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» The politics of liberation NEGOTIATION IS OVER!

The politics of liberation

May 27, 2010 — Negotiation Is Over

Simulposted with Thomas Paine’s Corner

May 26, 2010

by Aragorn Eloff , Public Relations
SA Vegan Society

INTRODUCTION:
It is clear to most reasonable people that apart from the Eternal Treblinka of non-human animals, other
crises weigh heavy on our biosystem:

Anthropogenic climate change, deforestation, water loss and pollution, soil loss, the sixth great
extinction crisis and the resultant threat to ecosystems stability, islands of plastic the size of small
countries floating in the Pacific and Atlantic, seemingly perennial global conflict – nowadays most
often in the pursuit of war industry profits ala Naomi Klein’s disaster capitalism, or in order to maintain
a state of exception whereby fundamental rights can be made null and void – the spread of dread
illnesses, the poisoning of our food with toxic additives of all kinds, the invasion of the food supply by
GMO’s touted as panacea by hegemonic corporations…The list is long and it’s all fueled by an out of
control economy promulgating a deadly myth of infinite growth that is profoundly at odds with the
reality of our finite planet.

How nice it would be if, in the face of all this, the most pressing task ahead of us was a roundtable
discussion of the hermeneutics of the animal as it appears in the work of Jacques Derrida, or discerning
traces of, or extrapolations to, an anti-speciesism in Giorgio Agamben or Donna Harraway, or
extending various normative ethical and jurisprudential approaches beyond the usual human boundary,
as though the associative weight of all these noble and satisfying academic pursuits would suffice to
convince us and our peers so thoroughly of our convictions that the world would be impelled to change
to meet the conclusions they draw.

Admittedly, the becoming-animal of the academy is somewhat heartening. Who, after all, could fail to
be a little bit encouraged when hearing major philosophers like Derrida say the following:

“Although I cannot demonstrate this here, I believe– and the stakes are becoming more and more
urgent– that none of the conventionally accepted limits between the so-called human living being and
the so-called animal one, none of the oppositions, none of the supposedly linear and indivisible
boundaries, resist a rational deconstruction– whether we are talking about language, culture, social
symbolic networks, technicity or work, even the relationship to death and to mourning, and even the
prohibition against or avoidance of incest– so many ‘capacities’ of which the ‘animal’ (a general
singular noun!) is said so dogmatically to be bereft, impoverished.” – Derrida

However, it does not seem at all clear to me that much of the work here offers us a particularly
effective path towards resolution, or even praxis. The often superficial ‘becoming animal’ of the
academy, with all its zoontologies, zoosemiotics, and so forth does not come close to a full practical
engagement with any relevant issues; in many ways it is merely another instance of insular and
distracting ludic transversality, the narcissistic shuffling around of pieces on a board that was warned of
by over sixty years ago by Herman Hesse in Magister Ludi – The Glass Bead Game:

“Castalia is a symbolic realm where all spiritual values are kept alive and present, specifically through
the practices of the Glass Bead Game. It depicts a future society in which the realm of culture is set
apart to pursue its goals…in splendid isolation.” – Herman Hesse, The Glass Bead Game

It seems to me that, whether they emerge in the academy or in activist circles, many of our discussions
unfold within, reinforce, and are thus captured by, a specific set of social and economic conditions,
underpinned by values antithetical to the sustainable and consistent application of animal rights. Here’s
how Lewis Mumford, an early proto-anti-industrialist sees it:

“The chief premise common to both technology and science is the notion that there are no desirable
limits to the increase of knowledge, of material goods, of environmental control; that quantitative
productivity is an end in itself, and that every means should be used to further expansion.” – Lewis
Mumford

Total liberationist Dr. Steve Best also describes the situation well:
“The global capitalist world system is inherently destructive to people, animals, and nature. It is
unsustainable and the bills for three centuries of industrialization are now due. It cannot be humanized,
civilized, or made green-friendly, but rather must be transcended through revolution at all levels—
economic, political, legal, cultural, technological, moral, and conceptual.” – Steve Best

Clearly these values and conditions threaten the entire context within which such rights could ever be
afforded.

There are other aggravating factors:

The values capitalism inculcates – acquisitiveness, consumerist-utilitarianism, short-term-gain (not to

forget the concomitant myth of the rational, isolated individual standing atop a world of resources
external to herself and in contrast to which her subjectivity is constructed) – as well as the restrictive
reinforcement provided by the State – a paternalistic authoritarian other that positions itself as the
single legitimate recipient of our demands – channel ethical issues into highly limited statements of
consumer intent directed to an ever-deferential and ultimately unaccountable so-called ‘representative’
body that forces us to enact all so-called ‘resistance’, all so-called ‘direct action’, as a set of
performances that do little more than legitimate these same forces of oppression.

Our Cartesianism, our Enlightenment humanist myth of rational man caught up in an entirely
anthropocentric teleological unfolding, also allows us to artificially separate the ethics we apply to a
specific group from a full unfolding into other domains that appear within their scope; we see each of
the ’causes’ we affiliate ourselves with as an enclosed instance of consumerism, without allowing for
the ethical values that lead us to those causes to illuminate the other causes those values should equally
be applied to.

Let’s now look at one of the clearest examples of this single cause exceptionalism: the radical approach
of many animal activists to the animal rights cause and the way in which this radicalism is strongly
contrasted – or even antithetical to – the approach these activists take when confronting ecological and
human rights issues. Given the strong analogies animal activists are so fond of drawing – factory farms
and the holocaust, or the anti-feminist pornography of meat, for example – this contrast is both stark
and ironic.

THE EXCEPTIONALISM OF ANIMAL RIGHTS:

Illegal action:
Given the rhetoric it generates, one would be forgiven for thinking that the animal rights movement
was composed primarily of balaclava-clad members of the Animal Liberation Front. Folk heroes like
Keith Mann, Ronnie Lee and Peter Young are the Facebook friends of many otherwise docile
vegetarians. What is fascinating in this regard is not that this sentimental mass expresses adulation for
midnight maneuvers in animal research laboratories and battery farms, that they live vicariously
through them, but that they would likely balk at such activities were they undertaken in order to liberate
innocent human beings. If political prisoners like Mumia Abu Jamal, Leonard Peltier or Marie Mason
were liberated from prison by brave abolitionists, the likely response from the armchair ALF’ers would
be, ‘they should just let justice take its course. Vigilantism has no place in a decent society!’

If this is not yet clear, remind yourself of the common responses to human liberation actions
undertaken by, for instance, desperate individuals in occupied Palestine against Israeli forces.
The rule is simple: when addressing animal issues, anti-authoritarian, illegal direct action is the
preferred course of action, whereas when dealing with social or ecological issues, the radical choice is
to vote for the democrats and get a WWF-linked credit card. Direct action that illegitimates the power
of the state on one hand, and an appeal to legitimated hierarchies on other. It is worth noting in this
regard that Ronnie Lee, the founder of the ALF, expressed strong anti-Statist leanings, and that many
actual ALF’ers are anarchists.

Property damnage:
Property damage is okay when you’re smashing up a vivisection lab, but not when you’re a Greek
protester whose country has been sold up the creek by Goldman Sachs in collusion with the IMF and
your own government, and certainly not when you’re a jobless protester in Orange Farm, South Africa,
who takes to lining streets with flaming tyres and destroying police cars when your needs – the
addressing of which is enshrined in your post-apartheid constitution – are consistently ignored by those
in power (who are ostensibly too busy servicing their own ‘needs’). We also defend – or even
romanticise – the rampages of non-human animals placed in exploitative contexts like circuses or zoos.
How then does it make sense to simultaneously vilify the direct and, yes, sometimes violent actions of
oppressed and marginalised humans (oppressed no matter what capitalist rhetoric might have to say
about their freedom)?

(If we take the words of David Barbarash, Former spokesman for the ALF to heart here, it does seem
that at least some of those entering labs by cover of night have a useful analysis of property and
systemic injustice:

“We’re very dangerous philosophically. Part of the danger is that we don‘t buy into the illusion that
property is worth more than life…we bring that insane priority into the light, which is something the
system cannot survive.”)

Equality and intrinsic rights:

Animal rightists are also fond of using the language of equality and non-exploitation, of intrinsic rights,
when challenging those who see the exploitation of non-human animals as legitimate given man’s place
at the very top of the hierarchy of objectified nature, yet fail to see how unlikely it is that people will be
willing to, or even able to conceive of, extending these notions to other species when most of us
continue to adhere to very similar entrenched hierarchies within the systems unique to just our own. It
is not too much of a stretch to imagine that these entrenched hierarchies – authoritarian Statism,
patriarchy, racism, heteronormativity and cultural arrogance, to name a few – become the model, the
structural ‘diagram’, that we generalize in all our other interactions with the natural world and its
inhabitants. This view is perhaps best revealed through contrast with the surprisingly large crossover
between feminism and veganism: the arguments and alternative values inherent in a full critique of
patriarchy are almost identical to those that emerge within an honest consideration of non-human
animal exploitation.

Domestication; theirs and ours:

We tend to use sympathetic constructions of animal others in order to domesticate them; it is not so
much that we literally infantilise a subset of animal others with names and treats and comfy cushions
but rather that we don’t allow animality its full range of expression, its truly strange otherness. Hereby
we also domesticate ourselves and suppress our own potential for strange otherness – by submitting the
whole of the world to our closed-off, a priori notions of unitary subjectivity without allowing for
ourselves to become in any way other through a sustained and open encounter with the world. The
subject, the notion of self that is perpetuated in this manner, is the one constructed by capitalism, the
one that must reduce and assimilate everything in the world to its own image through facile
consumption.

But the world and its possible encounters are not exhausted by these ‘consumer’ relations.

The property status of animals, only animals:

Abolitionist animal rightists like Gary Francione and Tom Regan question the property status of
animals by appeal to intrinsic rights, yet unless we also see how capitalism creates the very values that
lead to such objectification in the first place, how we are fundamentally defined by our capacity to
choose between consumer options, we have little hope of rescuing non-human animals from being
anything more than quantifiable goods. The humaneness required here – a humaneness we’re ironically
most likely to demonstrate through the consumption of cause-related paraphernalia like donations to
Greenpeace or the purchase of Sea Shepherd t-shirts – is secondary to fulfillment: just like non-human
animals, sweatshop workers manufacturing t-shirts in developing countries are imprisoned, exploited
and objectified, yet just like non-human animals it only takes sufficient distance to assuage our sense of
complicity.

And this is only the surface of human exploitation. Let’s not discuss, for now, where your vegan
chocolate came from.

The marginally applied argument from marginal cases:

One of the strongest arguments for affording non-human animals rights, even though it is originally
from the utilitarian perspective of Peter Singer, who is now best regarded as a new welfarist, is the
argument from marginal cases. When confronted with arguments about what criteria non-human
animals lack – rationality, the capacity for reciprocity, the ability to be subjects as well as objects of
justice – we can easily find some cases where we grant rights to humans where these criteria are
lacking – the severely disabled, for instance, or the very young. How strange it is then that, instead of
the appeals to empathy and nurture they deliver nightly from across the dinner table, so many animal
rights activists use near-Social Darwinist might-is-right rhetoric to defend privilege and relative
freedom in their own lives from the poor and subjugated humans seeking their fundamental rights to
sanitation, housing, food and clean water.

Solidarity, but not with each other:

Animal activists do go so far as to talk about solidarity between species – how we have an ethical
responsibility to look after these other inhabitants of the Earth – yet within our species it’s competition
that counts: why should our hard-earned tax money be spent on the lazy poor, the violent savages,
those Slavoj Zizek so powerfully calls ‘the subjects supposed to rape and pillage’? To talk of solidarity,
of love, of shared living in relation to our non-human animal others is not even lip service if we cannot
also begin to foster these same egalitarian values in our own human communities.

