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.

Staying Above the Oil Slick

Recently Obama declared that he'd be clearing the way for more domestic oil drilling to help ease our struggles at the gas pump. This should be an opportunity to point out that every time a middle eastern oil supply is endangered, we get pinched for gas prices, and why don't we extract ourselves from oil dependency itself? No, no. Let's not waste our time on renewable energy sources. Instead, let's just drill more inside our own borders. The environmental degradation will be permanent, and the fuel source will be temporary at best. Just because it's not a good trade-off for our future, doesn't mean we shouldn't do it.

Another crappy element to this situation is that "clearing the way" really means giving more (taxpayer) money to oil companies as an incentive to go tearing around the continent, drilling, spilling, polluting and destroying in search of oil profits. In case no one noticed, BP never really paid for the huge mess they made of the Gulf of Mexico, and there's really nothing preventing them or anyone else from doing the exact same thing again.

Let's not forget the fact that our use of fossil fuels is causing global warming. We obviously do forget that one of the most necessary tools for fighting global warming is maintaining and increasing our forests. Meanwhile, Obama has stated plans for increasing logger access to our forest lands. This is depressing. Recently, I drove in the Mt. Hood area, looking for access to Lost Lake (turned out it was still blocked by snow), and in one particularly scenic area happened upon a really revolting, giant chunk of clear-cut land. It was hideous - it looked like a huge splat of death in the forest. Then I noticed a chunk of trees nearby, that were strangely all the same height and clearly the same tree species. This was the effect of earlier replanting, a stand of trees with no biological diversity. The fact that they were in an area where clear-cutting was frequently happening meant that there were most likely no wildlife being supported by this undiverse christmas tree lot.

It's frustrating that humanity is so uncreative and so destructive to everything around us. Next: how using cellphone is killing us and all the bees. Then: Human population overload, redux.

Wolf Rider

I find it criminally inane that one of our representatives in congress, jon tester--a democrat from montana, added a rider to the newest budget bill that strips wolves of their endangered status in montana, idaho, wyoming, washington, and oregon. apparently, no one is opposing it because democrats don't want to lose any of their number and they think this guy will get a free pass in the next election if he makes ignorant ranchers happy by making up a new law that goes completely against the endangered species act and all the reasons that we have that in place. HATE HIM.

Violence Against Life

It is only been in the last century that people have begun to believe that violence against animals could be considered morally and legally wrong. To put that in perspective, it has only been a few hundred years since people began to believe the same about violence against women. Violence is a way for humans (to be specific, it is generally humans who identify as "men") to establish control over other people or animals, it's a way to express anger, and it's a way to punish, which may result in death. The Animal Legal Defense Fund has been working hard to establish a legal precedent for the link between animal cruelty and domestic violence. Many of their cases have been successful because the evidence is so damning.

Not quite domestic violence, but definitely connected, was the recent case of Russell Swigart. He became enraged at his female co-worker, broke into her house while she was out of town, killed her cats, and then texted her to describe the ways in which they had died at his hands. He went to jail and was recently up for parole. 15,000 signatures were gathered to help the victim of his crimes keep him in jail (http://www.aldf.org/article.php?id=1627).

I think in our culture, and many others, we are taught that there is something "natural" or inevitable about cruelty to animals. They are separated from humans by some arbitrary differences, so we don't have to follow the same ideas about preserving life. Not only do we eat them for the pleasure of their taste on a regular basis, but we smack them around when they annoy us, we abandon them to starvation, disease or danger, we use them for our benefit and then toss them away, our children are given BB guns to go out and amuse themselves by shooting at anything that moves, our big manly men (and Sarah Palin) go out and prove themselves by blasting away anything that moves with automatic rifles...the list kind of never ends. We aren't taught to value their lives like we're supposed (at least legally) to value human life. Some people even believe it's better for people to get out their frustrations through violence to animals because at least it keeps them from hurting other people. But that's not the way it works. Cruelty to animals is almost always a precursor to violence against people, if not a direct method of terrorizing the intended human victim (as in the case of this West Virginia man in March of 2011: http://www.wtov9.com/news/27148515/detail.html).

Full disclosure, I saw a dead cat in the street on my way home from work, which always spins my mind out to a really sad and frustrated place. Someone let that cat live outside in a busy neighborhood, someone hit that cat with their car and kept driving, someone else ran over its inert body in the street, and everyone else let its remains sit in the middle of the road for the rest of the day. I myself could not bring myself to go out and bury it, mostly because it will require me crying on the side of a busy street for about an hour. These characteristics of empathy for animals that I have are considered ridiculous and impractical by most people. It is maybe too inconvenient and overwhelming to let oneself think about the suffering of other lives - one can barely let oneself think about the experiences of people who have different skin tones or cultural practices, let alone all the billions of non-human creatures out there.

Throwing Wolves to the Wolves

Oregon's House Committee on Agriculture and Natural Resources heard testimony on March 30 by the Oregon Cattlemen Association that 5 new bills should be passed concerning approximately 24 wolves that live in the state. Most of the bills are to basically to make it legal to kill all the wolves, any wolves anyone ever sees, at any time, with any weapon.

Details:

Bill #1 & #2: Ranchers would be compensated for livestock killed by wolves by either the state Board of Agriculture or the Oregon Fish and Wildlife Commission.

Note: Organizations such as Defenders of Wildlife have been offering compensation for livestock proven to be killed by wolves since 1987. One detail of these bills is that ranchers want to be able to get the compensation without having to prove the dead animal in question was killed by a wolf. This is suspicious.

Bill #3: Wolves can be killed by ranchers or other people when they attack livestock or people.
Bill #4: Wolves can be killed by anyone for any reason.
Bill #5: Wolf population must be reduced to four breeding pairs.

Note: This is a most likely unsustainable number of breeding pairs. That makes this a bill for the extinction of wolves in Oregon.

Long story short (and fear and extermination of wolves is a long, long story), people who choose to live or work in the dwindling wild lands of this continent are frightened of the dark. They don't want to have to have adult supervision for their children at all times and they don't want to have to pay someone to watch over their cows and sheep all night. Despite the fact that many advancements have been made in inexpensive ways to deter wolves from preying on livestock, the easiest thing still looks like shooting at anything that moves. Education about co-existing with wolves and other "inconvenient" parts of natural ecology hasn't effectively come to these sunburned (how do you get sunburned in Oregon? somehow it happens) ranchers in white cowboy hats.

The world as we know it won't survive many more of these "traditional" solutions to humanity's desire to over-consume. We really can't keep clear-cutting, burning, exterminating, and sport-hunting our natural world away. Something has to stop us.

Hawaiian Water Rights

when america forcibly took over hawaii, it set in motion a whole slew of environmental and social disasters that are continuing to this day. the native hawaiian people were completely disenfranchised, and corporate interests took over the islands' resources. sugar plantations grabbed whatever they wanted, free of charge. water was diverted for use by plantations, then, later, when big plantations gave way to tourism, that water was owned by the corporate "water company" and sold back to the public at the company's discretion. hawaiians have been fighting to regain public water for years.

Restoring Stream Flow in Hawaii