All around the cathedral, the saints and apostles
Look down as she sells her wares
Although you can't see it, you know they are smiling
Each time someone shows that he cares
I was riveted last evening by the Broadway performance of Mary Poppins, and what's even better, I got to meet the incredible performer, Caroline Sheen, who plays Mary on the American tour! You never know the blessings that will come your way when you decide to follow your heart and show you care. I got to meet this wonderful actress and person because I volunteer at Big Cat Rescue, a sanctuary devoted to the care of abandoned, abused, neglected, and orphaned exotic cats. Most of the main cast had come out for a tour of Big Cat Rescue last week, and Caroline liked it so much she came out for a second tour, and I was fortunate enough to be there when she did. Amazingly, this talented cast seemed to be just as riveted by our cats and their stories as we all were by their awesome performances on the stage.
I found myself surprised at how emotional I became during some moments of the show. I told myself that it is because I recently lost my mother, and she is the one who really helped me appreciate Mary Poppins when I was a kid. The character has been one of my heroes ever since, so I supposed that I was just having an unexpected moment of grief. But I was not the only one who was moved. It was all I could do to keep from openly sobbing during the "Feed the Birds" number, and I noticed that my husband was sniffling, and so was the teenaged girl sitting on the other side of me. I suppose some would say that we are sappy and sentimental, and more than a few would accuse those of us who love this story, movie, and production of simply pandering to the common emotional manipulations of mass-marketed show tunes. No doubt with some popular movies and shows, this criticism would have some legitimacy.
But I think sometimes the masses are on to something. I think sometimes we flock to these performances because we recognize something truly worthy within them, some kind of beauty that we know is reflected in ourselves. "Feed the Birds" was my mother's favorite song from the film, and I don't think I have appreciated it until now. The simplicity of the message coupled with the grandeur of the cathedral and the ever watchful eyes of the saints and apostles stirs something deep within us. It's the kind of thing that brings tears to your eyes, not because you have just witnessed something heartbreaking or sad, but because it reminds you of some long forgotten truth, or of some place you once called home and only now you see just how far you have wandered from it. An old beggar woman begs for money not for herself, but for a flock of birds that some people cast off as pests, and it actually seems to make her happy. What a concept.
I remember once, years ago, meeting a woman who claimed to have had a near-death experience while undergoing plastic surgery on her nose. She was a very funny lady. I remember her saying, "Can you believe I paid for this nose and almost died for it? Before I looked like Jamie Farr, now I look like Bob Hope." Somewhere in her mid 50's, when I told her I was 25, she told me I was just a baby. I had to reach the age of 40 before I understood what she meant. There were a couple of things about her experience that stood out to me. I remember her talking about "them" or "they." She kept saying things like, "They love you, no matter what you do." She never told me who "they" were and the reader will probably find it very frustrating that I never thought to ask. Also, she said, "Little things, like being kind to animals, are really important." Having already begun a journey of deep concern over the way I had seen helpless creatures being treated, I was moved and inspired by this statement, just as I am moved and inspired by this song.
I can't always explain why I know it is so important to care for the helpless and speak for the voiceless, I just know that it is. I think there is a gentleness that lies within all of us, and I feel a sense of urgency to move towards healing when I witness someone betraying that gentleness by exploiting the most vulnerable beings under our collective wing. It is because I believe it is natural for people to care that I must do something when I see them behaving as if they don't. It is because I know that bestowing love upon creatures that seem insignificant can bring us great joy and satisfaction that I spend so much time trying to move other people towards expressions of that joy.
Life is simple. We are the ones who are making it complicated. While we may think the worst fate of all is to end up a beggar in the street, perhaps the bird woman is on to something. If she has the power to act on her best instincts, so do we all. "All it takes is tuppence from you."
Though her words are simple and few
Listen, listen, she's calling to you
Feed the birds, tuppence a bag
Tuppence, tuppence, tuppence a bag
Sharyn Beach
Monday, June 7, 2010
Sunday, May 16, 2010
Go Monkey Go.....Where?
This morning's St. Pete Times featured a fascinating story about a rhesus macaque monkey that has been on the run in the Tampa Bay area for over a year. Eluding several attempts at capture, his neighborhood wanderings have made him somewhat of a local hero, spawning the battle cry "Go monkey go!"
While it is refreshing to see so many people on the side of the monkey's freedom, the article provides an excellent overview of why the animal may very well be suffering from a great loneliness. Experts on the species point out that what is keeping him on the lam is a futile search for members of his own kind. The article is extremely thoughtful and well-written, but there is one aspect of it that greatly disturbs me: it seems to suggest that once captured, the monkey should be placed in the hands of a private owner, and yet in the same breath points out the distinct possibility that the monkey is an escaped pet. Can't we see the connection here? The trade in exotic pets is exactly why he is so desperately looking for something he will never find. The only way to keep a trade like this going is to separate the animals from one another in the first place, particularly by separating the young from their mothers.
The only solution that really benefits the monkey is to place him in an accredited sanctuary. Accredited sanctuaries are the only places truly committed to giving disenfranchised animals a permanent home.
Below is the letter that I wrote both to the reporter and to the editor:
Dear Michael,
I wish to thank everyone involved in the story about the rhesus macaque monkey that has been on the run in Tampa Bay. By honestly outlining the animal's needs, you have helped to dispel some of the myths that humans have believed and even perpetuated about wild animals and especially about wild animals living in captivity. Recognizing their need for autonomy and social interaction with their own helps us to also recognize the ethical implications of separating family units, keeping them in isolation, and using them for our own purposes.
The only thing that disappointed me was that the article seemed to insinuate that the only solution for this monkey is to capture him and give him to one of the private owners who maintain licenses to keep such animals. Such a solution ignores the fact that the fallacy of private ownership may be the reason that the monkey is in this predicament to begin with. The article adeptly outlines the lack of foresight that caused someone to bring in a troop of macaques to entertain tourists without considering the needs and abilities of the animals, and as well points out that the monkey may be on the run precisely because it got loose from a license-bearing pet owner. Why do we assume that the solution is to put the animal right back into the hands of people who are contributing to a multi-billion dollar industry that willfully separates social animals from one another for the sole purpose of keeping them as pets?
I am surprised that the possibility of placing the animal in an accredited primate sanctuary, like Jungle Friends, was not even mentioned. Accredited sanctuaries are held to the standards of the accrediting body, The Association of Sanctuaries, and dedicate every resource they have to providing the animals with what they actually need, including the social interaction so important to primates. Additionally, the homes they give them are permanent. Private ownership is nothing more or less than buying, selling, and trading individual animals, which means that such individuals get moved from place to place with little regard for the toll it takes on them psychologically, no matter how much people involved in this trade shout that they trade them for the purposes of conservation.
If we really cared about conserving wild animals, we never would have taken them from their rightful homes to begin with. But we can make up for our past wrongs by focusing our considerable energy on placing unreleasable captive animals in accredited sanctuaries that operate according to the highest standards, and by talking to one another and our lawmakers about how we can preserve wild places and let the wild animals that we have left in this world live peacefully within them. It is time for the public to recognize squarely that private ownership is a business and not a part of any organized conservation effort, and is inherently unsustainable becaue it essentially treats living creatures like a commodity.
Thank you again for covering this story and for your attention to detail. I would love to see more
articles about this topic in the future, especially anything that outlines the very best things we can do for the welfare of the animals.
Sincerely,
Sharyn Beach
Tampa, FL
While it is refreshing to see so many people on the side of the monkey's freedom, the article provides an excellent overview of why the animal may very well be suffering from a great loneliness. Experts on the species point out that what is keeping him on the lam is a futile search for members of his own kind. The article is extremely thoughtful and well-written, but there is one aspect of it that greatly disturbs me: it seems to suggest that once captured, the monkey should be placed in the hands of a private owner, and yet in the same breath points out the distinct possibility that the monkey is an escaped pet. Can't we see the connection here? The trade in exotic pets is exactly why he is so desperately looking for something he will never find. The only way to keep a trade like this going is to separate the animals from one another in the first place, particularly by separating the young from their mothers.
The only solution that really benefits the monkey is to place him in an accredited sanctuary. Accredited sanctuaries are the only places truly committed to giving disenfranchised animals a permanent home.
Below is the letter that I wrote both to the reporter and to the editor:
Dear Michael,
I wish to thank everyone involved in the story about the rhesus macaque monkey that has been on the run in Tampa Bay. By honestly outlining the animal's needs, you have helped to dispel some of the myths that humans have believed and even perpetuated about wild animals and especially about wild animals living in captivity. Recognizing their need for autonomy and social interaction with their own helps us to also recognize the ethical implications of separating family units, keeping them in isolation, and using them for our own purposes.
The only thing that disappointed me was that the article seemed to insinuate that the only solution for this monkey is to capture him and give him to one of the private owners who maintain licenses to keep such animals. Such a solution ignores the fact that the fallacy of private ownership may be the reason that the monkey is in this predicament to begin with. The article adeptly outlines the lack of foresight that caused someone to bring in a troop of macaques to entertain tourists without considering the needs and abilities of the animals, and as well points out that the monkey may be on the run precisely because it got loose from a license-bearing pet owner. Why do we assume that the solution is to put the animal right back into the hands of people who are contributing to a multi-billion dollar industry that willfully separates social animals from one another for the sole purpose of keeping them as pets?
I am surprised that the possibility of placing the animal in an accredited primate sanctuary, like Jungle Friends, was not even mentioned. Accredited sanctuaries are held to the standards of the accrediting body, The Association of Sanctuaries, and dedicate every resource they have to providing the animals with what they actually need, including the social interaction so important to primates. Additionally, the homes they give them are permanent. Private ownership is nothing more or less than buying, selling, and trading individual animals, which means that such individuals get moved from place to place with little regard for the toll it takes on them psychologically, no matter how much people involved in this trade shout that they trade them for the purposes of conservation.
If we really cared about conserving wild animals, we never would have taken them from their rightful homes to begin with. But we can make up for our past wrongs by focusing our considerable energy on placing unreleasable captive animals in accredited sanctuaries that operate according to the highest standards, and by talking to one another and our lawmakers about how we can preserve wild places and let the wild animals that we have left in this world live peacefully within them. It is time for the public to recognize squarely that private ownership is a business and not a part of any organized conservation effort, and is inherently unsustainable becaue it essentially treats living creatures like a commodity.
Thank you again for covering this story and for your attention to detail. I would love to see more
articles about this topic in the future, especially anything that outlines the very best things we can do for the welfare of the animals.
Sincerely,
Sharyn Beach
Tampa, FL
Thursday, March 25, 2010
Mountaintop Removal
Now his life is full of wonder but his heart still knows some fear
Of a simple thing he cannot comprehend
Why they try to tear the mountains down to bring in a couple more
More people, more scars upon the land
John Denver
I was a child when John Denver was at the height of his popularity, and whenever I heard this song, I could not understand this lyric. I remember thinking, "You can't tear down a mountain! That doesn't make any sense!"
Twenty-five years later, I was horrified to realize just how wrong I was. When I was in graduate school, I attended a conference at my alma mater, the University of Tennessee, about energy conservation. I decided to attend a session about mountaintop removal, a practice I had never heard about before. "How in the world," I wondered, "does one remove the top from a mountain?" The answer is simple of course - with lots and lots and lots of explosives. Apparently, digging into the mountains to extract the underlying coal became too cumbersome and expensive, so coal companies decided it was just easier to remove the mountains altogether by exploding the tops off of them.
As you may well imagine, this takes some doing, and the unfortunate people who live in these mountains can attest to the fact that the shelling goes on all day, every day, for months on end. One resident of West Virginia, named Maria, described the scene of her family's Christmas dinner as something akin to trying to celebrate in a war zone. The dishes were literally coming up off of the table. (Yes, they were shelling on Christmas day.) As you can also imagine, the constant shelling results in debris flying everywhere and destroys the natural beauty and wonder for which most people move to, visit, and write songs about mountains. For the residents of Appalachia, the very reason their ancestors moved to the mountains generations ago is being demolished before their very eyes. When Maria expressed her concerns to the coal company that was causing this damage, she was told that if she didn't like it she should just move away, as if she could sell her property to anyone after it had been filled up with the mud and debris from the havoc being wreaked all around her.
The domino effect that mountaintop removal has on ecosystems most certainly cannot be measured, but there is one immediate repercussion that claims lives and leaves many homeless - flooding. An important factor not considered by the coal companies and their government supporters is that the mountains, and the trees and shrubs calling them home, are holding water - lots and lots and lots of water. They are not just rearranging dirt out there; when they remove the tops from mountains, they are erasing hundreds of millions of years of quiet, constant, and patient development. This reality becomes painfully apparent with the first heavy rains that fall on a mountain that has been violently transformed into a plateau. The waters run right off of the top and proceed to flood the valleys and the homes of the people living in them, claiming history, property, and innocent lives.
As people witness their friends and neighbors dying or being driven out of their homes, fear becomes palpable. Maria's children sleep with their clothes on and their shoes right next to the bed every night so that they may run at a moment's notice, and are taking anti-anxiety medications just to sleep at all. Similar stories were shared by others who live in the mountains of West Virginia, and those people clearly perceive what so many of us do not want to recognize: "They can get away with doing this to us because we're poor." In other words, their opinions are considered invalid. I have repeatedly heard the argument that poor people should not enjoy the benefits of a government run on tax dollars because "they haven't paid." It appears to me that too many of them certainly do pay. They pay with their homes, their livelihoods, their communities, and their lives. They pay more dearly than most of the rest of us could ever imagine.
