Letter to the Editor re Douglas County Lamb Show & Barbecue

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Letter to the Editor re Douglas County Lamb Show & Barbecue
Date submitted: May 30, 2013
News outlet: The News-Review

Sigmund Freud wrote that “Children show no trace of the arrogance which urges adult civilized men to draw a hard-and-fast line between their own nature and that of all other animals.”

Freud’s observation is confirmed by the friendships that children readily make with animals.  Unfortunately, the process of turning caring children into “civilized men” (and women) often involves terminating these friendships and mocking their significance.

The annual Douglas County Lamb Show & Barbecue serves this function of hardening hearts.  Children who have cared for animals are expected to put their friends on the auction block and eventually under the knife.  Amongst the civilized it is deemed a sign of maturity to willingly exchange the lives of loved ones for money.

Resource:
74th Annual Douglas County Lamb Show & Barbecue Program [PDF]
http://www.co.douglas.or.us/dcfair/docs/lamb_program.pdf

Luddites on the Internet?

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gutenbergpress

There are a significant number of people who receive the vast bulk of their information from the internet—accessed with computer or smartphone. Indeed, such information outlets often crowd out other channels of information. This means that if people are to come across a critique of technology it will likely come to them by means of a technology that is within the scope of the critique. If it is a contemporary critique, the person reading it may dismiss the author as a hypocrite for employing a technology that he or she has expressed concerns about.

By sealing themselves into the virtual, many have created a scenario where they can divide people neatly into allies or hypocrites. There is seemingly no room for legitimate criticism because simply by entering the space one has purportedly discredited themselves and is not to be taken seriously.

But critics of technology, if they are to reach those who do not already share their views need to get their message into the virtual so that such critiques can be found by people who almost exclusively get their information there. It is a genuine dilemma for critics of technology and there is seemingly no perfect way to resolve it but to dismiss such critics as hypocrites because their arguments are not delivered exclusively via stone tablets, cave paintings, scrolls of parchment, or orally is unwarranted and disingenuous. It is, more often than not, a glib way to refuse to engage with critics rather than to substantively answer their charges.

To exacerbate the situation, critics of technology are confronted with a wide range of circumstances beyond their control. Indeed, it is very often the perceived lack of meaningful options that fuels the harshest criticism; the idea is that technologies are initially introduced as products that consumers may freely use or ignore but very quickly become almost obligatory. James Howard Kunstler has characterized a driver’s license as being almost a requisite for full citizenship that is to say that it has become essential to fully participate in society (but perhaps that is waning). In a very strict sense one has the freedom to refuse to drive a car but it is not a free choice because of the penalty imposed for declining. This is how many technologies become so invasive; tracing a trajectory from voluntary to obligatory.

Additional examples could be piled to the sky. Not having a Facebook page is now sufficient to be characterized as “suspicious” behavior; columnists at Slate have suggested that “if you are going out with someone and they don’t have a Facebook profile, you should be suspicious.” Not having a Facebook page should be a “red flag”. There have been reports that lacking a Facebook page is also a red flag for employers and thus may compromise one’s search for employment.

And that is simply Facebook. Consider the social cost for forgoing email or the internet altogether. Again, people can and do make such decisions but it is at a great social cost. It could potentially be argued that critics of technology should bear those costs for the sake of their values but that argument needs to be made rather than assumed. Abstaining creates a chasm between such critics and the people they are trying to reach and thus may actually be counterproductive. Abstaining from a particular technology is a strategy but it is one strategy amongst many, it need not be the default position. In many cases, the freedom to abstain is itself a privilege that is not equally available.

Finally, critics of technology are generally not born with such a worldview. It’s a minority viewpoint that many people may not arrive at until well into adult life. Their upbringing and formal education has made them dependent on an environment permeated with technological apparatus. To use myself as an example, I may be able to write a fairly witty letter to the editor, a decent blog post, and use email but I struggle to grow food, recognize the plants and animals who live alongside me, or build anything more complex than a paper airplane (assuming that I am provided with the paper and a flat surface). Simon Fairlie explains similar circumstances in his excellent article “Growing Up Dystechnic”:

Throughout my childhood I lived under the uneasy suspicion that in order to maintain the English class system, I was being deprived of contact with the more robust aspects of the material world, and on leaving school I realized that my suspicions were entirely correct. I was utterly ill-equipped to do anything except write academic essays and bowl leg-breaks; the only thing I was qualified to do was to sink back into the academic system from which I had only just emerged.

