Seoulscapade

You’d be a fool to expect that women, society’s traditional nurturers, can be more trustworthy to do the right thing by other creatures sharing the planet. You’d be a fool to think they have a sense of moral propriety inherently superior to men. Some of them are just evil bitches, and you’d be a fool not to accept the fact. The following profile is about one of those.

I refer to the former Deputy Assistant Secretary for Fish and Wildlife and Parks in the US, Julie MacDonald, who resigned April 30, 2007, in the midst of a scandle and in disgrace. So what happened, what kind of things did she get up to?

Broadly, “Ms. MacDonald has betrayed the mission she swore to uphold,” as Wyden put it, a member of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee. It was a betrayal guided by self-serving powermongering and evil.

“It looks like another Bush administration official was protecting her own bottom line instead of protecting the public interest,” said George Miller, a senior member and former chairman of the Natural Resources Committee and a long-time proponent of the Endangered Species Act and Bay-Delta fish and wildlife issues.

THE WITCH AND THE WILDLIFE

A Department of the Interior Inspector General’s investigation found that she bullied U.S. Fish and Wildlife scientists, violated federal ethics rules by leaking sensitive government documents to friends, industry lobbyists and political allies, and illegally overturning scientific recommendations to stop protections for endangered species.

MacDonald repeatedly leaked internal Fish and Wildlife Service documents to business groups who opposed the Service and its environmental decision making in court. Some of these internal documents later surfaced as evidence in lawsuits filed against the Service.

She sent draft studies and preliminary discussions about application of the Endangered Species Act to the California Farm Bureau Federation and the Pacific Legal Foundation; to two people with e-mail addresses at Chevron; and to the father of an online role-playing game partner, who had no legitimate reason for access to internal Interior Department records.

An engineer by training, MacDonald had no scientific background. But she routinely phoned biologists to try to weaken protection for wildlife and force scientists to alter their findings about endangered species.

She was heavily involved with editing, commenting on, and reshaping the Endangered Species Program’s scientific reports from the field. She interfered with field reports such as the sage grouse risk analysis, a critical habitat decision for endangered bull trout, a designation of California’s northern and southern tiger salamanders as distinct populations, a decision about California’s delta smelt, and an analysis of California’s vernal pools as critical habitat.

In a number of e-mails and comments on the bull trout critical habitat decision, an agent of the IG’s office wrote, “MacDonald forced a reduction in critical habitat miles in the Klamath River basin from 296 to 42 miles.”

A former Endangered Species Director said that, “MacDonald did not want to accept petitions to list species as endangered, and she did not want to designate critical habitats.”

“In one case, she demanded that the determined nesting range of the Southwest Willow Flycatcher be shrunk from a 2.1 mile radius to 1.8 miles, so that it would not cross into the state of California, where her husband’s family owned a ranch,” said Wyden.

Which brings us to the conflict of interest issue. She improperly removed a California fish from a list of threatened species in order to protect her own financial interests.

She was actively involved in removing the Sacramento splittail fish from the federal threatened and endangered species list at the same time that she was profiting from her ownership of a farm that lies within the habitat area of the threatened fish, according to an investigative report published Sunday by the “Contra Costa Times” newspaper.

MacDonald’s financial disclosure statement shows that she earns as much as $1 million per year from her ownership of the 80 acre active farm in Dixon, California.

This only scratches the surface of the travesties she committed.

ILLEGAL ACTIONS COME TO AN END

Final she was stopped. “Julie MacDonald’s reign of terror over the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is finally over,” said Kieran Suckling, policy director of the Center for Biological Diversity, a nonprofit conservation group based in Tucson, Arizona. “Endangered species and scientists everywhere are breathing a sigh of relief.”

To redress the evils McDonald committed, federal biologists are going to reconsider several decisions affecting endangered animals that were improperly influenced by her. They will review and probably overturn eight decisions on wildlife and land-use issues. Among the decisions that could be reversed is the determination last year to slash 90 percent of the proposed critical habitat for an imperiled frog in California. In the East Bay, 99 percent of the proposed critical habitat for California red-legged frogs was eliminated.

But some conservationists say the scope of the review of too narrow.

“Although we are glad these species will receive consideration for additional protection, the list of decisions to be reconsidered is outrageously incomplete and appears to be a token effort designed for damage control and cover up, rather than an attempt to address the problem,” said the Center for Biological Diversity, CBD.

“Fish and Wildlife’s reconsideration of eight decisions tainted by former assistant secretary Julie MacDonald is a day late and a dollar short,” said CBD conservation biologist Noah Greenwald.

“Despite no scientific training, MacDonald interfered in dozens of scientific decisions concerning endangered species – only a full and transparent accounting of all the decisions tainted by MacDonald’s malignant influence can undue the damage she has done,” Greenwald said.

Greenwald says the list fails to include decisions to not list the Mexican garter snake, to potentially delist the marbled murrelet, and to sharply reduce critical habitat for the bull trout, even though regional directors of the Fish and Wildlife Service specifically requested that these decisions be reconsidered because of MacDonald’s influence.

The list also fails to include reconsideration of critical habitat for a fish called the Sacramento splittail, even though a story by the “Contra Costa Times” newspaper revealed that MacDonald may have illegally limited designation of its habitat to avoid an 80 acre farm she owns in Dixon, California.

“We welcome Julie MacDonald’s resignation,” said UCS Scientific Integrity Program Director Francesca Grifo, “but she represents a much larger problem of widespread political interference at federal agencies.”

“The real culprit here is not a renegade political appointee.” Grifo said. “The real culprit is a process where decisions are made behind closed doors.”

REDNECK POLITICS OVER SCIENCE

MacDonald’s actions sparked an outcry among agency biologists and environmental advocates and led to a series of hearings in Congress on whether the Bush administration was politicizing science.

Rep. Nick Rahall, chairman of the House Natural Resources Committee, praised the Interior Department for “stepping up to the plate to begin addressing the ‘politics trumps science’ ploy endemic throughout this [Bush] administration.” His committee held a hearing on MacDonald’s actions shortly after her resignation was announced. Mr. Rahall added, “What we have learned to date raises concerns about political tinkering with science that has affected many endangered-species-related decisions — and goodness knows what else — that deserve further scrutiny.”

The conflict between science and political ideology has been a recurrent theme in Washington in recent years, with complaints arising from inside and outside the administration about decisions on oil exploration, timber rights, global warming and public health. Just last week, the former surgeon general Richard H. Carmona said top Bush administration officials had repeatedly tried to water down or suppress important public health reports for political considerations.

“But MacDonald was the administration’s attack dog, not its general,” Suckling said. “The contempt for science and law that she came to symbolize goes much deeper than a single Department of Interior employee.”

“It’s a travesty that a high-level political appointee with no training in biology is rewriting the conclusions of U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service scientists,” said Melissa Waage, legislative director for the Center for Biological Diversity. “The Bush administration has an unwritten policy to systematically deny protection to imperiled wildlife, dooming them to extinction.”

Thank goodness there are people out there that are combating such evil bitches. The problem is that people like that, who make life a little bit more like hell on Earth for living creatures, are everywhere in our midsts and in the corridors of power. What a shame they can only picked off one by one. What a shame they are not an endangered species.

Sources:

http://www.philly.com/philly/wires/ap/news/nation/washington/cabinet/8636542.html
http://www.ens-newswire.com/ens/jul2007/2007-07-20-04.asp
http://www.ens-newswire.com/ens/mar2007/2007-03-29-09.asp#anchor1
http://www.ens-newswire.com/ens/may2007/2007-05-01-03.asp http://www.ens-newswire.com/ens/may2007/2007-05-21-06.asp
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/21/washington/21interior.html?ref=us
http://www.contracostatimes.com/news/ci_6432056

For more, see this:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julie_MacDonald

“. . . not to know what has been transacted in former times is to continue always a child.”
Samuel Johnson

The opening of the Creation Museum in Petersburg, Kentucky, represents yet another dubious addition to Christianity’s long history of misinformation. It’s more like a kiddies fantasy fun park than a place of serious scholarly record, although you can be sure many of its visitors are not the kid of people who can tell the difference. It looks second rate and highly artificial; nothing can hide the cheapness of a lie to people who know a lie when they see it.

To give credit where credit is due, I commend the way designers avoided showing Adam’s and Eve’s genitals by immersing them up to their navels in pond water. I trust there were no leeches in paradise. There were dinosaurs, though; the museum has lots of dinosaurs, as if their existence were an inconvenient sticking point in theology, as if it were compensating overmuch for their biblical absence. Dinosaurs even survived Noah’s flood, the museum will have you know, because they were right there on Noah’s Ark with all of God’s other creatures.

From The birthplace of the Christian resistance
Anne Marie Owens, National Post
Published: Saturday, June 02, 2007

Beyond the gates, thousands of believers were on hand for the opening of the grand, 5,600- square-metre museum built entirely around a literal and faithful interpretation of the biblical version of Earth’s creation, which holds that it all occurred within the course of seven days; that major geological formations such as the Grand Canyon were a result of the Great Flood that set Noah’s Ark afloat; that humans descended from Adam and Eve and not apes; and that dinosaurs co-existed with humans when the Earth was formed, less than 10,000 years ago, not the 4.5 billion years that science generally contends.”In terms of science, we should be laughing,” says Professor Cooper, who teaches biology at the University of Kentucky and, on this day, has joined a haphazard bunch of protesters scattered along the edge of the country road leading to the museum.”But if parents start bringing their children here, and they get affirmation as if this is the science behind their beliefs, they’ll grow up believing it ? By the time they come to us, we will have to deactivate everything they’ve been taught as science. “It’s already happening.”Indeed it is. One of those believers on the other side of the gates on this day is Jenny Pafford, a 20-year-old senior studying nuclear medicine technology in Nashville who has been waiting for this museum to open for years — even sending in sporadic donations to speed its construction — and who spends much of her time trying to disabuse her scientific colleagues of their notions around the age of the Earth, human descendance from apes and the like.She is wearing a T-shirt that proclaims on its front, “The Earth is 10,000 Years Old,” and on the back, below a picture of an ape, “And This is Not My Great-Great Grandmother.”"I consider myself a creation scientist,” says the fresh-faced Ms. Pafford, who is touring the museum, and holding court on the nature of how she reconciles faith and science, while her parents look on proudly.