In fact, in defending our callousness by appeal to cold, hard nature, all red in tooth and claw, we have
even moved away from the original observations of Darwin, described here by Petr Kropotkin:

“Wherever I saw animal life in abundance, as, for instance, on the lakes where scores of species and
millions of individuals came together to rear their progeny; in the colonies of rodents; in the migrations
of birds which took place at that time on a truly American scale along the Usuri; and especially in a
migration of fallow-deer which I witnessed on the Amur, and during which scores of thousands of
these intelligent animals came together from an immense territory, flying before the coming deep snow,
in order to cross the Amur where it is narrowest — in all these scenes of animal life which passed
before my eyes, I saw Mutual Aid and Mutual Support carried on to an extent which made me suspect
in it a feature of the greatest importance for the maintenance of life, the preservation of each species,
and its further evolution.” – Kropotkin

Misanthropy:
Many of the above examples of the selective applications of ethical considerations and actions imply a
deep-seated misanthropy, as though many of those who are most passionate about the plight of our
furred and feather cousins have become entirely disenchanted with humanity and, instead of
transgressing species boundaries, wish to merely step over to the other side of that boundary they so
tirelessly rally against. Whatever the case, it seems obvious that one cannot talk of speciesism, of
porous boundaries and slippery categories, yet retain such a generalised misanthropy, especially not
when it is so clear that without resolving the fundamental social problems I’ve been alluding to, there is
little hope for any real, lasting reconciliation between humans, non-human animals and the whole of
nature.

Charges of simple misanthropy might be premature though. It might be that, in a uniquely effective
way, animal rights allows many of us to displace our revolutionary impulses, our deep knowing that
something very big and complicated is very wrong and in need of radical change, onto a single issue
that can act as a filter for our passion.

Summary:
In summary then, the values we hold in relation to non-human animals and the arguments we use to
support our actions in this regard are positioned exactly against the values we so often seem to exhibit
in encounters within our own species, values fostered by the power relationships we apply to the world
just as they are applied to us every moment of our lives by the forms of capitalism and the State. We
cannot hope for a full recognition of the rights of non-human animals, except as some kind of myopic
consumer tokenism or displacement, unless we fully engage the discourses of power that reinforce the
objectification and exploitation of these other beings.

ETHICS:
Before briefly discussing solutions, let’s take a quick look at the ethical discourses we apply to
questions of the animal, or questions of the animals, as Derrida insists.

To me it seems as though traditional normative ethical approaches are insufficient. Consequentialism,

deontology, virtue ethics; all of these tend to assume the sanctity of the subject position, the
homogeneity and interchangeability of all subjects and situations, a situational vacuum in which the
ethical encounter unfolds. Kantian universalism applied to the Cartesian subject lacks all nuance, is
blind to our situatedness, our boundedness, the discursive and material constitution of this transient
multiplicity of flows and processes that constitutes each of us, human and non-human alike.

These accounts offer little more than a functionalist, reductionist, utilitarian account of being that is
blindingly reflected in the current crisis of exploitation of the natural world and its framing as a mere
pile of resources. Even virtue ethics is guilty of submitting the final measure of what is said to be
virtuous to power, resulting in virtues measured by how well they reify current conditions and
understandings, current biases. Eudaimonia is captured by systemic prejudices and there is no real
flourishing as long as the unit of analysis is the subject and not the ecosystem.

(Environmental virtue ethics may be is a first step in this direction, if it can become ecological virtue
ethics. The environment, remember, is what is ‘out there’, a set of actors wholly separate to ourselves.
Ecology is what we are part of, the myriad flows and complex processes and creative unfoldings we are
so deeply enmeshed in.)

In moving beyond the sanctity of the subject as enshrined in traditional normative ethics, it is, perhaps
somewhat tellingly, the poststructuralist and neo-materialist feminists who have taken the lead by
applying the populations thinking and process ontology of Gilles Deleuze and others to these pressing
ethical questions.

“An ethical life pursues that which enhances and strengthens the subject without reference to
transcendental values, but rather in the awareness of one’s interconnection with others.” – Rosi
Braidotti

“The concepts of animals or the animalistic become a sort of conceptual dumping ground for all the
features of ourselves that we don’t like and want to expel from our definition of “the human”:
irrationality, instinct, emotion, ignorance, the body in a word, precariousness…

Wherever the human is, it is always outside itself in the non-human, or it is always distributed among
beings, among human and non-human beings, chiasmatically related through the idea of precarious life.
So we can neither lodge the human in the self, nor ground the self in the human, but find instead the
relations of exposure and responsibility that constitute the ‘being’ of the human in a sociality outside
itself, even outside its human-ness.” - Judith Butler

Regardless of the power and vitalism of these contemporary ethical approaches, however, I do not
think we will find some final salvation in subjective and highly convoluted explorations of ethics and
post-humanities that, if they were just delivered with sufficient conviction or eloquence, would
somehow magically suffice to turn the world vegan, to free all non-human animals – and human ones
too – from captivity, that would stop the logging trucks in their tracks and shut down the polluting
power plants and still the oil pumps and lift plastic from the ocean and divert food to the needy and
replace all GMO’s and monocrops with permaculture gardens and liberate the voices of all oppressed
and marginalised peoples around the globe.

No. What we need are not more sophisticated ethical arguments. What we need is much more simple.

SOLUTIONS:
We need to radicalize our thinking and challenge all of our sacred cows. Single issue campaigns, of
which animal rights in isolation from issues of social and ecological justice is a prime exemplar,
regardless of what people like Gary Francione might say, are, as we saw, a set of performances
legitimated by and legitimating the very system that needs to be dismantled. Petitions and protests can
serve to raise awareness, but unless they are coupled with an appeal for real, radical action, undertaken
on behalf of the entire biocommunity, they merely serve to reproduce themselves, just as we saw
during the unprecedentedly vast street marches that arose in opposition to the war in Iraq several years
ago; millions of marchers had no impact on US imperialism then and they have no impact now. Power
concedes nothing without a real demand and the performance of a demand is not a real demand.

An effective campaign is more like class struggle. Not in the sense that unionised Marxists need to
seize the means of production in some kind of proletarian moment of divine redemption, but in the
sense that we need to expand the boundaries of our class – the class of the exploited – to include all
other life on Earth and position the full force of every moment of every life in the swelled ranks of this
enlarged proletariat against the systems – and if necessary those who refuse to disengage from them –
that continue to oppress us.

Steve Best has said that:

“Victims of oppression cannot advance by oppressing and victimizing others.” - Steve Best

I would add that they cannot advance by ignoring the oppression and victimization of others either.

Many former Animal Liberation Front’ers recognised this in the 1990′s; they became the Earth
Liberation Front. There is but a single short, necessary step to be taken by those of us who allow
ourselves to fully accept the implications of animal liberation from the exceptionalism of the ALF to
the inclusive justice of the ELF and beyond.

We cannot hide behind the rhetoric of fundamentalist pacifism any longer either. Violence is only
violence in context. The violence an abuser enacts against his victim is not the same as the violence his
victim enacts against her abuser. The violence – which is almost always more accurately seen as
property damage – that is enacted against the destructive, soul-destroying machineries of capitalism
and the State is not the same as the violence enacted by capitalism and the State against each and all of
us, human and non-human alike.

Indeed, these dogmatic, overly-simplistic prohibitions to act serve only to facilitate our oppression and
our right to extensional self-defense against great ongoing violence, and they operate only within the
context of complete denial. The suffragettes knew this. So did the Black Panthers. So did the Native
North American peoples. So did umkhontho we Sizwe. So did the Indian fighters against colonialist
rule, no matter what you think Gandhi might have said.

As Ward Churchill says in his book, Pacifism As Pathology:

“The desire for a non-violent society is the healthiest of all psychological manifestations. It seems the
height of contradiction, therefore, that we should need to break with this in order to achieve it. Therein,
however, may lie our only hope.” – Ward Churchill

I do not wish to fetishize violence, but if we are to be effective we can no longer flippantly dismiss
anything beyond peaceful placard-waving as somehow antithetical to our ends, as a priori wrong. We
cannot deny the possibility that at some point violence will be necessary; the more we discuss the
implications of this now, the more successfully we will be able to absorb its impact then.

More importantly and positively than the need to accept the possibility of violence though, we need to
effect massive, fundamental systemic change. The hierarchies and the endless competitive
consumerism that mark our social existence are diametrically opposed to those values all of us
naturally seek, and find, in our own communities: egalitarianism, trust, mutual aid, consensus,
creativity, companionship and a proclivity for life that is truly lived. We urgently need a system that
reflects these values, that emphasises power to not power over, that doesn’t encourage or necessitate
hyper-individualism, hegemony, deference to authority, endless accumulation, progress as an ends in
itself and the desacralization of the whole of the natural world. We need permaculture and communal
living and relationship with instead of stewardship of or control over. We need to fundamentally alter
our economics, our education, our modes of production. Even our relationships. Even how we make
decisions.
What I’m talking about, of course, is anarchism.

What is anarchism? Here’s how Emma Goldman, a prominent anarchist from the beginning of the last
century describes it, in admittedly anthropocentric terms:

“Anarchism really stands for the liberation of the human mind from the domination of religion; the
liberation of the human body from the domination of property; liberation from the shackles and
restraint of government. Anarchism stands for a social order based on the free grouping of individuals
for the purpose of producing real social wealth, an order that will guarantee to every human being free
access to the earth and full enjoyment of the necessities of life, according to individual desires, tastes,
and inclinations.” – Emma Goldman

If the term remains unpalatable due to its common connotations, we can replace it with whatever we
wish; we can call ourselves libertarian socialists if that makes us feel better. Regardless of how we refer
to this alternative way of living though, this enhanced sense of all being in this together, one thing is
certain. We can choose anarchism – in the best sense of the word: radical egalitarian horizontalism – or
we can have anarchy – in the poorest, most savage sense of the word – chosen for us.

If we choose well, it is likely that we will, naturally and through necessity, evolve new values and also
a renewed vision of the world; environment will become ecology, them will become us, the unitary
subject of Enlightenment humanism will become partial, concrete and embedded multiplicity, the
domesticated animal other would become simply another index of animality, of the richly diverse
possibilities of life.

We do not need to wait for the revolution, although a revolution – or even countless revolutions –
might well be necessary; we can begin the task of living anew right now. We can give up all the
comforts that shield us from the existential horror of our own mortality and begin to explore everything
I’ve been speaking about. Revolution or not though, one thing is for sure: some kind of confrontation
with power, however it plays out, is almost inevitable. Willing workers on organic farms and refugees
in recovery from Western civilization will not be spared this encounter and, indeed, a sense of
solidarity worthy of the name impels us to act on behalf of all, not just ourselves, in countering the
forces of subjugation with all our being instead of actively avoiding them.

CONCLUSION:
So we need not just animal liberation, not just earth liberation, not just human liberation, but a total
liberation that is far more than the sum of its parts and that is radically anarchist, in the full sense of the
term. This involves sharing animal rights with ecological justice and social justice activists, but also,
importantly, encouraging liberal or politically apathetic animal rights people to engage in radical
political discourse without reducing any of these to any other or believing that one is foundational or
primary.

When we put everything I’ve been saying together and consider it in all its glorious heterogeneity, it
comes close to capturing the pursuit of ecosophy that Felix Guattari, following Gregory Bateson, talks
about in The Three Ecologies:

“Without modifications to the social and material environment, there can be no change in mentalities.
Here, we are in the presence of a circle that leads me to postulate the necessity of founding an
“ecosophy” that would link environmental ecology to social ecology and to mental ecology.” – Felix
Guattari
In closing, although it is not foundational, the insights of animal rights do seem uniquely situated to
address the foregoing problems, but only if we follow through all their implications and allow
ourselves to be radically altered by them, subjectively, politically, materially, and spiritually.

To quote Steve Best once more:

“Animal liberation is the culmination of a vast historical learning process whereby human beings
gradually realize that arguments justifying hierarchy, inequality, and discrimination of any kind are
arbitrary, baseless, and fallacious. Animal liberation builds on the most progressive ethical and political
advances human beings have made in the last 200 years and carries them to their logical conclusions. It
takes the struggle for rights, equality, and nonviolence to the next level, beyond the artificial moral and
legal boundaries of humanism, in order to challenge all prejudices and hierarchies, including
speciesism.” – Steve Best

Stacy Young's MySpace Blog | Stacy Young

Unbeknown to most of us cows are indeed complex creatures. Cows can recognize familiar
faces. Contrary to common perception cows do not mindlessly moo. Their calls are
indications that they experience a variety of emotions some of which are very intense.
These calls indicate pleasure, frustration, excitement and stress, they are used to regain
contact when they become isolated and to express grief and anger. Cows will call loudly for
days even weeks after their calves have been taken away from them.

Other signs of emotion may be more subtle; tail position indicates mood as does the
position of thier head which is an important indicator of aggression or submission. Cows
communicate in many ways which to us may go unnoticed if you do not understand these
complex creatures. Cattle have a large number of of odour glands, and odours are
important in their social, sexual and maternal behaviour. Cows have a social hierarchy;
tactile communication and grooming are used to establish social rank, and in both sexual
and maternal behaviour.