I am struggling to learn skills that in a different time and place would have been mastered as a child, skills that now must be learned in a discursive manner, often from books, and with the clunky brain of an adult rather than breathed in with the air of childhood.

It is absurd to suggest someone is a hypocrite because their options are severely constrained and what they have to choose from is contrary to their values or desires.

Curious “Creatures”

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crea·turecreature walks among us

1. an animal, especially a nonhuman: the creatures of the woods and fields; a creature from outer space.
2. anything created, whether animate or inanimate.
3. person; human being: She is a charming creature. The driver of a bus is sometimes an irritable creature.
4. an animate being.

I avoid using the word “creature” to refer to the beings whom we share the planet with because it implies creation and hence creationism.   And creationism, in addition to being intellectually bankrupt, is also a rather unsatisfying story when compared with the story currently being told by Darwinian evolution.

But there is another interesting question to ask about the term “creatures” and that is: who is included?

In my experience, “creatures” tends to be used so as to include only animals but plant species are no less a part of creation (if that is the story we are working with).  Why then do dandelions have less of a claim to the label than do Dalmatians?  Perhaps when we speak of our fellow creatures we should include those who, quite literally, are rooted in the soil.  Such a change may make us more open to learning from them.

Yet even limiting “creatures” to members of the biotic community—the community of life—may be too narrow.  Creation includes everything and so every individual (no less difficult a term) is a creature.  Plants are creatures but planets are presumably also creatures.  Leopards and lemurs are creatures but maybe landscapes are too?  Rivers no less than ravens.

Pushing further still, creatures may not need to have resulted from an original act of Creation but perhaps could be the result of more mundane creative acts.  Billiard balls may be said to be unique creatures traversing across terrains of green felt.  The second definition listed above suggests that “creature” can be applied to “anything created, whether animate or inanimate” and so by this standard billiard balls are indeed appropriately described as creatures.  In fact, if we discard creationism, billiard balls may have a better claim to being described as creatures than human being s do.

The objection may be advanced that by employing such an expansive or inclusive definition of the term “creature” that it ceases to be of any practical value for communicating.  If a term applies to everything—rather than picking out particular objects or individuals amongst a larger field—then arguably it isn’t very helpful.  But perhaps the value in such an all-embracing term is rather in calling our attention to the similarities that are found even amongst such a brilliant diversity.  It provokes questions that might not otherwise arise such as how we respectfully engage with other creatures whatever form they might take.  It may draw our attention to the fact that the stuff of billiard balls is no less part of a living earth than the stuff that makes up our own bodies.  There is a significance to that which is unlikely to be discovered if we cannot fathom a single commonality.

A second objection—or more accurately—curiosity might be why someone such as myself who admittedly avoids the word “creature” and will probably continue  to do so would trouble oneself with such questions.

The only answer that I can currently muster in response to this would be that I am hopeful that there are other terms that offer the advantages of the term “creature” without implying creationism.  I would like a term that reinforces our kinship with others and is equally all-embracing (including human others, nonhuman others, and perhaps even inanimate others).  Perhaps that term is “beings” which I tend to use but, in my opinion, is deficient is some way that I cannot quite name.

Alternatively, perhaps there is a way to save rather than surrender the term “creature” that is not currently clear to me.  In defending his use of the word “spiritual,” prominent atheist Sam Harris insists that “we must reclaim good words and put them to use.”  Harris explains that his fellow atheist Christopher Hitchens “believed that “spiritual” was a term we could not do without, and he repeatedly plucked it from the mire of supernaturalism.”

Is “creature” a good word that needs to be reclaimed?  Or is it something we can do without?

Letter to the Editor re Oregon National Primate Research Center

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OHSU Tortures Animals 2

Letter to the Editor re Oregon National Primate Research Center
Date submitted: April 25, 2013
News outlet: The Oregonian

Sometimes we are slow to do the right thing; reluctant to make a bold decision even if it would significantly benefit others or make the world a more peaceful place.  Sometimes we wait for others to chart a course and are only comfortable following their path toward social justice.  In extreme cases, we drag our feet and actively resist the birth of a just world.

Oregon Health & Science University (OHSU) is not going to lead the way toward a more compassionate world for animals.  It is simply not.  But with the recent announcement by Harvard Medical School that it will be closing the New England Primate Research Center perhaps wheels are in motion.  OHSU would be wise to follow their lead by making a similar announcement with respect to the Oregon National Primate Research Center.

