Wolves and Anger

“The Northern Rockies have become an unsupervised playpen for reactionaries to act out warrior fantasies against demonic wolves, coastal elites, and idiotic environmentalists.” - James William Gibson, writing in The Earth Island Journal

I work on an alpaca farm part-time. I generally enjoy myself and love working with the alpacas, but animal exploitation alarms go off in my head on a regular basis anyway. The farm is owned by a born-rich person who does it as a hobby but pretends like it's real-life, "dog-eat-dog," cutthroat sell-or-die work. Long story short, I disagree with many of my boss' assertions about the moral correctness of how the business is practiced. My boss happens to also own a huge cattle ranch in another state.

What really gets me, time and again, is my interactions with farm owners and ranchers that consider themselves "environmentalists" because of the way they run their ranches. They think they're doing a great job providing necessary, "sustainable" meat to the world and they don't "get" the distress of people like me when they talk about slaughtering cattle. In their world, it's all ok, because they decided cattle are "just food." Obviously I disagree strongly with letting ourselves believe the convenient illusion that if you call a living creature a new name, it means it isn't a living creature anymore and you don't have to worry about how wrong it is to kill a living creature for pleasure or convenience (eating meat is not "necessary" btw). They're not alive, they're "just cattle."

They blather on and on about how "environmentally conscious" they are, creating "sustainable" organic beef for people to eat. It's the hardest thing in the world for me to sit there listening to this bullshit and not freak out, because I'm just a peon and there's no way my words could penetrate the self-congratulating fog they've created around themselves. So, the fact that cattle ranching is responsible for most of the devastating environmental degradation affecting our continent (as well as South America), creates 30% or more of the global-warming-causing greenhouse gases, and encourages our government to favor ranchers' financial concerns over other wildlife that are largely on the brink of extinction, as well as public health, doesn't make  them question the "environmentalism" of running a cattle ranch? Troubling at the very least.

Apparently ranchers in my state have been driving wolves to nearby states where it is now totally legal to murder any wolves you see, anyplace, anytime, any reason/lack of reason, and shooting them there. The complete governmental failure that was the de-listing of wolves from the Protected list is already shooting them straight back to the "almost extinct" status they were when the U.S. government funded their extermination in the early 20th century. But here's the problem, see, I just don't understand the woes of the hard-working ranchers who "have" to kill wolves to save their livelihoods, and yes, their families. Pro-wolf-murdering ranchers have created a magical story about child-eating, destructive, mindless predators who want nothing else than to finally exterminate humankind. Handily, this story covers their true reasons for wanting to kill wolves, which is that they can be inconvenient to making money off of exploiting and killing other animals. Being told that they aren't allowed to kill this inconvenience by Big Daddy Gubment also irks them to no end, since Gubment has been getting on their cases already for ignoring tons of environmental protection laws about what lands they can let their cattle destroy and what pollutants can be dumped into nearby waterways.

Seriously, I could go on and on and on about how completely ranching has fucked up our natural environment, in some ways erasing it beyond the chance of ever getting it back again. I get that ranchers don't know or care about the history of their profession and are just trying to make a living. Unfortunately, this is also the reason given by many large corporations that destroy things or people just to keep their stockholders happy. No matter what profession we're in, if we are "good, hard-working" people, at some point we have to acknowledge if we are responsible for very bad things happening. This includes environmental degradation (of public lands) and the killing of living creatures for money or convenience. Ranchers need to call themselves on their shit (not gonna happen) and admit that their anti-wolf murder spree is not a righteous act of Goddamn American Freedom, but a shitty little grab at power that only shows their smallness and ignorance. "Environmentalist" ranchers need to acknowledge that, at best, they are reducing some of their heinous environmental degradation, and their pitiful changes to how they use up the land that they have access to is not the same as "preserving the environment."

Rant done.

