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Turkeys
It is so much fun watching the rescued turkeys enjoy their outdoor pasture, acting like their wild cousins.
This is Miwok and Cheyenne. They are two of five turkeys who were dropped off at the sanctuary a couple weeks before Thanksgiving.
After their quarantine, the four boys (the girl is with the female turkeys) were released into their new enclosure.
The boys spend their time roaming the meadow, perusing the grass for edibles. Sometimes they perch up on the boulders, looking pleased with their new vantage point. There will come a time when such a feat will prove difficult, if not impossible as they will weigh too much.
Plus, when they see you enter their territory, they come running over. Sit down, and they are all over you. They love freckles and hair bands. Creek loves it when you scratch his chest. Miwok will stand still and start preening himself if you rub his belly. Dakota is shy, while Cheyenne loves to walk on your leg.
Florida Senator Reintroduces Ag-Gag Bill
Florida Senator Jim Norman believes that accessing farms and taking video or still photographs is almost like terrorism. At the behest of an egg farmer, Norman introduced legislation (SB 1184) that would criminalize the act of taking photography on farms.
The nonhumans on these farms experience actual terrorism in their daily lives. Accessing farms in order to document animal welfare violations and cruel treatment is not terrorism. Considering undercover investigations that cause no harm to another living being acts of terrorism is insulting, at best.
You can read more over at Green is the New Red
If you live in Florida, contact your Senator: This link takes you to a form letter you can edit while this link takes you directly to the Florida Senate website. Ask them to oppose SB 1184
Hugs All Around
Douglas gets a big hug from our animal care manager at the sanctuary. He loves hugs, although these days he and his brother Linus consider themselves big boys and avoid physical contact with people at all costs. They’ll get over this, as all growing calves do, and we will welcome them back with open arms.
A Little Bit of Chicken Love
I have been asked if chickens feel. Emotions. Thoughts. Sometimes I am told whether they do or not (and when I *am* being told, it’s to let me know they don’t). I am unsure of the nuances and depth of chicken thought and feelings. I know they experience emotions, I have seen it. This is irrefutable to me. It is simple fact made complex by people.
Today I watched two animals bond. It was a simple act of comfort being offered and accepted. I cannot describe it in any other way.
There is a hen who has a bad eye. The eye, it squints. There is perhaps difficulty seeing. When she cannot see, she becomes uncomfortable in her skin. You can see it by the way she turns in circles, keeping her good eye to the world. When the good eye is turned the wrong way, towards the center of the circle, her world winnows down and she paces, circles, paces, circles. You want to reach out and help her but know quickly how flighty she is, how afraid of humans a hen from a battery cage operation becomes.
Her good eye suddenly catches sight of white, feather, fluff. The soft down of another bird. Carefully, she investigates. Sometimes those she seeks to touch retaliate with pecks or move away. Sometimes chickens are moody and cruel. She stands in front of the other bird, then sidles to the side – I am no threat, she says, remember me? The other bird appears to do so. She is an ex-battery cage hen too.
Under the misters, they touch. Squinty-eyed hen circles the seeing hen, leaning into her, deeply, superficially, but always touching. She drapes a head over her companion’s back. She touches the comb of her friend, gently. At one point, she falls deeply into the contours of the hen’s body, filling the small “s”. A perfect connection.
But this photo is my favorite moment. It is the second the hen with the squinty eye can totally relax it. She does not struggle to keep her bad eye open. She closes it. She has a friend.
Holding Onto Sorrow
My little note: I am a firm believer that things will get better, that progress will continue to be made for all oppressed beings. But this post is less about that and more about sadness. Just want to express that caveat – I think we have the right, have earned it, to feel what I believe are healthy emotions, like sorrow.
The horror of Harris Ranch, for me, is that I only ever really see the animals suffering on it after leaving the Animal Rights Conference held in Los Angeles. Nothing ruins a great weekend of inspiring animal rights activists like a barren drylot with thousands of cows and steers awaiting death.
You don’t see this feedlot – which can hold up to 120,000 animals at one time – while going south. You smell it, but can avoid (unwillingly or not) seeing, truly gazing upon, the thousands of cows* who live that smell.
Traveling north, unless you take a longer route, will take you directly by.
I hate the place.
I hate it not because it is run by people who profit off the oppression and abuse of sentient beings.
I hate it because it exists in the open and no one cares.
I hate it because no matter what I do, no matter how many vegan meals I eat, I know the fate of those beautiful creatures, know that nothing I do now in this very moment means anything to them, to their future.
