respond when they are told they share 99 per cent of their genes with fundamentalists. I guess they’ll be as depressed as I am, since I share genes with those religious morons, too.