All I Want for Xmas is SHMEAT

One of the great sadnesses I have in my life is my inability to stop supporting the meat industry. While I'm vegan and don't eat meat myself, for the health of my cats, I have to buy meat. I don't agree with some people's assertion that cats can eat a specially balanced vegetarian diet and be fine. They are natural carnivores, and unlike humans, have to eat meat. This is why I was excited when I heard about "shmeat" a few years ago.

Back in 2009 or so, there was a segment on the Colbert Report about PETA funding the development of lab-made "meat" that was never a part of a living creature. It's basically muscle tissue grown in a petri dish. Medical science has been working on developing lab-made tissue types for testing medicines and treatment of injuries for some time. Nobody had been thinking about people eating it, though. I love the Colbert Report, but the segment focused on how gross lab-made meat would be (as if killing an animal and cutting the flesh off its bones and eating THAT isn't gross), and makes that joke that the nickname "shmeat" comes from "shit"+ "meat".

Actually "shmeat" comes from the fact that it's created in "sheets" of tissue in the lab. While I have no interest in eating it myself, I hope that someday soon I can feed it to my cats, and other people can feed it to their cats, and people who just can't face becoming vegetarian or vegan (even though they agree with it logically) because meat is "so damn tasty" will choose shmeat instead of flesh hacked off of cow, pig, chicken, turkey, and lamb corpses. Maybe our eating habits can stop making massive contributions to global warming and general environmental degradation as well. Merry X-mas!

The Gray Area

Sometimes, to offset our regular intake of indie, underground, queer, feminist films and films made by immigrants and people of color, my partner and I sometimes grab a movie from one of those Red Box things at the grocery store. We expect these movies to be shmaltzy or shlocky or just bad in a variety of other ways. However, I was shocked when my partner brought home The Gray, starring Liam Neeson.

In order to make it through the movie without breaking something, I had to make up a drinking game where every time  a character in the movie stated something factually inaccurate about wolves, we would take a drink. I drank three glasses of wine during the movie due to this game. My partner takes bigger gulps than me, and went through two bottles of beer and two glasses of wine.

I remember that when this movie came out, there were protests by different wildlife and pro-wolf groups around the country. Not a big deal to anyone. But in the light of all the rampant wolf-killing that's happening in Wyoming, Montana, and Oregon, among other places, this country can't afford to have hatefully false bits of media like The Gray floating around for the ignorant and unintelligent to happen upon.

The film paints a picture of the North American gray wolf that is scientifically false and entirely based on fairy-tale fear. Unfortunately, there are ranchers and other anti-wolf entities across the nation that use these same untrue reasons to validate exterminating wolves, regardless of their right as a wild animal to exist, even if sometimes inconvenient to certain humans.

In the movie, wolves are said to have a "kill radius," meaning they will kill any living being found within a certain circular area of their territory. I don't even know where the filmmakers made this up from. Pulled it completely out of their asses, from what I can tell. The characterization of wolves as heartless killers who target the plane crash survivors, just for the fun of it, is patently ridiculous in the light of the fact that the only species of animal on earth that kills for fun is homo sapiens. There were many other false claims about wolves in the film, including stuff about how wolf pack hierarchy works, plus a pack of wolves with like fifty animals in it is pretty unheard of.

I would call the film hilariously incorrect if not for how many people believe that wolves are always waiting in the woods to take our children, and ranchers that think that two wolves living in their state is "overpopulation." I did laugh out loud at the final scene, when Neeson's character tapes a bunch of broken bottles to his knuckles for a final mano a lobo  showdown in the wolves' "fucking den" against the alpha.