Pigs – A Happier Note
Mercy for Animals is always depressing me with their undercover investigations, and their recent one at a pig farm is no exception (warning: video automatically starts playing, it’s not pretty). They leave me feeling like I’m one of a few sane people in a really messed up world. I mean, by this point, why isn’t the whole world mostly vegan – these videos aren’t exceptions, they’re rules, standard industry practices.
I want to celebrate pigs and all the cool stuff about them. Like how they generally really like people and yeah, you can snuggle with them in ways you can’t with a dog – even a big one. This is Sally and she is totally into the whole “lay on top of me” interaction. Pigs are very tactile animals and are especially fond of belly rubs. There is no species who loves belly rubs like a pig. This is irrefutable fact that you can see in action at any farmed animal sanctuary in the world!
Flying Away
A couple weeks ago, Celeste flushed out a wild turkey hen from brush at the sanctuary. In a flurry of motion and flapping, the hen leaped in the air and took flight. There was grace and strength in that motion.
Every time I see a wild turkey fly, I think of what domestic white- and bronze-breasted turkeys lack, what has been taken from them by humans.
These are wild turkeys. They are either the Eastern or Rio Grande subspecies. Every season, they congregate to meet and breed. The tom turkeys fill their chests with air, puffing up proudly for the hens. It’s a sight to behold, ten or twelve males with their flagging tails and deep-throat gobbles. They reside on the sanctuary, alongside the rescued turkeys.
Around 15 volunteers from the Orlando Foot Not Bombs chapter have been arrested for, oh my gosh hold your breath, feeding homeless people! I know, right? I love the Orlando chapter, because they are all smiling being walked away in handcuffs, those miscreants! Orlando doesn’t have anything more important to worry about, like a violent crime rate 4 times the national average. No, it’s those homeless people being fed within two miles of City Hall that pose the real threat. Look at them, so scary.
If you live in or outside of Orlando, feel free to sign this petition. Petitions are feel-good tactics, so feel good about it.
I don’t know about writing Orlando officials. The douche-canoes totally defended their law in court, because ZOMG HOMELESS PEOPLE EATING FOOD! It’s not murder that reduces tourism, it’s pancakes.They should do a billboard campaign with a picture of a pancake stabbing someone to death, then we’d all get their point and support Orlando city officials in the cause to get grits off the streets of Orlando!
Or start your own Food Not Bomb chapter and kick some butt with vegan/vegetarian food.
On “The Chimps of Fauna Sanctuary” by Andrew Westoll
As a vegan and animal rights activist, I can easily review Andrew Westoll’s “The Chimps of Fauna Sanctuary: A True Story of Resilience and Recovery” by focusing, perhaps to the point of ranting, about speciesism and exceptionalism. After all, what discussion about any kind of rights for chimps or other apes doesn’t come down to how much they are like humans; they’re exceptional because we’re exceptional. We should treat them better than we treat other nonhumans simply because they are fortunate enough to share so many qualities (and genes) with we who are at the top of the evolutionary heap.
But a rant like that would detract from the good a book like this could do for its target market: the mainstream “animal-loving” public, and for animals. Yes, there’s some linguistic housekeeping. For instance, there’s a bit of confusion about animal rights and animal welfare. And yes, I would love to meet the person who made the decisions about when animals were to be called “he” or “she” and when they were to be called “it.” Perhaps the strangest choice of verbiage comes at the end of a description of the horror and anxiety chimps in laboratories experience when their friends are shot with dart guns in order to render them unconscious. The page-long passage gave me the chills but then ended with: “Even if the knockdown is only for a blood draw or cage transfer, to the casual observer it looks and sounds and smells as if the ape believes it is about to be murdered” (70-71). “It” is about to be “murdered”? My chills were replaced by irritation. There’s also a jab at vegans: “In the lab the chimpanzees had been fed a joyless diet of water and monkey chow—dehydrated ricks of protein, carbohydrates, and nutritional supplements that would be enjoyable only to the most abstemious of vegans” (93). But I’m going to look beyond my pet peeves, which are well represented, and focus on the many positives the book has to offer.
Onward.