Justice demands that every facility dedicated to imprisoning and tormenting animals be shuttered.

ONPRC

source: PETA.org

Some People Have Blogs, Others Have Matches

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 support-walter

“Fire has shut down fur farms, closed slaughterhouses, and destroyed years of animal abusers research. It is the A.L.F. tactic abusers fear most, precisely because it is the biggest threat to their work. That should be sufficient as a selling point for anyone serious about animal liberation.”
–Peter Young

Walter Bond is a prisoner in the Control Management Unit (CMU) at Marion federal prison.  His anticipated release date is currently set for March 21, 2021.  He received a 12 year sentence for three arsons carried out as an Animal Liberation Front operative targeting the Tandy Leather Factory (Salt Lake City, Utah), the Tiburon Restaurant (Sandy, Utah), and the Sheepskin Factory (Denver, Colorado).  Fires set at each location resulted in damages that collectively totaled over half a million dollars.

I have been corresponding with Walter since 2010 when he was arrested for these actions.  In the course of this correspondence and from Walter’s public writings, I was excited to learn that Walter is an individual with a very broad perspective.  He identifies as an anarcho-primitivist and therefore in addition to uncompromising support for veganism, he also condemns domestication, mass society, advanced technology, and civilization.  As I have argued before, animal liberation requires such far reaching goals even if most vegans and animal rights advocates fail to trace the consequences of their own position that far.

Walter therefore has the potential to link two fringe communities that could benefit from dialogue and collaboration but frequently tend to be dismissive of one another: the animal rights community and the primitivist or anti-civilization community.  Drawing out those connections has been, in part, what has motivated me to create the Uncivilized Animals blog.

Finally, I share this information today because today–April 16–is Walter’s birthday.  It is another birthday that he will spend it in a cage because he took concrete action to defend our animal relations and lashed out at those who torment them.

Please consider providing some tangible support to Walter.  That may be in the form of written correspondence, sending money to his commissary fund, or getting him a book from his wish list.  Checking out his book list is also a good way to learn about some of his current interests which may be useful when writing a letter.

Walter risked—and ultimately sacrificed—his freedom for the sake of others.  It is vitally important that he receive our support both for his sake and so that those considering similarly bold actions know that if apprehended that they will likewise be supported.

matches2

“Made Up” Stories

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“I suspect that practice of the wild coverprimary peoples all know that their myths are somehow “made up.” They do not take them literally and at the same time they hold the stories very dear. Only upon being invaded by history and whipsawed by alien values do a people begin to declare that their myths are ‘literally true’.”

-Gary Snyder

 

The above passage is from Gary Snyder’s essay “Blue Mountains Constantly Walking” which appears in The Practice of the Wild (1990).  It is not quite clear to me what to make of his claim that “primary peoples all know that their myths are somehow ‘made up’.”

Is this a way to salvage (itself a somewhat derogatory or at least dismissive term) such myths and to thereby defend the integrity of the people to whom they belong?  If so, it is probably a failed effort that is itself rather insulting (“Surely they know better!  They cannot genuinely believe what they are saying!”).

The difficulty seems to arise from equating genuine belief with literal belief; in prioritizing literal expression over and above all other sorts of expression.  Yet, surely something can be true without being literally true.  A person can assert something and/or believe something, without taking any position as to its literal truth.  Snyder does not say that primary peoples know or suspect that their myths are false and he places “made up” in scare quotes.  In a sense, all stories are “made up” whether they appear in The New York Times or Aesop’s Fables, they all need to be composed or put into words.  Stories may be both “made up” and true.  That a story is made up has nothing to do with its truth value.

The myths referred to by Snyder may fall precisely into this category of the true yet not necessarily literally true.  Furthermore, it is not that they are lacking in literal truth or deficient in some way but rather that they do not aspire toward that particular manner of being true.  To ask about their literal truth is to assess them by the wrong standard.

It is difficult—for me, at least—to avoid the mistake of failing to even recognize the category of the true but not necessarily literally true.  For example, I might ask “Does she really believe this?” when in fact, I mean to ask “Does she believe it to be literally true?” The questions are not equivalent. “Really” should not be used in place of “literally” as if genuine Truth was necessarily literal truth; something may really be true without being literally true.

David Abram, in an interview with Scott London explained, that “people in our culture…tend to think of poetry as a kind of secondary use of language. We don’t realize that language originates in poetry and in poetics.”