Cows are amongst the gentlest of breathing creatures; none show more passionate
tenderness to their young when deprived of them; and, in short, I am not ashamed to
profess a deep love for these quiet creatures.

Thomas de Quincey

Cows are sentient beings, they have feelings, their apparent appearance of docility many
simply be an acceptance of their lot in life, docility is often a mark of depression,
acceptance or resignation. Cows are not milk making machine spontaneously producing milk
at our behest. Like humans, cows in thier natural environment and circumstances without
human interference lactate only to produce milk for their new born. Cows are very much
like ourselves when it comes to thier offspring, like us the gestation period is nine months,
in their natural environment a calf will suckle for nine to twelve months. Before giving
birth in the wild cows will separate themselves from the rest of the herd and hide their
calves for several days after giving birth. This is done to prevent intrusion from other
females which may interfere with bonding. After only five minutes cows develop a strong
bond with their calf so you can understand the trauma of separation, a trauma much like or
the same as that experienced by a human mother. Such emotion of this intensity shows that
these creatures are sentient, the lament of a cow denied her newborn is one of the most
unmistakeable indications of sentience. Here are two stories of the great bond between
mother cows and their offspring.

To complete research for an academic project Valerie Macys needed to examine documents
in the study of a charming white farm house next to a cattle farm. A colleague had
described it as a place of pastoral serenity with cows peacefully grazing nearby. Prepared
for a relaxing visit the reality was to prove quite different

Stacy Young's MySpace Blog | Stacy Young

For as long as men massacre animals, they will kill each other. Indeed, he who sows the seed of murder
and pain cannot reap joy and love.
Pythagoras (6th century BC)

You have just dined, and however scrupulously the slaughterhouse is concealed in the graceful distance
of miles, there is complicity.
Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882)

Truly man is the king of beasts, for his brutality exceeds theirs. We live by the death of others: We are
burial places!
Leonardo Da Vinci (1452-1519)

But for the sake of some little mouthful of flesh we deprive a soul of the sun and light, and of that
proportion of life and time it had been born into the world to enjoy.
Plutarch (c.AD 46-c.120)

While we ourselves are the living graves of murdered beasts, how can we expect any ideal conditions
on this earth?
George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950)

The Utopians feel that slaughtering our fellow creatures gradually destroys the sense of compassion,
which is the finest sentiment of which our human nature is capable.
Thomas Moore (1478-1535)

If he be really and seriously seeking to live a good life, the first thing from which he will abstain will
always be the use of animal food, because ...its use is simply immoral, as it involves the performance of
an act which is contrary to the moral feeling -- killing.
Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910)

I don't myself believe that, even when we fulfill our minimum obligations not to cause pain, we have
the right to kill animals. I know I would not have the right to kill you, however painlessly, just because
I liked your flavour, and I am not in a position to judge that your life is worth more to you than the
animal's to it.
Brigid Brophy (1929- )
All beings hate pains; therefore one should not kill them. This is the quintessence of wisdom: not to kill
anything.
Sutrakritanga (Jainism)

Viler than unbelievers are those cruel ones who make the law that teaches killing.
Yogashastra (Jainism)

Beings which kill others should not be killed in the belief that the destruction of one of them leads to
the protection of many others.
Purushartha Siddhyupaya (Jainism)

Not to kill is a supreme duty.

Hitopadesa (Hindu)

Those who have forsaken the killing of all; those who are helpmates to all; those who are a sanctuary to
all; those men are in the way of heaven.
Hitopadesa (Hindu)

Let him not destroy, or cause to be destroyed, any life at all, nor sanction the acts of those who do so.
Let him refrain from even hurting any creature, both those that are strong and those that tremble in the
world.
Suita-Nipata (Buddhist)

One act of pure love in saving life is greater than spending the whole of one's time in religious
offerings to the gods ...
Dhammapada (Buddhist)

He who, seeking his own happiness, punishes or kills beings who also long for happiness, will not find
happiness after his death.
Dhammapada (Buddhist)

From thence the beasts be brought in, killed and clean washed by the hands of their bondsmen. For they
permit not their free citizens to accustom themselves to the killing of beasts, through the use whereof
they think clemency, the gentlest affection of our nature, by little and little to decay and perish.
Thomas Moore (1478-1535)

After they had accustomed themselves at Rome to the spectacles of the slaughter of animals, they
proceeded to those of the slaughter of men, to the gladiators.
Michel de Montaigne (1533-1592)
It is a cruel folly to offer up to ostentation so many lives of creatures, as to make up the state of our
treats.
William Penn (1644-1718)

How do we know that we have a right to kill creatures that we are so little above, as dogs, for our
curiosity or even for some use to us?
Alexander Pope (1688-1744)

No humane being, past the thoughtless age of boyhood, will wantonly murder any creature which holds
its life by the same tenure that he does.
Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862)

The very emphasis of the commandment: Thou shalt not kill, makes it certain that we are descended
from an endlessly long chain of generations of murderers, whose love of murder was in their blood as it
is perhaps also in ours.
Sigmund Freud (1856-1939)

To a man whose mind is free there is something even more intolerable in the sufferings of animals than
in the sufferings of man. For with the latter it is at least admitted that suffering is evil and that the man
who causes it is a criminal. But thousands of animals are uselessly butchered every day without a
shadow of remorse. If any man were to refer to it, he would be thought ridiculous. And that is the
unpardonable crime.
Romain Rolland (1866-1944)

To my mind, the life of a lamb is no less precious than that of a human being. I should be unwilling to
take the life of a lamb for the sake of the human body.
Mohandas Gandhi (1869-1948)

Late upon the third day, at the very moment when, at sunset... there flashed upon my mind, unforseen
and unsought, the phrase 'Reverence for Life'.
Dr Albert Schweitzer (1875-1965)

A man is ethical only when life, as such, is sacred to him, that of plants and animals as well as that of
his fellowman, and when he devotes himself helpfully to all life that is in need of help.
Dr Albert Sweitzer (1875-1965)

The man who has become a thinking being feels a compulsion to give every will-to-live the reverence
for life that he gives his own.
Dr Albert Sweitzer (1875-1965)
Any religion or philosophy which is not based on a respect for life is not a true religion or philosophy.
Dr Albert Schweitzer (1875-1965)

A single death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic.

Joseph Stalin (1879-1953)

The man who regards his own life and that of his fellow creatures as meaningless is not merely
unhappy but hardly fit for life.
Albert Einstein (1879-1955)

My prayer is that what we have gone through [World War One] will startle the world into some new
realisation of the sanctity of life, animal as well as human.
Christopher Morley (1890-1957)

We cannot have peace among men whose hearts find delight in killing any living creature.
Rachel Carson (1907-1964)

To inflict cruelties on defenceless creatures, or condone such acts, is to abuse one of the cardinal tenets
of a civilized society - reverence for life.
Jon Evans (1917- )

Life is life's greatest gift. Guard the life of another creature as you would your own because it is your
own. On life's scale of values, the smallest is no less precious to the creature who owns it than the
largest ...
Lloyd Biggle Jr. (1923- )

Killing an animal to make a coat is a sin. It wasn't meant to be and we have no right to do it. A woman
gains status when she refuses to see anything killed to be put on her back. Then she's truly beautiful!
Doris Day (1927- )

We don't eat anything that has to be killed for us. We've been through a lot and we've reached a stage
where we really value life.
Paul McCartney (1942- )

Stacy Young's MySpace Blog | Stacy Young

Interesting Facts About Cows

Cows have been known to walk for miles to find thier calves.
Cows like to sleep close to their families

Sleeping arrangements are determined by thier position in the social hierarchy.

There are approximately 920 different breeds of cows in the world.

Cows where thought to have been domesticated approximately 5000 years ago.

Cows have incredible senses: they have near panoramic vision, can detect odours up to five
miles away and they can hear low and high frequency sounds better than humans.

Stacy Young's MySpace Blog | Stacy Young

For clarity lets firstly establish the definitions. A cow is an adult female, a baby is called a
calf and a female who has not yet had a calf is called an heifer and a bull is an adult male.
Collectively they are called cattle. However it is quite common for people to refer to cattle
as cows regardless of the above classifications and for ease of writing I will occasionally do
likewise when referring to cattle in general terms.

Recently, as we walked along the foot path near to a field in the Northumbrain hills we
could hear the dull sound of the distant explosions, army manoeuvres I knew, but
nonetheless the noise was unsettling. Cows grazing in a nearby field approached us
expectantly, quietly mooing, loosing thier shyness and aloofness as though wanting
reassurance. Many people see cows as indifferent, unresponsive but like other farm animals
such misconceptions are dispelled as soon as you have contact with them, even brief
contact as above and you will realise there is more to cows than docile servitude. I do not
know if it did any good but we calmly talked to the cows who where clearly troubled by
these sounds.

Cows to many people are a metaphor for mindless passivity, as they appear to graze
seemingly oblivious to the world around them. Yet behind this placid facade cows feel pain,
fear and anxiety and they worry about the future, they have emotions, form friendships,
bear grudges and in the right circumstances they feel happiness and experience pleasure,
they have long memories and just like us they are capable of learning from each other,
have individual personalities and cognitive abilities: in short they are sentient. There is
much scientific and anecdotal evidence that shows us that underneath their docility is a
thinking, feeling, aware being.

Firstly consider that cows have a huge brain, there are nearly as many folds and
connections as a human brain, and it is bigger proportionally than the brain of a cat or dog.
If cows where instinctive creatures they would not require such a large brain. Cows do have
some instinctive behaviours as indeed do we. Nonetheless cows like us are sentient and
aware, they can think, feel and are capable of emotions and numerous others attributes
that may well surprise most people who see them only as milk and meat producing
automatons
Cows understand cause and effect, this is indicative of advanced cognitive abilities which
demonstrates that they are aware. Research studies show us that cows understand cause
and effect, for instance cows have learnt that when they are thirsty that pushing a lever to
operate a drinking fountain provides them with water and when they are hungry cows have
learnt that pressing a button with their heads provides them with food. Like humans cows
soon learn to keep away from that which causes them pain, such as electrical fences and
moreover cows learn from the experience of other cows and once one or two cows have
experienced pain due to contact with an electrical fence other cows avoid similar contact.
Indeed the ability to learn from one another is yet another example that cows are
intelligent and sentient. Furthermore this ability is on a par with a dog and higher than a
cat. Cows have remarkable memories, among the many things they recall are human faces,
they have good spatial memory; this means they recall where things are located. In the
wild cows remember watering holes, migration routes, the best places to shelter and the
best eating spots in the pasture. And it goes without saying that they of course remember
their own calf, in fact a very close bond exists between a mother and her calf as I shall
mention again in more detail later.

It seems that cows know which herbs are medicinal, perhaps like sheep who possess similar
knowledge this is passed down from generation to generation. They seem to understand
which herbs to eat whenever they are ill and have been observed to eat plants not normally
part of thier diet.

Cows like all animals are individuals with their own personalities as diverse as that of your
cat or dog or indeed other humans. Some are intelligent, others less so, some are timid,
nervous, others are more bold coming up to you as you approach them, some are friendly
while others can be aggressive although this is rare, some may be compassionate others
indifferent. In her book The Secret Lives of Cows, Rosamund Young says cows “can be
highly intelligent, moderately so, or slow to understand; friendly, considerate, aggressive,
docile, inventive, dull, proud, or shy."

Stacy Young's MySpace Blog | Stacy Young

Cows are not the indifferent creatures we assume and may be as curious about you as you
are about them.

Did you know that cows form social groups within the herd, social hierarchies with leaders
chosen based upon their intelligence.

"Recent studies on leadership in cows and other grazing herbivores suggest that
intelligence, inquisitiveness, confidence, experience and good social skills help to
determine which animals will become leaders within herds

The fact that in groups of animals of different age, leaders are amongst the oldest animals
suggests that it's not innate, but the result of previous experience," said Bertrand Dumont,
lead author of a recent Applied Animal Behavior Science paper on leadership in a group of
grazing heifers."
The Above is an extract from an article :Study: Cows Excel At Selecting Leaders.
By Jennifer Viegas, Animal Planet News

The Animals Voice: Articles

An Unnatural Order: Why We Are Destroying the Planet and Each Other

BY JIM MASON

Some think human society seems to be steadily going insane. They note the ridiculous hatreds that keep
us nearly constantly at war with each other. They see we are fouling our global nest, wiping out much
of the planet's life and making life more and more miserable for ourselves. I don't think we are going
insane; I think we have just not learned to look deeply enough into the causes of our current social and
environmental problems. I believe with a growing number of others that these problems began several
millennia ago when our ancestors took up farming and broke the primal bonds with the living world
and put human beings above all other life.