Thirteen chimps are housed at Quebec’s Fauna Sanctuary when primatologist-turned-writer, Andrew Westoll arrives for his several month stay. He will volunteer and learn/write about them, their primary caregiver, Gloria Grow, and, as he discovers, himself. The majority of the chimps are research subjects who “had endured years of pain and deprivation as living test tubes for the study of human diseases. They’d been torn from their mothers just days after birth. They’d been imprisoned in cages, sometimes in solitary confinement. They’d undergone blood draws, invasive surgeries, and viral experiments. Some had been knocked unconscious with dart guns almost every week” (10). The rest are from nearby zoos. Regardless, all had been in the same position for years: the basic choices of their everyday lives were taken away from them, and they were prisoners.
Ironically, they’re still prisoners, and that fact is discussed. It’s not as if they could possibly be returned to the wild, as that’s not where most of them are from (they were captive bred). Their needs are met as best as any human could ever meet them, and that’s really what the book is about. There is history of research with chimps as subjects and the individuals are placed within the context of our use of animals for science as well as entertainment (and food is briefly mentioned). Current legislation is discussed and there are calls to action. All but a few people have used and continue to use the chimps. We continue to take from them, even when we visit them, expecting them to present us with some profound lesson as if that’s their job.
But the real story is the individual chimps and the woman who has dedicated her life to listening to them and doing her level best to provide them with an environment and opportunities that will help them heal. It’s a story of unconditional love. Not insignificant is also the story of the writer who longs to have a fraction of what Gloria has with the chimps. He’s well aware of the costs of what she has and I’d say he probably doesn’t think he could handle more than a fraction.
Here at Animal Rights & AntiOppression, we’ve spent quite a bit of time exploring what works in animal rights advocacy. Westoll speaks of “a peculiar truth” he “realizes” and I’m fairly certain some activists would disagree with his pronouncement of truth. Nevertheless . . .”[I]n order for people to commit themselves fully to fighting injustice, they must first witness an extreme example of it” (143). What do you think of that? Far less controversial is Westoll’s realization that the day we begin to see animals as individuals is the day our world begins to turn upside down (to paraphrase him, 168). I’m sure every vegan can relate to that; helping people see animals as individuals is a large part of what we do.
Finally, Gloria originally thought that once people learned what the chimps have been through, their lives would be changed, just as hers was. But that’s not what happens. She wonders what it will take to get people to make the connections that are right in front of them, clear as day. I certainly empathize with that. We show graphic footage, we tell the stories of individuals without graphic footage. We provide unfathomably large numbers—uncontested numbers—to attest to the carnage we create for something as trivial as our palates. We describe health problems and environmental devastation. And yet, the vast majority of people will continue to not care (as measured by their actions).
Westoll provides an insider’s view of the lives, loves, habits and quirks of the individual chimpanzees of Fauna Sanctuary. Many passages describing the sentient nonhumans, if read alone, can easily be about humans. From their gestures to their emotions to the games they play, they are so much like us that it’s especially unfair for us to use them the way we have. Or so the story goes.
I’m torn because though all chimps being used by humans right now deserve sanctuary, for me they don’t deserve it because they are chimps. The rats and mice and pigs and dogs in laboratories around the world are just as deserving of the opportunity to heal from the hells we have created for them. Perhaps chimps will be the gateway animals, and rights for others will follow. It might not be able to be said that granting rights to chimps or banning invasive research on them will necessarily be good for all animals. But it will definitely be good for chimps, and I don’t think I can come down against that.
What do you think?
Neighborhood Vegan Food Sharing Week
A few years ago some curious omnis asked me “what do vegans eat?” They didn’t just want to know food groups and ingredients, they were interested in hearing specific examples of what I eat for meals. When I mentioned that I had a great and easy recipe for chili, and that it had won 2nd place in a work chili cook-off against non-veg chilis, it sparked the idea for a routine (if not regular) get together where we’d choose recipes and make a vegan feast together.
It was an exploration for all of us, many times the recipes we chose used ingredients none of us had ever used, or made things none of us had ever tried. It was a fun social experience for us to explore grocery stores and cook together; we always had a good time, learned quite a lot, and they were always impressed with the food we made. I’d gotten into the habit of photocopying the recipes we’d use to make it easier on us in the kitchen, and so they always had copies of the recipes we’d made at the end of the night.
Read more…
The Difference An Animal Killing CEO Makes
Remember Bob Parsons and his great elephant hunt? Mr. Parsons is the CEO of GoDaddy.com, and he went out and shot a “nuisance” elephant, killing him. After the hunt, the local people stripped the elephant of his flesh and ate him. Oh my gosh, did the world give him crap for that or what? PETA labeled him the scummiest CEO of like forevah, and every other domain registrar offered deals to transfer domain names away from GoDaddy.com to theirs. Around 20,000 people did just that and switched to NameCheap, for example.