From a poignant short documentary film that was shown at the conference, one scene really stood out to me and has stuck with me for several years. A gentleman in his 60's, who had lived in Appalachia his entire life, stands on a lookout that once featured a spectacular view of mountains and foothills that boast the most biologically diverse temperate forests on the planet, and looks out over a plain of ruins, a desert of brown streaks where there once was a sea of green leaves and quiet mist. He explained that when he, too, protested the wholesale destruction of the mountain behind his home, he was asked the following impertinent, if not downright perverse, question, "Why don't you just take a picture of it?" With tears filling his eyes, he recounted his reply, "You don't take a picture of a mountain. It's always going to be there."
It is heartbreaking to witness how greed has so thoroughly wrenched the truth from this statement. It is maddening to listen to our own collective consciousness rationalize that such destruction is necessary while, as individuals, we would never allow this to go on in our own backyards.
Maria ended the session with this statement: "This is eco-terrorism, and it's making our lives a living hell, and we are asking for your help."
There are so many ways that we can help that cost us very little.
1. The first way is obvious: turn off the lights. Get into the habit of turning off electronics when you are not using them, and don't use them at all when they are unnecessary (pass on the electric hand-lotion warmer, please).
2. Call the EPA and tell them to support Clean Water legislation, which can prevent the dumping of debris and sludge into mountain streams, and as such effectively halt or dramatically slow mountaintop removal.
3. Support the development of alternative energies.
4. Visit www.appvoices.org to find out more about mountaintop removal.
5. Lastly, search yourself to find out what you truly value. I believe that the reason so many of us allow things like this to go on is that we too readily accept values that are imposed upon us, rather than reflecting on what we really want. In spite of our grandest platitudes, we are still taught that material wealth and the health of the economy are more important than the health of everything else. I think if we really search within ourselves, we will find that what we really value is the health of living things, and will plainly see that causing this much pain isn't worth a little more convenience for some and lots of money for others. I think we will see that we do feel a connection with other people and with other living things, and from that connection recognize the egregiousness of blowing them apart for the sake of cheaper energy.
We have the power to find another way. There are countless moments in our history when we have changed and overcome practices and institutions that we knew were hurting people, and we can change this practice as well. Please take the Mountain Pledge and do just one thing. Just one.
Sharyn Beach
I know I am only one little person and I can only do little things. But there are so many little things that need to be done.
Peace Pilgrim
Of a simple thing he cannot comprehend
Why they try to tear the mountains down to bring in a couple more
More people, more scars upon the land
John Denver
I was a child when John Denver was at the height of his popularity, and whenever I heard this song, I could not understand this lyric. I remember thinking, "You can't tear down a mountain! That doesn't make any sense!"
Twenty-five years later, I was horrified to realize just how wrong I was. When I was in graduate school, I attended a conference at my alma mater, the University of Tennessee, about energy conservation. I decided to attend a session about mountaintop removal, a practice I had never heard about before. "How in the world," I wondered, "does one remove the top from a mountain?" The answer is simple of course - with lots and lots and lots of explosives. Apparently, digging into the mountains to extract the underlying coal became too cumbersome and expensive, so coal companies decided it was just easier to remove the mountains altogether by exploding the tops off of them.
As you may well imagine, this takes some doing, and the unfortunate people who live in these mountains can attest to the fact that the shelling goes on all day, every day, for months on end. One resident of West Virginia, named Maria, described the scene of her family's Christmas dinner as something akin to trying to celebrate in a war zone. The dishes were literally coming up off of the table. (Yes, they were shelling on Christmas day.) As you can also imagine, the constant shelling results in debris flying everywhere and destroys the natural beauty and wonder for which most people move to, visit, and write songs about mountains. For the residents of Appalachia, the very reason their ancestors moved to the mountains generations ago is being demolished before their very eyes. When Maria expressed her concerns to the coal company that was causing this damage, she was told that if she didn't like it she should just move away, as if she could sell her property to anyone after it had been filled up with the mud and debris from the havoc being wreaked all around her.
The domino effect that mountaintop removal has on ecosystems most certainly cannot be measured, but there is one immediate repercussion that claims lives and leaves many homeless - flooding. An important factor not considered by the coal companies and their government supporters is that the mountains, and the trees and shrubs calling them home, are holding water - lots and lots and lots of water. They are not just rearranging dirt out there; when they remove the tops from mountains, they are erasing hundreds of millions of years of quiet, constant, and patient development. This reality becomes painfully apparent with the first heavy rains that fall on a mountain that has been violently transformed into a plateau. The waters run right off of the top and proceed to flood the valleys and the homes of the people living in them, claiming history, property, and innocent lives.
As people witness their friends and neighbors dying or being driven out of their homes, fear becomes palpable. Maria's children sleep with their clothes on and their shoes right next to the bed every night so that they may run at a moment's notice, and are taking anti-anxiety medications just to sleep at all. Similar stories were shared by others who live in the mountains of West Virginia, and those people clearly perceive what so many of us do not want to recognize: "They can get away with doing this to us because we're poor." In other words, their opinions are considered invalid. I have repeatedly heard the argument that poor people should not enjoy the benefits of a government run on tax dollars because "they haven't paid." It appears to me that too many of them certainly do pay. They pay with their homes, their livelihoods, their communities, and their lives. They pay more dearly than most of the rest of us could ever imagine.
From a poignant short documentary film that was shown at the conference, one scene really stood out to me and has stuck with me for several years. A gentleman in his 60's, who had lived in Appalachia his entire life, stands on a lookout that once featured a spectacular view of mountains and foothills that boast the most biologically diverse temperate forests on the planet, and looks out over a plain of ruins, a desert of brown streaks where there once was a sea of green leaves and quiet mist. He explained that when he, too, protested the wholesale destruction of the mountain behind his home, he was asked the following impertinent, if not downright perverse, question, "Why don't you just take a picture of it?" With tears filling his eyes, he recounted his reply, "You don't take a picture of a mountain. It's always going to be there."
It is heartbreaking to witness how greed has so thoroughly wrenched the truth from this statement. It is maddening to listen to our own collective consciousness rationalize that such destruction is necessary while, as individuals, we would never allow this to go on in our own backyards.
Maria ended the session with this statement: "This is eco-terrorism, and it's making our lives a living hell, and we are asking for your help."
There are so many ways that we can help that cost us very little.
1. The first way is obvious: turn off the lights. Get into the habit of turning off electronics when you are not using them, and don't use them at all when they are unnecessary (pass on the electric hand-lotion warmer, please).
2. Call the EPA and tell them to support Clean Water legislation, which can prevent the dumping of debris and sludge into mountain streams, and as such effectively halt or dramatically slow mountaintop removal.
3. Support the development of alternative energies.
4. Visit www.appvoices.org to find out more about mountaintop removal.
5. Lastly, search yourself to find out what you truly value. I believe that the reason so many of us allow things like this to go on is that we too readily accept values that are imposed upon us, rather than reflecting on what we really want. In spite of our grandest platitudes, we are still taught that material wealth and the health of the economy are more important than the health of everything else. I think if we really search within ourselves, we will find that what we really value is the health of living things, and will plainly see that causing this much pain isn't worth a little more convenience for some and lots of money for others. I think we will see that we do feel a connection with other people and with other living things, and from that connection recognize the egregiousness of blowing them apart for the sake of cheaper energy.
We have the power to find another way. There are countless moments in our history when we have changed and overcome practices and institutions that we knew were hurting people, and we can change this practice as well. Please take the Mountain Pledge and do just one thing. Just one.
Sharyn Beach
I know I am only one little person and I can only do little things. But there are so many little things that need to be done.
Peace Pilgrim
Tuesday, January 5, 2010
White Tigers - Marketing a Fraud
Conservation. It is a word that we hear and throw around often. It is ubiquitous in the media and, in some of us, conjures up a warm feeling, particularly when it flows freely from those that we believe have everything under control, those that we believe will stem the tide of bad news that we repeatedly hear from the so-called wild. While the word conservation sounds pleasing, the concept of conservation is largely misunderstood. Unfortunately, most of us view conservation according only to individual species, and in so doing erringly conclude that as long as those individual species exist in sufficient number, then we may check conservation off of our collective to-do list. Upon a closer and more thorough inspection though, we see that this conclusion is fundamentally and dangerously flawed, and is not only NOT preventing endangerment and extinction, but is also leaving a trail of devastating suffering in its wake.
Perhaps no other single species embodies the issues of endangerment and extinction more than the tiger. Sleek and graceful, powerful and exotic, awe-inspiring and beautiful, the tiger is the very definition of "charismatic mega fauna." And if the bold and beautiful orange and black felines illicit such an intense response in the human animal, the mysterious and perhaps even mystical white tiger captures our attention even more acutely. With its ghostly white appearance and searing blue eyes, the white tiger is difficult to ignore. Furthermore, we humans engage in an ongoing fascination with anything that we consider to be rare; and so, like gold, we value the white tiger for its supposed rarity, and find a ready rationalization for perpetuating its breeding by simply engaging one, perhaps now meaningless, word: conservation. After all, they must be "saved." If the orange and white tigers are facing such a gloomy future in the wild, then surely the rare white tiger is the one in the most trouble, the pinnacle of the endangerment problem, the poster child for the wreckage that the reckless attitudes of human beings have left in what we used to call wild places.
Such is the conclusion that we often collectively come to when we view conservation as an issue that affects only individual species, especially the individual species that we happen to find the most charismatic. The problem with this reasoning is that it fails to consider the bigger picture. Specifically, it fails to include the environment, or habitat, in which these charismatic species live, depend upon for their survival, and in which they each make a significant contribution that belongs uniquely to them.
If the white tiger is the poster child for any issue, it is the poster child for this faulty reasoning. The headlines are all too familiar: this zoo or that performer or this wildlife center is breeding white tigers in order to save them from extinction and restore them to their native habitats. Both the media and the public adore these types of stories, but the heartwarming and short-lived nature of today's news belies the real story that will surface for the white tiger cubs tomorrow. The truth is simple, yet difficult for many people to accept. White tigers are not a species and do not have a native habitat. Tigers do not inhabit any section of the globe in which it would be advantageous for their survival to be white. This includes the Siberian Tiger, which is actually more properly called the Amur tiger, as its habitat is the Amur River Region between China and the Russian far east.
The real story behind white tigers is revealed by the subject that many of us dreaded in high school or collegiate biology: genetics. What we call the "Royal" White Tiger is in fact a genetic anomaly, caused by a double recessive gene occurring so rarely in nature that it is estimated only 1 in every 10,000 tigers born in the wild is white, and not likely to live for very long.* Born with a condition that we call "leucism," the pigment does not color the skin and the fur, and more importantly, robs the animal of one of the main tools for its survival - camouflage. Without the proper coloring, the ambush technique upon which tigers depend for catching food is seriously compromised. We do tigers no service at all by forcing more of them to be white. If anyone were foolish enough to attempt to release a white tiger into any habitat that tigers normally occupy, it would most likely starve to death. Dr. Dan Laughlin, DVM, PhD, who is widely recognized internationally for his expertise in the care and management of zoological animals, has an international consulting practice limited to zoological animals, and fully researched and documented the accurate genealogy and origin of the white tiger in the U.S., states it well (the bold is mine): "...when a deleterious recessive genetic mutation randomly occurs that is disadvantageous for the survival of the animal, such as white color in a tropical jungle environment, the animal does not survive to pass on that genetic mutation or disadvantageous characteristic to its offspring."* In other words, cruel as it may sound, nature is not providing a place for the white tiger.
If nature is designed in such a way as to prevent the survival of genetic mutations that are a danger to the survival of an entire species, then why do we see white tigers in shows, zoos, circuses, carnivals, and wildlife centers across America? Once again, we find our answer in genetics, and in this case, its uglier side. How do we circumvent the laws of nature to create more animals for which nature does not provide a home? We don't. We simply bend the laws of nature to our own wills. We engage in a practice with animals that we would never dream of doing purposely with humans. We inbreed them. Those of us that survived the genetics section of those dreaded biology courses know that genetic diversity is vital to the health of both individuals and entire populations of species. The most critically endangered feline species and subspecies, such as the South China Tiger and the Amur Leopard, are considered to be functionally extinct by some experts because with numbers as low as 20 or 30, inbreeding is inevitable. Yet in the case of the white tiger, the breeding of mothers to sons, brothers to sisters, and fathers to daughters and grand-daughters is commonplace.
According to Dr. Laughlin, in addition to the now famous and severely inbred line of white Bengal tigers that can be traced back to Mohan, a white tiger taken as a cub out of the wild in 1951 and bred back to his daughter and grand-daughters,
"there is a second and separate origin of the white tiger which occurred spontaneously in two separate private collections in this country, when both owners inbred brothers to sisters that were all offspring of two litters resulting from crossing a pure Siberian male and a Bengal female at a small zoo in South Dakota." In any case, inbreeding is a necessary ingredient of the recipe for white tigers, and there is a price to be paid for it.