Because of this, we have no sense of kinship with other life on this planet, hence no good sense of
belonging here. Our tradition is one of arrogance toward the living world around us; it is a thing
beneath us — to be either used up or kept at bay. We are, as intellectuals say, alienated from nature.

A World Alive and Ensouled

[Although] most religions [today] describe a three-tiered hierarchy: God, people, and everything else ...
primal people lived not merely close to, but in and with nature. Food and materials came not by
working the soil, not by controlling the lives and growth of plants and animals, but by incredibly
detailed knowledge about them. They lived with daily reminders of their connections with the living
beings around them and with constant awareness of how their taking from their world might affect their
lives in it. All of this evolved into a set of beliefs and eventually into tribal religions, which have taken
on many forms and variations. What they all have in common, though, is a deep emotional attachment
to, and respect for, the living world that made changing or controlling it unthinkable.

Alienated as we are from the natural world, our modern minds are too maimed to fully grasp how
thoroughly this human mind was fed by its environment — particularly by the moving, living beings in
it. The emerging cultural human mind literally took its shape and substance, its basic images and ideas,
from the plants and animals around it. It came to know which plants out of hundreds made the best
foods, medicines, and materials. It came to know the life cycles and day-to-day habits of dozens of
kinds of animals intimately enough to be able to predict when and where a hunt might be most
successful. It came to know how all of the above might be affected by wind, rain, seasons, and the
other elements and forces in nature. From such living, the people knew the land, their foraging
territory, probably better than any modern ecologist could. They had, after all, generations of wisdom
and experience in living in it, and most of all, a feeling for it that no books nor journals can ever
convey.
Animals intrigued human beings with their size, speed, strength, habits and other features. They were
believed to have powers humans did not. For primal humans — especially those with the flowering
mind, consciousness and culture of modern Homo sapiens about 45,000 years ago — the animals in
their foraging lands were the most impressive, the most fascinating living beings in the world.
Measured in terms of the amount of human wonder they caused, animals were the most wonderful
things out there in the world. The primal relationship with the powers of the living world was more of a
partnership in which human beings had interactions and a strong sense of interdependence with them.

Other things in nature impressed us, too, like dark forests, violent storms, rivers swollen by flood
waters. Yet animals impressed us in ways that the rest of nature could not. Why animals? Why do
animals figure so centrally to the process of mind formation? Why isn't the child moved by stuffed
plants and figures of trees and rocks? Animals, like us, move freely; and they are more obviously like
people than are trees, rivers, and other things in nature.

Animals have eyes, ears, hair, and other organs like us; and they sleep, eat, defecate, copulate, give
birth, play, fight, die and carry on many of the same activities of life that we do. Somewhat similar to
us yet somewhat different, animals forced comparisons, categories, and conclusions. Animals made us
think. Animals drove and shaped human intelligence. They are fascinating to watch. Of all the things in
nature, then, animals stand out most in ways needed by the developing brain/mind. Animals are active,
noisy, colorful characters — all of which makes them most informative. In contrast, the rest of nature is
background — relatively amorphous, still, inscrutable, and not much help to the budding brain/mind,
whether that of the species or the individual.

As movers of the mind, thought, and feeling, animals are very strong stuff to human beings. No wonder
our ancestors believed they had souls and powers.

After centuries of manipulative animal husbandry, however, men gained conscious control over
animals and their life processes. In reducing them to physical submission, people reduced animals
physically as well. Castrated, yoked, harnessed, hobbled, penned, and shackled, domestic animals were
thoroughly subdued. They had none of that wild, mysterious power that their ancestors had when they
were stalked by hunter-foragers. Domestic animals were disempowered — made docile — by
confinement, selective breeding, and familiarity with humans. They gradually came to be seen more
with contempt than awe.

In reducing domestic animals, farmers reduced animals in general, and with them they helped reduce
the animal/natural powers because crop-conscious farmers saw more and more species as pests, more
and more natural elements as threats. But it was animal husbandry in particular that nudged people
from seeing animals as powers to seeing them as commodities and tools. It was husbandry that
drastically upset the ancient human-animal relationship, changing it from partnership to master-and-
slave, from being kin with animal-nature to being lord over animal-nature.

This reduction of animals — the soul and the essence of the living world to the primal mind — reduced
all of nature, creating, in the agriculturalist's mind, a view of the world where people were over and
distinctly apart from nature. Animal reduction was key to the radically different worldview that came
with the transition from foraging to farming, for more than any other agricultural development, it broke
up the old ideas of kinship and continuity with the living world. This, more than any other factor,
accelerated and accentuated human alienation from nature. It originated in the East's first agricultural
center, it founds its legs there, and then it spread to the other centers of civilization.
Husbandry was, I think, the more influential side of farming that led, ultimately, to the agrarian
worldview that we still hold today. As that worldview began to emerge thousands of years ago, wrote
University of California historian Roderick Nash, "for the first time humans saw themselves as distinct
from the rest of nature."

Misothery, Misogyny and Racism: The Reduction of Animals, Women and People of Color

Alienated from animals and nature by misothery, our agri-culture puts us superior to, and distinct from,
the living world. In that position, we can only despise and deny the animal and natural wherever we see
it in ourselves or in the rest of humanity. Our anxieties about our animal-like characteristics cause us to
project our fear and hatred onto not only other animals but other people whose differences we think
places them below us — nearer to animals and nature than us.

On this ladder or hierarchy of being, women of one's own group are one step down. People whom we
call "Others" are another step or two down, depending on their usefulness and their distance from
nature. Male Others may outrank the women of one's group if they are "civilized" — that is, if they
have a similar agri-culture with dominionism, patriarchy, royalty, wealth, monumental art, urban
centers, and so on.

On the rungs below Others stand animals, first those useful to men, then, father down, all the others. At
the bottom of the ladder is raw, chaotic nature itself, composed of invisible organisms and an
unclassifiable mass of life that feeds, grows, dies, and stinks in dark, mysterious places. This is muck
and swamp, and steamy jungle and all backwaters and wildernesses far from the pruned orchards and
weeded crop rows of agrarian civilization; this is nature least useful, nature most mysterious, and
therefore nature most hostile and sinister.

Then it draws on the breeder's ideologies of bloodline and purity, as it did in Nazi Germany and the
segregated South; as it still does today among neo-Nazis and white supremacists. The rhetoric of all
these racists speaks of the breeder's obsessions, and the extremity of their actions speaks of the depth of
their fear and hatred of "lower" nature. The Nazis ranted against Jews, gypsies, Poles, and other
"mongrel races" and then methodically tried to exterminate them. Southern segregationists preached
against "race mixing" and used lynchings, mob violence, and terrorist campaigns to keep people of
color "in their place."

This is why, despite all the efforts of science and civil rights campaigns, the racial hatred still lies, like
a great aquifer, just beneath the surface of consciousness in our culture. On occasion, it wells upward
and becomes a very conscious, very political cause.

Beyond Dominionism

Biologically speaking, human beings have been too successful at the expense of other species. For one
thing, our numbers have swollen quite recently. The global human population first reached a billion
about 150 years ago; it reached 2.5 billion only 40 years ago. Our numbers are expected to pass 6
billion in the year 2000. Even if we started now to put the brakes on world birthrates, experts predict
that the human population will swell to 10 to 12 billion people before it levels off around the year 2050.
The average human being today uses dozens of times more energy and materials than ever before. We
have become very materialistic animals. We boast of our affluence barely realizing that, ultimately, all
of our wealth consists of stuff taken from the environment.

Consequently, human voracity has set off a chain reaction of destruction in the world's food chains.
Since we began steadily intensifying human food production through agriculture 10,000 years ago, we
have just as steadily wiped out species after species. Biologists fear that human impact is setting off
mass extinctions that could wipe out a fourth of the world's remaining species in the next 50 years.

The scale of war and massacre has increased with the scale of both technology and society. In sheer
numbers, the 20th century has been the bloodiest in history. In our century alone, nearly 36 million
have been killed in battle in the various wars. An incredible 120 million more have been killed by the
various genocidal programs carried out by governments. Human devastation, this huge, this constant,
must have some basic causes, which the West avoids looking too deeply for.

The movers and shakers of conservation and environmentalism, with rare exceptions, stop dead in their
tracks when they approach the Animal Question — the whole sticky mess of human views toward,
relations with, and uses of animals. This part of the Nature Question is oddly off limits. Should one of
them step on it accidentally, he or she usually jumps back to safety in the remoteness of discussions
about trees or the abstractions of biodiversity and species.

The Animal Question is regarded as illegitimate, silly, peripheral. Those who address it are regarded as
emotional, sentimental, neurotic, misguided, and missing the bigger picture of human relations with the
living world. One's bigness and seriousness as a thinker on the Nature Question is measured, in part, by
how well one steers clear of the Animal Question.

On the contrary, the Animal Question is the very heart of the Nature Question. Animals have always
been the soul, spirit, and embodiment of the living world. To exclude discussion of relations with
animals from the discussion of our relations with nature is to exclude the most important part of the
discussion. Emotionally, culturally, psychically, symbolically — just about any way you want to
measure it — animals are the most vital beings among all the beings of the living world. They are
fundamental to our worldview; they are central to our sense of existence in this world.

We are fooling ourselves if we think we can deal with the big picture, the mangled mess of our
relations with nature, without a soul-searching examination of our dealings with animals. For if we try
to steer around the Animal Question, then of course we leave it in place, forever to trouble our relations
with nature.

When we come to the laboratory and the slaughterhouse, the calls for a "radical" or "fundamental"
overhaul of relations with the living world suddenly go silent. Indeed, no reasonable person challenges
these bastions of dominionism. Those who do so are pegged as the "lunatic fringe," which is a handy
way of disposing of them and their troublesome ideas. The overwhelming perception is that these uses
of animals are well justified in that they confer great benefits to the human species. That perception is,
of course, both the source and the lasting strength of dominionism.

If we want a truly "fundamental" overhaul of our dominionist worldview, then we are going to have to
deal with the most difficult issues, which are meat-eating and animal experimentation. Many, of course,
will refuse to step onto these sacred grounds. They will simply fall back on familiar dominionist
axioms and stand their ground. To be charitable, we must excuse them, for many, if not most, people
are simply not inclined toward soul-searching and changing their habits. Age, subculture, and other
circumstances tend to instill a certain inflexibility in many people, and it is probably best not to bother
them. But for others who genuinely want to help reconstruct our worldview, our sense of ourselves, and
our human spirit, nothing can be off limits for reexamination and soul-searching.

Men today needn't feel responsible for the mistakes of both men and women who lived 5,000 years
ago. Men do have a huge responsibility, however, to participate in the processes of restoring female
principles, status, and power to society and of building an egalitarian sexual ethic. These are difficult
tasks, of course, and no group that has long enjoyed supremacy and privilege of any kind has ever
relinquished them gladly.

These and other chores offer plenty of opportunities for men to find and build in their humanity, as
opposed to carrying on boyish displays of macho manhood. In the past, men showed bravery in the
hunt or in battle; they showed "strength" in taking pain and dishing it out without feeling.

Instead of macho displays, the modern man can show genuine human bravery and strength. He can be
brave enough to tackle the thorny strands of tradition that warp human society and threaten the living
world.

Men can have the strength to accept an equal role in the house, at work, in bed, and in society as a
whole.

Men, the predominant makers and users of pornography, can have the bravery and strength to
dismantle this industry that degrades women, the human body, sexuality, and nature.

Men, whose traditional masculine culture values stoicism, detachment, and control of others, can use
their strength to uproot those values and to build a culture that values empathy, altruism, and kinship
with all Others — regardless of sex, "race," size, or species.

We are coming full circle around to the kind of awareness held by primal human society. We see the
awesome web of life in the world; we see the human place among it all. We see the cycles of birth, life,
death, and rebirth that keep all of nature alive and evolving. We see the living world as a First Being
made up of many lesser beings, of which we are one. We see the miracle of living existence animated
and given character by animals. We feel for animals whom we see as kindred beings; they give us a
sense of belonging here, of membership in the Great Family of life in this world. Our ancestors gained
this worldview through real experience, we are gaining it, ironically, through science.