She has just finished having her picture taken in front of the display in the museum’s entranceway, an intentional, stopin- your-tracks scene showing a life-like child cavorting in lush greenery with dinosaurs. It is but a prelude to the showstopper around the corner, which displays Adam and Eve in a Garden of Eden abundant with dinosaurs.

Creationism for Dummies

This, quite clearly, is no average museum of natural history. This is a site of resistance in the ongoing, and surprisingly intense, fight over evolution and creationism in America.
“I don’t know if it’s going to make any more people believe just because they’ve come,” says Ms. Pafford, “but the people who believe often feel as if they can’t make a stand because they don’t have the information — this gives them the information to make their stand ? What they’ve done here is they’ve filled the void in providing scientific information for creation.”This is the one point that she and Prof. Cooper agree upon, that the Creation Museum fills some kind of knowledge gap. From Prof. Cooper’s perspective, however, the gap being filled is a troubling educational one, and in particular, a lag in scientific literacy, which he argues allows these unproven theories to take hold: “If the quality of teaching, of schools, is already getting lower in quality, that will form a vacuum, and the vacuum will be filled with this nonsense.”He says Kentucky is fertile ground for such controversial theories, which gain currency here because educational levels are among the lowest in the country, science knowledge among the worst, and religious groups like the one behind this museum — Answers in Genesis –hold a great deal of sway.Prof. Cooper did his postdoctoral work a decade before coming here at the University of Toronto, and he says a museum such as this one — which cost US$27-million to build, drew 5,000 people on its first day, and had its animatronic displays and special-effects shows overseen by a Disney designer — is almost unthinkable in Canada.

Literal Interpretation of the Bible

Everything about this place is an overt testament to this literal reading of the Bible. “Prepare to believe,” says the slogan at the entranceway. The Six Days of Creation Theatre spells out the daily countdown of the Earth’s origin; the Ark Construction Site room is a wood-panelled replica detailing what it claims are the exact measurements of Noah’s vessel; the Special Effects Theatre delivers sprays of water and quaking chairs as it spells out the story. There are fossils, explained not by the passage of time, but by the effects of a weather change as sudden and intense as in the Great Flood; ditto for the Grand Canyon, according to detailed charts explaining its formation. . . .There is a comparison of family trees, with one set out under “Human Reason” and the other according to “God’s Word:” One shows the first ape about 20 million years ago, branching up to various apes, and over to the famous Lucy, believed to be the bridge to humans; the other shows God making “the beast of the earth after its kind,” with apes branching up to apes, including Lucy, and, on a separate tree, “man created in God’s image.”During a pause to take it all in, a mother taps her young son on the top of his head and tells him to look at the ape in the picture. “Does that resemble you, Luke?” she says playfully, as if such a notion is all nonsense.

Clash at the Center of Ignorance

The vision behind this is Ken Ham, an Australian who moved to the U.S. two decades ago, founded his mission group, and ever since has been proselytizing that the true story of the Earth’s creation lies in the Book of Genesis.His aim with the Creation Museum, about 13 years in the making, is multi-pronged: to reach non-Christians with the Bible’s message; and to equip Christian families with the answers they need to explain creation science when their children come home from school asking about evolution, the advanced age of the Earth’s geological rock formation, and so on.He was originally fighting to have the museum set up near Great Big Bone Lick State Park, not far from here, where early nomadic humans hunted and co-existed with giant woolly mammoths and mastodons. Such proximity would have made an easier sell of his whole humans-coexisted-with-dinosaurs message.Rev. Mendle Adams, a United Church pastor from nearby Cincinnati, was among those who drove the group from that site, and is here on the museum’s opening day to show his displeasure.Back then, he recalls, they described themselves as an operation so small that all their materials fit into a single bucket. These days, however, Answers in Genesis is a huge radio, television and publishing powerhouse, and the museum gift shop — with its US$39.99 T-shirts, its US$59.99 Pilgrim’s Progress hardcovers, its shelves filled with DVDs and specialized home-schooling materials — abounds with evidence of a vibrant commercial operation.”What makes this dangerous,” says Rev. Adams, “is that this doesn’t just stay in this one spot. People expect this to be taught in the schools, but there’s nothing scientific about it at all. I think it’s important for people like me to say, ‘You can be religious, and not believe this stuff.’ “Another protester nearby has a sign that captures the sentiment: “Creation Museum: Bad Science. Worse Religion.”

From In the Creation Museum, it’s all by the Book
San Francisco Chronicle Laughing at Kiddy Science

The text below the display case says scientists are “puzzled” by the varieties of finches. “The Bible provides the explanation,” the text continues. “In the beginning of time, six thousand years ago, God created every kind of bird, including the finch kind, and He gave them the ability to ‘multiply on the Earth.’ “. . .Because history began only 6,000 years ago, they argue, dinosaurs discovered in the fossil record must have coexisted with humans. In the diorama that greets museum visitors, models of baby T-rexes cavort among animatronic children clad in buckskin.Dinosaurs, in fact, are all over the Creation Museum: Visitors can plunk down $29.99 for a plastic apatosaurus in the gift shop. Their kids will be able to saddle up on the back of a model triceratops by the coffee bar.”Kids are fascinated by them,” said Ken Ham, president of Answers in Genesis, who says the creatures have too long been used as propaganda for the evolutionist cause.”We like to say, ‘You’ve captured them for evolution, and we’re going to take them back,’ ” Ham said.The museum, with its flat-screen TVs, coffee bar and special-effects theater, is an attempt to go mainstream with an idea that has been widely discredited by modern science. And that is a concern for defenders of evolutionary theory. Campaign to Defend the Constitution, a project of the Tides Center that advocates science education and the separation of church and state, recently compared the museum to cigarette ads focusing on the young.

“This is to science what Joe Camel was to health — a crass marketing ploy that cynically preys on the impressionable minds of children,” campaign co-director Clark Stevens said in a statement.

Ham, a former Australian schoolteacher who founded his ministry in 1979, said he simply wants people to “think about the origins issue” in a new way.

“You have secular museums in every major city that treat evolution as fact, and public schools around this nation treating evolution as fact, and they’re worried about one Creation Museum?

“If evolution is so obvious,” he said with a smile, “why are they so worried?”
(I’ll take a stab at that one: because ignorance breeds ignorance?)

. . . scientists such as Lawrence Krauss laugh out loud.

“. . .remarkable,” said Krauss, a physicist and astronomer at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland. “Any child knows that when they make up a story, and unfortunately make up the facts, they have to make up more and more excuses to justify those facts.”

From Inside the Creation Museum
Salon NewsThe World According to Ham

At the ribbon cutting, Ken Ham told the enthusiastic crowd that the Creation Museum will … “show that belief in every word of the Bible can be defended by modern science.”. . .As Ham later tells me, the conclusions of modern science are not to be trusted, as they are biased by the fickle reasoning of man and a modern antagonism toward faith. On the other hand, he says, the Book of Genesis is true “from the first word to the last.”The museum is situated in . . . an area chosen in large part because it’s within a one-day drive for two-thirds of the country or 200 million Americans. Recent polls show that 40 percent of all Americans would feel at home with the views put forth in the Creation Museum. Only about an equal percentage accept the underlying message of the country’s mainstream science museums. Only 39 percent answer yes to the question, “Do you believe that human beings as we know them developed from earlier species of animals?”The museum’s 49 acres of carefully landscaped grounds are encircled by a tall metal fence. Visitors tempted to enter without paying will be discouraged by armed guards in black state-trooper-like uniforms and attack dogs. On Monday, just outside the fence, a group of 50 die-hard atheists and skeptics are gathered in the light rain under a “Rally for Reason” banner. Overhead, a small airplane pulls a sign that says, “Thou Shalt Not Lie.” Edwin Kagin, national legal director for American Atheists, explains that as far as he’s concerned, AIG “can teach that things fall up if they want. But we want to make it clear that this nonsense is not accepted by those who do not share its fundamentalist religious views. They are trying to drag us back to the Dark Ages.”Among the damp roadside protesters is Lawrence Krauss, author and physics professor at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, and a member of the advisory board of Defcon: Campaign to Defend the Constitution, the group that paid for the airplane tugging around the Seventh Commandment. Krauss calls the museum “anti-science” and says it reflects an erosion of American science education, posing “a threat to American kids already struggling just to get the basic concept of what science is and how it works.”. . .Mark Looy, co-founder of Answers in Genesis, is walking me through the museum. He explains that the great flood is responsible for the fossil record. Plants and animals are distributed in different strata based not on the time of their formation, but on where the flood waters moved them before receding. Those areas where no thorns or other defensive or hostile plants are found, he explains, are pre-flood forms.

Later Ham tells me that his skeptics, who cling to the “millions of years” theory, are wrong about when dinosaurs stalked the Earth. He cites a recent discovery of intact blood vessels in some T. rex tissue, suggesting that the finds are only thousands of years old, not 65 million, as paleontologists say. “They will try to come up with an explanation to keep the fossils old,” says Ham, “but we don’t need to. The explanation of their age is already right there in the Bible.”