White tigers endure a host of health problems about which the public is largely unaware. These include immune system deficiencies that cause many to live miserable and short lives, scoliosis of the spine, hip dysplasia, neurological disorders, cleft palates, and protruding, bulging eyes. Eighty percent of all white tigers are stillborn; many of the ones that survive are too deformed to put on display. Out of the ones that look pretty, according to some tiger trainers, only 1 in 30 will consistently perform.* White tigers are at the mercy of a double-edged sword; they are often preferred by trainers because, as fundamentally sick animals, they are very dependent upon humans. On the other hand, the relentless inbreeding takes its toll on their mental capacity, rendering them unreliable as performers. At this point someone must be faced with the question rarely asked by the reporters who happily recount the birth of the cubs: what now? What happens to the 29 out of 30 white tigers that were too dull and sick to perform? We know by the former discussion that they could not have been, and will never be, released into the wild. Tracing their fate is exceedingly difficult, but the paths in front of them are bleak to say the least. The lucky ones will find permanent homes in accredited sanctuaries, but the majority will either be killed or sold to traveling zoos, circuses, and wildlife centers, living lives in quarters that are often cramped, filthy, and rarely inspected.
There is yet another side to this sad story. What becomes of the orange and white cubs (by far the majority) born to parents who were specifically paired to render the desirable white coloring? As with the unwanted whites, their fate is difficult to trace, but will most likely include becoming victims of canned hunts, being sold into the exotic pet trade to live out their lives as breeding animals, or being killed, dismembered, and their parts shipped to be sold in Asian markets. Virtually none of them will join their wild counterparts for the purpose of re-populating their severely dwindling numbers. They will never see the wild lands from which their forebears were taken, and as such, will never really know what it is like to be tigers.
Meanwhile, healthy wild tigers, able to engage in the activities for which tigers were designed and assume their role in carefully balanced ecosystems that depend on them as much as any other life form within them, disappear at alarming rates. Just one hundred years ago, there were approximately 100,000 tigers living in the wild; some experts estimate that fewer than 3,500 individuals roam the forests of our world, from India to southeast Asia to the Amur River region, today. Three subspecies of tigers are gone forever, and the South China tiger is well on its way to joining their ranks.
If the relentless breeding of white tigers has nothing to do with conservation, and the resulting animals are sick and live lives in captivity at best and suffer small quarters and little veterinary care at worst, then why do people continue to breed them? The answer is simple. When the genetic line to which Dr. Laughlin refers was continued and promulgated by the Cincinnati Zoo, the resulting cubs fetched as much as $60,000 each, the beginning of many, many more thousands of dollars that have passed through countless hands and yet still do not lead the endangered tiger back to its rightful home. Countless thousands of dollars that do nothing to stop the poaching of wild tigers. Countless thousands of dollars that do nothing to stave off the destruction of wild tiger habitats. Countless thousands of dollars that only serve to keep wild, dignified creatures behind bars. Do we really value genetic mutations more than the habitat in which healthy wild tigers live and thrive?
Dr. Laughlin believes that "The genealogical misrepresentation, repeated inbreeding, exhibition and sale, for $60,000 each, of white tigers by the Cincinnati Zoo initiated the greatest conservation deception of the American public in history. That deception continues through today. In my view, exhibiting and breeding white tigers is the very antithesis of conservation, is dishonest and unethical and is tantamount to catering to the public's desire to see genetic aberrations rather than educating the public regarding the incredible process of natural selection, how the unbelievable diversity of life has evolved on our planet throughout the past 50 million years and the crucial need for us to preserve natural habitats and stop the destruction of our global ecosystem if we desire to save any threatened or endangered species from extinction."
The insidiousness of this deception is that the heartwarming stories of individual cubs being born again and again creates the illusion that we are doing something. It creates the illusion that the so-called experts are solving the problems that we create with our own complacency. It is time to face the issue squarely. There can be no conservation of species without conservation of habitats, and there can be no conservation of habitats without conservation of entire ecosystems; therefore we are accountable for how our actions affect those ecosystems, in every choice that we make. Conservation. It is not about the white tiger. It is about us.
Will our fascination with tigers give them back the dignified, free life that they had earned by surviving every hardship nature threw at them before we came along? Or will we be satisfied that we have done our job by having enough of them living in cages, performing tricks, and dazzling us with genetic deformities we would never dream of perpetuating in humans? If we choose the second option then there is one more reality that we must be willing to accept. If we pull the animals that we like out of the sinking ship that is their destroyed habitat and call it a day, every single solitary species that we did NOT find charismatic goes down with that ship, and with them the history of the natural world, and answers to questions that we perhaps no longer deem fundamental because we have so thoroughly removed ourselves from that world. It begs the question, if a tiger can't know who he or she really is, how can we know who we really are?
Sharyn Beach
*http://www.bigcatrescue.org/cats/wild/white_tigers_genetics.htm
*http://www.bigcatrescue.org/cats/wild/white_tigers_fraud.htm
*http://www.bigcatrescue.org/cats/wild/white_tigers.htm
Perhaps no other single species embodies the issues of endangerment and extinction more than the tiger. Sleek and graceful, powerful and exotic, awe-inspiring and beautiful, the tiger is the very definition of "charismatic mega fauna." And if the bold and beautiful orange and black felines illicit such an intense response in the human animal, the mysterious and perhaps even mystical white tiger captures our attention even more acutely. With its ghostly white appearance and searing blue eyes, the white tiger is difficult to ignore. Furthermore, we humans engage in an ongoing fascination with anything that we consider to be rare; and so, like gold, we value the white tiger for its supposed rarity, and find a ready rationalization for perpetuating its breeding by simply engaging one, perhaps now meaningless, word: conservation. After all, they must be "saved." If the orange and white tigers are facing such a gloomy future in the wild, then surely the rare white tiger is the one in the most trouble, the pinnacle of the endangerment problem, the poster child for the wreckage that the reckless attitudes of human beings have left in what we used to call wild places.
Such is the conclusion that we often collectively come to when we view conservation as an issue that affects only individual species, especially the individual species that we happen to find the most charismatic. The problem with this reasoning is that it fails to consider the bigger picture. Specifically, it fails to include the environment, or habitat, in which these charismatic species live, depend upon for their survival, and in which they each make a significant contribution that belongs uniquely to them.
If the white tiger is the poster child for any issue, it is the poster child for this faulty reasoning. The headlines are all too familiar: this zoo or that performer or this wildlife center is breeding white tigers in order to save them from extinction and restore them to their native habitats. Both the media and the public adore these types of stories, but the heartwarming and short-lived nature of today's news belies the real story that will surface for the white tiger cubs tomorrow. The truth is simple, yet difficult for many people to accept. White tigers are not a species and do not have a native habitat. Tigers do not inhabit any section of the globe in which it would be advantageous for their survival to be white. This includes the Siberian Tiger, which is actually more properly called the Amur tiger, as its habitat is the Amur River Region between China and the Russian far east.
The real story behind white tigers is revealed by the subject that many of us dreaded in high school or collegiate biology: genetics. What we call the "Royal" White Tiger is in fact a genetic anomaly, caused by a double recessive gene occurring so rarely in nature that it is estimated only 1 in every 10,000 tigers born in the wild is white, and not likely to live for very long.* Born with a condition that we call "leucism," the pigment does not color the skin and the fur, and more importantly, robs the animal of one of the main tools for its survival - camouflage. Without the proper coloring, the ambush technique upon which tigers depend for catching food is seriously compromised. We do tigers no service at all by forcing more of them to be white. If anyone were foolish enough to attempt to release a white tiger into any habitat that tigers normally occupy, it would most likely starve to death. Dr. Dan Laughlin, DVM, PhD, who is widely recognized internationally for his expertise in the care and management of zoological animals, has an international consulting practice limited to zoological animals, and fully researched and documented the accurate genealogy and origin of the white tiger in the U.S., states it well (the bold is mine): "...when a deleterious recessive genetic mutation randomly occurs that is disadvantageous for the survival of the animal, such as white color in a tropical jungle environment, the animal does not survive to pass on that genetic mutation or disadvantageous characteristic to its offspring."* In other words, cruel as it may sound, nature is not providing a place for the white tiger.
If nature is designed in such a way as to prevent the survival of genetic mutations that are a danger to the survival of an entire species, then why do we see white tigers in shows, zoos, circuses, carnivals, and wildlife centers across America? Once again, we find our answer in genetics, and in this case, its uglier side. How do we circumvent the laws of nature to create more animals for which nature does not provide a home? We don't. We simply bend the laws of nature to our own wills. We engage in a practice with animals that we would never dream of doing purposely with humans. We inbreed them. Those of us that survived the genetics section of those dreaded biology courses know that genetic diversity is vital to the health of both individuals and entire populations of species. The most critically endangered feline species and subspecies, such as the South China Tiger and the Amur Leopard, are considered to be functionally extinct by some experts because with numbers as low as 20 or 30, inbreeding is inevitable. Yet in the case of the white tiger, the breeding of mothers to sons, brothers to sisters, and fathers to daughters and grand-daughters is commonplace.
According to Dr. Laughlin, in addition to the now famous and severely inbred line of white Bengal tigers that can be traced back to Mohan, a white tiger taken as a cub out of the wild in 1951 and bred back to his daughter and grand-daughters,
"there is a second and separate origin of the white tiger which occurred spontaneously in two separate private collections in this country, when both owners inbred brothers to sisters that were all offspring of two litters resulting from crossing a pure Siberian male and a Bengal female at a small zoo in South Dakota." In any case, inbreeding is a necessary ingredient of the recipe for white tigers, and there is a price to be paid for it.
White tigers endure a host of health problems about which the public is largely unaware. These include immune system deficiencies that cause many to live miserable and short lives, scoliosis of the spine, hip dysplasia, neurological disorders, cleft palates, and protruding, bulging eyes. Eighty percent of all white tigers are stillborn; many of the ones that survive are too deformed to put on display. Out of the ones that look pretty, according to some tiger trainers, only 1 in 30 will consistently perform.* White tigers are at the mercy of a double-edged sword; they are often preferred by trainers because, as fundamentally sick animals, they are very dependent upon humans. On the other hand, the relentless inbreeding takes its toll on their mental capacity, rendering them unreliable as performers. At this point someone must be faced with the question rarely asked by the reporters who happily recount the birth of the cubs: what now? What happens to the 29 out of 30 white tigers that were too dull and sick to perform? We know by the former discussion that they could not have been, and will never be, released into the wild. Tracing their fate is exceedingly difficult, but the paths in front of them are bleak to say the least. The lucky ones will find permanent homes in accredited sanctuaries, but the majority will either be killed or sold to traveling zoos, circuses, and wildlife centers, living lives in quarters that are often cramped, filthy, and rarely inspected.
There is yet another side to this sad story. What becomes of the orange and white cubs (by far the majority) born to parents who were specifically paired to render the desirable white coloring? As with the unwanted whites, their fate is difficult to trace, but will most likely include becoming victims of canned hunts, being sold into the exotic pet trade to live out their lives as breeding animals, or being killed, dismembered, and their parts shipped to be sold in Asian markets. Virtually none of them will join their wild counterparts for the purpose of re-populating their severely dwindling numbers. They will never see the wild lands from which their forebears were taken, and as such, will never really know what it is like to be tigers.
Meanwhile, healthy wild tigers, able to engage in the activities for which tigers were designed and assume their role in carefully balanced ecosystems that depend on them as much as any other life form within them, disappear at alarming rates. Just one hundred years ago, there were approximately 100,000 tigers living in the wild; some experts estimate that fewer than 3,500 individuals roam the forests of our world, from India to southeast Asia to the Amur River region, today. Three subspecies of tigers are gone forever, and the South China tiger is well on its way to joining their ranks.
If the relentless breeding of white tigers has nothing to do with conservation, and the resulting animals are sick and live lives in captivity at best and suffer small quarters and little veterinary care at worst, then why do people continue to breed them? The answer is simple. When the genetic line to which Dr. Laughlin refers was continued and promulgated by the Cincinnati Zoo, the resulting cubs fetched as much as $60,000 each, the beginning of many, many more thousands of dollars that have passed through countless hands and yet still do not lead the endangered tiger back to its rightful home. Countless thousands of dollars that do nothing to stop the poaching of wild tigers. Countless thousands of dollars that do nothing to stave off the destruction of wild tiger habitats. Countless thousands of dollars that only serve to keep wild, dignified creatures behind bars. Do we really value genetic mutations more than the habitat in which healthy wild tigers live and thrive?
Dr. Laughlin believes that "The genealogical misrepresentation, repeated inbreeding, exhibition and sale, for $60,000 each, of white tigers by the Cincinnati Zoo initiated the greatest conservation deception of the American public in history. That deception continues through today. In my view, exhibiting and breeding white tigers is the very antithesis of conservation, is dishonest and unethical and is tantamount to catering to the public's desire to see genetic aberrations rather than educating the public regarding the incredible process of natural selection, how the unbelievable diversity of life has evolved on our planet throughout the past 50 million years and the crucial need for us to preserve natural habitats and stop the destruction of our global ecosystem if we desire to save any threatened or endangered species from extinction."
The insidiousness of this deception is that the heartwarming stories of individual cubs being born again and again creates the illusion that we are doing something. It creates the illusion that the so-called experts are solving the problems that we create with our own complacency. It is time to face the issue squarely. There can be no conservation of species without conservation of habitats, and there can be no conservation of habitats without conservation of entire ecosystems; therefore we are accountable for how our actions affect those ecosystems, in every choice that we make. Conservation. It is not about the white tiger. It is about us.
Will our fascination with tigers give them back the dignified, free life that they had earned by surviving every hardship nature threw at them before we came along? Or will we be satisfied that we have done our job by having enough of them living in cages, performing tricks, and dazzling us with genetic deformities we would never dream of perpetuating in humans? If we choose the second option then there is one more reality that we must be willing to accept. If we pull the animals that we like out of the sinking ship that is their destroyed habitat and call it a day, every single solitary species that we did NOT find charismatic goes down with that ship, and with them the history of the natural world, and answers to questions that we perhaps no longer deem fundamental because we have so thoroughly removed ourselves from that world. It begs the question, if a tiger can't know who he or she really is, how can we know who we really are?