Incompatible Bedfellows

Today I got tricked into signing a petition to stop a mining operation in the Colorado wilderness that ended with a weird pro-hunting blurb. I realize that some environmentalists think that siding with hunters is the only way to preserve natural lands, and that's horribly sad. Not only do I not want the wilderness destroyed by mining run-off pollution and logging, but I ALSO dislike it being destroyed by sport hunters blowing everything that moves away with automatic rifles.  Hunters do absolutely nothing to preserve natural lands, often siding with extremely unnatural "animal management" policies that allow forest service and fish & wildlife agencies to kill off all the natural predators so elk or deer can reach overpopulation levels that make it "necessary" for human hunters to come kill indiscriminately. It's an ugly partnership between environmentalists and hunters (that's pretty one-sided, too - what hunters are all like "And it's good for ecology too!" when they're making weekend plans?) and I resent being accidentally convinced to sign anything that acknowledges hunters' rights to any opinion when it comes to preserving natural lands.

Atmospheric Depression

In this cold, wet, winter, it's hard for anyone not to be depressed. Add to that the fact that clinical depression stops for no season, and you have my situation. Adding even more, the state of the globe environmentally often halts any pattern of positive thinking I may start about life in general.

Can the few that are able to, willing to fight for the environment and animal rights do enough? Extinctions continue, environmental degradation constantly increases, deforestation continues almost entirely unabated, more new forms of pollution are being developed than old being eliminated, global availability of sex education and birth control is a distant dream...

Maybe I should be telling all this to my therapist.

Radical Animal Rights Disney

People who find ideas about animal rights uncomfortable (for example, my father who has a degree in biology but just doesn't get what my problem is) sometimes wonder what "went wrong" to turn some of us into raving, lunatic animal-lovers.

I blame Classic Disney.

Try not to cry (not joking):

Dumbo

The Fox and the Hound

Bambi

Dominion

Sometimes I've stated to people I know that I believe animals have just as much right to live as humans do. Usually, the reaction is as if I flippantly described how delicious my dinner of roasted human baby was last night. "Oh, so you're saying animals are more important than people? Do you even care that human beings are starving all over the world?"

That most people believe they have the right to decide what animal lives and what animal dies goes almost without saying. We humans have even gone so far as to write into our religious texts basically that God dost sayeth we have dominion over the birds and beasts, and can do whatsoevereth we doeth choseth with them. It's an awfully convenient idea, to just say, "Hey, well, God himself did ordain that we have control over all other living creatures, so I don't really need to spend too much time wondering if that's right or if animals deserve to be treated like unfeeling, edible objects or nuisances to be exterminated."

So, say the religious texts are all true and were really written by God/s, and we humans do have dominion over all other living creatures. Why did we decide that meant we should be so thoughtlessly violent and cruel to all the other animals? Why didn't that mean to anyone that humans needed to be stewards, helpers, caregivers, doting fathers and mothers, brothers, sisters to the creatures we share the globe with? It goes back to the convenience factor - it is decidedly uncomfortable and really inconvenient to think very hard about the suffering of the animals trying to share this shrinking habitat we call Earth with us. About how relentlessly we destroy our natural surroundings, about our unsustainable consumption, our pollution, and our insane exponential population growth. Not to mention the "little" things like constant, normalized animal cruelty, and use of animals for entertainment that often leads to their deaths.

Getting back to the original statement that I believe animals have as much right to live as humans do, and people's counter-argument that it means I don't care that humans are starving all over the world, I have to point out that disregard for the well-being of animals is directly related to disregard for human well-being. Since we do not care about the plight of hunted, displaced, or starving animals and their degenerated environments, it shows that we do not care or understand humans' relationship to that ecology and the impact that its destruction has on human access to food, water, life. The same "natural" impulse to use animals for whatever we please because they aren't powerful enough to stop us, extends to human use of other humans that are not as powerful as themselves. By extension, animals are the largest oppressed group on earth.

Jesus (who may not have been the son of god, may not have been a holy prophet, but was definitely a man who confronted issues of class and gender oppression in his time) apparently said that the "Meek shall inherit the earth." Perhaps this could also mean that whatever animals manage to survive humanity's rush to destroy themselves, will then have dominion over this earth.