For generations, paleontologists have shown that dinosaurs and humans never trod the Earth at the same time, that in fact with the exception of birds (modern-day dinosaurs), they never got within 60 million years of each other on the timeline of natural history. Not so, says Looy. “They all had to exist at the same time because they were all made on the same day. There may not be any fossil evidence showing dinosaurs and people in the same place at the same time. But it is clearly written that they were alive at the same time.”

In the Garden of Eden in Genesis, says Ham, when everything was still perfect, animals weren’t predators or prey, so the museum’s designer, Patrick Marsh, is able to crowd grizzly bears, wildcats, zebras, kangaroos, an iguanodon and several other dinosaurs into the same little chunk of primeval Eden. After the fall, such a scene would result in a bloody mess.

. . .

The Garden of Eden presents a series of scenes down a “trail of life.” In the first, a bearded, dark-haired Adam beckons to a mountain lion with one outstretched arm, while the other is wrapped around a little lamb. Smaller animals appear drawn to Adam, who is perhaps naming them, God’s first assignment for him. A bit farther along we’re introduced to Eve, looking like a great big brown Barbie and staring intently into Adam’s eyes. Adam and Eve are naked, and Maggie and Tom Thorne, a pair of Christians visiting from Michigan, are smiling at the scene. They agree it seems a little unfair for God to expect two such well-designed specimens not to get around to sinning pretty quickly. A few yards further we see Adam and Eve again, this time standing in a pool of water, their genitals coyly obscured by lily pads. Now they definitely appear to be grappling with the chemistry that will get them in big trouble.

An oversize cobra-like snake makes an appearance, and before you know it, Eve is holding grape-size, blood-colored fruits in her outstretched hand, offering knowledge of good and evil to a flummoxed-looking Adam. “We’re not sure what kind of fruit it was, but we do know it wasn’t an apple,” says Looy, perhaps to demonstrate the kind of questions the several Ph.D. researchers at the museum are now toiling over in the labs behind the walls of the exhibition space.

In the next scene, after the fall from grace, Adam and Eve, looking far less happy than before, are standing next to two lambs they have slaughtered on a sacrificial stone table. The sacrifice has a practical value — the original couple are now wearing lambskin suits and the lambs are skinless — and a spiritual one; the lambs are sacrificed, a visitor explains to me, in partial payment for the debt incurred by Adam and Eve for eating the fruit of knowledge. I tell the visitor it seems unfair for the lamb to pay for their mistake. “Well, it wasn’t enough,” he says. “God had to send his only Son to pay the ultimate price for their sin.” When I tell him that sounds kind of extreme, he looks at me and shakes his head slowly a couple of times before moving on.

Inside the Garden of Eden, Nancy Senai, who is visiting from Lansing, Mich., tells me, “It feels pretty nice to have something that is for God and about God, instead of all the evolution in other places.” I ask her if she thinks the history presented here is true. “God said it clearly, and I believe it the way he said it,” she says. “Everything else is uncertain.”

The great flood, which washed away all life on earth, is the key to understand the Catastrophe exhibit and the museum’s version of natural history. After Adam and Eve’s original sin, God told Noah to build an ark. He sent him two of every kind of land animal to repopulate the earth. Visitors to the museum walk among robotic representations of Noah and his building crew as they construct a supposedly full-scale section of the boat. After Noah has invited his sinning neighbors onto the ark and warned them of the coming flood, they mock him or are dissuaded from heeding his advice by the small pressures of daily life. The door slides shut and they are left behind to drown in the 40-day deluge that formed everything we see on Earth today, from Mt. Everest to Death Valley.

In Ham’s view, the great flood explains not only where scientists find fossils today but also the topography of the modern world. The Grand Canyon, he informs me, was made in a matter of days or weeks as the waters of the flood rushed away and the land was reclaimed. In the exhibit, you walk through a winding canyonlike corridor with spinning, dizzying lights into a wide-open room with videos, exhibits and diagrams explaining the hydrology of instant canyon-making. Ham says that instant canyon-making is based on the fact that volcanoes, such as Mount St. Helens, created reservoirs of water for a time in their altered topography. When those reservoirs breached, deep grooves were cut by the flowing water, leading to the fast formation of canyons.

After the flood, Noah’s descendants multiply again on Earth, but not quickly or broadly enough to satisfy God, who then introduces a slew of new languages to drive people apart, resulting in their dispersal around the globe. The ensuing C-for-Confusion theme is represented through a gritty and menacing back alley postered with newspaper headlines about the rise in abortion, drug use, homosexuality and teen suicide.

The entire exhibit, in fact, is awfully grim. A montage slide show of fetuses, starving kids, swastikas, tourniquet-bound arms ready for the needle bombard the wall in a room with a soundtrack of blaring sirens, boots marching in unison, and crying kids. In the middle of this urban mess is a big wrecking ball with the words “Millions of Years” carved into it. Ham blames the notion that the Earth is quite a bit older than the Bible suggests for just about all the world’s problems. Evolution, which requires large amounts of time for small changes to accumulate into larger ones, makes it far too easy for people not to believe the Bible, he says. And that loss of belief “is at the root of modern evil.”

Inside the Confusion exhibit, I strike up a conversation with Tim Shaw, a high school student visiting from Florida. “I don’t care how long it took to make the Grand Canyon,” he tells me. “It’s not how old it is that matters to me. What matters is being right with God. Darwin’s theory has no God. It can’t be right. I don’t know if this story is truer than Darwin’s theory, but I do know it’s better.”

* * *

Thanks kid—by example, you help to show exactly what I’m trying warn everyone about.

(My apologies for some of the pixelated photographs that follow. I would most certainly have shown the uncensored versions if I could have obtained them.)

A primitive mentality operates behind the idea of seeking out scapegoats as objects of sin. It is a delusional action that goes back to the days before science and rationality. Yet even with science and rationality, the “scapegoat” impulse has remained, disguised in sophisticated belief systems and cloaked in ceremonial practices.

For example, the myth of Christ’s atonement came from the old tradition of animal sacrificing. As the Old Testament explains, a person could transfer sins and then be forgiven for them through the offering and the pouring out of the blood of, for instance, an “unblemished” lamb (cf. Lev 4:32). Later, Christ took on the role, but initially an animal was used a kind of ritual substitution object.

Thus, the animal takes on a meaning significant only to a select group of humans partaking in a collective delusion. The animal’s individuality is all but lost, and it regrettably receives no benefit, even though it is the one sacrificing everything. We can be as sure of that animal’s innocence as of its complete lack of comprehension of the moronic farce going on around it.

Unfortunately, such barbaric practices did not end some 2000 or 3000 years ago. They are still performed in Korea, a land that has modernized so quickly that the minds of some people do not seem to have advanced beyond a kind of backward and simple peasant ignorance.

But the people who attended this protest rally are more than just primitive, backward and uneducated: they are also evil and demonic. At least Christianity, despite its primitive beginnings, has become synonymous with a message of goodness and compassion. We do not see anything of that nature in the incident pictured here. We can safely assume therefore that Christians were not present at this satanic ritual.

No animal deserves to suffer and die like this.

This two-month-old pig was ripped apart with a knife and was then disemboweled at a rally attended by about 1,500 protesters in Icheon. It was a protest about a US military facility (or perhaps only an office) being relocated to the area. The mayor of Icheon was there, by the way, along with other officials, all of whom did nothing to stop the evil ritual.

Well, I guess I expected too much from a country that boasts 5000 years of culture and a miraculous modernization. Nor should I be surprised if some of its people insist on barbaric rather then cultured behavior, given that it happens wherever you find humans. But what a shame Korea has come so far and has achieved so much, and yet it still cannot entirely demonstrate an enlightened culture.

What could it possibly gain anyone to torture an innocent animal to death? Well, as I mentioned in my preamble about sacrificing animals, it all comes down to symbolism and analogy. At Korean protests, murdering an animal like this is supposedly to express the depth of feeling the protesters feel about an issue. Yes, it’s just done to express “emotion.”

This is not the first time protesters in Korea have viciously tortured and slaughtered a pig for the purpose of expressing “emotion.” In a protest a couple of years ago, a group of former South Korean commandos hacked to death a squealing pig daubed with the word “Koizumi” to protest against the Japan’s Prime Minister at the time, Kiozumi, and his surprise visit to a notorious war shrine.

Here you can see that something like an axe or knife has already been used on the poor animal. Primitive, barbaric, ignorant, evil, uneducated, small-minded, pathetic, demonic—this is what is says to me, and most of world I should think, regardless of the symbolic meaning it is supposed to convey, or what it means to small minded people. Clearly, they don’t have intelligence tests to screen commando applicants in Korea.

Koreans do get carried away at protests. Usually they strive to hurt themselves, and I’m all for that: if it’s emotion you really want to show, then using a substitute creature just doesn’t cut it for me (no pun intended).

So, the follow people are genuinely impressive and convince me of their emotion. In front of the Japanese Embassy in 2005, a 68-year-old mother snipped off her little finger with pruning shears and her 41-year-old son cut off his finger with a butcher knife. This was again against Koizumi and to protest the Dokdo issue (an ongoing tussle for a big rock in the ocean between Korea and Japan). Now, those acts show commitment. Elsewhere, a few wimps burned Japanese flags.

People like those at the protest in Icheon who torture young animals are wimps and cowards, too. Let’s make it plain what they are doing. Let’s put it in perspective and recognize that in the world of pigs, the animal they tortured to death was a small child. I know—people eat the children of nonhuman animals everyday because that’s what the meat industry serves up. Nonetheless, these barbaric theatrics pictured here should be seen for what they are: child abuse and torture.

The state of animal treatment throughout Asia is bad in general, and it’s no exception in Korea. I’m so ashamed of this country, a country I have made my home, when such abuses go on unchallenged. The laws are weak, as weak as the will of authorties to stop such abuse. I get the impression it’s the ingrained thinking in Korean society that is also to blame: widespread backward thinking about animals prevails alongside an otherwise modern system.