Sharyn Beach
*http://www.bigcatrescue.org/cats/wild/white_tigers_genetics.htm
*http://www.bigcatrescue.org/cats/wild/white_tigers_fraud.htm
*http://www.bigcatrescue.org/cats/wild/white_tigers.htm
Wednesday, December 2, 2009
Colleen Patrick Goudreau's Prayer
Today I would like to share "Prayer for Humans on Behalf of Animals" by Colleen Patrick-Goudreau, a dynamic writer, speaker, chef, and all-around beautiful person! I offer it up as a holiday prayer for all creatures, human and non-human alike, this holiday season.
A Prayer for Humans on Behalf of Animals
My hope is that we can navigate through this world and our lives with the grace and integrity of those who need our protection. May we have the sense of humor and liveliness of the goats; may we have the maternal instincts and protective nature of the hens and the sassiness of the roosters. May we have the gentleness and strength of the cattle, and the wisdom, humility, and serenity of the donkeys. May we appreciate the need for community as do the sheep and choose our companions as carefully as do the rabbits. May we have the faithfulness and commitment to family of the geese, the adaptability and affability of the ducks. May we have the intelligence, loyalty, and affection of the pigs and the inquisitiveness, sensitivity, and playfulness of the turkeys.
My hope is that we learn from the animals what it is we need to become better people.
~Colleen Patrick-Goudreau
To find out more about Colleen and her work, visit CompassionateCooks.com
A Prayer for Humans on Behalf of Animals
My hope is that we can navigate through this world and our lives with the grace and integrity of those who need our protection. May we have the sense of humor and liveliness of the goats; may we have the maternal instincts and protective nature of the hens and the sassiness of the roosters. May we have the gentleness and strength of the cattle, and the wisdom, humility, and serenity of the donkeys. May we appreciate the need for community as do the sheep and choose our companions as carefully as do the rabbits. May we have the faithfulness and commitment to family of the geese, the adaptability and affability of the ducks. May we have the intelligence, loyalty, and affection of the pigs and the inquisitiveness, sensitivity, and playfulness of the turkeys.
My hope is that we learn from the animals what it is we need to become better people.
~Colleen Patrick-Goudreau
To find out more about Colleen and her work, visit CompassionateCooks.com
Wednesday, October 28, 2009
Courteously Deferential Apathy
“Every snowflake in an avalanche pleads not guilty.”
Stanislaw J. Lec
When I was in the seventh grade, I did volunteer work for the Humane Society in order to fulfill service hours for my school. My job was to make phone calls about animals that had been left at the shelter, and my supervisor used to comment about how hard I worked. My mother was so proud. Garnering respect for rescuing cats and dogs is a “no-brainer.” Who could hate someone who cares for animals?
Twenty years ago, when I became a vegetarian, I realized the answer to that question. Family, friends, and acquaintances suddenly decided that I “had some ‘splainin’ to do.” Since then, I have encountered every argument and reaction from the lame to the ridiculous, with some arguments being so much so that I suppose I appeared to be surrendering because the “reasoning” I was offered was so ludicrous I didn’t even know where to begin.
I have also encountered the full range of emotional reactions. Some think veganism is interesting, but others become defensive and still others become angry. The anger usually takes the form of ridicule, as it so often does in so many situations. Ridicule is easy, accessible, and effective. Scorn is something that many will shun even more than they will bursts of rage, because scorn is insidious in its presentation and difficult to diffuse. Rage only makes the angry person seem more transparent, but ridicule makes perfectly serious, legitimate ideas seem trivial and frivolous. Scornful jokes succeed in distracting people from the real issue and belittling those who dared to bring up the issue in the first place.
After twenty years, I have become more and more adept at dealing with such reactions, perhaps in part because vegetarianism has become more widespread and in part because I am not as affected by negative reactions as I once was. I am especially amused by those who believe they are offering up an argument that I have never heard before. Oh no, I have NEVER heard the “people are starving in India because they can’t kill a cow” routine. But that is for another essay altogether.
At this point in my journey, I can handle most of the common rationalizations, except one. Now, the most infuriating, maddening, discouraging, and disheartening response is one that I will label “courteously deferential apathy.” It is not open scorn; it is not anger or defensiveness; nor is it ridicule. It is the quietly patronizing pat-on-the-head. “Isn’t it nice that you care about the little animals? Good luck with your cause. I am so glad that you found a project to fill up your time.” While scorn is difficult to recognize when doled out by those who have mastered it as a tool, it still amounts to a hatefulness that most of us can detect at least as an unnamed droning background noise lingering in the back of our minds. The insidiousness of courteously deferential apathy lies in its ability to make the scornful trivialization of important issues seem like a compliment. It is still, ultimately, a defense mechanism, one of the myriad ways in which we shield ourselves from the truth. It is tantamount to saying, “I think it’s sweet that you are concerned about these things, but don’t expect me to feel the same way.”
Such pleasant (and convenient) platitudes are missing the point. I have some news that some readers may find shocking. I DO expect you to feel the same way. I do not refer to the meaning of the word “expect” as “to demand something.” I refer to the meaning of “expect” as anticipating a certain event based on past experiences. Those past experiences include the pride that my family felt when I volunteered at the Humane Society, the rescued animals that so many of my friends and acquaintances have adopted, the stray cat that my family members took to the vet and spent more than $200 on, the frightened cat that one of my former roommates spent hours coaxing out of a tree, the dog that one of my friends brought home because he found it hanging around a gas station with a metal wire around its neck. The list goes on and on. It is what is commonly referred to as “the milk of human kindness” that causes us to respond to situations that we find unworkable or intolerable, especially situations in which we find others, human and non-human, abandoned or in pain.
So anyone out there who is considering using the “you can care about animals but I don’t” argument may as well drop it, because I’m not buying it. Herein lies the fundamental flaw of courteously deferential apathy; it assumes that those who speak out for animals have some special emotion, or some special access to emotions and sentiments that others just don’t have. The above examples are just a small sampling of evidence that this simply isn’t true. Let me illustrate with a story.
A few years ago, when my husband and I were walking from our apartment door to our car, we heard a dog whimpering. We searched for the source of the sound and finally realized it was coming from the swimming pool. A puppy had fallen into the freezing water (it was November) in the pool and could not get out because its back legs were still too short to clear the distance from the top step to the lip of the concrete around the pool. Its two front paws were out of the pool while the back half of its body was in the pool, and it was struggling to get out, to no avail. Because it was winter, the gate to the pool was locked. My husband climbed over the locked gate and got the shivering puppy out of the pool and we took it to the manager’s office, where the custodian, whom we had come to know, said he would take it home.
Are my husband, myself, and that custodian somehow “special?” Are we different than anyone else? How many people really would have ignored that puppy’s cry for help? No, I am not naïve enough to believe that there are not people who would have walked away, but I am speaking to the people reading this that I KNOW are caring, compassionate people. It is utterly natural to respond to calls for help that come from other people and also from non-human animals, which is why I expect that most people would (and do) respond. When we see people sick or injured, what do we do? We call 911. We try to relieve their pain. We do all we can for them, and we don’t need a reason. We do it without thinking, because we care. Period.
Yet, when the cry for help is faint and comes from a distant slaughterhouse that most people would never choose to visit or even read about, we find it very easy to ignore the call. Are the pleas for mercy that come from animals that will end up on someone’s dinner plate somehow less valid and less legitimate than the pleas of a cat or a dog? Why, precisely, do we choose NOT to respond in this situation?
The answer is simple – because it’s just too painful. You see, the puppy probably fell into the pool by accident. While it was suffering to some degree, it only suffered because it tripped over its own circumstances, not because someone purposely tried to hurt it. In such a case, it is easy to be the Good Samaritan.
Those distant cries coming from the slaughterhouse are another story entirely. They issue from the one thing that we fear the most – the darker side of humanity. The mysterious and scary side that motivates some people towards unspeakable abuses, including kicking, punching, stabbing, hanging, burning, scalding, and skinning animals alive. And the cries are not just coming from the animals; they are also coming from the people who have the unfortunate job of carrying out tasks that result in constant bloodshed, day after day, week after week, month after month, year after year. It is a far, far more brutal life than most people imagine. In some of the larger “processing plants,” which is where 90% of animal food comes from, the “stickers” will slice the throats of between 900 and 1200 pigs every HOUR. They are literally covered in, and surrounded by, blood (among other bodily fluids) all day, every day.
Feeling a little lightheaded? I am. I know what some of you are thinking. “Stop being so melodramatic. It’s not THAT bad. Those people just get used to it.” That is precisely the problem. You think they leave the violence behind in the slaughterhouse? NOW who is being naïve? It is extremely difficult to keep one’s cool when one is being screamed at and berated all day, and then being given free range to take out one’s aggressions on defenseless animals. Is violence something we are supposed to just get used to? There is only one way to get used to it, and that is to cut oneself off from one’s own feelings, to cut oneself off from that connection that makes us respond to cries for help without a thought for our own welfare.
This is why I simply cannot buy the “it’s OK for you to care but don’t expect me to” argument. Sorry, but you cannot get off the hook that easily. I expect people to care. I expect them to care because I know that they DO care, whether they want to admit it or not. I do not speak for animals because it is “my special thing,” or because it is fun, or to make a fashion statement, or to ruin someone else’s day. I speak for animals because they called to me for help and their pain drove me into action. I speak for animals because the reckless abuse, neglect, and endangerment of them violates a fundamental, universal law of connection, the connection that causes us to cringe when we see others in pain and to rejoice when we see them flourish. We cannot keep ignoring their cries for mercy forever without injuring ourselves in the process. And we cannot deprive others of the dignity of meaningful work by asking them to commit acts on our behalf that few of us would be willing to do for ourselves.
It is time to open the doors of the slaughterhouse and look inside. It is time to face the stench and the bloody reality. It is time to, literally, wake up and smell what we are shoveling. We have to stop pushing it away into dark corners because we can’t bear to look at it. A plea for help that is muffled by thick, steel doors is still a plea for help, and if we are still human at all, we will respond. ALL of us.
Sharyn Beach
Stanislaw J. Lec
When I was in the seventh grade, I did volunteer work for the Humane Society in order to fulfill service hours for my school. My job was to make phone calls about animals that had been left at the shelter, and my supervisor used to comment about how hard I worked. My mother was so proud. Garnering respect for rescuing cats and dogs is a “no-brainer.” Who could hate someone who cares for animals?
Twenty years ago, when I became a vegetarian, I realized the answer to that question. Family, friends, and acquaintances suddenly decided that I “had some ‘splainin’ to do.” Since then, I have encountered every argument and reaction from the lame to the ridiculous, with some arguments being so much so that I suppose I appeared to be surrendering because the “reasoning” I was offered was so ludicrous I didn’t even know where to begin.
I have also encountered the full range of emotional reactions. Some think veganism is interesting, but others become defensive and still others become angry. The anger usually takes the form of ridicule, as it so often does in so many situations. Ridicule is easy, accessible, and effective. Scorn is something that many will shun even more than they will bursts of rage, because scorn is insidious in its presentation and difficult to diffuse. Rage only makes the angry person seem more transparent, but ridicule makes perfectly serious, legitimate ideas seem trivial and frivolous. Scornful jokes succeed in distracting people from the real issue and belittling those who dared to bring up the issue in the first place.
After twenty years, I have become more and more adept at dealing with such reactions, perhaps in part because vegetarianism has become more widespread and in part because I am not as affected by negative reactions as I once was. I am especially amused by those who believe they are offering up an argument that I have never heard before. Oh no, I have NEVER heard the “people are starving in India because they can’t kill a cow” routine. But that is for another essay altogether.
At this point in my journey, I can handle most of the common rationalizations, except one. Now, the most infuriating, maddening, discouraging, and disheartening response is one that I will label “courteously deferential apathy.” It is not open scorn; it is not anger or defensiveness; nor is it ridicule. It is the quietly patronizing pat-on-the-head. “Isn’t it nice that you care about the little animals? Good luck with your cause. I am so glad that you found a project to fill up your time.” While scorn is difficult to recognize when doled out by those who have mastered it as a tool, it still amounts to a hatefulness that most of us can detect at least as an unnamed droning background noise lingering in the back of our minds. The insidiousness of courteously deferential apathy lies in its ability to make the scornful trivialization of important issues seem like a compliment. It is still, ultimately, a defense mechanism, one of the myriad ways in which we shield ourselves from the truth. It is tantamount to saying, “I think it’s sweet that you are concerned about these things, but don’t expect me to feel the same way.”
Such pleasant (and convenient) platitudes are missing the point. I have some news that some readers may find shocking. I DO expect you to feel the same way. I do not refer to the meaning of the word “expect” as “to demand something.” I refer to the meaning of “expect” as anticipating a certain event based on past experiences. Those past experiences include the pride that my family felt when I volunteered at the Humane Society, the rescued animals that so many of my friends and acquaintances have adopted, the stray cat that my family members took to the vet and spent more than $200 on, the frightened cat that one of my former roommates spent hours coaxing out of a tree, the dog that one of my friends brought home because he found it hanging around a gas station with a metal wire around its neck. The list goes on and on. It is what is commonly referred to as “the milk of human kindness” that causes us to respond to situations that we find unworkable or intolerable, especially situations in which we find others, human and non-human, abandoned or in pain.