If primary peoples suspect that their myths are made up that may be to their credit and speak to a level of nuance in their thinking that is absent in contemporary cultures which trivialize the other-than-literal.

It is clear that Snyder values the other-than-literal for in the same essay just prior to the above quoted passage he writes that, “Narratives are one sort of trace that we leave in the world.  All our literatures are leavings—of the same order as the myths of wilderness peoples…Other orders of beings have their own literatures.”

To recognize the literatures belonging to “other orders of beings”—be they deer or deciduous trees—requires that we see truth in cloven hoof prints left in the snow and in the changing colors of autumn leaves.

In Praise of Dead Trees

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Pileated Woodpecker Flying (3753)

[D]ying and dead wood provides one of the two or three greatest resources for animal species in a natural forest … if fallen timber and slightly decayed trees are removed the whole system is gravely impoverished of perhaps more than a fifth of its fauna.
–Charles S. Elton, The Pattern of Animal Communities, 1966

I recently attended one day of the four day long Public Interest Environmental Law Conference (PIELC) held at the University of Oregon.  One panel in particular titled “Rethinking Forest Health” serves as the inspiration for this post.  The panel included George Wuerthner.  The purpose of the panel was to reconsider what it means for a forest to be in good health.  Wuerthner’s portion of the presentation focused largely on the need for dead trees and down wood in a healthy forest—a requirement no less vital to forest health, according to Wuerthner, than living trees.

I was most interested in the many ways that wildlife—including birds, mammals, reptiles, amphibians, and others—depend on the presence of dead trees.  Below are some examples drawn from the available scientific and technical literature (bold emphasis on species names has been added):

  • Primary cavity excavators, such as woodpeckers, make cavities in dead trees for nesting and roosting.  Many woodpeckers explicitly require dead trees for such purposes as they are unable to puncture sound wood.  This has led Swedish researchers Angelstam and Mikusinski to conclude that the presence of woodpeckers is “not compatible with intensive forest management.”
  • Secondary cavity nesters, such as red squirrels, flying squirrels, bushy-tailed woodrats, and many species of bat, do not create their own cavities but nest in cavities made by the primary cavity excavators. (Source)
  • “Hollow logs may be homes for returning marten, fisher, lynx (Lynx canadensis), bobcat (L. rufus), bear (Ursus spp.), raccoon, and numerous other creatures.” (Source)
  • “Shrew-moles (Neurotrichus gibbsii), shrews (Sporex sp.), deer mice (Peromyscus maniculatus), salamanders and frogs may use smaller cavities in the decaying wood for thermal and protective cover, in addition to foraging on the various insect larvae harbored there.” (Source)
  • “[S]everal mammals use floating logs including mink (Mustela vison), river otter (Lutra Canadensis), and beaver (Castor canadensis)” (Source)
  • Beetles and ants are primary cavity excavators.  They raise their young in the cavities they create in dead wood. (Source)
  • Honey bees and wasps frequently use hollow logs, decayed trees, or other cavities to build their nests.  In turn, animals such as bears often rely on the insects who make their home in dead wood as an important food source. (Source)
  • “Rodents, snowshoe hare (Lepus americanus), gray wolf (Canis lupus), and wolverine (Gulo gulo)…use down wood as maternal or resting dens” (Source)
  • Larger animals may use snags (standing dead trees) to evade predators; likewise smaller animals can use down wood as cover to avoid aerial predators.
  • “Loose bark on dead trees may also provide nesting crevices for brown creepers (Certhia americanus)” and certain other birds. (Source)
  • “Logs provide cover for mountain lions (Felix concolor) at diurnal bed sites and at natal and maternal den sites.” (Source)
  • “Red-backed voles use logs extensively for cover and food, eating mostly fungi and truffles, many of which are associated with logs.” (Source)

The above examples focus exclusively on what dead trees and down wood—commonly referred to as “coarse woody debris” in the relevant literature—provide to animal species.  The list could be expanded with both by listing additional benefits to animals but also by listing benefits to plant life or things such as preventing erosion and enriching the soil.