I don’t see any real excuse for practices of ancient stupidity and ignorance in this day and age, no matter what culture. Especially in Korea, a country that values education so highly, there’s no excuse for uneducated barbarism like this. It is totally unforgivable. Shame, Korea, shame. Some of your citizens are a disgrace to humanity.

So, I’m writing about this as my contribution towards change, for with improvement to its animal welfare laws, Korea can really show it does have an enlightened culture and not be the target of disdain from around the world. I don’t want to be ashamed of Korea, and I don’t want other people to be ashamed of the country, either.

But these are the people who have brought shame on Korea–look at them all–that’s all they have achieved: shame and disgust.

I’m also writing about this incident because I felt some emotion, and I wanted to have my own little protest. I wanted to say that you people who did this are low-life peasant-ignorant scum (this is the censored version of what I really think of you).

And now, I’ll just let stand the truth in words and pictures for all the world to see. That’s what usually happens in civilized countries, when we want to show our emotion.

. . . among other things.

The advocacy of animal rights or animal liberation is all about seeking to protect non-human animals from being used, abuse or regarded as property by humans. Animal rights movements aim not only to attain more humane treatment for animals, but also to support moral consideration for species other than human beings by giving their basic interests–such as the interest in avoiding suffering–the same consideration as those of human beings. In other words, humans and other animals ought to be regarded as moral equals. This extends to the idea that animals cannot be regarded legally or morally as property, or treated as resources for human purposes, but should instead be regarded as legal persons.

Furthering the rights of animals on such legal grounds is important because simply appealing to common sense, fairness or compassion will only awaken a small segment of the human population to the plight of animals. Advanced legal rights for non-humans can provide the guide for people who cannot think for themselves, for all future dealings with non-humans by institutions and individuals, and better enable the prosecution of people who commit wilful acts of cruelty. Overall, personhood for non-humans will lead institutions and individuals to behave more appropriately towards non-humans and in turn bring about the advancement of human civilization.

The idea of extending personhood to animals has the support of some major legal scholars, and ongoing campaigns are seeking to include gorillas, orangutans, chimpanzees and bonobos in a “community of equals” with human beings, extending to them the protection of three basic interests: the right to life, the protection of individual liberty, and the prohibition of torture. This is seen by animal rights lawyers as a first step toward granting rights to other animals.

Unfortunately, in the West, the disparage of animal rights is deeply influenced by Christianity. Critics argue that animals do not have reason and cannot make moral choices, and therefore cannot be regarded as possessors of moral rights. Deeply influenced by Christianity, this kind of thinking has been ingrained in western culture. As a result, supporters of this position would argue that there is nothing inherently wrong with using animals for food, as entertainment, and in research, though human beings may nevertheless have an obligation to ensure they do not suffer unnecessarily. Of course, such a position is weak, open to interpretation and easily corruptible. Animals have been suffering unnecessarily since the Christian myth was first pulled out of a hat.

Unfortunately, in the East, the compassion central to Buddhism or Hinduism has not filtered into mainstream modern cultures there. Asian countries are some of the worst in terms of abuse and cruelty to animals. Countries like Japan, India, China, Korea–the list goes on.

Logic is another way through which an appeal for animal rights is being made. And there is no denying the logic, but the problem is that few people take the time to study it. However, logic is often easier to negotiate than a legal thesis. Plus erroneous thinking that is culturally ingrained or a part of upbringing in some way cannot compete against logic, although, I agree, no guarantee exists that logic will be acknowledged even if it is staring someone in the face.

A logical approach to an animal’s moral status is that taken by Peter Singer. In this approach, an animal’s moral status is not based on the concept of rights, but on the utilitarian principle of equal consideration of interests. His 1975 book Animal Liberation argues that humans grant moral consideration to other humans not on the basis of intelligence (in the instance of children, or the mentally disabled), on the ability to moralize (criminals and the insane), or on any other attribute that is inherently human, but rather on their ability to experience suffering.

As animals also experience suffering, he argues, excluding animals from such consideration is a form of discrimination known as “speciesism.” Speciesism is next frontier in terms of overcoming prejudice, now that human beings have finally managed to warm to the ideas that slavery is wrong, ethnic cleansing is wrong, basing a social hierarchy on race is wrong, the lacks of rights for woman is wrong, etc. Behind the fight against speciesism is the idea that you cannot assign different values or rights to beings on the basis of their species membership.

This concept becomes even more pertinent for those who regard life on earth as essentially meaningless, or of a purpose entirely unto itself. Most major intellectuals in the world today would hold this view. Without a higher purpose, or the belief that human life is somehow ordained by divinity or has a spiritual dimension, the idea of any kind of hierarchical organization in life, where humans occupy the top rung of the ladder, collapses. In short, all living beings exist on the same playing field.

Singer uses a particularly compelling argument called the Argument from Marginal Cases. If we give rights to humans based on some quality they possess, then we cannot argue that humans that lack that quality should have rights. Such a quality may be sentience or ability to enter a social contract or rationality. But an infant born with a defect so that it will never have those qualities can not be granted rights without invoking speciesism. Singer argues that the way in which humans use animals is not justified, because the benefits to humans are negligible compared to the amount of animal suffering they necessarily entail, and because he feels the same benefits can be obtained in ways that do not involve the same degree of suffering.

If none of this has made any sense, just concentrate on the idea of common decency and fairness. Everyone would agree with this statement: no human that is innocent deserves to suffer at the hands of other humans. The same is true of innocent non-human animals; when it comes to suffering at the hands of humans, they just don’t deserve it.

Some people in the hall of fame for animal rights:

Pythagoras
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
John Oswald
Jeremy Bentham
Arthur Schopenhauer
Henry Salt

Some people in the hall of shame for animal rights (which goes to show that intelligence is no indication that blind spots of stupidity do not exist in a person’s thinking):

Aristotle
Augustine
Thomas Aquinas
René Descartes
Kant

The basic source for this material was http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animal_rights

On Vegetarianism

Most of the following is from http://www.ivu.org/news/1-96/shelley.html
In 1812, through William Godwin’s son, the English Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley met John Frank Newton, the author of The Return to Nature which strongly advocated the vegetarian diet. Newton was a highly educated person who had formerly been at Christ Church College Oxford and intended to write three more books on vegetarianism. Shelley and his wife (Mary, author of Frankenstein) were influenced by Newton’s vegetarian views and adopted them in 1812. Later they admitted that their health had improved and that they felt much better.

Shelley wrote two articles advocating vegetarianism, both of which have an approach which is extraordinarily contemporary. In “A Vindication of Natural Diet”, Shelley considers meat eating as a consequence of the Fall from Grace described in the Old Testament, and a proof that we live in a post-lapsarian world. He gave the example of Prometheus. Having brought fire to people for culinary purposes, thus allowing them to consume flesh, Prometheus was punished by having his liver perpetually devoured by vultures.

Shelley considered that people should eat only the food produced in their own native country because they grew up in that natural environment and are adapted to it. Consequently he believed that the English should not drink wines from France, Portugal or Spain. Spices from India were also not to be used, for the same reason. He was against any kind of strong drinks because they are not a natural product: “Drink no drink but water restored to its original purity by distillation.” With regard to food, he counseled: “Never take any substance into the stomach that once had life. Vegetarianism will give you longevity. Avoiding meat does not mean self-mortification. It is both for you and for the natural environment you belong to. You will be rewarded for this.”

Shelley’s second article about vegetarianism is “On the Vegetable System of Diet.” The author considers that eating animal food is an unnatural habit producing disease. As we don’t have the teeth that predator animals have it is normal to assume that animal food should not be eaten by humans. We should also keep in mind that eating animal food means torturing animals. Man tortures either when he kills them or when he raises them. This is unfortunately very contemporary when we think of present-day factory farming systems.

Butchering animals is wicked. Forcing them to produce more products than is natural is wicked. Forcing them into existence is wicked. “If the use of animal food be, in consequence, subversive to the peace of human society, how unwarrantable is the injustice and the barbarity which is exercised toward these miserable victims. They are called into existence by human artifice that they may drag out a short and miserable existence of slavery and disease, that their bodies may be mutilated, their social feelings outraged. It were much better that a sentient being should never have existed, than that it should have existed only to endure unmitigated misery.”

Shelley’s advice is to have simple culinary habits as the human being is most capable of bodily exertion after or before a simple meal.

The great Romantic poet advocates vegetarianism in a very convincing and contemporary way. He might be our contemporary or we might be his contemporaries from this point of view.