So anyone out there who is considering using the “you can care about animals but I don’t” argument may as well drop it, because I’m not buying it. Herein lies the fundamental flaw of courteously deferential apathy; it assumes that those who speak out for animals have some special emotion, or some special access to emotions and sentiments that others just don’t have. The above examples are just a small sampling of evidence that this simply isn’t true. Let me illustrate with a story.
A few years ago, when my husband and I were walking from our apartment door to our car, we heard a dog whimpering. We searched for the source of the sound and finally realized it was coming from the swimming pool. A puppy had fallen into the freezing water (it was November) in the pool and could not get out because its back legs were still too short to clear the distance from the top step to the lip of the concrete around the pool. Its two front paws were out of the pool while the back half of its body was in the pool, and it was struggling to get out, to no avail. Because it was winter, the gate to the pool was locked. My husband climbed over the locked gate and got the shivering puppy out of the pool and we took it to the manager’s office, where the custodian, whom we had come to know, said he would take it home.
Are my husband, myself, and that custodian somehow “special?” Are we different than anyone else? How many people really would have ignored that puppy’s cry for help? No, I am not naïve enough to believe that there are not people who would have walked away, but I am speaking to the people reading this that I KNOW are caring, compassionate people. It is utterly natural to respond to calls for help that come from other people and also from non-human animals, which is why I expect that most people would (and do) respond. When we see people sick or injured, what do we do? We call 911. We try to relieve their pain. We do all we can for them, and we don’t need a reason. We do it without thinking, because we care. Period.
Yet, when the cry for help is faint and comes from a distant slaughterhouse that most people would never choose to visit or even read about, we find it very easy to ignore the call. Are the pleas for mercy that come from animals that will end up on someone’s dinner plate somehow less valid and less legitimate than the pleas of a cat or a dog? Why, precisely, do we choose NOT to respond in this situation?
The answer is simple – because it’s just too painful. You see, the puppy probably fell into the pool by accident. While it was suffering to some degree, it only suffered because it tripped over its own circumstances, not because someone purposely tried to hurt it. In such a case, it is easy to be the Good Samaritan.
Those distant cries coming from the slaughterhouse are another story entirely. They issue from the one thing that we fear the most – the darker side of humanity. The mysterious and scary side that motivates some people towards unspeakable abuses, including kicking, punching, stabbing, hanging, burning, scalding, and skinning animals alive. And the cries are not just coming from the animals; they are also coming from the people who have the unfortunate job of carrying out tasks that result in constant bloodshed, day after day, week after week, month after month, year after year. It is a far, far more brutal life than most people imagine. In some of the larger “processing plants,” which is where 90% of animal food comes from, the “stickers” will slice the throats of between 900 and 1200 pigs every HOUR. They are literally covered in, and surrounded by, blood (among other bodily fluids) all day, every day.
Feeling a little lightheaded? I am. I know what some of you are thinking. “Stop being so melodramatic. It’s not THAT bad. Those people just get used to it.” That is precisely the problem. You think they leave the violence behind in the slaughterhouse? NOW who is being naïve? It is extremely difficult to keep one’s cool when one is being screamed at and berated all day, and then being given free range to take out one’s aggressions on defenseless animals. Is violence something we are supposed to just get used to? There is only one way to get used to it, and that is to cut oneself off from one’s own feelings, to cut oneself off from that connection that makes us respond to cries for help without a thought for our own welfare.
This is why I simply cannot buy the “it’s OK for you to care but don’t expect me to” argument. Sorry, but you cannot get off the hook that easily. I expect people to care. I expect them to care because I know that they DO care, whether they want to admit it or not. I do not speak for animals because it is “my special thing,” or because it is fun, or to make a fashion statement, or to ruin someone else’s day. I speak for animals because they called to me for help and their pain drove me into action. I speak for animals because the reckless abuse, neglect, and endangerment of them violates a fundamental, universal law of connection, the connection that causes us to cringe when we see others in pain and to rejoice when we see them flourish. We cannot keep ignoring their cries for mercy forever without injuring ourselves in the process. And we cannot deprive others of the dignity of meaningful work by asking them to commit acts on our behalf that few of us would be willing to do for ourselves.
It is time to open the doors of the slaughterhouse and look inside. It is time to face the stench and the bloody reality. It is time to, literally, wake up and smell what we are shoveling. We have to stop pushing it away into dark corners because we can’t bear to look at it. A plea for help that is muffled by thick, steel doors is still a plea for help, and if we are still human at all, we will respond. ALL of us.
Sharyn Beach
Thursday, October 22, 2009
Prairie Dogs in the Great Plains
Here is a letter I wrote to my lawmakers about the EPA's recent efforts to approve poisons that will kill prairie dogs in the Great Plains by causing them to slowly and painfully bleed to death. It's time we started caring.....
The first paragraph and last line were composed by Defenders of Wildlife, the rest is mine:
As someone who cares about wildlife and environmental health, I'm writing to strongly oppose the Environmental Protection Agency's efforts to register Kaput-D for use in eradicating prairie dogs in ten states across the Great Plains. The Environmental Protection Agency should not approve Kaput-D, and should immediately rescind its May 2009 approval of Rozol, a similar poison used to kill prairie dogs.
I remember feeding prairie dogs on a trip to the Great Plains many years ago; they were a major draw for visitors in the Badlands, and, like the bison, are a part of the landscape. That experience stands out to me as one of the great experiences of my life, and a moment when I felt humble and grateful to live in this land. I cannot imagine supporting anything that would so ruthlessly and carelessly destroy these animals, and I cannot imagine the Great Plains without prairie dogs.
It's time we stopped believing that we can poison our way out of our problems. It's time we stopped thinking that we can continue to engage in the destructive habits that we engage in and then simply apply a chemical to repair the damage. And it's time we stopped looking upon every other living thing in this world as a nuisance that is in our way and needs to be destroyed.
How long can this go on? Seriously. How many species do we have to obliterate before we are comfortable enough? How much violence will we heap upon other creatures before we realize that we cannot harm them without also harming ourselves?
We are subject to natural laws that are unchanging, and we are playing Russian roulette with things that we don't understand nearly as much as we think we do.
They are not just a bunch of stupid animals. They matter, and their fate is tied with ours, whether we recognize it or not.
Americans care about wildlife in America. We do not want to see them poisoned at all, and we especially do not want to see them subject to the slow and painful deaths associated with these chemicals.
Please withdraw the efforts to use these biocides on our prairie dogs.
Thank you for considering my views on this urgent matter. I look forward to your reply.
Sharyn Beach
The first paragraph and last line were composed by Defenders of Wildlife, the rest is mine:
As someone who cares about wildlife and environmental health, I'm writing to strongly oppose the Environmental Protection Agency's efforts to register Kaput-D for use in eradicating prairie dogs in ten states across the Great Plains. The Environmental Protection Agency should not approve Kaput-D, and should immediately rescind its May 2009 approval of Rozol, a similar poison used to kill prairie dogs.
I remember feeding prairie dogs on a trip to the Great Plains many years ago; they were a major draw for visitors in the Badlands, and, like the bison, are a part of the landscape. That experience stands out to me as one of the great experiences of my life, and a moment when I felt humble and grateful to live in this land. I cannot imagine supporting anything that would so ruthlessly and carelessly destroy these animals, and I cannot imagine the Great Plains without prairie dogs.
It's time we stopped believing that we can poison our way out of our problems. It's time we stopped thinking that we can continue to engage in the destructive habits that we engage in and then simply apply a chemical to repair the damage. And it's time we stopped looking upon every other living thing in this world as a nuisance that is in our way and needs to be destroyed.
How long can this go on? Seriously. How many species do we have to obliterate before we are comfortable enough? How much violence will we heap upon other creatures before we realize that we cannot harm them without also harming ourselves?
We are subject to natural laws that are unchanging, and we are playing Russian roulette with things that we don't understand nearly as much as we think we do.
They are not just a bunch of stupid animals. They matter, and their fate is tied with ours, whether we recognize it or not.
Americans care about wildlife in America. We do not want to see them poisoned at all, and we especially do not want to see them subject to the slow and painful deaths associated with these chemicals.
Please withdraw the efforts to use these biocides on our prairie dogs.
Thank you for considering my views on this urgent matter. I look forward to your reply.
Sharyn Beach
Wednesday, October 7, 2009
Comment on "My Monkey Baby"
Today I am posting a short comment I made about a show on TLC called "My Monkey Baby." The show features a couple who keep a monkey as a pet, dressing it up in baby clothes and taking it with them everywhere they go. They become offended if someone calls it a pet; they insist that it is their baby.
There are many comments posted, some saying that this is cruel, and others saying it is not cruel because the people are protecting the animals from all of the dangers and discomforts of the wild. I plan to write a longer essay addressing the fallacy of this argument, but for now, here is the comment I posted on TLC's website:
"Wild animals are dignified, self-sufficient creatures with complicated needs that are best met by living with their own kind. Research and common sense reveal that primates especially need the social interaction of their respective species. No matter how safe we are keeping them from the elements when we put them in our houses or in cages, when we do so we corrupt their dignity by taking away their choices. Our own children face all kinds of dangers and risks out in the world, but we don't lock them up in their bedrooms for the rest of their lives. We don't do this because we know that if we do, we deny them the opportunity to be who they really are. It is not a wild animal's job to fulfill our human need to be needed. We are decimating wild populations of animals with this foolishness. It is time to face the truth: wild animals do not now, nor have they ever, nor will they ever, belong to us. They are not our children or our property. If we really love them, we will restore their rightful homes that we destroyed and allow them to live peacefully within them."
Sharyn Beach
There are many comments posted, some saying that this is cruel, and others saying it is not cruel because the people are protecting the animals from all of the dangers and discomforts of the wild. I plan to write a longer essay addressing the fallacy of this argument, but for now, here is the comment I posted on TLC's website:
"Wild animals are dignified, self-sufficient creatures with complicated needs that are best met by living with their own kind. Research and common sense reveal that primates especially need the social interaction of their respective species. No matter how safe we are keeping them from the elements when we put them in our houses or in cages, when we do so we corrupt their dignity by taking away their choices. Our own children face all kinds of dangers and risks out in the world, but we don't lock them up in their bedrooms for the rest of their lives. We don't do this because we know that if we do, we deny them the opportunity to be who they really are. It is not a wild animal's job to fulfill our human need to be needed. We are decimating wild populations of animals with this foolishness. It is time to face the truth: wild animals do not now, nor have they ever, nor will they ever, belong to us. They are not our children or our property. If we really love them, we will restore their rightful homes that we destroyed and allow them to live peacefully within them."
Sharyn Beach
Wednesday, September 30, 2009
Cuddle a Tiger, Save a Species?
Today I am posting a letter I wrote to a reporter who did a story about some elementary school children adopting a tiger from Tiger World, in an effort to educate the children and lend a hand to conserving an endangered species. Their adopted tiger was actually brought into their classroom, and several of the children commented that they would like to take the tiger home with them. Here is what I wrote:
Dear Chris,
I read with great interest your piece about Moss Hill Elementary adopting a tiger from Tiger World. While I appreciate the efforts of anyone, especially school children, to save endangered species, I must say that my heart was not warmed by the comments of some of the children that they would like to take the tiger home with them. To me, this represents a fundamental cultural change in the way we perceive nature that is not at all cute or sweet, but rather alarming. What exactly are we teaching them?
When I was growing up, it was my father who instilled in me a respect for nature - I used to think the National Geographic specials that he watched all weekend were boring. I never realized the influence he was having in my life, but I can say one thing for sure - I never, ever wanted to take a tiger home with me, cub or not. I understood and respected their power, and I knew that they had a place, and that place was not at home with me, or in anyone else's home for that matter.
This is the reason that I have been appalled over the last few years to discover the presence and magnitude of the exotic animal trade in our country and worldwide, a trade in which people are actually duped into believing that a tiger (or any other wild animal) can make a good pet. What I have learned is that there is a cycle of wild animals being moved around, from this place to that, through dozens of different people's hands, and yet never, ever finding their way back home, in spite of all the happy promises from so-called sanctuaries that all of their efforts are for conservation or education. What happens in truth is that the animals are viewed as a commodity, and their needs are often neglected or they are just downright abused. They are taken from their mothers, dragged around to malls, fairs, and carnivals, posed for photo ops, and thrown in a cage and forgotten when they aren't working. They are then bred to bring in a new generation and sold off or killed when they are spent. In short, just like puppies, they are being "milled."
But do we really have to be told about all this abuse to understand how utterly unnatural all of this is to a wild animal? Have you ever seen anyone come back with pictures from an African Safari, arm-in-arm with a wild lion? What does it take for us to understand that they can only be engaging in such things against their wills? Anyone who has seen the conditions that many of these animals live in usually walks away appalled, horrified, and heartbroken, and resolves that they will have none of it. They will not support anyone or anything who is lending a hand to keeping this cycle in motion. Any person or organization who claims to love and want to conserve animals should be shouting from the rooftops that this madness must stop, and they certainly would not be adding to the cycle by continuing to breed more animals or by obtaining them from those who do breed them. Some so-called sanctuaries may indeed care for their animals well, but if they breed animals or buy cubs from those who do, they are keeping this trade going and are being dishonest with themselves, with one another, and with the public.
I am not trying to question the honest desire of schoolchildren to save endangered species, nor am I questioning the integrity of the teachers who so faithfully guide them. I am questioning the validity of anything that suggests to the next generation that a tiger is something that we can, or should even want to, take home with us. I am also questioning the legitimacy of the idea that the relentless breeding (and consequent buying, selling, and trading) of exotic animals will save them from extinction. There are now more tigers living in residential basements and backyards than there are living in the wild, and yet the news from their native habitats repeats the same tired knell - for the wild tiger, it's five minutes to midnight.