And then Mark Zuckerberg, founder of Facebook, went out and boiled a lobster alive, slit the throat of a pig, goat and chicken, and everyone is swooning! I mean that literally, in some cases. PETA sent him a gift basket and may name him awesomest CEO of the year or something, I dunno. Zuckerberg is calling himself mostly vegetarian, which is like being mostly pregnant or something equally “either/or”. No one seems to be suggesting abandoning the Facebook ship, either.
Parsons = evil. Zuckerberg = primal genius. Weird!
So on one level, yeah, I think every meat-eater needs to get themselves down to the local slaughterhouse and kill them some adorbs sheep or piglets or chickens or moo-moos. I think it’s a super easy way to get a lot more people to reduce their reliance on animal products.
On another level, I cannot even BEGIN to describe the creep-factor I experience when I read stuff like this, “I think many people forget that a living being has to die for you to eat meat, so my goal revolves around not letting myself forget that and being thankful for what I have”.
So don’t forget it, Zuckerberg, and don’t slit anyone’s throat!
Thoughts?
Fighting Exploitation Through Veganic Gardening
When I bought my condo, one of the selling points for me was the patio. “I can garden,” I thought with glee.
It’s been 4 years, and the garden has been both a success and a failure – this is the nature of learning, and I am happy to try things just to see if they’ll work. My space, like all growing spaces, has its challenges. My motivation isn’t always up to speed. Despite the challenges, the failures, and the effort, I grow more and more convinced of the vast importance of gardening (when feasible). From social justice to environmentalism to animal rights to frugality, gardening directly addresses many issues.
Social Justice
If you follow the Food Empowerment Project (facebook, twitter, or their blog), you know that there are a lot of issues with farm workers. Even if you are unfamiliar with FEP, it is hard to miss the news in recent years about tomato growers in Florida or strawberry pickers in California. Exploitation of farm workers is rampant, and there is no guarantee that the produce you are buying at the grocery store avoided farm worker exploitation. Not even if it is organic. At farmers’ markets or if you purchase a share in a CSA it’s better, since you can ask those questions of the farmers directly, and hopefully trust the answers.
Community gardens and farmers markets can address some of the issues of food deserts. Community gardens in places lacking options for fresh produce, and which are only available for the people living in that neighborhood, directly address issues of food availability.
On Mother’s Day and Doing Something
Do you have room in your heart and home for me?
This is Willy, he’s a boxer mix who’s up-to-date on his shots and good with kids and dogs. He was first rescued from Miami Dade Animal Services, where there was distemper in March and the chosen solution was to kill all of the dogs. After a brief battle, rescues were given a short window of time in which to pull the dogs and they did. Willy is one of those dogs. He was taken in by Comfort Kennels in South Florida, which then abandoned its dogs shortly thereafter and he was re-rescued by South Florida Recycled Dog Rescue.
South Florida Recycled Dog Rescue is housed in a 5,000 square foot facility about 35 minutes south of me. Though I did once try to volunteer, Sky in tow, within five minutes that revealed itself to be a terrible idea. How much can you get done at a rescue when you’re supervising a 10.5 month old human? Not surprisingly, the same amount you can get done at home when you’re supervising a 10.5 month old human, which is to say, practically nothing. And definitely nothing of quality.
For Mother’s Day, my husband stayed home with Sky so I could help at the rescue. I wanted to be able to do something. And that something was walk a bunch of dogs and transport a handful from an adoption event. It wasn’t much, but the point is that I’m not in a position to go down there on a Tuesday and do what needs to be done for the dogs. But I do have a car, and I do have a free babysitter (his name is Dada), and without transportation to events each weekend the 40 dogs at the rescue will likely never get adopted.
A neighbor of mine said, “Yeah, but they’re just 40 dogs, and if they ever even get adopted there are 40 more right behind them.” Part of veganism is respect for the individual. And regardless of breed or the situation they came from, each of these individuals deserves a loving home. And you might be surprised by what you can contribute. Check out the Wish List of your local rescue. They might need towels and blankets. Got a bunch you’re not using? Maybe they’re having a food drive. Got $20 for a big bag of food? Some need office supplies or cleaning supplies. Some need washable dog beds and maybe you have a handful too many (like I did, but was irrationally thinking I’d be betraying Charles if I gave away his beds).