This emerging global view conflicts with many of the main beliefs of the West's agrarian religion,
which sees this world as a temporary testing ground for humankind, as a lowly way station full of
soulless beings whose despicable existence offers temptations to sin and evil. It will be interesting to
see if religion's various branches can accommodate the emerging understanding of humans as beings
kindred with others in the living world. If they cannot, they will become increasingly irrelevant. If they
are unable to join the rest of us in coming to terms with nature and finding kinship among the life
around us, they will cease to provide spiritual guidance and comfort and they will fall away as religions
have done before.

Western religion needs to come to terms with its ancestor religions — the "idolators," "pagans,"
goddess — worshippers, and the other belief systems that the monotheists so ruthlessly tried to stamp
out. Many traces of these are alive and well today in the developing world despite centuries of mostly
Christian and Islamic missionary campaigns. Judaism, to its credit, never sought to impose its theology
and its God on other peoples and cultures. If Christianity and Islam can get beyond their current phase
of strict fundamentalism and their obsessions with the "revealed word of God" on the printed page,
they could bring massive mending to the spiritually torn fabric of humanity. When they recognize that
human spirituality began with awe of life on earth and that humanity has always found comfort in a
sense of kinship with the living world, perhaps they will see the need for, and the wisdom in, coming
full circle to the primal worldview.

My own view is that the primal worldview, updated by a scientific understanding of the living world,
offers the best hope for a human spirituality. Life on earth is the miracle, the sacred. The dynamic
living world is the creator, the First Being, the sustainer, and the final resting place for all living beings
— humans included. We humans evolved with other living beings; their lives informed our lives. They
provided models for our existence; they shaped our minds and culture. With dominionism out of the
way, we could enjoy a deep sense of kinship with the other animals, which would give us a deep sense
of belonging to our living world.

Then, once again, we could feel for this world. We could feel included in the awesome family of living
beings. We could feel our continuum with the living world. We could, once again, feel a genuine sense
of the sacred in the world.

Jim Mason is the author of the book An Unnatural Order: Uncovering the Roots of Our
Domination of Nature and Each Other, from which this essay has been edited.

The Animals Voice: Articles

Gitel & Byrne: Or What I Learned From a Drive in the Country

BY LOIS FLYNNE

I had reached the age of righteous indignation, a stage through which most of us pass somewhere
around the age of sixteen. In those immediate post war years, there was much to be righteously
indignant about. Our own walking skeletons of men, some of them relatives, returning from the hell
camps, gave verity to the grim gray films of Bergen-Belsen, Buchenwald and Auschwitz that flickered
on our cinema screens.

My new school chum, Petra, had actually lived through the whole of the war in Germany. Petra and her
mother were, of course, anti-Nazis, good Germans who had worked with the resistance. On one
particular occasion, I was holding forth on the collective responsibility of all of the German people for
the holocaust, accepting only those who fought like Petra’s family with the underground. All of the
German people had to know what was going on. How could they not? Their neighbors were being
arrested and carted off. Train loads of people were being crammed in cattle cars and transported
through the country. It was not possible that a small group of Nazis could murder six million people
without the knowledge and hence consent of the rest of the population.

Petra and her family knew what was going on and had the courage to join the resistance. The other
people in the resistance knew. Therefore, everybody knew. They let it happen, whether out of
cowardice, indifference or agreement. The whole German people were accessories before, during and
after the fact. They knew. They knew. They knew.

During the course of this diatribe, we were on our way to our regular Sunday in the country at our
favorite picnic spot, with Gitel, Petra’s aunt and her uncle Berne in front of the Morris, Petra and I in
back. As we drove, I had been ranting on my theme for about ten minutes, unconvinced by counter
arguments put forth by Gitel and Petra. I was about to extend my theme of universal knowledge and
collective guilt to collective evil and collective fatal character flaw, capped by “the holocaust could
never happen in Australia” litany, when Gitel turned in her seat.

“Darrrrling, shooosh,” she said. “They knew and they didn’t know. You make evil everyday and
nobody notices. For the past ten minutes, while you have been raving about Germans, we have been
stuck behind a cattle truck and there is a little calf who has got his leg caught in the gate and is surely in
pain.”

At that moment, a break occurred in the oncoming traffic and Berne roared the Morris around the truck,
which fell two cars behind.

Gitel continued. “Not only do we good animal lovers do nothing to help the calf, mostly we do not
notice as you did not notice. Nor did Petra notice, nor did Berne. Nor would I perhaps if I had not been
searching ways to answer you. So if later someone asked us, ‘Did you know there was a little calf with
its leg caught?’ we would have had to say in all honesty, ‘No, I did not know.’ Though it would be very
hard, now that I have pointed it out, for us to know how we could not have known?”

At the time, I thought this lesson immensely profound. One cannot know what one does not notice. It
also relieved me of the need to be down on things German. With the exception of the Nazis who
directly did evil, the Germans were restored to being “just like us.” Bergen-Belsen-Buchenwald-
Auschwitz were as big a shock to the average German as they were to us. People being rounded up and
trucked around were every day. Foul-smelling smoke stacks were every day. Every day is A-OK. So
they didn’t notice. Therefore they didn’t know. Now, when I tell this story most people get upset.
“They had to know,” they say. But I think Gitel was right.

On that day, at that time in my moment of mind expansion, I totally missed the larger profundity, as did
Gitel herself, and Berne and Petra. Here we were, self-proclaimed animal lovers. We didn’t race
alongside the truck, pulling it over so the calf could get its leg out of the gate. We did not try to rescue
the calf. We went on to our picnic and ate the flesh of chickens. We attempted with some feeble fishing
at the beach to impale forlorn fish on barbed hooks, taking great care not to hook the dogs or ourselves.

We came home that night and ate calf flesh in Berne’s delicious Wiener Schnitzels. We did not notice
all the things we didn’t notice. Even our observation of the terrified calf with its caught leg on its long,
hungry, thirsty, pain-filled journey toward its pain-filled death did not make us good, kind people
notice. We noticed only that the calf had its leg caught, causing it pain-of-the-moment. The rest of the
picture escaped us.

If it had been a person, a human being, everybody would have noticed immediately and acted to rescue
it, unless of course it was a person who was a non-person in the particular society. If it had been a dog,
we would all have noticed sooner and taken some action to help. We would certainly not have
proceeded to dine on the flesh of its fellows without a qualm.
It is as if we have blind spots in our vision that let us see only so much and no more, dead spots in our
brains that make it impossible to know, numb spots in our feelings. We only find out about those blind,
dead, numb spots in retrospect. No matter how many we discover over the course of our lives, we live
in the present with more yet to be discovered of which we are totally unaware.

For much of my life I continued to not “see” cattle trucks and to eat flesh and to wear fur and leather
and ivory and drive cars with pigskin seats, and to kill pests like mice and rats with poisons and traps
and to look to medical research and animal studies to save me from the consequences of my booze and
nicotine habits. I did not notice the living animals involved. I was a good human, and if hauled before
some animal Nuremberg in the sky would have been hard pressed to understand, “Why me?”

The Animals Voice: Articles

Cow Dancing

BY LOIS FLYNNE

Dancer came to me when she was six going on seven. For the first six years of her life she had had no
name — just a number, as part of a large dairy herd. She was about seven months pregnant when she
came to me, a Jersey Springer, her great bag swinging, heavy with milk from her last calf long gone,
long dead, long veal. Not long ago, like all the rest, her fifth baby had been taken from her, barely a day
old, a little boy.

You see them at the auctions, in crates out front of the dairies, pathetic little fellows, their navels
oftentimes still wet from their birthing, their little empty bellies unfed, their soft baby voices lowing for
their frantic mothers, once more confined to the hydra suck of the godawful machines draining their
milk into the vast vats and thence to the maws of humankind.

Five, perhaps six, such babies Dancer had born. From the time she was physically able to have babies,
she had carried and birthed a baby a year. For two hundred and seventy nine days each year, she carried
her baby curled high in her belly, close to her heart, while the machines sucked and sucked at her teats,
sucking the milk of the baby before. One day of each year she spent giving birth, twenty-four hours to
nurse her baby, nuzzling and washing and nurturing the tiny creature with her rich colostrum.

Then they would come as they always came, the soul-dead tenders of the hydra machines, and kick and
curse her back and seize her baby and drag it away, boys to the vealers, girls to be raised for the same
servitude as their mother. Ah, god, the dreadful, deadful, mooomoaning bellow of the two, such a
keening knell of awful anguish that surely must move a stone to pity ... to no avail.
One day, shortly after her last baby, Dancer slipped and fell on the wet concrete ramp as she and the
other mothers were being herded to the milking. Somehow one of the others trod on her teat and it was
ripped away as she struggled to rise, or so the story is told. Perhaps it was mashed by the machine and
hacked away by one of the tenders. Who knows how she came to lose a teat, but certain it is that a
three-teated cow is no use to the machines. So she was sent to auction, kicked and cussed onto the
truck, kicked and cussed off the truck, kicked and cussed thirsty and hungry into the ring for the
bidding to start, like all her babies before her.

And she stood there with her painful swollen bag, dripping milk and blood from her torn teat, shaking
her great head at her tormentors. And she bellowed, as her babies had bellowed, as all of the mothers
bellowed, and the babies there bellowed, mooomoan, such a keening knell of awful anguish that surely
must move a stone to pity.

I bought Dancer. Not only did I buy her, I paid her auction price, a bargain to be sure, because Dancer
now carried a calf.

And this calf she was going to get to keep forever. On that, I was bound and determined. As her time
grew closer, I obsessively began counting days, looking up gestation tables in the manual again and
again. Always it said the same: 279 days for a Jersey. I counted the days off on the calendar. August
1st. Every time, it came up August 1st. Again and again. I counted forward. I counted backward.
August 1st.

While I fretted, Dancer wandered the range with her friends, grazing the grass. She sat with her circle
in the shade by the creek, chewing her cud. Morning and night the cows came to the barn for their hay
and their grain and their treats, apples, carrots, bananas, grapes.
A week before August 1st, I prepared Dancer’s stall. Was 16x32 large enough? Too large? Too small?
When should I confine her? Should I confine her?

Dancer herself settled the confinement question. When I tried to lock her in, she bellowed with such
anguish that I immediately turned her loose with her friends. I decided to go with the advice of my
rancher friends who ran cattle wild on the range. “Keep an eye on her from a distance,” they said.
“She’s had calves before. She’ll know what to do. She’ll pick her spot.”

And so Dancer dropped her calf right on schedule, at dusk in the cool of the evening on August 1st. She
picked her spot, as the ranchers foretold, a clean spot, surrounded by a fierce stand of thigh-high star-
thistle bristling with one-inch thorns situated at the southwest corner of a 40-acre paddock in which all
the water and shade was at the northwest end. In the gathering dark from my distant perch, I barely
discerned the ease and grace of the birth, the competent way Dancer cleaned her calf, licking and
loving its tiny form, nudging it carefully to its feet for its first tentative steps and flop back down.

Then she nudged it back up again. Stronger steps this time, though still a comedy walk, guiding it,
guiding it back along her side to her dripping bag, crooning softly to it reaching out...oops, it loses its
balance and sits back down. Patiently she starts the whole process again...and again...till it fastens on
and sucks for maybe a minute. Then it rests. Then up again. Another minute-long suck, then a little
later a stronger minute ... caught in flashlight glimpses.

Dancer has done it. She has had her calf, a fine healthy calf, mother and baby doing well. But now I
had a real problem. Suddenly it struck me. Dancer and baby are at one end of the field surrounded by a
thicket of thorns. Water and shade and sweet grass are at the other end of the field. The barn is even
farther away and August 2nd is forecast to be a scorcher, 110 degrees in the shade.

I did not have a pickup. All I had was a 1983 much-abused Toyota 4-wheel-drive wagon. Nine a.m.
came and Dancer was still in her star-thistle fortress.In retrospect, the story is funny. It was serious at
the time. Knowing Dancer’s history, the whole notion of picking up and moving her calf was anathema
to me. How do we explain to them that the sometimes horrible things we do to them we do out of love,
in their best interests to the very best of our soul-searching perceptions?
Anyone who has trapped and taken a feral cat to the vet knows exactly the torn feelings. That was how
I approached Dancer, torn. I knew that picking up her calf would bring back all the nightmares of all
her other calves, the dreadful desolation. I knew it would also be but momentary. The sun was already
burning down. She and her calf had to move from her thorn fortress into the shade.