If we really want to help our kids help animals, then we must ask ourselves some tough questions. Where does a tiger really belong? There is really only one answer - in the wild. And what is the connection between captive breeding and conservation? In almost all cases, there just isn't one. The subspecies' bloodlines have been so thoroughly mixed (to get the resulting characteristics that humans want) that they no longer have any connection to their respective habitats - they are virtually unreleasable. They will never see the wild lands from which their forebears were taken.
I know most news stories are not intended to be exposes, but must we confuse the next generation with these mixed messages? They've got their work cut out for them as it is; if we want them to have any hope of solving the looming crises that they will inherit from us, the truth is a weapon they will not long survive without.
Please help true conservation efforts by telling the truth about wild animals. Tigers belong in the wild, not in photo shoots, not on leashes, not in our yards, and not in our classrooms. What they need is protected wild lands - and for us to get out of their way.
Sincerely,
Sharyn Beach
Dear Chris,
I read with great interest your piece about Moss Hill Elementary adopting a tiger from Tiger World. While I appreciate the efforts of anyone, especially school children, to save endangered species, I must say that my heart was not warmed by the comments of some of the children that they would like to take the tiger home with them. To me, this represents a fundamental cultural change in the way we perceive nature that is not at all cute or sweet, but rather alarming. What exactly are we teaching them?
When I was growing up, it was my father who instilled in me a respect for nature - I used to think the National Geographic specials that he watched all weekend were boring. I never realized the influence he was having in my life, but I can say one thing for sure - I never, ever wanted to take a tiger home with me, cub or not. I understood and respected their power, and I knew that they had a place, and that place was not at home with me, or in anyone else's home for that matter.
This is the reason that I have been appalled over the last few years to discover the presence and magnitude of the exotic animal trade in our country and worldwide, a trade in which people are actually duped into believing that a tiger (or any other wild animal) can make a good pet. What I have learned is that there is a cycle of wild animals being moved around, from this place to that, through dozens of different people's hands, and yet never, ever finding their way back home, in spite of all the happy promises from so-called sanctuaries that all of their efforts are for conservation or education. What happens in truth is that the animals are viewed as a commodity, and their needs are often neglected or they are just downright abused. They are taken from their mothers, dragged around to malls, fairs, and carnivals, posed for photo ops, and thrown in a cage and forgotten when they aren't working. They are then bred to bring in a new generation and sold off or killed when they are spent. In short, just like puppies, they are being "milled."
But do we really have to be told about all this abuse to understand how utterly unnatural all of this is to a wild animal? Have you ever seen anyone come back with pictures from an African Safari, arm-in-arm with a wild lion? What does it take for us to understand that they can only be engaging in such things against their wills? Anyone who has seen the conditions that many of these animals live in usually walks away appalled, horrified, and heartbroken, and resolves that they will have none of it. They will not support anyone or anything who is lending a hand to keeping this cycle in motion. Any person or organization who claims to love and want to conserve animals should be shouting from the rooftops that this madness must stop, and they certainly would not be adding to the cycle by continuing to breed more animals or by obtaining them from those who do breed them. Some so-called sanctuaries may indeed care for their animals well, but if they breed animals or buy cubs from those who do, they are keeping this trade going and are being dishonest with themselves, with one another, and with the public.
I am not trying to question the honest desire of schoolchildren to save endangered species, nor am I questioning the integrity of the teachers who so faithfully guide them. I am questioning the validity of anything that suggests to the next generation that a tiger is something that we can, or should even want to, take home with us. I am also questioning the legitimacy of the idea that the relentless breeding (and consequent buying, selling, and trading) of exotic animals will save them from extinction. There are now more tigers living in residential basements and backyards than there are living in the wild, and yet the news from their native habitats repeats the same tired knell - for the wild tiger, it's five minutes to midnight.
If we really want to help our kids help animals, then we must ask ourselves some tough questions. Where does a tiger really belong? There is really only one answer - in the wild. And what is the connection between captive breeding and conservation? In almost all cases, there just isn't one. The subspecies' bloodlines have been so thoroughly mixed (to get the resulting characteristics that humans want) that they no longer have any connection to their respective habitats - they are virtually unreleasable. They will never see the wild lands from which their forebears were taken.
I know most news stories are not intended to be exposes, but must we confuse the next generation with these mixed messages? They've got their work cut out for them as it is; if we want them to have any hope of solving the looming crises that they will inherit from us, the truth is a weapon they will not long survive without.
Please help true conservation efforts by telling the truth about wild animals. Tigers belong in the wild, not in photo shoots, not on leashes, not in our yards, and not in our classrooms. What they need is protected wild lands - and for us to get out of their way.
Sincerely,
Sharyn Beach
Monday, September 28, 2009
Sanctuary
Today I am posting a poem I wrote for Big Cat Rescue, a sanctuary dedicated to providing a permanent place for abused and unwanted exotic cats, mostly cast offs from the exotic pet trade. I dedicate it to Nikita the lioness, pictured above, who came to Big Cat Rescue after police found her chained to a wall in a crack house in Tennessee. I dedicate it with the tenacious hope that human beings will stop rationalizing, that we will wake up and realize that making living creatures into a commodity, even if we treat them well, is not saving them from extinction. It is not saving them from anything but their own freedom and dignity. For Nikita and so many like her, having been made into little more than slaves, sanctuary is the best we can give to them. The best we can give to their kind is to give them the space to be who they are, in their own habitat. A cage is not a home.
Sanctuary
Abandoned, forgotten, neglected, abused
Forsaken, dismissed, mistreated, misused
The worthy, the beautiful, the graceful, the tall
The courageous, the cunning, the secretive, the small
Find refuge and comfort and safety herein
And voices who shout the unspoken within
In sanctuary finding they are never alone
Until hands warm and tender, point the way home
Sharyn Beach
Thursday, July 23, 2009
The Caged Bird Sings Because There Is Nothing Else to Do
The wild, cruel beast is not behind the bars of a cage. He is in front of them.
Axel Munthe
This is the first in a series of essays that I am writing that address the reasons (read: rationalizations) that people offer for continuing the practice of breeding and trading captive wild animals. They are in no particular order.
Reason #1: By keeping wild animals in captivity, we are protecting them from all of the hardships that come with life in the wild.
I have heard this common reason used time and again by people who breed, trade, and keep wild animals as pets. Because animals in the wild must contend with difficulties, such as potential food scarcity, confrontations and competition with other animals, natural disasters, disease, and fleas (to name a few), those who keep them in captivity claim that they are doing them a favor by releasing them from these burdens.
The most obvious hole in this argument is that wild animals have contended with, overcome, and survived such hardships in the wild for thousands of years without our assistance. In fact, the ability of a species to meet these challenges is precisely why they are still here; they are the very definition of the fittest. This is not just to say that they are physically fit, it is to say that they exist in their particular habitats because they are fit to meet its particular challenges.
Another hole in the argument is the flagrant neglect and abuse that takes place in far too many places that engage in animal trading, regardless of the outward promise of animal protection. Let's take a closer look at the word "trading." In economic terms, what is it that people trade? Commodities. We must face the fact that if we engage in trading living creatures, then we perceive them as commodities, no matter how much we may shout that we love them and are protecting them. This perception leads to the inevitable application of a fundamental principle that governs commodities trading, which is to keep the costs low and the profits high. It costs a great deal of money to meet the needs of captive wild animals, particularly large and dangerous animals like big cats. Therefore costs are kept at a minimum by neglecting the animals' needs. Cage sizes are minimized, and cages fall into disrepair for the lack of manpower and materials to maintain them; animals often live in their own waste because cleaning cages takes time and money; veterinary care is non-existent; and the quality of the food diminishes sometimes to level of dry dog food, completely unfit for an obligate carnivore. Dare to question people who keep animals in conditions like this and you may receive a sharp and patronizing response, "They don't get veterinary care in the wild!" But wait a minute, weren't you supposed to be protecting them from the cruel fate of the wild?
The corollary of course, to keeping the costs down is to maximize profit. And the reach for profit occurs in two primary ways. The first way is that the animal has to go to work. This means being dragged around to malls, fairs, carnivals, and street corners, posing for pictures, and learning undignified tricks at the hands of people who wouldn't dare even approach their kind in the wild, much less attempt to train them. It also means the separation of family units; babies are taken from their mothers at a very young age so that they will bond with humans instead of their own kind. When they are spent from the stress of these activities, the second primary reach for profit occurs. They are sold to the highest bidder, dead or alive. If alive it is, then little regard is given to where the animals that these people were "protecting" end up. To quote one breeder from Florida, "I know some of my cats went to bad places, but what could I do when they weren't making money for me anymore?" It is clear that animal protection is not the primary motivation here.
But in order to really understand the fallacy of this argument, let's look at it from another point of view. As Harper Lee said, you cannot understand a man (or an animal) until you walk a mile in his shoes. Let's side aside, for a moment, the issue of the conditions in which an animal lives in captivity. It is not rocket science to understand why it is unethical to cage an animal in deplorable living situations. But what about the ones who are well-cared for? The argument on the part of some universities that keep wild animals as team mascots goes something like this: "That tiger lives in a $3 million facility that was built just for him! Nothing is good enough for you people!"
Consider this: does a tiger understand a $3 million cage, or does it understand the forest? Does it understand the shouts of thousands of screaming fans in a stadium, or does it understand the rippling of water in a forest stream? Does it care about the skill of a quarterback, or does it care about the patience required to refrain from making a single sound in order to keep from tipping off its prey? Football, team spirit, and $3 million facilities are things that WE value, not things that caged animals value. (I could write an entire additional essay about the irony of the claim that animal rights activists should care more about people than about animals, all the while our institutions of higher education build $3 million facilities for sometimes only a single tiger. What about the people living in the streets? I guess homelessness is less of an immediate problem than quashing team spirit.)
Let's take this analogy a step further. Suppose someone came to you and said that they would build you a lovely compound, with a big house and a cozy bed and the best food and all of your needs met with no effort on your part. You could have whatever you wanted on the compound - a pool, a big-screen TV, a tennis court, whatever suits your fancy. But there is one caveat: YOU CAN NEVER LEAVE. Ever. Still sound like a good idea? Here is the short list of places you will never get to go: the beach, a public park, an amusement park, the grocery store, church, the Louvre, the library, a friend's house, college, the theatre, a basketball game, a family reunion. Yes there are many things that could come to you from the TV or internet, but those would only make you long to go to the places you see via these technologies yet are forbidden to go. Why would you care? Why would you want to leave when you have everything you need right there on the compound? Because in truth you DON'T have everything you need on the compound. Why? Because you are an animal, and animals need to explore their world. Yes, I understand that wild animals do not want to go to the places I just mentioned, but that does not mean that they don't want to go anywhere at all. Some tigers have been tracked roaming as far as 1,000 miles in the wild. Perhaps if they find a place where food is abundant and they are getting their needs met, they would not travel that far from it, but in the wild that is THEIR choice, and choice is precisely what we robbed from them, the thing from which we presumably protect them, when we took them out of the wild and put them in cages to begin with.
Our own children face many difficulties and challenges when they move away from home, and indeed faced many challenges every time they left home while they were still living there. Does that mean we should lock them away in their rooms forever to protect them from hardship? Are we doing them a favor if we do this? If I live in perfect protection, I don't have to do the difficult things that are necessary to survive and flourish in this world, but it also means that I don't GET to do any of those things either. When we are protected from the hardships of life, we are also denied the rewards of meeting them.
Meeting those hardships is exactly what wild animals have been doing for thousands of years, and quite successfully. The tiger has perfected the art of the patient wait and the exuberant lunge towards its prey; and the prey animals have perfected the art of getting away well enough that 9 out of 10 of a predator's attempts to catch them fail. Their bodies, their efforts, their diversity, their commitment to survival, as well as an overarching drive in nature to achieve balance, have painted a natural landscape full of beauty, excitement, and surprises - a landscape which generations of wild animals have never known because we, collectively, removed them from it and put them to work for us. Protection, indeed. By caging, buying, selling, and trading them, we protect them from nothing but their own freedom and dignity.
They don't need protection from the places that they call home. The argument of protection deflates as soon as we recognize one thing: anything that lives in captivity can only be described as a captive. The caged bird may very well sing, but it is little consolation when what it really wants to do is fly.
Sharyn Beach
Axel Munthe
This is the first in a series of essays that I am writing that address the reasons (read: rationalizations) that people offer for continuing the practice of breeding and trading captive wild animals. They are in no particular order.
Reason #1: By keeping wild animals in captivity, we are protecting them from all of the hardships that come with life in the wild.
I have heard this common reason used time and again by people who breed, trade, and keep wild animals as pets. Because animals in the wild must contend with difficulties, such as potential food scarcity, confrontations and competition with other animals, natural disasters, disease, and fleas (to name a few), those who keep them in captivity claim that they are doing them a favor by releasing them from these burdens.
The most obvious hole in this argument is that wild animals have contended with, overcome, and survived such hardships in the wild for thousands of years without our assistance. In fact, the ability of a species to meet these challenges is precisely why they are still here; they are the very definition of the fittest. This is not just to say that they are physically fit, it is to say that they exist in their particular habitats because they are fit to meet its particular challenges.