If you can foster, add your name to the Charlie to the Rescue database, if you want to make yourself available for transport, Yahoo has a Dog Transport Volunteers Group, and if your Facebook page looks anything like mine, every day you see opportunities to transport animals to and from homes, rescues, fosters, and even vets. The couple of hours you have on a Sunday afternoon to drive someone to the airport or across your state could be the one piece of the puzzle necessary to save that individual’s life.
But back to Willy. The founders of the rescue prefer not to have photos of the dogs in kennels. It’s depressing and they look like they’re in jail, they believe. Or maybe, depending on the breed perhaps, the bars make them look mean to some people. Others think that the kennel shots tug at heartstrings and are preferable for that reason. We all see so many snapshots of animals, and for some reason we look twice at some of them and not at others. I know there might be a variety of reasons for this, and I know that readers of this blog aren’t representative of the general public, but I’m going to ask anyway: What are your thoughts regarding images of animals behind bars, assuming the photo quality is the same as that of an animal not behind bars?
–Photo by Mary Martin, who needs to get some fun photo software and welcomes ideas.
I Want You to Know Chickens
Comments are closed on this entry. This was a personal post written by me, not on behalf of any organization. That some people were unable to accept this and chose to use this post as a springboard to air their personal dislike of me or the organization I work for is unfortunate. Thanks for understanding and my apologies for any inconvenience this may cause (if this was a post ABOUT perceived inconsistencies in the AR movement, I would obviously not shut down the comments).
I wrote this for my personal blog, but realized it would probably resonate with many of you here. I tailored this more to my blog’s audience, hence the end message that may be a bit softer than for other audiences (my personal blog’s audience is mostly omni).
The first time I held a chicken was in college. She was a small white creature with big amber-hued eyes. I imagine the most unwanted thing she wanted to endure was being passed amongst a bunch of college kids. Stiff with fear, it was not the best way for chicken and human to meet.
A few years later I started volunteering at a sanctuary for farmed animals. I wandered amongst the hens, roosters and turkeys roaming a verdant field. What I remember most is their song, their talking. If there is one thing anyone takes away from interacting with happy chickens, it’s their conversation. Chickens and turkeys voice their thoughts and feelings and opinions on just about everything. It’s a rather soothing chorus.
Not always true, though.
Nearly seven years ago, I stepped foot into the modern chicken shed. In each building, 80,000 hens lived in cages so small they could not stretch their wings or move without bashing into another hen. Their existence was crazed, winnowed down to a few inches and endless boredom, ceaseless frustration.
On egg farms, to prevent the fighting and aggression that comes with abnormally high stocking densities of living beings, farmers cut off a portion of each hen’s beak. This leaves her unable to perform basic chicken things – preening, protecting, eating and drinking normally. A chicken’s beak is innervated, it has sensory neurons running to the tip, along with a blood supply. It is vital for a chicken to feel what is touching her beak, to know where base begins and tip ends. So it hurts to have a part of it removed, always done without anesthesia. Sometimes the nerves hurt so much, are so damaged, that they never stop crying, never stop sending messages to the brain that ouch! it hurts.
And the sound these hens make. The cries. I have never heard anything like it. There is a cadence, a rhythm to it that would almost be comforting if it wasn’t so jarring. You never hear this sound in nature or on sanctuaries or in little backyard flocks because it is impossible. No sanctuary has 80,000 hens running free, and if they did, on no sanctuary would you find hens so full of fear. The sound is a cross between the sound a hen makes when cooing to her babies and the sound she makes when fleeing a hungry fox. It is not right or normal.
The Power of Seeds
Most of us have the luxury of taking our food for granted. We go to the grocery stores or the farmers markets and we buy what we like, or what we can afford, and there is always plenty there. We assume there always will be plenty, simply because there always has been, but we leave the responsibility of safe-guarding our food, and the seeds they come from, to others.
If you’re like me, the more you think about that — especially with the climate changes that we can’t predict — the more vulnerable it makes you feel.
Most of us don’t think about what seeds are being used to grow our vegetables and grains and fruit, or whether those seeds are being cultivated in a way that will preserve their ability to withstand future droughts or flooding. Even when we choose organics and shop at farmers markets where we talk to the actual farmers, most of us don’t know very much beyond the labels they put on their produce at the market.
Whenever I hear people talking about the importance of seed saving and seed sharing and seed swapping, I get fired up. It makes so much sense (on so many levels) and it’s the kind of grassroots action that could literally save our world someday.
This video interview with Vandana Shiva is powerful, filled with intersections and plenty of food for thought.
Stephanie Ernst
Marji
Kelly G.
Deb
Mary Martin