I drove to within twenty feet of her and the calf and brought her grain. She would have none of it. She
tossed her head and pawed the ground and did her fighting bull act. A long time ago, perhaps as a child
growing up round my father’s greyhounds and running free around relatives’ farms, in with the pigs
and the cows and the bull, and with older sisters who were legendary horsewomen, I had learned that,
unless they consider you something good to eat, non-human animals simply do not want to hurt you.
They will posture and threaten. Even when they are acting to protect themselves, they generally choose
to use the minimum force necessary. They mostly just want to get away.

I did not consider myself brave when I approached Dancer and picked up her baby. I was much more
worried about her distress than any threat to me. Moreover, I was in more danger from the star-thistle
scratching through my jeans and stabbing through my sneakers. Dancer danced around me, threatening,
making missing passes at my body with her head. I picked up her baby and carried it to the car, placing
it carefully in the rear compartment. I was too preoccupied to appreciate how perfectly exquisite it was,
with its great ears and great eyes, soft nose it wrinkled at my smell, tiny hooves still encased in its birth
slippers.

Most of all I remember its perfect trust, its obvious belief in a benevolent world that would continue to
love it as its mother loved it. How could anyone ever hurt such a creature? How can we let the hurt
continue? How can we stop it? I guess one calf at a time, one mind at a time. One calf’s story reaching
many minds one by one.

Slowly, I started to drive toward the shade, the baby quieted, relaxed in the back, seemingly enjoying
the jaunt. Not so Dancer. She ran frantically round and round searching for her baby, bellowing the
awful bellow that will tear my heart for eternity. But she did not seem to know to follow the car. The
baby now started to fret, “maaaaa.” I promptly drove back to Dancer and opened up the rear door to
show her the baby. Once more I tried to drive away. Once more I drove back.

The sun was going for its personal best in scorchers. I lifted the baby from the car and started out
across the field with it in my arms. This worked. Dancer followed, dancing around making soft noises
to the baby, then gently butting me along to speed up the process that was getting heavier at every step.
Bang. Another butt from Dancer. Stagger a few more steps. Bang again. So it went for the whole
miserable thousand feet, every rotten miserable inch of it with star-thistle stuck in my sneakers and
jeans.

The baby was a girl. Dancer nursed her till she was almost eighteen months old. Of course, they are
still together, here at the Sanctuary. Leanna Pavlova will be two in August. Dancer no longer becomes
frantic at the sight of cattle trucks coming on the property, bringing new arrivals. She dances with her
very grown-up baby and the other cows under the light of the moon. Sometimes, they let me dance with
them, whirling and swirling, such light-footed giants, in tune with the earth and the beauty of being.

Lois Flynne was the director of the Community of Compassion for Animals sanctuary in Orland,
California. The sanctuary was also home for goats, pigs, dogs, chickens, turkeys, donkeys — and three
cows previously used in vivisection experiments.

Is There Anything Truly Sustainable or Humane About Eating Meat? | Food | AlterNet

FOOD

AlterNet / By Joshua Frank

229 COMMENTS

Is There Anything Truly Sustainable or Humane About Eating

Meat?
Animal rights crusader Lee Hall says the only way to prevent animal suffering is to 'stop breeding these
poor beings only to betray them.'

May 7, 2010 |

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Natural food sections in our grocery stores are chock full of them. The ethical foodies seek them out.
They're intended to inform the consumer about where our food comes from and how it's produced:
"Sustainable," "organic," "free-range," "local" products -- we've all seen the terms and we hope they
genuinely convey what they imply.

But what do they really mean? What's the truth behind the label? Can meat ever really be sustainable?
Is purchasing local a good thing for the environment? Not always, says activist, author and educator
Lee Hall, who serves as legal affairs VP for Friends of Animals. Hall is also an active supporter of
HumaneMyth.org, a new group that seeks to expose the facts behind our misleading food labels and
farming practices.

I spoke with Hall, whose new book on animal-rights theory and advocacy, On Their Own Terms:
Bringing Animal-Rights Philosophy Down to Earth, is due out later this month.

Joshua Frank: As someone who frequently shops at farmer's markets and natural food stores, I
have noticed a rapidly growing trend toward so-called ethical eating. People are becoming aware
of the dark side of industrialized farming, and as a result more and more animal products are
being labeled with terms like "cage free," "humane certified" and "organic."

Lee Hall: You're right; this trend is growing fast and the advertising hype that's driven by enterprises
such as Whole Foods have a lot to do with it, as does the reality that global warming really is upon us.
Climate disruption is the most frightening thing since the bomb (and that's not gone). People are
looking for pacifiers. People want to be able to say they've grasped the inconvenient truth but they still
want peace of mind. If they've got money, they'll pay a bit more these days for that.

JF: But you've argued that these are simply marketing terms that do not necessarily mean what
they convey to consumers. Can you explain why? What's the reality behind these terms?

LH: First, they're usually just marketing ploys. There's no legally binding definition for cage-free eggs,
for example. These items are bought by people who want to believe the birds were treated OK. That's
well-meaning. But think about what's going on. Packing a mass of birds into a shed isn't much better
than jamming them into a cage. Cannibalism increases in shed situations where so-called cage-free
chickens lay eggs, as does bone breakage. Recall that birds who are purpose-bred to lay eggs do that a
lot. So they're always short of calcium; it leaves their bodies and goes into the shells. That means
osteoporosis is common in commercial birds. I don't mean to be a party pooper here; I assure you there
are great vegan recipes for just about anything you're making with eggs now.

I know some people will say: Oh, but my eggs, my ham -- it really does come from a good farm; look
at their Web site and all the greenery! Well, you must have a lot of money to eat that way all the time.
But even if the animal farms you support are spacious, think about the ramifications. More space for
agribusiness concerns, less free animals in wild spaces. Just like suburban development, farms take up
a lot of land. Why would we as a society continue to think this is a good trend?
Is There Anything Truly Sustainable or Humane About Eating Meat? | Food | AlterNet

JF: What about grass-fed cattle? Michael Pollan and others have touted the alleged
environmental and ethical benefits of eating free-range beef as opposed to cows raised in CAFOs
(confined animal feeding operations). Isn't this method of raising animals qualitatively better?

LH: To my mind, Michael Pollan's arguments are clever, but ultimately unconvincing. Eight years ago,
Pollan wanted to be assured that eating the flesh of cattle could be done without barbarism. This was no
easy feat. To prove the thesis of compassionate carnivorism, this contributing writer for the New York
Times Magazine actually bought a calf. Pollan chronicled the growth of the little Black Angus steer
from a nursing baby up until the end of it all. The animal was killed a few weeks after turning one year
of age.

Do you remember the name Pollan referred to that calf by? Number 534. Compassionate, isn't? Now
we're supposed to believe that there's no ecological barbarism in eating these animals either -- if it's
done on pastures, not in factories. Balderdash. As the human population continues to rise, as biofuels
compete with agricultural land, as energy and water become concentrated in fewer hands, mass
production will be the norm. Only a select few will have the opportunity to eat that grass-fed flesh
Pollan's touting.

And what happens to the wolves, coyotes, bobcats, and other animals who once roamed the land made
over to farm sprawl?

If you really want to tread lightly on the earth and its conscious life, the answer is to stop breeding
these poor beings only to betray them and stop annihilating wildlands for malls -- and the farms too.
There's a great saying ascribed to Confucius: "The way out is via the door."

JF: I've always been skeptical of the free-range cattle notion. Spending a considerable amount of
time hiking around Eastern Oregon, I have seen many grass-fed cattle roaming our public lands
and shitting in and around some of the state's remaining wild rivers. A study by UC Davis
Medical Center recently confirmed that free-roaming livestock are polluting rivers in the Sierras
with their waste.

LH: That study is on to something: water on public lands and wilderness areas are dirtiest where cattle
graze. And what a word from an ethical point of view. Livestock. Live today, stock tomorrow. It's
really a bane, this notion that conscious life can and should be a commodity. Imagine if we dared to
challenge that. Environmental advocacy would be revolutionized overnight.

This is what the locavores aren't talking about. Cows aren't part of the natural biocommunity. As
commercial cows became widespread, their free-living ancestors, the aurochs, went extinct in the
seventeenth century, when a poacher shot the last one in Poland. Free-range? Not really. The ones we
see today are purpose-bred animals, imposed on the land.

JF: Since you bring up the locavore movement, I'm reminded of Prof. James McWilliams at
Texas State University who has argued that "If you want to make a statement, ride your bike to
the farmer's market. If you want to reduce greenhouse gases, become a vegetarian." Why do you
think the broader environmental movement has yet to fully embrace vegetarianism as one way to
challenge climate change?

Is There Anything Truly Sustainable or Humane About Eating Meat? | Food | AlterNet

LH: Much of what we call the environmental movement relies on donations. So there's a hydraulic pull
to behave as though laws and lawmakers should fix things. That's convenient. Potential donors aren't
challenged to make personal changes.

At the same time, the moneyed donors non-profits hope to attract will find comfort in promotions of
"humane, sustainable, all-natural meat" and the like. Rarely do environmental groups ask potential
supporters to begin with the personal, essential paradigm shift that a full vegetarian commitment
involves.

What underlies this hesitance? Well, imagine the Catholic authorities' initial resistance to the
Copernican revolution. People had to leave their comfort zone to grasp the reality the universe does not
revolve around the human being. Galileo got the picture, and wound up under house arrest.

Suggest that humans are part of the biocommunity rather than in charge of it? Say the universe does not
revolve around us? Humanity is not quite ready to accept that reality -- although everything from the
climate to the extinction rate is telling us the time has come to do so.

JF: In 2006 the UN Dept. of Food and Agriculture reported that the world's cattle industry was
responsible for more greenhouse gas emissions, by CO2 equivalence, than all the vehicles on the
road. Even if big environmental groups aren't addressing this very serious problem, why do you
think popular climate activists, such as Al Gore and Bill McKibben, aren't talking about this
issue in any substantive manner?

LH: Al Gore, pressed on this issue, has said, "Cutting back is a responsible alternative" but Gore is not
a vegetarian. Likewise Bill McKibben -- who, in the March/April 2010 issue of Orion, criticized
factory farming, but gave grass-fed beef a pass. If they haven't seen fit to personally get beyond animal
agribusiness, they aren't prepared to take vegetarianism seriously in their public commentaries.

Gidon Eshel and Pamela Martin, assistant professors in geophysical sciences at the University of
Chicago, observed in 2006 that a fully vegetarian diet is the most energy-efficient. Fish and red meat
virtually tied as the least efficient. And while the average person on our landmass puts out four tons of
carbon dioxide-equivalent a year, each person who goes vegan cuts that by some 1.5 tons. How's that
for direct action?

Professor Eshel, once a cattle farmer in Israel, became a proponent of vegan-organic farming. What
I've seen Eshel say to interviewers that I've not yet seen from Gore or McKibben is the understanding
that animals have thoughts, and their death is a dreadful sight. That understanding -- a queasy response
to violent human privilege -- is a vital characteristic of people who undergo a personal paradigm shift.

There's some genuine transformation going on, with knowledge-sharing in and between communities;
it's happening, for example, through the vegan-organic movement. We need to look for people who
show our population what to strive for, not what we can settle for.
Is There Anything Truly Sustainable or Humane About Eating Meat? | Food | AlterNet

JF: Let's talk a bit more about some of the locavores. Where I live in Portland, Oregon the
movement is so substantial that even Oprah's magazine has lauded a local chef and former
vegetarian for her "sustainable" food practices. Of course, her menu is loaded with meat,
including foie-gras of all things.

Hipster Portland is even home to the so-called "Ethical Butcher," a former vegan, whose love for
the environment and animals has caused him to give up his plant-based diet and embrace
"humane" animal slaughtering. How should environmentalists and animal rights activists
challenge this aspect of the locavore movement that seems so dominant these days?

LH: First the PR agents need to assure us that whatever they're marketing -- sausages, aircraft, bottled
water -- is ecologically benign. Also known as greenwash.

Then they want to assure us that animals are happy to be farmed and eaten. Also known as hogwash.
So there are two faulty claims that environmentalists and animal advocates, together, can and should
challenge: that animal agribusiness can be kind and that it can be green.

It was an uncle's "idyllic" farm that impelled Vegan Society founder Donald Watson to organize a
movement. As a child visiting the farm, Donald was always greeted by a pair of pigs -- until the day
one was killed. Donald couldn't forget the screams, and henceforth regarded the farm as Death Row.
The folks at HumaneMyth.org have gathered some intriguing samples of "happy meat" PR, coupled
with counterpoints offered by people in the know.