Another hole in the argument is the flagrant neglect and abuse that takes place in far too many places that engage in animal trading, regardless of the outward promise of animal protection. Let's take a closer look at the word "trading." In economic terms, what is it that people trade? Commodities. We must face the fact that if we engage in trading living creatures, then we perceive them as commodities, no matter how much we may shout that we love them and are protecting them. This perception leads to the inevitable application of a fundamental principle that governs commodities trading, which is to keep the costs low and the profits high. It costs a great deal of money to meet the needs of captive wild animals, particularly large and dangerous animals like big cats. Therefore costs are kept at a minimum by neglecting the animals' needs. Cage sizes are minimized, and cages fall into disrepair for the lack of manpower and materials to maintain them; animals often live in their own waste because cleaning cages takes time and money; veterinary care is non-existent; and the quality of the food diminishes sometimes to level of dry dog food, completely unfit for an obligate carnivore. Dare to question people who keep animals in conditions like this and you may receive a sharp and patronizing response, "They don't get veterinary care in the wild!" But wait a minute, weren't you supposed to be protecting them from the cruel fate of the wild?
The corollary of course, to keeping the costs down is to maximize profit. And the reach for profit occurs in two primary ways. The first way is that the animal has to go to work. This means being dragged around to malls, fairs, carnivals, and street corners, posing for pictures, and learning undignified tricks at the hands of people who wouldn't dare even approach their kind in the wild, much less attempt to train them. It also means the separation of family units; babies are taken from their mothers at a very young age so that they will bond with humans instead of their own kind. When they are spent from the stress of these activities, the second primary reach for profit occurs. They are sold to the highest bidder, dead or alive. If alive it is, then little regard is given to where the animals that these people were "protecting" end up. To quote one breeder from Florida, "I know some of my cats went to bad places, but what could I do when they weren't making money for me anymore?" It is clear that animal protection is not the primary motivation here.
But in order to really understand the fallacy of this argument, let's look at it from another point of view. As Harper Lee said, you cannot understand a man (or an animal) until you walk a mile in his shoes. Let's side aside, for a moment, the issue of the conditions in which an animal lives in captivity. It is not rocket science to understand why it is unethical to cage an animal in deplorable living situations. But what about the ones who are well-cared for? The argument on the part of some universities that keep wild animals as team mascots goes something like this: "That tiger lives in a $3 million facility that was built just for him! Nothing is good enough for you people!"
Consider this: does a tiger understand a $3 million cage, or does it understand the forest? Does it understand the shouts of thousands of screaming fans in a stadium, or does it understand the rippling of water in a forest stream? Does it care about the skill of a quarterback, or does it care about the patience required to refrain from making a single sound in order to keep from tipping off its prey? Football, team spirit, and $3 million facilities are things that WE value, not things that caged animals value. (I could write an entire additional essay about the irony of the claim that animal rights activists should care more about people than about animals, all the while our institutions of higher education build $3 million facilities for sometimes only a single tiger. What about the people living in the streets? I guess homelessness is less of an immediate problem than quashing team spirit.)
Let's take this analogy a step further. Suppose someone came to you and said that they would build you a lovely compound, with a big house and a cozy bed and the best food and all of your needs met with no effort on your part. You could have whatever you wanted on the compound - a pool, a big-screen TV, a tennis court, whatever suits your fancy. But there is one caveat: YOU CAN NEVER LEAVE. Ever. Still sound like a good idea? Here is the short list of places you will never get to go: the beach, a public park, an amusement park, the grocery store, church, the Louvre, the library, a friend's house, college, the theatre, a basketball game, a family reunion. Yes there are many things that could come to you from the TV or internet, but those would only make you long to go to the places you see via these technologies yet are forbidden to go. Why would you care? Why would you want to leave when you have everything you need right there on the compound? Because in truth you DON'T have everything you need on the compound. Why? Because you are an animal, and animals need to explore their world. Yes, I understand that wild animals do not want to go to the places I just mentioned, but that does not mean that they don't want to go anywhere at all. Some tigers have been tracked roaming as far as 1,000 miles in the wild. Perhaps if they find a place where food is abundant and they are getting their needs met, they would not travel that far from it, but in the wild that is THEIR choice, and choice is precisely what we robbed from them, the thing from which we presumably protect them, when we took them out of the wild and put them in cages to begin with.
Our own children face many difficulties and challenges when they move away from home, and indeed faced many challenges every time they left home while they were still living there. Does that mean we should lock them away in their rooms forever to protect them from hardship? Are we doing them a favor if we do this? If I live in perfect protection, I don't have to do the difficult things that are necessary to survive and flourish in this world, but it also means that I don't GET to do any of those things either. When we are protected from the hardships of life, we are also denied the rewards of meeting them.
Meeting those hardships is exactly what wild animals have been doing for thousands of years, and quite successfully. The tiger has perfected the art of the patient wait and the exuberant lunge towards its prey; and the prey animals have perfected the art of getting away well enough that 9 out of 10 of a predator's attempts to catch them fail. Their bodies, their efforts, their diversity, their commitment to survival, as well as an overarching drive in nature to achieve balance, have painted a natural landscape full of beauty, excitement, and surprises - a landscape which generations of wild animals have never known because we, collectively, removed them from it and put them to work for us. Protection, indeed. By caging, buying, selling, and trading them, we protect them from nothing but their own freedom and dignity.
They don't need protection from the places that they call home. The argument of protection deflates as soon as we recognize one thing: anything that lives in captivity can only be described as a captive. The caged bird may very well sing, but it is little consolation when what it really wants to do is fly.
Sharyn Beach
Thursday, July 16, 2009
Constitutional Rights?
Last Friday evening my husband turned on the news in the middle of a segment about the private ownership of exotic animals. Having turned the TV on in the middle of the story, we didn't know the exact context, but I assume the story was presented in regards to the recent killing of a 2-year-old Florida girl by the family's "pet" Burmese python, and the resulting controversy over the wisdom of importing exotic animals to be kept as pets. As many Floridians know, there are some 150,000 non-native pythons now roaming in the already fragile Everglades, competing with the native wildlife for space and food. This problem began with the release of "pets" that proved to be too independent and too dangerous to control.
There are so many aspects of this story about which I could probably write an entire book, but one comment from an exotic pet owner really struck me. He claimed that he has a constitutional right to own these animals because the constitution protects his right to the pursuit of happiness, and owning these animals makes him happy. This statement reminds me of what the seventh-grade bully who use to taunt my niece at school said: "I do it because it's fun." Perhaps it was fun for her, but it was not fun for my niece. Do we not also have the right to be free from the pursuits of others that make us miserable?
Like it or not, our constitutional rights do not grant us unlimited leave to do as we please. There are limits to what our rights allow us to do, and those limits present themselves via the rights of others. In other words, our rights end where the rights of others begin. My right to pursue happiness does not include the right to curtail the happiness of others. Proclaiming that my right to pursue happiness gives me the right to cage a wild animal for my own amusement makes about as much sense as proclaiming that I should be able to force someone who doesn't love me into marriage because it is the only thing that will make me "happy."
There are really three main issues involved in this man's statement: the definition of rights, the definition of happiness, and the question of exactly who enjoys the benefits of these things we claim to hold dear. The critics of "animal rights" activists have been traditionally quick to point out that animals do not have "rights," mostly because they cannot vote. (Well, no, they can't, can they?) This is, of course, another lame attempt to make the question of protecting animals seem silly and irrelevant. Perhaps animals do not have "rights," but they do, however, have INTERESTS, and the inability to vote does not render their interests invalid; likewise, their interests cannot simply be dismissed by the constitutional right of a human to pursue happiness.
For the most part, the interests of wild animals are not that different than the interests of people. If they could vote, they would probably vote in favor of anything that gives them enough space to be who they are. It is reasonable to assume that few of them would agree that a cage in a backyard or a room in a basement is sufficient for this purpose. Few humans would agree to these terms; why do we believe it is acceptable to impose such limits upon those who don't have a say in the matter? Perhaps it is because, as Henry Beston stated so well, we erringly "patronize them for their incompleteness, for their tragic fate of having taken form so far below ourselves."*
Perhaps we just cannot admit to ourselves that it is WE who feel incomplete, and must therefore justify the imprisonment of magnificent beings by invoking the rights handed down by a document that they did not and could not have had a hand in creating, nor could they have created the emptiness that we fruitlessly try to sate by turning them into just one more of our possessions. A "right" is nothing more than the protection of an interest, and a wild animal, say, a tiger, is interested in being a tiger, a predator, a hunter, a wanderer of the forest, not in being my pet. Because wild animals do not typically wander into our homes of their own accord (unless we foolishly lure them) it is safe to assume that being "pets" does not make them happy.
We call on the constitution to protect OUR happiness, not theirs. In the appallingly short time that anyone is given to speak in a news segment, Scott Lope of Big Cat Rescue pointed out that anyone who really loves a wild animal would not willingly put it in a cage and feed it processed food from the grocery store. Why? Because we realize that while it might make US happy, it infringes upon the inherent interest of the animal to be who it is, whether it be a hunter, a runner, a flier, or a swimmer. They ask for so little, really - to find their own food, to find their own mates, and to explore their world. If we really care for them, then protecting their interests is the only thing that can make us truly happy.
The exotic pet trade usually spells misery for captive animals, frustration and sadness for those who quickly find out that it was NOT a good idea to keep them as pets, and an increase of problems in the already complicated situations facing native wildlife still living in the wild. It's time to graduate from the reasoning of the seventh-grade bully. There is nothing fun about impeding the freedom of others - not with ridicule, not with taunting, and not with cages in the backyard. The constitution protects our right to pursue happiness, not to pursue others. Real happiness comes from growing up enough to understand that we don't now, nor did we ever really, own them. They simply do not belong to us. They are not ours to buy, sell, trade, or borrow. They are not objects but whole beings, "gifted with extensions of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear."* Is it really too much to ask to give them enough space to follow where those voices lead?
Protect animals. Protect people. Protect innocent children. Protect native wildlife. Support a ban on the importation of dangerous exotic animals for the pet trade.
Sharyn Beach
*Beston, Henry. The Outermost House: A Year of Life on the Great Beach of Cape Cod. 1928. New York, Doubleday.
There are so many aspects of this story about which I could probably write an entire book, but one comment from an exotic pet owner really struck me. He claimed that he has a constitutional right to own these animals because the constitution protects his right to the pursuit of happiness, and owning these animals makes him happy. This statement reminds me of what the seventh-grade bully who use to taunt my niece at school said: "I do it because it's fun." Perhaps it was fun for her, but it was not fun for my niece. Do we not also have the right to be free from the pursuits of others that make us miserable?
Like it or not, our constitutional rights do not grant us unlimited leave to do as we please. There are limits to what our rights allow us to do, and those limits present themselves via the rights of others. In other words, our rights end where the rights of others begin. My right to pursue happiness does not include the right to curtail the happiness of others. Proclaiming that my right to pursue happiness gives me the right to cage a wild animal for my own amusement makes about as much sense as proclaiming that I should be able to force someone who doesn't love me into marriage because it is the only thing that will make me "happy."
There are really three main issues involved in this man's statement: the definition of rights, the definition of happiness, and the question of exactly who enjoys the benefits of these things we claim to hold dear. The critics of "animal rights" activists have been traditionally quick to point out that animals do not have "rights," mostly because they cannot vote. (Well, no, they can't, can they?) This is, of course, another lame attempt to make the question of protecting animals seem silly and irrelevant. Perhaps animals do not have "rights," but they do, however, have INTERESTS, and the inability to vote does not render their interests invalid; likewise, their interests cannot simply be dismissed by the constitutional right of a human to pursue happiness.
For the most part, the interests of wild animals are not that different than the interests of people. If they could vote, they would probably vote in favor of anything that gives them enough space to be who they are. It is reasonable to assume that few of them would agree that a cage in a backyard or a room in a basement is sufficient for this purpose. Few humans would agree to these terms; why do we believe it is acceptable to impose such limits upon those who don't have a say in the matter? Perhaps it is because, as Henry Beston stated so well, we erringly "patronize them for their incompleteness, for their tragic fate of having taken form so far below ourselves."*
Perhaps we just cannot admit to ourselves that it is WE who feel incomplete, and must therefore justify the imprisonment of magnificent beings by invoking the rights handed down by a document that they did not and could not have had a hand in creating, nor could they have created the emptiness that we fruitlessly try to sate by turning them into just one more of our possessions. A "right" is nothing more than the protection of an interest, and a wild animal, say, a tiger, is interested in being a tiger, a predator, a hunter, a wanderer of the forest, not in being my pet. Because wild animals do not typically wander into our homes of their own accord (unless we foolishly lure them) it is safe to assume that being "pets" does not make them happy.
We call on the constitution to protect OUR happiness, not theirs. In the appallingly short time that anyone is given to speak in a news segment, Scott Lope of Big Cat Rescue pointed out that anyone who really loves a wild animal would not willingly put it in a cage and feed it processed food from the grocery store. Why? Because we realize that while it might make US happy, it infringes upon the inherent interest of the animal to be who it is, whether it be a hunter, a runner, a flier, or a swimmer. They ask for so little, really - to find their own food, to find their own mates, and to explore their world. If we really care for them, then protecting their interests is the only thing that can make us truly happy.
The exotic pet trade usually spells misery for captive animals, frustration and sadness for those who quickly find out that it was NOT a good idea to keep them as pets, and an increase of problems in the already complicated situations facing native wildlife still living in the wild. It's time to graduate from the reasoning of the seventh-grade bully. There is nothing fun about impeding the freedom of others - not with ridicule, not with taunting, and not with cages in the backyard. The constitution protects our right to pursue happiness, not to pursue others. Real happiness comes from growing up enough to understand that we don't now, nor did we ever really, own them. They simply do not belong to us. They are not ours to buy, sell, trade, or borrow. They are not objects but whole beings, "gifted with extensions of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear."* Is it really too much to ask to give them enough space to follow where those voices lead?