For the PDF of Shelley’s “A Vindication of Natural Diet” see the Browse Documents section here.
Extracts from His Poems

Source: http://www.ivu.org/history/shelley/poems.html

Notes from an American University website (author unknown):
Queen Mab was published May 1813 and was Shelley’s first major production. Queen Mab was considered subversive and radical. It’s main targets were established religion, political tyranny, the destructive force of war and commerce, and the perversion of human love caused by such chains and barriers as the marriage institution and prostitution. Secondary themes were temperance, vegetarianism, and republicanism. What Shelley was preaching came to be understood as a “vision of the good life built on atheism, free love, republicanism, and vegetarianism.”

from Queen Mab:

. . . . . . . . . . . . No longer now
He slays the lamb that looks him in the face,
And horribly devours his mangled flesh;
Which, still avenging nature’s broken law,
Kindled all putrid humours in his frame,
All evil passions, and all vain belief,
Hatred, despair, and loathing in his mind,
The germs of misery, death, disease, and crime.
No longer now the winged habitants,
That in the woods their sweet lives sing away,
Flee from the form of man; but gather round,
And prune their sunny feathers on the hands
Which little children stretch in friendly sport
Towards these dreadless partners of their play.

from Queen Mab:

How strange is human pride!
I tell thee that those living things,
To whom the fragile blade of grass,
That springeth in the morn
And perisheth ere noon
Is an unbounded world;
I tell thee that those viewless beings,
Whose mansion is the smallest particle
Of the impassive atmosphere,
Think, feel and live like man;
That their affections and antipathies,
Like his, produce the laws
Ruling their moral state;
And the minutest throb
That through their frame diffuses
The slightest, faintest motion,
Is fixed and indispensable
As the majestic laws
That rule yon rolling orbs.

from The Revolt of Islam:

Never again may blood of bird or beast
Stain with its venomous stream a human feast,
To the pure skies in accusation steaming.

from Alastor or The Spirit of Solitude:

Earth, ocean, air, beloved brotherhood!
If our great Mother has imbued my soul
With aught of natural piety to feel
Your love, and recompense the boon with mine;
If dewy morn, and odorous noon, and even,
With sunset and its gorgeous ministers,
And solemn midnight’s tingling silentness;
If autumn’s hollow sighs in the sere wood,
And winter robing with pure snow and crowns
Of starry ice the gray grass and bare boughs;
If spring’s voluptuous pantings, when she breathes
Her first sweet kisses, have been dear to me;
If no bright bird, insect, or gentle beast
I consciously have injured, but still loved
And cherished these my kindred – then forgive
This boast, beloved brethren, and withdraw
No portion of your wonted favour now

from Prometheus Unbound:

I wish no living thing to suffer pain.

Extracts from His Prose

Source: http://www.ivu.org/history/shelley/prose.html

Extracts from ‘A Vindication of Natural Diet’:
(originally written as notes for Queen Mab but later published separately)

Man, and the other animals whom he has afflicted with his malady or depraved by his dominion, are alone diseased. The Bison, the wild Hog, the Wolf, are perfectly exempt from malady, and invariably die either from external violence or from mature old age. But the domestic Hog, the Sheep, the Cow, the Dog, are subject to an incredible variety of distempers, and, like the corruptors of their nature, have physicians who thrive upon their miseries. The super-eminence of man is, like Satan’s, the super-eminence of pain; and the majority of his species doomed to poverty, disease and crime, have reason to curse the untoward event that, by enabling him to communicate his sensations, raised him above the level of his fellow animals. But the steps that have been taken are irrevocable. The whole of human science is comprised in one question: How can the advantages of intellect and civilisation be reconciled with the liberty and pure pleasures of natural life? How can we take the benefits and reject the evils of the system which is now interwoven with the fibre of our being? I believe that abstinence from animal food and spiritous liquors would, in a great measure, capacitate us for the solution of this important question.

I address myself not to the young enthusiast only, but to the ardent devotee of truth and virtue the pure and passionate moralist yet unvitiated by the contagion of the world. He will embrace a pure system from its abstract truth, its beauty, its simplicity, and its promise of wide extended benefit. Unless custome has turned poison into food, he will hate the brutal pleasures of the chase by instinct. It will be a contemplation full of horror and disappointment to the mind that beings, capable of the gentlest and most admirable sympathies, should take delight in the deathpangs and last convulsions of dying animals.

From ‘On the Vegetable System of Diet’

It is evident that those who are necessitated by their profession to trifle with the sacredness of life, and think lightly of the agonies of living beings, are unfit for the benevolence and justice which is required for the performance of the offices of civilised society. They are by necessity brutal, coarse, turbulent and sanguinary. Their habits form an admirable apprenticeship to the more wasting wickedness of war, in which men are hired to mangle and murder their fellow beings by thousands, that tyrants and countries may profit. How can he be expected to preserve a vivid sensibility to the benevolent sympathies of our nature, who is familiar with carnage, agony and groans? The very sight of animals in the fields who are destined to the axe must encourage obduracy if it fails to awaken compassion. The butchering of harmless animals cannot fail to produce much of that spirit of insane and hideous exultation in which news of a victory is related altho’ purchased by the massacre of a hundred thousand men.

If the use of animal food be, in consequence, subversive to the peace of human society, how unwarrantable is the injustice and barbarity which is exercised toward these miserable victims. They are called into existence by human artifice that they may drag out a short and miserable existence of slavery and disease, that their bodies may be mutilated, their social feelings outraged. It were much better that a sentient being should never have existed, than that it should have existed only to endure unmitigated misery. (The attachment of animals to their young is very strong. The monstrous sophism that beasts are pure unfeeling machincs, and do not reason, scarcely requires a confutation.)

Jo Ann Smith rose high in beef industry. It’s been good to her and she’s done a lot to advance its cause. That’s not to say she’s done a lot to lessen the suffering of the victims of that industry, the animals themselves. Far from it. Her life was devoted to increasing meat consumption, not improving animal welfare. Suffering is not the point, making money is the point, and that is why she was and is lauded throughout the industry.

She rose high in the meat industry and then high in government. It all started 70s. She was a fifth-generation cattle rancher, who climbed the ranks of the National Cattlemen’s association. In 1985, she became the first female president of the that Association, and went on to be regarded as one of its most effective leaders ever.

She believed her calling was to “express the positive story about beef,” as she said in her NCA acceptance speech, and “that’s what I do best.” Then she set out to aggressively promote the beef industry, traveling from one end of the country to the other. Following her term as NCA president, she continued her promotion campaigns based on the famous slogan “Beef. Real Food for Real People.” Yes, promoting was her thing, and in fact, she is probably best known as the founding chair of the Cattlemen’s Beef Promotion and Research Board.

With the meat industry behind her, Smith gained the position of assistant secretary for Marketing and Inspection Services of the U.S. Department of Agriculture from 1989 to 1993. I guess it is equivalent, if you will forgive the old cliche, to putting Dracula in charge of a blood bank, or a lunatic in charge of the asylum.

It’s a fair question to ask, the question Gail Eisnitz puts in her book, Slaughterhouse, concerning a conflict of interest here.

Would the beef industry’s top spokesperson, an individual whose life’s goal was to increase beef consumption, really make an appropriate candidate as the nation’s chief watchdog ensuring compliance with regulations in federally inspected plants?

One of the first things Smith set out to do was “stretch” the definition of meat. She authorized that beef trimmings and cartilage could be labeled as meat. This stuff could then end up in “beef” patties and the like. The move increased the value of a carcass, no doubt to the cheers of all cattlemen across the US.

Consumers however had nothing to cheer about. This stuff now allowed to be called meat is in fact a solid fat that gets colourized. It has proteins, but they are useless because our bodies cannot use them. What is more, this “meat” is perfect for breeding bacteria:

. . . two years after JoAnn Smith became assistant secretary you had all of these outbreaks of bacteria–they’re directly attributable to that kind of disregard of health issues.

But she made the beef industry more money, and that’s what counts, apparently. On the other hand, increasing profits wasn’t really her entire job at the USDA. Her job was also to protect consumers. In reality, however, the meat industry runs the USDA in the US because major appointees are also major figures in the meat industry, just like Smith was. See the paradox?

. . . the very same officials who are charged with promoting the sale of agricultural products are also supposed to protest the consumer from filth and unscrupulous practices.

The best of luck to all consumers out there.

I’ll get back to this conflict of interest. What concerns me foremost at the moment is another kind: the conflict between the enforcement of the humane treatment of animals and increasing of profits for the meat industry.

According to Eisnitz, Smith’s family cattle operation probably sold it’s cattle to Kaplin, one of the largest beef slaughterhouse operations in Florida. Kaplin, like so many slaughterhouse operators then and now, was operating under substandard conditions. OK, enough with the euphemisms, I’ll state it plainly.

At Kaplin Industries back in the late 80s, they were skinning cattle while they were still alive. The problem with cattle slaughtering, as people in the meat industry know, is that cattle often aren’t killed by the “knocking gun,” for what might be a whole host of reasons, and are then shackled up and sent on down the line, alive.

If strung-up cattle arrive at skinner’s station still alive, after having been stabbed by the sticker to bleed them, they might start kicking. To remedy this inconvenience, the skinner will knife the cattle in the back of the head to paralyze them. This doesn’t make the animal unconscious or immune to pain, it just stops them from kicking.

The key to job survival at Kaplan and, of course, the bottom line, profits, was to keep the line moving. Even when violations such as what is described were pointed out, nothing was done about it.

So what did we have here? We had family operation of the assistant secretary for Marketing and Inspection Services of the U.S. Department of Agriculture–the most senior official at that department responsible for enforcing the Humane Slaughter Act–selling cattle to Kaplin Industries where cattle were being routinely skinned while alive.

Sadly, the Humane Slaughter Act was not being enforced, which shouldn’t surprise anyone because the USDA was opposed to it, even through it was actually charged with its enforcement. Couldn’t any of the knuckleheads in government figure how that was going to pan out?

One thing is for sure, with JoAnn Smith at the helm, nothing was any better for the animals. It wasn’t any better for consumers, either. While Smith, the nation’s chief meat inspector, was in the USDA new lows were reached in standards for the inspection of meat.

Smith was around when the USDA began relaxing meat inspection procedures and standards and when line speeds had skyrocketed. The USDA had approved so-called streamlined inspection methods, first introduced in the poultry industry and then the cattle industry. Here’s how it works: inspectors were reduced and striped of their authority, especially of any authority to stop the line. What you ended up with in the cattle industry was about 1 in every 1000 cows being inspected, yet 100% were stamped as inspected.

So, while the USDA did not enforce the humane slaughter of animals, it was also not enforcing proper inspections of meat. These resulted in a rise of rates of E. coli 0157:H7 infections. E. coli is a pathogen like salmonella that lives in the intestinal tracts of livestock and it contaminates meat through high-speed slaughter and processing operations.