And no matter how they're grown or how far their bodies are transported, the cows, lambs, pigs, and
birds raised as food on any local farm are potent emitters of methane -- regardless, too, of where their
feed came from. And their manure produces nitrous oxide, which has nearly 300 times the immediate
warming effect of C02.

A comprehensive study, funded by Britain's Department for Environment Food and Rural Affairs, was
conducted earlier this decade and released by Adrian Williams of Cranfield University. It showed that
free-range chickens, used for eggs or flesh, have a 15-20 percent greater impact on global warming
than factory-caged birds. That's because "sustainable" chickens take longer to raise, and eat more feed.
Not that I'm endorsing high-volume farming. I've found it's quite easy, once you make the initial
adjustment, to cook without ever selecting animal products at all.

Joshua Frank is an environmental journalist and author of "Left Out! How Liberals Helped Reelect
George W. Bush." He is co-editor, with Jeffrey St. Clair, of "Red State Rebels: Tales of Grassroots
Resistance in the Heartland." Frank and St. Clair are also the authors of the forthcoming book, "Green
Scare: The New War on Environmentalism." He can be reached at brickburner@gmail.com.

Perdue's "Humanely-Raised" Chicken: The Latest Misleading Food Claim | BNET Food Blog | BNET
Perdue's "Humanely-Raised" Chicken: The Latest Misleading
Food Claim
By Melanie Warner | May 21, 2010

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Just when you thought it was safe to go back to the

supermarket, another food manufacturer has decided to slap a misleading claim on its products. This
time it’s Perdue, the country’s third largest chicken producer, which has started touting its a natural
chicken products as “humanely raised.” But, according to the Animal Welfare Institute, this chicken
is grown pretty much the same way most conventional chicken is — that is to say in large, dimly-lit,
horribly smelly and crowded barns.

The new packaging for natural Perdue chicken, which the company started rolling out in February, also
makes the claim that the chickens were “raised cage free” — a hollow assertion since the caging of so-
called broiler chickens is not actually an issue. That would be caged egg-laying hens. Thus the “cage
free” claim has all the meaning of a declaration that the chickens were not genetically modified or not
allowed to breed with feral cats. But it nonetheless gives consumers the impression that Perdue’s
chickens are of particularly high quality and different from the norm.

That, however, doesn’t appear to be the case. Perdue is basing its humanely raised claim on the
National Chicken Council’s animal welfare guidelines, industry-created standards that the Animal
Welfare Institute and other groups have taken issue with since they were created back in 2005. This is
the first time any chicken producer has attempted to use the humane label.
The NCC guidelines allow as little as one square foot per bird and that there’s no requirement for
natural light or that the birds have access to the outdoors. And the NCC stipulates that chickens must
have at least four hours of darkness (for sleeping), but it doesn’t specify that it be four consecutive
hours. All in all, it’s not the pastoral image that shoppers looking for humanely raised meat have in
mind.

To top it off, Perdue’s chicken packages also declare that their product has been “USDA Process
Verified,” making it sound like a USDA inspector went out to make sure that Perdue’s chickens were
really living the good life. But in reality, the “Process Verified” stamp only means that the company is
correctly adhering to the NCC standards, not that the living conditions are actually humane.

The important lesson for managers here is that when you’re trying to play into a consumer trend, it’s
best to either do it all the way or not at all. Half measures and weak, industry-generated standards
aren’t going to fly and may come back to bite you.

It may be true that large scale chicken farming doesn’t lend itself to things like outdoor access, ample
space and pasture eating, but in that case the smart thing to do is leave labels like humanely-raised to
smaller producers who can actually adhere to them.

Image from Veganoutreach.org

The price of bacon: Jon Henley investigates industrial-scale pig farming | Environment | The

'Welfare doesn't come into it'

Pigs kept on slatted, concrete floors; pregnant sows in cages so small they can't move; piglets castrated
without pain relief; tails routinely docked to prevent animals attacking each other. This is the truth
behind the European pig industry - and so behind most of the pork we eat. By Jon Henley

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o Jon Henley
o The Guardian, Tuesday 6 January 2009
o Article history
A pregnant pig in a sow stall in the Netherlands. the stall does not allow the sow to move more than a
few inches for her entire pregnancy. Photograph: Varkensinnood.nl

Heaving with heavy goods, the A67 from Eindhoven barrels through the flat, featureless fields of the
south-eastern Netherlands on its way to the German border. On a frozen December morning, nothing
very much moves beyond the road's edge; a horse stamps at a trough, a tractor pushes along a narrow
track. Every half mile or so, behind a stand of poplars, a neat brick farmhouse - raked gravel drive, lace
curtains at the windows - slides into view. Next to it is a large, windowless and vaguely ominous shed,
the size, perhaps, of a small aircraft hangar.

It will hold, almost certainly, several hundred pigs. In a country famed for the unnatural feats of its
intensive farming sector (the Netherlands occupies less than one-thousandth of the world's surface, but
is its third largest exporter of agricultural produce), this area, known as De Peel, is more densely
populated with pigs than anywhere else on the planet.

Some of the sheds are multistorey; they're called pig-flats. There's a fair chance - especially if you're
partial to bacon - that you've eaten meat from one of them. A good proportion of the 20m pigs born,
fattened, sent abroad or slaughtered each year in the Netherlands come from here, and the Netherlands
has become the biggest single supplier of our morning rasher.

"This," Hans Baij of the animal welfare group Varkens in Nood, or Pigs in Distress, had told me the
day before in his office in Amsterdam, "is advanced industrial pig farming. There's nothing natural
about this whatsoever. It's about science, sperm selection, antibiotics, piglets per sow, grams per day,
muscle-to-fat ratios. It's what this country does. Welfare doesn't come into it."

Picture, for a moment, a pig. Engaging, maybe. Large, pink, ungainly, certainly (though that's not how
they always were; the original pig was compact and capable of speeds up to 40mph). That strong,
muscular snout was designed for rooting around in soil and undergrowth; a sense of smell acute enough
to snuffle out buried truffles was plainly intended for forensic foraging.

In many languages, pigs are a byword for anything gross, unpleasant, unhygienic. They're actually very
clean; they hate a dirty bed, and will select a latrine area and use it. They are the most curious and
intelligent farmyard animals. (A professor from Pennsylvania State University has demonstrated that
pigs learn problem-solving games faster than dogs and as quickly as chimps, and will remember the
lessons for three years or more.)

Orwell, of course, knew that. Winston Churchill, a serious pig fancier, saw it too. "I like pigs," he said.
"Dogs look up to you; cats look down on you; pigs treat you as equal." A shame, then, that we treat
pigs the way we do. Britons ate 1.6m tonnes of pork in 2007. We're so fond of the meat that we now
import more than 60%, including 40% of all fresh and frozen pork and an astonishing 80% of all bacon.
In fact, our pig meat imports - mainly from Denmark, the Netherlands and Germany - have been
soaring for nearly a decade; the Netherlands, and those sheds, account for almost half our bacon
imports. Demand for UK pork, meanwhile, has slumped 36%.

There is one very good reason for this, say British farmers. It is that in 1999, we introduced standards
on pig welfare - regarding the space in which they are reared - that have yet to come into force across
the rest of the EU. They have made our pork a great deal more expensive.

"To rear our pigs the way we do," says Vicky Scott, who with her sister and father, Kate and David
Morgan, wean more than 500 piglets a week on their 1,000-sow intensive farm near Driffield in
Yorkshire, "costs us about 12p a kilo extra. Will that be reflected in the price we get for it? What do
you think?"

Some Dutch and Danish producers do rear pigs for the UK market to UK rules. But according to the
British Pig Executive, an alarming 70% of the 970,000 tonnes of pig meat we import each year does
not meet British welfare standards. What's more, you are probably buying it without knowing it:
retailers are perfectly entitled to label foreign meat British if it has been processed here.

The pigs from which much of that foreign meat comes will have led very different lives to many of
those reared in Britain. Here, for example - and in Sweden, Switzerland and Norway - the use of a
particularly nasty piece of kit called a sow stall has now been outlawed; it is legal in the rest of the EU
until 2013. A sow stall is a narrow metal cage, on a bare concrete and slatted floor, in which pregnant
sows spend all three months, three weeks and three days of their gestation. They can move a few inches
back and forwards, but not turn around. Lying down and getting up is difficult, too.

"It prevents almost all their natural activities," says Phil Brooke, welfare development manager for
Compassion in World Farming (CIWF). "They can't forage, they can't root around, they can't prepare a
nest for their young. They're subject to bone and muscle weakness, digestive and urinary illnesses,
cardiovascular problems. Many display signs of severe psychological problems, stress and frustration."

In much of mainland Europe, too, and on a by no means negligible percentage of British farms,
naturally boisterous and playful fattening pigs also spend their days and nights on bare concrete and
slatted floors; their faeces and urine fall through and are flushed away. In theory, EU regulations
require plentiful "environmental enrichment" - straw, in other words - for bedding and rooting, but an
undercover report by CIWF last month showed that 100% of farms surveyed in Spain, 89% in
Germany and 88% in the Netherlands provided none. Such rules are, it seems, not very easy to enforce
when animal welfare is weighed against export earnings.

If they're lucky, the animals may get a chain or a plastic football to play with. But since there is rarely
enough light to see by (pigs are quieter in the dark), fighting and biting are more common than playing.
To minimise the effects of this, the vast majority of piglets' tails are routinely docked soon after birth,
and their teeth clipped, again in breach of EU rules.
Routine tail-docking in particular, Brooke and Baaij both argue, is a good general indication of pig
welfare: pigs reared on extensive farms, outdoors, with plenty of scope for foraging and rooting, rarely
need their tails docked. "If they've got plenty to do, they're happy," says Baaij. Otherwise, basically,
they go for each other, with tails and ears the favoured targets. And once a pen full of pigs gets the
scent of blood, the consequences can be catastrophic; pigs are, after all, omnivores.

In much of Europe too, male piglets are routinely castrated. That's because the powerful flavour of
male pig meat - boar taint - is distasteful to many consumers. The operation is performed without pain
relief, although the Dutch plan to adopt a gas anaesthetic, voluntarily, later this year. (British pigs are
not castrated because they are slaughtered younger, before the taint develops.)

"Across Europe, we found examples of poor welfare and excessive use of confinement systems and
mutilations in lieu of good welfare practice," the CIWF report concluded, lamenting the effects of "an
industrial system on a highly sentient, intelligent" animal. "Pigs looked uncared for, they showed
aggressive behaviour and there was nothing for them to do. Across Europe, pig legislation is being
ignored and welfare conditions are often appalling."

So is that what it's like, then, in those Dutch pig farms? Perhaps unsurprisingly, it isn't all that easy to
find out. The big farms at least seem distinctly wary of allowing a journalist access. Any number of
Dutch welfare groups, including the highly vocal Varkens in Nood, backed by an array of Dutch
writers and artists, are now on their case. CIWF has accused them, along with most other continental
pig farmers, of routinely breaking EU laws. This month they might also have to face up to Jamie
Oliver, in a TV special aiming to do for intensively reared pigs what the TV chef did last year for
battery chickens.

At the pristine and gargantuan Houbensteyn Group in Ysselsteyn, home to a barely imaginable 25,000
pigs, a manager tells me bluntly that they can't let me in as they have too much work on in the run-up to
Christmas. Another factory farm near Helmond cites stringent hygiene laws that mean no one can so
much as poke a nose round the door without taking their outdoor clothes off, donning disinfected boots
and laundered boiler suit, even taking a shower.

Introduced after a catastrophic outbreak of swine fever in 1997 that saw 10m Dutch pigs slaughtered,
they're a useful deterrent for the curious visitor. "Too much of a bloody performance," says Jaap, the
chief stockman. "What do you want to see, anyway? Look, everything here's spotless. You can't even
smell this place from the outside. We put in a new air filtration system last year."

Smaller farms prove more open. A few have even installed neat little viewing windows so visitors can
gaze into a couple of presumably carefully selected pens - Step in the Shed, the scheme is called, and
it's very popular with Dutch primary schools.

John Rooijakkers, who runs a farm of 750 breeding sows with his brother Martin at Aarle-Rixtel, near
Eindhoven, will not tolerate British farmers' accusations of unfair competition. "I'm losing money," he
says. "Most Dutch pig farmers are. Only the most efficient 20-30% are making any. The European pig
market is cut-throat, and it's swings and roundabouts - you may have tougher welfare regulations, but
we have far more stringent environment and hygiene laws. Holland is much smaller, much more
densely populated than Britain. Don't talk to me about regulations."