Protect animals. Protect people. Protect innocent children. Protect native wildlife. Support a ban on the importation of dangerous exotic animals for the pet trade.
Sharyn Beach
*Beston, Henry. The Outermost House: A Year of Life on the Great Beach of Cape Cod. 1928. New York, Doubleday.
Thursday, July 9, 2009
Comment About Bobcat in Florida Subdivision
Today I am copying a comment I left about an article regarding a Florida bobcat "moving into a subdivision" in Melbourne, Florida.* I read this article a couple of days after reading an article about a woman who rehabilitates wild animals, but also breeds them or breeds hybrids of them to be sold as pets, which seems a little nonsensical. Aside from the fact that so many people cannot seem to accept that we cannot take the wild completely out of a wild animal by simply crossing it with a domestic animal, breeding and selling them only creates more animals that then have to be taken in and rehabilitated later.
The article about this was quite flowery and heartwarming, focusing on the noble work of caring for innocent animals. The article about a bobcat roaming in a neighborhood, however, had quite a different tone. It spoke of its "razor-sharp claws and needle-like teeth,*" and how it seemed to cunningly elude the traps laid out for it. Where are the warm, fuzzy feelings now? Additionally, where was the mention of sharp claws and teeth in the article about the breeding and selling of African Servals, who by the way, can leap up to 14 feet in the air and pounce on prey as large as a wood stork and as small as a shrew by just listening?
The truth is, we are picking and choosing amongst the characteristics of these animals to suit our purposes at the moment, and we fail to see the whole being. More importantly, we fail to see the whole, living system of which those beings are a part. Here is the comment I wrote.
-----------------------
I find it interesting and revealing that when a wild cat is reported roaming free there is a focus on its weight, size, and "razor-sharp claws and needle-like teeth," as if it were some sort of big-foot type monster that is out to get us.
Yet when the media reports about wild cats being bred in captivity and traded, the focus is on the animal's magnificence or cuteness. When some people point out that keeping them as pets is a bad idea precisely because of the "razor-sharp claws and needle-like teeth," those people are then sometimes accused of being overzealous animal rights activists.
It's time to stop picking and choosing the characteristics of these animals that suit our fancy at the moment and look at the big picture. They are neither a nuisance nor a novelty. They are living creatures that belong in this world and we are accountable to them and to the natural systems that they call home.
And let's get one thing straight - we moved into the bobcat's territory, he did not move into ours.
----------------------------------
Sharyn Beach
*Bobcat prowls Florida subdivision, UPI.com, July 7, 2009. www.upi.com/Top_News/2009/07/07/Bobcat-prowls-Florida-subdivision/UPI-34101247018689/
The article about this was quite flowery and heartwarming, focusing on the noble work of caring for innocent animals. The article about a bobcat roaming in a neighborhood, however, had quite a different tone. It spoke of its "razor-sharp claws and needle-like teeth,*" and how it seemed to cunningly elude the traps laid out for it. Where are the warm, fuzzy feelings now? Additionally, where was the mention of sharp claws and teeth in the article about the breeding and selling of African Servals, who by the way, can leap up to 14 feet in the air and pounce on prey as large as a wood stork and as small as a shrew by just listening?
The truth is, we are picking and choosing amongst the characteristics of these animals to suit our purposes at the moment, and we fail to see the whole being. More importantly, we fail to see the whole, living system of which those beings are a part. Here is the comment I wrote.
-----------------------
I find it interesting and revealing that when a wild cat is reported roaming free there is a focus on its weight, size, and "razor-sharp claws and needle-like teeth," as if it were some sort of big-foot type monster that is out to get us.
Yet when the media reports about wild cats being bred in captivity and traded, the focus is on the animal's magnificence or cuteness. When some people point out that keeping them as pets is a bad idea precisely because of the "razor-sharp claws and needle-like teeth," those people are then sometimes accused of being overzealous animal rights activists.
It's time to stop picking and choosing the characteristics of these animals that suit our fancy at the moment and look at the big picture. They are neither a nuisance nor a novelty. They are living creatures that belong in this world and we are accountable to them and to the natural systems that they call home.
And let's get one thing straight - we moved into the bobcat's territory, he did not move into ours.
----------------------------------
Sharyn Beach
*Bobcat prowls Florida subdivision, UPI.com, July 7, 2009. www.upi.com/Top_News/2009/07/07/Bobcat-prowls-Florida-subdivision/UPI-34101247018689/
Tuesday, July 7, 2009
The Tigers Are Not For Sale
But you have made it a den of thieves**
A few weeks ago at church we had a visit from the bishop, and his homily was based on the reading about Jesus driving the sellers and moneychangers out of the temple. I have always been particularly moved by this passage, as I feel that it has a message far beyond what most people realize. The bishop explained that the moneychangers were there so that the Jewish laws against false gods could be circumvented, thus enabling the market to cheapen the church by turning its doors into a place for buying and selling. You see, the Jews were required to bring gifts for the priests on certain holy days. Because Roman tender referred to the Roman emperor as “divine,” the Jews could not use Roman money to purchase items because the money itself was idolatrous. The moneychangers showed up on the steps of the temple to change out Roman coins for Jewish ones, thus enabling the peddlers to sell their wares to the Jews who needed gifts for their holy ones.
What, you may ask, does this have to do with tigers? This bible story often reminds me of the disturbing image displayed above. I think we humans would do well to expand our view of the “temple.” When we say “temple,” we usually think of buildings dedicated to the worship of a religious deity, or some sort of sanctuary, the meaning of which is often taken literally as a sacred place to which to retreat to escape the demands of the world. How often do we ask ourselves precisely what it is from which we need to escape? From what do we need sanctuary? Perhaps the above image says it all.
I view the entire earth as a temple, teeming with life forms of all kinds, and all of which are sacred. Each one has a position, a role, a unique gift for the entire living system. Its worth is truly measured by its living gifts to the living. Yet we treat these creatures like cheap Roman coins, made to be cut up and exchanged for the things that we wrongly believe are truly valuable. To those who view these magnificent beings as a commodity, they are worth more dead than alive.
Perhaps the most insulting and insidious example of this twisted thinking is the proposal, recently featured by John Stossel on 20/20, that in order to “save” tigers from extinction, we should “farm” them to satisfy the greed of the poachers and those to whom they sell dismembered tiger parts. “Free market economics!” they cry. Once again, someone offers up the tired old myopic view that the market will save us from everything. People are so busy looking through the wrong end of the telescope that they fail to see that the market mentality is the thing that got tigers into this mess in the first place. Talk about worshiping a false god.
I repeatedly marvel at how a group of people can come up with a really, really bad idea, spin it, twist it, sell it, build enormous juggernaut-like institutions around it, and then point to the institutions themselves as proof that the original idea was good and true. Once this happens, it becomes ever more difficult to dismantle the faulty reasoning and resurrect the truth. People begin looking through the lens of the institutions themselves and are blind to everything else. Here I refer to the institution of economics. “If we can keep tigers from going extinct AND satisfy the poachers, what’s the problem here?” they ask. The problem here is that the ideas that drive the poachers are, in a word, wrong. Or, more precisely, they stem from people valuing the wrong things. Or, more precisely, they stem from people valuing ONLY THINGS. Tigers are becoming extinct not because people can’t buy and sell them; they are becoming extinct because we push them out of the way to make room for the things we want to buy and sell.
Does this become a wake-up call? Do we face the inherent problems with the free market? No, we simply turn the free market lens on living creatures, and from there, we come to the faulty conclusion that we can "save them" by paying them the big favor of becoming another one of the things that we want to buy and sell. The market may very well be free, but the tigers most certainly are not. We do not farm tigers to save them from extinction; we farm them so that their parts can be sold for profit. We do not breed them to save them from extinction either; we breed them so that they may be sold as pets and novelty acts. All of these things have been going on for over one hundred years and we are still losing tigers in the wild.
But that’s really it, isn’t it? It’s not so much the tigers that we are losing as it is the “wild” from which they come and to which they really belong - the wild that shaped their contours over the countless milennia, the wild, in whose dominions they earned a place by meeting its challenges over the unfathomable eons, the wild that, in our quest for predictability and comfort, we have ultimately feared and forsaken. The reason the ideas that drive poachers and tiger farmers are wrong is because they reflect that we value the tigers only according to what they can give us, not according to what they really are.
This earthly temple came to us with conditions that we have stubbornly and childishly refused to accept, and as a result we are forcing the tigers and every other wild thing that we cannot understand through the proverbial eye of the needle, the gate that leads to the institutions that we built to serve us but that we now serve, and we make them pay the price - first by forcing them to live in concrete and barbed-wire worlds that are completely foreign to them, and last by handing them over to those who have no regard for anything they might hold dear, like the rivers in which they would swim, the forests in which they would roam, the grass in which they would bask in the sun.
These are the gifts of the wild. These are the gifts of the earthly temple. These are the things that were given freely until WE were the ones that decided they needed to be divided, bought, and sold. The tigers need more than to just be saved from extinction. They need sanctuary - from us. Those of us who value them whole and alive have this to say – it’s time to drive the moneychangers out of the temple. The tigers are not for sale.
Sharyn Beach
*Photo courtesy of Save The Tiger Fund http://www.savethetigerfund.org/AM/PrinterTemplate.cfm?Section=CATT_Media_Kit
Tiger (farmed) cut in half by smugglers that were caught by Thai highway police May 2004.
*Tim Rice, Andrew Lloyd Webber. The Temple, from the album "Jesus Christ Superstar," 1970, Decca Records. Interpretation of Matthew 21:12.
Having Trouble Saying It?
The impulse is pure -
Sometimes our circuits get shorted,
By external interference
Signals get crossed -
And the balance distorted
By internal incoherence
Neil Peart*
Ever have trouble getting your point across? I know I do. I can't count the number of frustrating conversations I have had with family members and friends, during which I have tried to communicate something that is utterly and vitally important to me, only to find that interruptions, tempers, moods, and irrelevant tangents prevent me from getting to the real heart of the matter.
Conversations often begin with a pure impulse, that being the desire to share our thoughts with one another. But all too soon the circuits get shorted by the external interferences of the phone ringing, the waitress asking if we want another drink, the television previewing a favorite series, the dog barking, the kids screaming, the blackberry buzzing, the lawnmower running next door.....
While we sometimes cannot help these things, we should probably begin to recognize how they get in the way of real communication. Quiet and solitude, or the quiet, shared company of a few friends, are things that we experience less and less often. In our frantic pace, we forget that conveying a message requires energy and thought, and receiving a message requires concentration and attention. As our "deficit disorders" in these skills become more and more acute, the internal incoherence that arises from these disorders frustrates the sending and receiving of signals even more.
I am posting this blog as a way to communicate ideas about things that are extremely important to me, but that external interferences and internal incoherences prevent me from saying in day to day conversations. The written word has power; it has a way of circumventing the obstacles of speech, because the writer can express complex thoughts and emotions in an atmosphere that is more free (hopefully!) from interruptions, and the reader can be more open to receiving ideas when the burden of defending a particular point of view is lifted by the solitude of reading.
My hopes in sharing my thoughts are that the signals will reach their destination, and that the reader will be inspired, moved, or at least moved to say, "I never thought of it that way before."
Thanks for stopping by, happy reading, and if you find you are having trouble saying it, try writing it out loud.
Sharyn Beach
*Rush. Vital Signs, from the album "Moving Pictures," 1981, Core Music Publishing.
Sometimes our circuits get shorted,
By external interference
Signals get crossed -
And the balance distorted
By internal incoherence
Neil Peart*
Ever have trouble getting your point across? I know I do. I can't count the number of frustrating conversations I have had with family members and friends, during which I have tried to communicate something that is utterly and vitally important to me, only to find that interruptions, tempers, moods, and irrelevant tangents prevent me from getting to the real heart of the matter.
Conversations often begin with a pure impulse, that being the desire to share our thoughts with one another. But all too soon the circuits get shorted by the external interferences of the phone ringing, the waitress asking if we want another drink, the television previewing a favorite series, the dog barking, the kids screaming, the blackberry buzzing, the lawnmower running next door.....
While we sometimes cannot help these things, we should probably begin to recognize how they get in the way of real communication. Quiet and solitude, or the quiet, shared company of a few friends, are things that we experience less and less often. In our frantic pace, we forget that conveying a message requires energy and thought, and receiving a message requires concentration and attention. As our "deficit disorders" in these skills become more and more acute, the internal incoherence that arises from these disorders frustrates the sending and receiving of signals even more.
I am posting this blog as a way to communicate ideas about things that are extremely important to me, but that external interferences and internal incoherences prevent me from saying in day to day conversations. The written word has power; it has a way of circumventing the obstacles of speech, because the writer can express complex thoughts and emotions in an atmosphere that is more free (hopefully!) from interruptions, and the reader can be more open to receiving ideas when the burden of defending a particular point of view is lifted by the solitude of reading.
My hopes in sharing my thoughts are that the signals will reach their destination, and that the reader will be inspired, moved, or at least moved to say, "I never thought of it that way before."
Thanks for stopping by, happy reading, and if you find you are having trouble saying it, try writing it out loud.
Sharyn Beach
*Rush. Vital Signs, from the album "Moving Pictures," 1981, Core Music Publishing.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)