What they are calling meat poisoning now, since it’s becoming more common, is hamburger disease. It generally kills children and the elderly.

You’d think that the USDA, or someone would act. What happened was that the USDA instead began working out allowable levels of fecal contamination on meat. I suppose that was their only option, since with high speed lines and deregulation, there was no way to stop contamination.

It is spread by the process. Cows that were cancerous, that have abscesses full of pus, that are covered in feces and urine, that have mud, grease and blood on them are processed with only cosmetic cleaning. Some of that stuff gets embedded from the high pressure carcass sprays and otherwise just spread around through rinsing processes.

I’m not pinning it all on Smith, but she was the head of the USDA when all of this crap was going on, the so-called “First Lady of American Agriculture.” As the website for the Florida Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services states:

In this position she set policy direction and managed multiple agencies under the jurisdiction of the USDA. She brought to the office an atmosphere of openness and professionalism and proved herself to be a woman of action on behalf of agriculture.

Yeah, right. JoAnn Smith worsened the situation for animals. She increased their suffering and reduce any recourse for justice and humane treatment. She was a huge part of the problem and nothing to do with the solution.

She’s a classic example of the kinds of people behind the meat industry and its regulation. I’m not just talking about the US either. The USDA like other organizations of its kind are everywhere, full of people who are part of the problem, who just go along, including those you’d think would want to improve things, like vetenarians, but don’t. When you have a pack of meat industry cronies running the show, nothing will bring justice and fair treatment to those without a voice.

Smith is one of the many who has contributed to making life a hell on Earth for millions upon millions of animals.

The image above is from footage of the final moments of Tyke’s life in Honolulu on August 20, 1994. At this moment, she probably has around 70 bullet holes in her. You can see some bullet holes in that stupid headdress. It is gut wrenching for me to see this and to know the history that led up to it. She didn’t deserve that death sentence, nor the life sentence imposed on her beforehand by cruel human captors.

For some reason that I cannot explain exactly, what stirs my blood and emotions with a mix of helplessness and anger, even more than seeing the bullet holes and blood, is the presence of that stupid circus headdress. It represents such a disjunction, something completely out of place with the unjust and dirty reality of what is happening. Such a frivolous costume, an unworthy vestment, doesn’t belong draped on such a noble creature. It’s like a final insult, a uniform of bondage in the form of a clownish hat. Even in death she is forced to wear it.

What else I find deeply saddening is the unnaturalness that surrounded her–all the metal and buildings and bitumen, the whole world around her constructed for other beings. She is completely alone in a foreign world and under attack. And not just on that day–since she a baby, nothing around her was natural. She knew only confinement and chains, and when free from those she knew only commands and harassment.

Hers was a life of deprivation, abuse, aloneness, and no doubt deep sadness. She grew up in a world where everything around her was unnatural and hostile, and that’s how her life ended too, through no fault of her own.

She had retaliated against her subjugation before this, on a number of occasions, as reported here. But who knows what punishments she received for those. Who really knows the torments she suffered away from public scrutiny since was a baby? It is clear she didn’t like trainers, and no doubt for good reason. But for her retaliation against oppression, alone and without hope of rescue, she was the one punished by being shot 87 times.

Here’s what happened, together with other circus footage:

Tyke was in my eyes, and those of many others, heroic. Although that is a human perception on the last stand of a frightened and angry creature seeking escape, it is not necessarily inaccurate. Her rebellion and the fact she had retaliated before is a testament to her personality, character and heroic spirit.

My only regret is that she was not able not take down more of the people who made her life a misery. And I don’t care what anyone thinks about that sentiment. Even when this happened in ‘94, I remember feeling at the time a kind of elation at her rampage. I was glad she got her own back.

Here is more background on Tyke from “Tyke’s Final Performance” in Animal Writings :

She was trapped and taken away from her family when she was a baby. She was shipped to the circus. There, she was confined to a concrete room and beaten over and over, to break her spirit. Circus trainers hit her repeatedly with a sharp metal “bullhook,” which made her cry out in pain. They struck her in her most sensitive areas: behind her ears, on top of her toes, in back of her knees, and around her anus. They wanted to hurt her and frighten her so she would be obedient.

She spent most of her time in chains, doing nothing. Her bones ached from no exercise. Her diet was monotonous. She stood in filth and excrement. She was deprived of every aspect of normal elephant life. She hated it.

She was in the Hawthorn circus, which had a track record of animal cruelty violations. In 1988, according to USDA documents, Tyke was beaten in public to the point where she was “screaming and bending down on three legs to avoid being hit.” The trainer said he was “disciplining” her. By April of 1993, she had had enough. She tried to escape during a circus performance. She didn’t make it. In July she tried to escape again; she was unsuccessful. Hawthorn should have retired her right then and there, as she was an obvious threat to the public. But they didn’t.

For the next year she performed in the circus and lived in a barren concrete barn, chained, between shows. The bullhook beatings continued. Her life stank. She vacillated between terror and boredom. She was not really an elephant.

In August of 1994 Tyke reached a breaking point. She had been in the circus nearly 20 years. She was tired of being beaten, whipped, and kicked. She could no longer take the pain and the confinement. She was angry and wanted to be free. At an afternoon performance at the Neal Blaidsell Center in Honolulu, it all came to a head.

At some point during the show, she veered from the script. Circus staff tried to beat her back, but no bullhook or whip could stop the rage that had been building inside her for two decades.

The following takes up the rest of story, written by Will Hoover of The Honolulu Advertiser in 2004:

The primary reason that Honolulu has probably seen its last circus can be summed up in one word: Tyke.

Ten years ago today, in front of hundreds of horrified Circus International spectators, Tyke, a full-grown female African elephant, mauled her groomer, Dallas Beckwith, trampled and killed her trainer, Allen Campbell, and then bolted from Blaisdell Arena onto the streets of Kaka’ako.

There the animal ran wild for a half-hour, nearly killing another man, before she was finally brought down by Honolulu police who riddled her with bullets from high-powered rifles.

In the aftermath, Tyke became the poster elephant of circus tragedies and a symbol for animal rights. Dozens of lawsuits were filed against the city, the state, the circus and Tyke’s owner, John Cuneo Jr. and his Hawthorn Corp. The suits were settled out of court, the last of them only last year, but the amounts were never made public.

No traditional circus has applied for a city permit since the Tyke incident, but officials are now reluctant to issue permits that include exotic animals anyway.

“You’re taking about a city that is extremely leery about allowing anything along those lines back at Blaisdell Arena anymore,” said city spokeswoman Carol Costa.

Costa said it didn’t mean the state couldn’t grant a circus permit, but so far it has not done so.

Others insist that simply because no circus elephants have been here in a decade doesn’t mean a tragedy similar to the Tyke disaster could not happen again.

“Of course it could happen if a traditional circus does came in — and they still can because we haven’t done anything legally to stop them,” said Cathy Goeggel, director of Animal Rights Hawaii.

Goeggel points to four failed bills to ban exotic animal acts in Hawai’i.

“We tried twice in the Honolulu City Council and twice in the Hawai’i Legislature,” she said. “None of those bills passed.

“What the industry is trying to do is wait until people’s memories fade.”

Tyler Ralston agrees. Ten years ago he was driving along Waimanu Street in Kaka’ako and was stunned to see a circus elephant charging toward his car.

“Initially, I was confused,” recalled Ralston, who was 26 at the time. “The elephant was coming at me and the police were behind it.

I saw this headdress on the elephant, and I thought there must have been a circus in town and the elephant got away.”

Instinctively, Ralston swerved onto Cummins Street, whipping his car into a motorcycle shop. In the next moments he witnessed a surreal, horrifying scene as Tyke chased a circus clown through a vacant lot while circus promoter Steve Hirano attempted to confine the animal within the lot.

“Hirano was trying to close the fence and the elephant charged at him, busted through, soccer-balled him on the ground and hit him, shattering his leg — and that’s when the first shots were fired.

“That’s when I was, like, ‘OK, this is really serious. There’s a lot of people around and I don’t want to see an elephant get killed.’

And the next thing I knew, it was running by me, bloody.”

It all changed his life, Ralston said. He tried to have bills passed banning animal acts and continues to advocate bringing in and promoting animal-free circuses such as Cirque du Soleil.

Whether grief-filled memories are enough to permanently eliminate traditional circuses in Honolulu remains to be seen. But there’s no doubt Tyke has altered the animal entertainment outlook here and elsewhere.

The Hawaiian Humane Society has formulated an official position stating that “wild animal acts should not be used in entertainment such as circuses, shows and exhibits.”

And last March, the federal government took away 16 circus elephants from an owner accused of mistreating his animals.

That owner was John Cuneo Jr. — the man who owned Tyke.

What a shame Cuneo is still on the planet. Others connected to the incident have died, like the circus apologist, Steve Hirano, the one who tried to contain Tyke behind the wire gate. He escaped Tyke, who regrettably was being shot at, otherwise she would have trampled him, but Hirano could not escape nature in the form of cancer. As for Cuneo, I hope I live long enough to have the satisfaction of hearing of him going out of business or like Hirano, departing the planet.

As for Tyke, lest we forget. The fight against human ignorance and stupidity goes on.

Endangered Species Handbook Segment 250

Source: http://www.endangeredspecieshandbook.org/persecution_roman.php

The tradition of killing animals for pleasure has a long history in Asia and Europe. So popular was hunting in ancient Rome that mosaics and paintings often depicted this pastime as a heroic activity. Slaughtering animals was considered a form of entertainment, and people scoured the countryside for bears, Lions, stags and boars to pursue with spears and dogs (Attenborough 1987). As the Roman Empire grew to encompass the entire Mediterranean basin, its citizens traveled throughout the region to hunt and bring back animals to be killed in primitive contests in the coliseums of Rome and other cities. The coliseum games continued for more than 400 years in more than 70 amphitheaters, the largest seating up to 50,000 people on stone benches arranged around a central arena (Attenborough 1987).