Rooijakkers is unusual in the Netherlands in keeping some of his pregnant sows on a mountain of
straw, because a portion of his pigs are destined for "a big British supermarket" which he declines to
name. For the same reason, some of his male piglets are not castrated. (He does, though, dock their
tails: "Show me a single intensive pig farmer who doesn't.")

Elsewhere, tiny piglets - Rooijakkers says proudly that he averages 15 in a litter, where a free-range
sow will typically deliver 10 or 12 - scrabble around their mothers on a blue plastic grate. The sows are
locked into farrowing crates, similar but slightly bigger than sow stalls and used by many intensive pig
farms in Britain too. The sows find it just as difficult to move in them, but they protect the baby pigs
from being crushed.

"I have a 0.2% mortality rate," boasts Rooijakkers. "On organic farms they're lucky to get away with
16%. Where's the animal welfare there, then, when you're talking dead piglets? Anyway, you have to
be realistic: today's pigs would all be sick within a week if you started raising them outside. They
couldn't take it. All those germs."

But next door to the farrowing crates, weaned piglets squal and leap viciously at each other in a bare
concrete pen, a punctured yellow ball their only distraction. When you open the door to the small
viewing room Rooijakkers has installed, they're suddenly bathed in fluorescent light. Hang around for a
while, and the light goes off: it's there for the visitors. Unless you're looking at them, the pigs live in
near-total darkness.

Upstairs in his office, Rooijakkers blames the system. "We're supplying what the market wants," he
insists. "And where are we, the farmers, in the chain? The retailers tell the slaughterhouses what they'll
pay, the slaughterhouses set their prices for us. Everyone takes their margin, and right at the bottom it's
the farmer. People, consumers, just aren't being realistic; they want cheap meat, then they're worried
about welfare. Buy organic, then! Pay twice the price. But no one will do that."

A few miles down the road in Panningen, Lowie and Jeanette Kersten are similarly blunt. Their farm,
Op den Haegh, is small: around 300 sows. Through their viewing windows, you can see pregnant sows
lumbering around a barren concrete pen. They are fed automatically. It's an ingenious system. When
each pig sticks her head round the feeder door, a computer reads an electronic chip clipped in her ear
and calculates whether or not she she has had her daily fill. If she has, the door stays shut; if she hasn't,
she's allowed in.

Next door are sows and piglets in spotless but desolate crates. Signs explain that the climate is
computer controlled, and make much of how modern pig-farming is doing all it can to minimise the
risk of disease, and reduce its impact on the environment. Weaned pigs are on stark concrete and slats;
a chain swings from the ceiling and a piglet makes a desultory grab. And there is a whole long side of
this big shed whose darkened windows you simply cannot see through; inside is a pale pink mass of
occasionally writhing forms. And the occasional furious squeal.

The Kerstens are a charming, and plainly thoughtful, couple in their 50s. They invite me into their
immaculate farmhouse kitchen for coffee. "It's all a compromise," says Lowie. "Everyone would like to
see better conditions for pigs, but change demands time, good laws, an effort from everyone in the
chain and responsibility, from the producer, the retailer, the consumer and the politician. The cold fact
is that better welfare means more expensive meat. We'd love to produce it; are people ready to buy it?"

In fact Lowie already does produce some more expensive meat. Half of his piglets are of a different
race to the others. They are taken off the farm and raised, in the open air and with special feed, on the
grounds of a monastery, under a new label he has developed with colleagues. "The meat from my
monastery pigs is tastier, with good fat - supermarkets don't want fat, they want pure lean, and modern
pigs are bred to deliver that," he says. "But good restaurants want flavour, and they want meat with a
story. Something distinctive."

Wouldn't he like to raise all his pigs that way? "Look," says Jeanette firmly, gesturing at the shed
behind her. "We're producers. We do this to earn money. That's what I tell the schoolkids who come
here. There's been a whole lot of research to see if we could produce the amount of meat we need any
other way ... We're very professional. And pigs aren't people."

On the whole, if you're concerned about pig welfare, you generally are better off buying British
(assuming, of course, you can be sure it actually was reared in Britain). Things are not perfect here, but
they are quite a lot better: CIWF's undercover inspectors found only 36% of British farms they visited
did not use straw, although 54% still carried out routine tail docking. But Vicky Scott and Kate
Morgan's farm in Yorkshire feels a world removed from those stifling Dutch sheds. Their pigs are
reared on straw, in huge, open-sided sheds that let in all the daylight and - on another chill winter
morning - the fresh air you could want.

Scott uses farrowing crates for birthing, although she prefers the term maternity units. "It may look like
factory farming," she says, "and it's not very nice to see, but I really believe no better system's been
invented." She docks her animals' tails ("We're planning on doing a trial without it, but if they start
tailbiting, really, it's horrendous") and clips their teeth ("We've tried not doing it, but they make such a
mess of their pen mates. Pigs' teeth are incredibly sharp.") Both operations are done when the piglets
are a day old. But the most important thing, for her, is the straw.

"I would never, ever finish [fatten] pigs on slats," she says. "I've always said that. You only have to
look at them. They need it, it's the way they're made. It's inconceivable to deny them it." And the
family's pigs do, indeed, look pretty damn happy. But there's precious little encouragement from the
market to do things that way, or to refund the extra pence per kilo of pork that the straw - and the extra
labour to muck it out and replace it - costs them.

The business is tough enough as it is: when animal feed prices went through the roof last summer,
Morgan and farmers like her were losing £26 on every pig they sold. "The retailers always say the
customer likes the cheapest," she says. "We say we think the customer would actually like the choice.
But the bottom line is, if people don't want to pay for higher welfare, farmers will stop doing it."

The best conditions, of course, are free-range, although there is a lot of confusion about what that
means. Some 40% of breeding sows in Britain are kept outdoors, compared to fewer than 1% in the
Netherlands; but only 7% of the piglets born to them are reared outdoors after they're weaned and only
2% are fattened, or finished, outdoors. "Outdoor bred" is not the same as "outdoor reared". The best
guarantee of all is organic, but that comes at a considerable cost.

On a magnificent high field bordered by the Ridgeway near the Wiltshire village of Bishopstone, Helen
Browning keeps her 250 saddleback sows producing some 65 piglets a week, about 3,500 a year. The
pigs sleep in spacious, clean, straw-filled arks and have free access to the open field around them.
Eastbrook farm is a mixed farm and the pigs are integrated into the agricultural cycle; they'll spend a
couple of months trashing - and very effectively fertilising - a patch of land and then move on, to be
replaced by grass or an arable crop for a few years.
Unlike high-intensity systems, in which pigs are removed from their mothers at three weeks or even
earlier, Browning's piglets are weaned at a more natural eight weeks. "They're stronger, maturer, they
don't need antibiotics," she says. Farrowing crates and the like, Browning believes, have bred the
maternal instincts out of most modern sows. And the never-ending, retailer-led search for ever-leaner
meat means they simply don't have enough fat on them to nurse their litters for long anyway.

Browning's pigs are kept in the same family group, and they have an awful lot of room to create an
unholy mess of their field. The day I was there, wading through the mud, they were positively
gambolling: racing round the field, playing (there's no other word) games. In 20 years of raising pigs,
Eastbrook farm has not experienced a single case of tail biting.

"Pigs are clever animals, curious animals, they're clean animals, they tell you about their problems,"
Browning says. "They're not like cows, they're not stoics, they vocalise. They wear their hearts on their
sleeves. And they're funny. They have pretty simple needs, really: space, lots to do."

But all this comes at a price. Tim Finney, managing director of Eastbrook's organic meats business,
reckons that amounts to an extra 30 or 40p a kilo just to keep the system running, plus another 70p a
kilo for the organic feed. "Overall," he says, "it probably costs us about double what it costs to produce
a conventional pig. Although if we weren't organic, we could run the farm the same way and produce
meat that was maybe 25% more expensive. That would still be a huge step forwards in welfare terms."

High-welfare organic meat is of course a niche market, recession-sensitive, and Finney admits he's is
budgeting for zero growth for the coming year. But the alarming thing is that today, even moderately
good welfare standards are coming under pressure. When it comes to pig welfare Britain is, Browning
reckons, "genuinely squeaky clean" compared to much of the rest of the world; "probably the best in
the world, in fact, for conventional pig-keeping". But what counts, it seems, is price.

Some years ago, the late Lyall Watson, who devoted his last book to The Extraordinary Potential of
Pigs, wrote that if you look properly behind the eyes of any pig, you will see "a liveliness, an
intelligence for which you are just not prepared". These are not like other animals. If it matters to us
that our morning rasher or chop or pork pie does not comes from a genetically engineered fat-free pig
that spent its brief life in a dark, bare, windowless shed stuffed full of antibiotics and reduced to
attacking its pen-mates for entertainment - a pathetic parody, in short, of a pig - we're going to have to
reach deeper into our pockets. Right now, that seems increasingly unlikely.

I’ve changed my mind about vegetarianism « Bite Club of KC

By Neel Mukherjee

Simulposted with the Guardian UK

12/24/09

I grew up in financially straitened circumstances and meat, which was expensive, was a rare thing at
mealtimes. We ate meat about once a month, if that. Also, growing up in a culture where meat dishes
were the centrepiece of private and public entertaining – birthdays, weddings, Sunday lunches, guests
for dinner – meat had the glitter of glamour, of showing off, of ceremony about it. Which perhaps goes
on to explain somewhat my fascination with and weakness for it.

Different cultural contexts account for some of the fascination too: in India, where I grew up, eating
meat is nowhere near as regular, as prevalent and as common as it is in primarily carnivorous first-
world countries. India introduced Britain to vegetarianism – see Tristram Stuart’s excellent first book
on this – and it is possible, indeed all too easy, to be a vegetarian in India and eat extraordinarily good,
varied food every day, with very few “repeats”.

But I race ahead. Meat-fetishiser that I was, I used to find willed vegetarianism inexplicable. It was one
thing to be a vegetarian because of religious and caste reasons – something I was familiar with because
of my Indian upbringing – but to choose to be a vegetarian when you could eat meat for every meal
every day? That seemed madness to me. It was as if you had chosen to live only half of your life, a
cussed and downright wrong self-inflicted deprivation. While I felt pity for “cultural” or religious
vegetarians, I looked on “converted” vegetarians with contempt. Stupid dimwits, I laughed. Holier-
than-thou, preachy, smug, sanctimonious … the arsenal wasn’t exactly thin.

The change of mind occurred slowly. As with most of my knowledge of the world, it came by way of
books. I think JM Coetzee’s work came before Peter Singer’s. Reading The Lives of Animals ignited
something in me. I searched out Singer’s books: Practical Ethics and a 2002 edition of Animal
Liberation. Because they mounted logically consistent arguments and because they were morally
sound, rigorously and convincingly argued, and eschewed the cheap, Disneyfied sentimentality that
mars so much of pro-vegetarian arguments – oh, let’s not eat that fluffy baa lamb, its mother will be so
unhappy to see cute Fleecykins eaten – it got me thinking instead of reacting with the knee-jerk
resistance I had (and still have) to the sentimental “arguments”.

It slowly dawned on me that there were no rational, intellectual or moral arguments to be made for
carnivorousness. The meat-eaters had always already lost. This is not the place to rehearse all those
arguments – in any case, they’ve been done far better than my potted precis could give an idea of by
the writers I’ve named. But I need to mention one point.

Far more convincing for me than all kinds of shocking exposés of the meat industry and the way a
piece of steak makes it way on to our plates – and, let’s face it, they are bone-rattlingly shocking – was
the unimpeachable moral argument against speciesism: because we are the most powerful animals in
the animal kingdom, because all animals are at our mercy and we can choose to do whatever we want
with them, it is our moral duty not to decimate, factory farm and eat them. It is an argument of such
majesty and generosity that its force is almost emotional.

And yet all of this is kinked by the fact that changing my mind hasn’t led to changing my habits. To
understand intellectually is one thing, to put it into practice quite another, a whole untraversable
territory away. I still haven’t been able to stop eating meat. In any restaurant, my eyes alight first, as if
by an atavistic pull, on the meat dishes on the menu. In any dinner party I throw, I think of the non-
vegetarian dish as central. I view this as a combination of weakness, greed and moral failure. Someone
please help.