In intensely managed forests—glorified tree farms—dead wood is often nearly absent wheras  “[i]n naturally dynamic forests dead wood is a dominating feature and makes up 30-40% of the total wood volume.” After a single logging event, dead wood may be reduced to 20 percent and after several logging rotations, dead wood may be a mere one percent of the total volume of wood that remains. (Source)

Current logging practices are often defended by pointing out that a clearcut, for example, might sometimes appear to mimic large scale fires.  The significant difference in these cases is that even intense fires tend to consume less than 10 percent of available wood whereas clearcuts can remove upwards of 95 percent of available wood.  Wuerthner describes this down wood as a “biological legacy” in contrast to the timber industry which often characterizes it as “wasted” or “squandered”.

During the question and answer portion of the panel that inspired this post, Wuerthner was asked what this information meant for the prospect of “sustainable forestry”.  Admitting that his answer was likely to be “unsatisfying” and imprecise, he suggested that any rate of harvesting timber that was economically viable was almost sure to have exceeded a sustainable level.

Perhaps an alarming conclusion for those with an almost religious faith in the idea that industry and nature can co-exist; less alarming for those such as Aldo Leopold who, albeit resorting to a mechanical metaphor, asked: “who but a fool would discard seemingly useless parts? To keep every cog and wheel is the first rule of intelligent tinkering.”

Recommended:

Wild Fire: A Century of Failed Forest Policy by George Wuerthner

Proceedings of the Symposium on the Ecology and Management of Dead Wood in Western Forests (2002)
http://www.fs.fed.us/psw/publications/documents/gtr-181/

“The Seen and Unseen World of the Fallen Tree”
http://digitalcommons.usu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1163

Treesearch
http://www.treesearch.fs.fed.us/
“All Treesearch publications were written or produced by Forest Service personnel and are in the public domain.”

Animals Made to Order

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Jackson Laboratory entranceThere is a scale of violence that can only be achieved by a civilized society.

Free people with simple tools are just not adequate for the realization of some tasks.  Warriors can only do so much without the support of bureaucrats and the tip of a spear cannot reach as far as a predator drone.

Most helpful to achieve certain levels of violence is rigid hierarchy, wage or slave labor, complex technology, standardization, mass society, and a cool distance (physical or psychological) between assailant and victim.  In short: people need to show up for work and the trains need to run on time.  To the extent that these things are missing, the scale of violence will almost necessarily be diminished.

Enter Jackson Laboratory.  They have achieved a scale of ongoing violence that is difficult to conceive.  They provide a key part of the infrastructure of the animal experimentation industry.

A staggering number of the mice who fill the cages in animal laboratories around the world originate from JAX Mice & Services, a division of Jackson Laboratory based in Bar Harbor, Maine (with additional locations in Sacramento, California and Farmington, Connecticut).  Approximately two-thirds of Jackson Laboratory’s $214 million 2011 operating budget was dedicated to JAX Mice & Services.  From June 2010 through May 2011, JAX Mice distributed over 3 million mice to more than 900 institutions in 56 different countries. And more than 1 million live mice are held at the Bar Harbor headquarters.

But as The Connecticut Mirror has explained:

“[t]hese aren’t just any mice. These are the product of a sophisticated, highly controlled and protected mouse-breeding operation.  They live in rooms designed to be impenetrable to the smallest unwelcome microbes, in cages stacked floor-to-ceiling and supplied with filtered air that changes once a minute. They’re cared for by handlers wearing protective suits, who know their inbred charges so well they can spot a potential genetic mutation that even a biologist might not notice.”

JAX Mice has over 7000 different genetic strains of mouse available for purchase by animal experimenters around the world.  Many of the varieties have been bred specifically to exhibit particular pathologies or to develop various diseases.  The “features”—or more accurately, ailments—of each genetic strain can be found by using the extensive JAX Mice online database.  Using their advanced search, one can search for mice by “phenotype of interest” or “human disease of interest.”  Their database can also be searched by “disease term

000646_lg

Stock Number: 000646
“It is highly susceptible to cortisone-induced congenital cleft palate. It has a high incidence of spontaneous lung adenomas, and lung tumors readily develop in response to carcinogens.”