Roman emperors curried favor with the public by upstaging their predecessors in killing more animals and producing more spectacular displays of slaughter (Morris 1990). Emperor Titus inaugurated the Roman Coliseum by declaring 100 days of celebration, during which enormous numbers of animals were speared by gladiators. On the opening day, 5,000 animals were slaughtered, and over the next two days, 3,000 more were killed (Morris 1990). The caged animals were kept underground in dungeons where they were not fed, and on the day of the festival, they were hauled in their cages onto lifts that brought them into the center of the arena. As the crowd roared with excitement, drums were beaten, trumpets blown, and the terrified animals were set loose (Attenborough 1987). Sometimes the animals were goaded to attack one another, and at other times, men armed with spears and tridents pursued them around barriers made from shrubs in imitation of hunts in the wild (Attenborough 1987). One arena hunt resulted in the killing of 300 Ostriches and 200 Alpine Chamois (Morris 1990).

Lions, Tigers, bears, bulls, Leopards, Giraffes and deer died after being tormented, stabbed and gored (Morris 1990). Big cats that had been starved were released into the ring where a human slave or prisoner of war was lashed to a post; the animals clawed at the person before they themselves were speared and stabbed by gladiators (Attenborough 1987). In some of the larger slaughters, 500 Lions, more than 400 Leopards, or 100 bears would be killed in a single day (Morris 1990). Hippos, even rhinoceroses and crocodiles, were brought into these arenas, and sometimes gladiators employed bizarre methods of killing such as decapitating fleeing ostriches with crescent−shaped arrows (Morris 1990).

The Roman audiences cheered these brutal slaughters enthusiastically as a rule, but when 20 elephants were pitted against heavily armed warriors, the screaming of these gentle animals as they were wounded caused the crowd to boo the emperor for his cruelty (Morris 1990). This did not stop their use in the games however. These slaughters virtually eliminated large mammals from the Mediterranean area. North African Elephants (Loxodonta africana) were exterminated, having been hunted and captured to die in these arenas (Leakey and Lewin 1995). Elephants were also used by the Romans for transport and even conscripted for battle by Hannibal, a Carthaginian general who used them in a deadly march across the Alps, in which all the elephants died of exposure. Romans were probably the key element in the disappearances of the Asian Elephant (Elephas maximus) from West Asia as well (Leakey and Lewin 1995).

Prior to the expansion of the Roman Empire, Atlas Bears (Ursus arctos crowtheri) lived in the mountains and forests of North Africa, the only bears on the African continent. Named for their last refuge in the Atlas Mountains of Morocco, they were a race of the Brown Bear which is native to Eurasia and North America. North Africa was the species’ most southerly distribution. When Romans entered North Africa, they cut the forest habitat of this bear and slaughtered thousands for sport. Others were collected for coliseum combat, where they were attacked by smaller animals, or gladiators wielding axes, spears and other weapons. Over the centuries, the Atlas Mountain forests were leveled for building materials, and colonial landowners used the cleared land for grazing livestock (Day 1981). The Atlas Bear became restricted to Mount Atlas, where an 18th century French naturalist discovered a fresh skin, upon which the first scientific description was based (Day 1981). Even as late as 1830, the bears were common enough to be captured and sent to French zoos. In 1840, an English scientist concluded that this bear, smaller than the American Black Bear (Ursus americanus), was a distinct subspecies. It was stocky, with a short face, blackish−brown, shaggy fur on its back, and orange−rufous fur on its belly (Day 1981). This differentiates it so much from the Brown Bear that modern taxonomists might consider the two distinct species. Although Atlas Bears became increasingly rare, they received no protection from hunting, and the last of these bears were shot around 1870 (Day 1981).

Herodotus and Aristotle, philosophers of ancient Greece, wrote that Lions once lived in that country (Attenborough 1987). Two thousand years ago, the range of these big cats extended eastward in a continuous band to India and Pakistan and throughout the African continent. The Lion disappeared at an early time from Italy and Greece after being hunted and captured by the thousands for gladiator spectacles. When European Lions had been killed off, Romans turned to North Africa. The Barbary or Atlas Lion (Panthera leo leo), once distributed through much of the region north of the Sahara, fell victim to hunting and Roman Coliseum games. Known for its enormous mane, which covered virtually half its body, the male Barbary Lion was one of the largest of all races of Lions (Day 1981). It was also the nominate, or first subspecies named. This massive animal weighed as much as 500 pounds and measured up to 10 feet long from the tip of his nose to the tip of his tail (Day 1981). After centuries of hunting, persecution and habitat loss, these Lions withdrew to remote forests, where the last of them were systematically hunted down. Arabian tribesmen in Tunisia and Algeria chased them for sport, and later, French colonial governments paid bounties for their skins; by the 19th century, hunters had exterminated the last of the lions in Algeria (Day 1981). Government lists recorded the bounty fees paid, with fewer each year; only one skin was submitted for payment in Algeria in 1884 (Day 1981). Their final refuge, like the Atlas Bear’s, was the wilderness forest of Morocco’s Atlas Mountains, where hunters killed the last one around 1922 (Day 1981). Although officially extinct, some of these Lions may still survive in captivity. Certain circus and zoo Lions resembling the original Barbary Lion have been identified, and an effort is being made to gather a breeding colony of these animals. Whether they are, in fact, direct blood lines from the original North African Lions remains to be seen.

By the 13th century, Lions had been eliminated in the eastern Mediterranean; they disappeared from Iraq, Iran and Pakistan by the 1800s (McClung 1976). The last Lion in the Saudi Arabian peninsula was killed in 1923. For most ancient cultures of the Middle East and West Asia, killing one of these great cats, especially a large male, was considered a heroic deed worthy of being recorded in paintings and mosaics. Many such art works remain from Assyrian and other West Asian cultures. By the mid−19th century, Asiatic Lions (Panthera leo persica) had become confined to India, but were still widespread in that country (McClung 1976). During the last half of the 19th century, however, Indian Lions came under siege by British Colonial officers, who traditionally proudly took a Lion pelt back to England; a single hunter boasted of shooting 300 Indian Lions in 1860 (IUCN 1978). Under such pressure, Lions disappeared from all of India, save the Gir Forest in the southwest, by 1884 (IUCN 1978). In 1900, protection was finally accorded the last of these Lions, when their populations had been reduced to fewer than 100 animals (McClung 1976). Today, the Gir Forest Lions number a few hundred animals, all that remain of these proud cats on the Eurasian continent. Confined to a habitat that was rapidly being whittled away by villagers cutting firewood, and overgrazed by livestock, the Gir Lions are now protected in the Sasan Gir National Park of western India where, in recent years their population has increased.

Hunting by Romans and later peoples, combined with capture for the colosseum games, devastated the wildlife of North Africa and the entire Mediterranean region. Large predators, as well as deer and other ungulates, disappeared altogether or become endangered. Few conservation programs exist to protect remaining populations from hunting and persecution.

“Nothing will benefit human health
and increase chances for survival of life on earth
as much as the evolution to a vegetarian diet.”

ALBERT EINSTEIN (1879-1955)
German-born American physicist
1921 Nobel Prize Winner

* * *

“The time will come when men such as I
will look upon the murder of animals
as they now look upon the murder of men.”

LEONARDO DA VINCI (1425-1519)
Italian sculptor, artist and inventor

* * *

“It is very significant
that some of the most
thoughtful and cultured men
are partisans of a pure vegetable diet.”

MAHATMA GANDHI (1869-1948)
Hindu pacifist, spiritual leader

“An infallible characteristic of meanness is cruelty. Men who have practiced tortures on animals without pity, relating them without shame, how can they still hold their heads among human beings?”

SAMUEL JOHNSON (1709-1784)
British essayist, poet, biographer, critic

* * *

“Of all the creatures ever made, Man is the most detestable. He is the only creature that inflicts pain for sport, knowing it to be pain.”

MARK TWAIN
Author of Tom Sawyer & Huckleberry Finn

Dominion: The Power of Man, the Suffering of Animals, and the Call to Mercy

Matthew Scully

Magnificently written. He covers a lot of ground in this, from canned hunts to whaling to hog concentration camps in North Carolina. The lies of the meat industries, the blindness or otherwise willful disregard for the plight of suffering animals, the ludicrous justifications for cruelty inflicted upon animals for profit. Everyone who eats meat needs to read this book for the truth. I don’t agree with Scully’s arguments against Singer or his Christian grounding, which makes step back from giving animals full rights. His Christianity spoils his thinking and conclusions. Shame, really. But in the end I’m on his side and he’s on mine.

Eternal Treblinka: Our Treatment of Animals and the Holocaust

Charles Patterson

Disturbing, to say the least. A must-read for all thinking people, but perhaps a more urgent read for those that do not think. I cannot complain about it. However, I thought that the thesis here could have been wider, although I realize size would have been an issue if it were extended. To me, what is discussed relates to a wider problem, not peculiar to the Nazis and nor to a certain period of time. It’s human nature and the potential for evil inherent in it that could perhaps have been addressed more fully.

The painting above is of course a fanciful lie. It’s Wenzel Peter’s Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, depicting a mythical Eden crowded with happy animals living in perfect harmony. Have you ever seen a more cheerful camel? It was never like that and never will be because everything has to eat. It’s as much a lie as those green sun-filled valleys with cows that are depicted on milk cartons, or those restaurants displaying a fat smiling pig wearing a chef’s hat and beckoning you in. The reality is that human beings directly and indirectly make life a hell on earth for many creatures.