To begin to understand the full scope of what JAX Mice offers it is worth taking some time to explore their database.  Here are a few examples of what can be found with even minimal effort:

  • If you were looking for mice who would develop tumors with unusual frequency you would have over 200 strains from which to choose.  You could then decide that your preference is for muscular tumors, skeletal tumors, tumors that develop on the eye, tumors that develop in the urinary system, the respiratory system, or the reproductive system.
  • You can find mice with heads that are of an abnormal shape or size.
  • You can find mice who have been bred to be obese.
  • You can find mice who suffer from paralysis and can select a strain with either front or hindlimb paralysis.
  • There are mice who age and/or die prematurely.
  • There are mice who suffer from a very wide range of eye abnormalities.
  • There are mice with abnormally high or abnormally low pain thresholds

Every one of these conditions—and countless others—is a deliberately inflicted injury.  The people at Jackson Laboratory are literally selecting for illness; breeding for disease and pathology.   They may often speak of finding cures but their routine activity is the deliberate imposition of suffering on millions of individual animals.  Furthermore, this suffering is generally amplified once the mice arrive at their final destination and are used in experiments at other institutions which can be highly invasive and most often deadly.

So those are some of the mice…but what about the services referenced in JAX Mice & Services name?  If mice are the raw material, services may be said to provide the “value added” portion of their operation.

The JAX Mice site has a page titled “JAX Surgical & Preconditioning Services”.  Experimenters can order mice with diet induced obesity, mice of various ages, and/or pregnant mice timed to deliver pups after being sent through the mail.

There are also various surgical procedures that mice may be subjected to prior to being shipped out.  There is a lengthy list of “standard surgeries” they will perform for a set fee.  They are willing to remove various organs, insert microchips, or do a brain cannulation.  The brain cannulation procedure is described on their site as follows:

The cannula implanted in mice consists of a guide cannula and a dummy cannula. The guide cannula is placed into the brain at predetermined coordinates through a hole drilled in the skull. The dummy cannula consists of a cap that screws onto the guide cannula and has a stylet that inserts into the guide cannula to prevent materials from entering it when it’s not being used.

brain cannulation

Brain cannulation

JAX Mice & Services boasts that: “We can age JAX Mice to display one or more of a variety of disease phenotypes, such as Alzheimer’s, alopecia, cancer, diet-induced obesity (DIO), and diabetes.”

The possibility of inflicting debilitating injury on an individual prior even to birth—effectively imposing cradle-to-grave suffering—may initially seem odd when in fact it is has become commonplace.  Human children are increasingly poisoned in the womb, being born with a heavy body burden of industrial chemicals.  They are then nursed on breast milk that may contain “DDT (the banned but stubbornly persistent pesticide famous for nearly wiping out the bald eagle), PCB’s, dioxin, trichloroethylene, perchlorate, mercury, lead, benzene, arsenic…paint thinners, dry-cleaning fluids, wood preservatives, toilet deodorizers, cosmetic additives, gasoline byproducts, rocket fuel, termite poisons, fungicides and flame retardants.”  (This is not to question the prudence of breast feeding for both mother and child; in a toxic world, this rocket fuel laden diet seemingly remains the best option available.)

Stock Number: 000697"Mice homozygous for the diabetes spontaneous mutation (Leprdb) become identifiably obese around 3 to 4 weeks of age."

Stock Number: 000697
“Mice homozygous for the diabetes spontaneous mutation (Leprdb) become identifiably obese around 3 to 4 weeks of age.”

In sum, the mice at Jackson Laboratory are simply further along the same trajectory of domestication that we ourselves are on.  If they are a paradigm example of what it means to be domesticated; we are nonetheless following the same path even if we have not received our Stock Numbers yet.  Not surprisingly, there is a wide gulf dividing so-called laboratory mice and their wild counterparts; for example, research results on laboratory mice cannot be reliably extrapolated to apply to field mice.  The former have been too thoroughly manipulated to shed light on the later.  But there is reason to be hopeful and to believe that the project of domestication is never complete, that fissures remain like cracks in concrete.

In 2003, Manuel Berdoy, an animal behaviorist from Oxford University, released 75 thoroughly domesticated and docile rats into an open field.  The rats who had never previously been outside very quickly began to engage in the wild behavior of their peers, behavior that was suppressed when they were confined to a laboratory.  They developed natural social hierarchies, mapped paths through their new terrain, and found food that was radically different from the pellets that were provided in the cages they left behind.  Berdoy has said that:

“This shows that while we can take the animal from the wild, we have not have taken the wild out of the animal,”

The wild remains in every one of us regardless of how long we have lived in a cage.

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Stock Number: 002726
“exhibit a phenotype similar to amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) in humans; becoming paralyzed in one or more limbs with paralysis due to loss of motor neurons from the spinal cord.”

Recommended Resources

Letter to the Editor re: “Logging Towns Are on a Roll”

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Letter to the Editor re “Logging Towns Are on a Roll,” February 24, 2012
Date submitted: February 25, 2013
News outlet: The Wall Street Journal

In truth, log yards are graveyards.  The stacked bodies of dead trees, viewed merely as building materials, were not only themselves once alive but also provided homes and security for countless others who lived amongst their branches.

To justify the industrial scale slaughter of trees by pointing to shifting unemployment rates and the “composite price per thousand board feet of framing lumber” is to paper over atrocity with the pages of an accounting ledger.

log yard daily astorian

The Zoobooks Approach to Animal Liberation

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zoobooks orangutanszoobooks pandaszoobooks elephants

A recent post highlighted the fact that dung beetles navigate by the light of the Milky Way galaxy and suggested the possibility of cultivating a greater compassion for insects.  This is a precarious yet common form of reasoning on behalf of animals.

Animal rights and animal protection organizations regularly point out the amazing range of abilities that nonhuman animals possess.  In a video released by PETA titled “Who Cares”, we learn that rats and mice are “affectionate”, “clever”, “resourceful”, that they “form lifelong relationships”, and even “giggle when they are having fun”.  In laboratories they are said to feel “lonely, anxious, and depressed”.

In Defense of Animals (IDA) describes elephants as “complex, social animals” who “live in extended family groups” and develop “lifelong bonds”.

Note that this is often quite different from learning about animals for the express purpose of skillfully caring for them and/or being sure not to unwittingly cause them harm.  It may be practically important to know about familial bonds amongst animals but probably less important to know if they regularly laugh (or sing).

I am lightheartedly calling this the Zoobooks Approach to animal liberation. It could just as easily be described as the David Attenborough Approach.  The core idea is to encourage people to learn about animals as a means of heightening their respect and consideration for those animals.  So for example, one might think that if people know that pigs enjoy, and arguably excel, at playing video games they will act differently toward pigs (but then again, given that such video game research has been done by animal science professors and apologists for animal agriculture it is probably not the best example!).

The danger in this line of reasoning is that one mistakenly takes the presence of such abilities and/or intelligences as requisites for moral consideration.  The danger is amplified when the ability or intelligence in question is deemed to be “human-like”; animals are then often seen as worthy of concern only to the extent that they are like us.  But as Gary Francione notes, “there is absolutely no logical relationship between the possession of humanlike intelligence and the morality of using animals as resources.”

So how do I explain seemingly engaging in this form of argument last month and then calling it into question this month?  My explanation is that this shouldn’t be considered a “form of argument” in the first place and that problems only arise when it is considered as an argument.

I do not wish to suggest that insects warrant compassion because they navigate by starlight, recognize their peers, experience loneliness, or may be able to count.  We do not need to know these things about a particular individual or species in order to grant it moral consideration.  The facts presented in an issue of Zoobooks are not presented as premises in a moral argument.

That dung beetles are “celestial navigators” is closer to a dramatic and memorable story than an academic argument.

It should be clear that philosophical arguments alone cannot bring liberation for animals; if it were otherwise, the task of liberation would be behind us.  And while scientific experiments continue to reveal a great wealth of information about our animal relations the findings rarely cause even the experimenters to set aside cruel and invasive techniques.

It has been said that scientists could discover that dairy cows spend their time praying the rosary and awaiting the return of Jesus and it wouldn’t add a day to their life.  To wit, the person who discovered that rats laugh—Jaak Panksepp—is himself an unapologetic animal experimenter who, as recently as August 2012, was a co-author on a study in which rats were forced to fight one another before being decapitated and having their brains removed and cut into slices.

So it is clear that facts are not enough and even when strung together into cogent arguments remain insufficient to affect the behavior of most people.  We therefore need to do more than aspire to allot moral consideration based on the result of an algorithm, moral calculus, or peer-reviewed article; rationing compassion in this manner is unlikely to work.

We—in the broadest and most inclusive sense—need stories.

The Dark Mountain Manifesto, released in 2009, comes to a similar conclusion stating that: “borrowing the guise of science and reason, we began to deny the role of stories, to dismiss their power as something primitive, childish, outgrown…Yet for all this, our world is still shaped by stories.”

We need stories that inspire and leave us in awe of our animal relations.  Stories that are informed in part by science, in part by lived experience but stories that make us grateful for the company of our four-legged, our feathered, our finned, our scaled, and our cold-blooded relations.

Philosophers, scientists, and theorists all have a role to play but the contributions of skilled storytellers and gifted artists must not be overlooked  .