What is implicit in that picture of paradise is the preposterous notion that human beings somehow have dominion over animals. That arrogance, coupled with the power to dominate, has lead to speciesism and a justified holocaust of abuse and cruelty.

Traditionally, religion or a society’s dominant mythological perspective plays a major part in a society’s prevailing attitudes. That’s meant that the attitude of the human animal toward other animals has varied throughout history, but the legacy of Christianity and other religions of its ilk has resulted in a legitimized disregard for other species. Christianity is totally to blame, for it inherited bad attitudes from the Greeks and Romans. Nevertheless, the outcome was a mistaken belief that other species on earth could be justifiably exploited because that was precisely why they were put here. You end up with what the painting below depicts–the inevitable outcome of a species who believed it originated in Eden.

Through the ages ideology has invariably worked in league with self interest to uphold arrogant assumptions and dismiss questioning. It wouldn’t do to risk questioning that would displace humans from their position at the centre of the universe–-and the claim to being the only creature noble enough to have a soul. Thus animals could never receive equal or fair treatment. It’s hard to fathom such ignorance. Did no one notice any similarities between humans and other creatures at all?

Well, they might have, had their minds not been clouded with notions of soul and other nonsense; Descartes and others, for example, studied anatomy while dissecting live dogs nailed to a table, immune to their screams because of mechanistic views on nature. We think them morons, looking back now. Thankfully, some forward thinkers recognized that animals, like us, felt pain. However, the prevailing attitude whereby animals were under the dominion of humankind could not be shaken. At least proper management was encourage, and this led to protective laws–not that they were comprehensive, but, incredibly, this wasn’t until the early 19th century.

Darwin and his theory of evolution changed everything. Of course, with scientific advances in the study of the universe, human beings had already been awakened to the fact that the world was not specially made for them. Darwin’s evolutionary theory made it even sillier to believe that humans were the apex of creation or made in the image of God. Nor could divinely legitimized dominion be substantiated; human beings were just animals that had evolved like all other animals.

But while ideological defeated might alter opinion, it is unlikely to lessen self interest. If the Bible couldn’t help you, at least you could conveniently appeal to nature-–things like the survival of the fittest, the natural order of hunters and the hunted, etc–-to justify dominion and the mistreatment of animals. Hence, new ideologies were put to work in league with self interest. That’s how it’s been until now, simplistic formulas still holding sway over deeper thought; palates still satisfied without the recognition of torture or tyranny.

These days more than any other time, if you don’t want to gaze at harsh realities, you don’t have to; and even if questions prompt you to see for yourself, you’d have a hard time doing it. Animal slaughter has increasingly been kept quiet and away from public eye. More and more these days, you see less and less animals in fields; what you see is empty fields, as in the picture of the hog farm. So much space and room and sunlight to run around in, but the hogs in these jam-packed, tin and concrete hells will not experience that in their lifetime.

It’s nothing new that a lot of people simply don’t care about animal exploitation, or they condone it as some kind of right, or they ponder it but conclude that authorities are mitigating abuse. Yes, ignorance is a strong ally to this kind of complacency. You might have the belief that one must eat meat to get the right vitamins, or that there are checks and balances in place to ensure the humane treatment of live stock. The first excuse is a myth and, as for the second one, you only need to look at big business or politics to know that people are not going to do the right thing if money or power are involved.

We all know that if there is money to be made by cutting corners, people will cut corners. Do you think it would be any different if the welfare of animals, unseen by the public eye, is a stake? You already know that no matter where you are, ruthless human beings exist that are going to exploit the weak, no matter what kind of creature falls into that category, for whatever reason-–from poaching to human trafficking. You also know that they do this because there is a market for it and because someone is letting them get away with it.

This brings us back to the core problem: people are unable to accept that animals should be given equal consideration, that their interests are as valid as our own, that they deserve to be treated fairly and with compassion, that they have the right to be happy, and that they are closer to us than many would like to admit. The underlying misconceptions and traditional thinking about animals are what need to be redressed in the name of education. It won’t be easy because there are systems in place that reinforce skewed thinking and support evil practices.

Education might start with common sense. The instincts and basic needs that animals have are like those of human beings. That should be obvious to any simpleton. On a physical level, they have extremely well developed nervous systems that have evolved the same way ours has. They have features that evolution has judged to be the best solution for survival–things like the development of sensory organs centralized about a face, with everything wired to the brain. These don’t only assist in rudimentary survival, they assist in the operation of complex social connections and habits as well. This is not being wishy washy and anthropomorphic. It’s like I said, pretty bloody obvious.

And what common sense observes, science can back up. Researchers are realizing more and more that animals have abilities they have not been given credit for previously. Some possess cognitive functions necessary for language; some communicate with sounds and even have personal names; some use logic to solve problems or think ahead; some use tools to obtain food. In fact, a recent study even found flies to have personalties and individual characteristics.

A problem that limits enlightened perception in non-humans is the inability to see past the herd and recognize that each animal is an individual. This isn’t surprising, given that some humans can’t even discern the individuality of those from other races apart from their own. However, those who have lived with or studied animals on a long term basis recognize their individuality quite clearly. Anyone who has had a pet will know what I am talking about.

How can humans tell, then, that an animal is not suffering just by looking at it? If humans fail to recognize individuality in animals, they are equally unlikely to recognize an animal’s unhappiness, or any other emotion, for that matter–they often can’t do it even when it comes to another human. If we are to look for ‘human’ signs of distress we are only going to detect the basic ones, often involving vocal expressions of pain. Unfortunately, for some animals, they don’t emit such audible indications of distress or suffering, at least not that can be detected by human ear. Most sea life would fall in this category. Just because a lobster or tuna or octopus does not scream, that does not mean it is not suffering.

Yet another perception problem lies in the idea that humans come first and that animal suffering is not as important as human suffering. This kind of opinion is the result of those outmoded ways of thinking mentioned earlier. It can be dismissed with the acknowledgment that pain and suffering is felt by nonhuman animals. Once that is acknowledged, it is only right they should be given equal consideration. For you can be sure that an individual non-human’s pain and suffering is just as significant and intolerable to it as it would be to you; that its life is as important to it as yours is to you. Equal consideration of interests overrides all debate on this count–-it’s only fair.

In any case, philosophically thinking, all living things are equal. This is the only view that can conform with the reality of life and the universe as it is understood now. The idea of dominion or superior importance corresponds to the reality of life and the universe as it was understood hundreds of years ago. That’s way out of date. As I mentioned earlier, we have no special place on earth–there is no ultimate hierarchy. The fact is, in a universe without meaning, all things can only have the same level of significance. Looking at it objectively, the life of a mosquito is no less significant than that of a human being.

The notion of equality or equal consideration for all living things is synonymous with an end to tyranny and can lead to what can truly be called civilization. Human beings haven’t reached that state yet. In a couple of hundred years, I predict, the attitudes towards animals prevailing now will be regarded as ignorant and even primitive. We will be the ones regarded as morons. I won’t even go into what they will think of the ecological damage done to the planet by animal farming. That’s a whole other issue. Let’s just concentrate barbaric behaviour.

Take for example the barbaric and uncivilized behaviour of animal experimentation, which strikes me sometimes as no more than an outlet for sadistic minds. The problem with testing is that a lot of it is redundant; it is simply not worth doing or furnishes superfluous results; it continues because of the large industries built up around it; it helps people establish careers or make money. But, in the end, it’s just torture. Animals imprisoned for no good reason and killed or damaged after a life of pain, boredom and loneliness. Why is testing done on animals? Because they have similar reactions as humans do on a physical and mental level. But isn’t this in itself a wake up call? I would think that for this very reason, there is no valid argument for experimentation.

The meat industry is an equally uncivilized nightmare, governed by speed and volume. Inhumane treatment and acts of brutality are common to keep the process running smoothly and to produce maximum profit. Animals born into this hell are deprived of all but the basics to sustain life, have none of their natural requirements met, and are subjected to unnatural pain, stress and torment. From birth to death, an unnatural environment of concrete or metal, extremely limited space and aloneness are their constant torments. I challenge people of intelligence to educate themselves and investigate how sows are kept, how veal is produced and what murderous acts go on away from the public eye in slaughterhouses and on the various kinds of intensive, concentration farms.

What can be said of the human treatment of animals is no different to how the Nazis treated the Jews–-now a commonly recognized analogy. But for animals the holocaust began long ago and did not end. The fundamental reason why animal abuse continues is that human beings have the power, and ignorant if not ruthless people will use that to make all the money they can. It’s curious that the nightmare scenarios that are often depicted in movies–such as human experimentation, human factory farming, the complete disregard for human freedom, humans treated as machines, and so on–-are all based on exactly what goes on in meat industry. Yet this hell for animals appears not to solicit horror in the general public. I can only guess that this is because of the erroneous thinking that prevails, the delusion of dominion.

Education is the key here, once again. Once people become educated, they will find that it all goes way beyond what I’ve mentioned here.

But knowing human beings as I do, as uncivilized as they are still, not a lot is going to change in a hurry. In the meantime, all one can do is raise awareness and reduce one’s intake of meat if not become vegetarian.

ALL THE ARGUMENTS TO PROVE MAN’S SUPERIORITY CANNOT SHATTER THIS
HARD FACT: IN SUFFERING THE ANIMALS ARE OUR EQUALS.

PETER SINGER

~~~

I AM NOT INTERESTED TO KNOW WHETHER VIVISECTION PRODUCES RESULTS THAT ARE PROFITABLE TO THE HUMAN RACE OR DOESN’T. ..THE PAIN WHICH IT INFLICTS UPON UNCONSENTING ANIMALS IS THE BASIS OF MY ENMITY TOWARD IT, AND IT IS TO ME SUFFICIENT JUSTIFICATION OF THE ENMITY WITHOUT LOOKING FURTHER.

MARK TWAIN