Recommended: Sherpa

Tremendous documentary, now on the Discovery Channel. (One aspect I emphatically do not recommend are the subtitles. Why anyone would place small white subtitles with no box behind them over a snowy, icy landscape is beyond me.)

Quotes and photo of the day - monster

“‘Although this animal is huge I was not that surprised it existed’, Mr Lightsey said. ‘We have come across lots over the last 20 years that have been only a little smaller. But what really drew our attention to this animal was the fact that it seems to have been feasting on the cattle on my farm, because mutilated body parts were found in the water. It was a monster which needed to be removed’.” [Source]

“‘A big alligator nonetheless, but they are not going to have an official measurement because it's not going to beat the record’, Tony Young, spokesman for the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission, said in a phone interview.” [Source]

And here’s an alligator at the Merritt Island Wildlife “Refuge,”* presumably thinking, “No, I’m not a rock, you idiot leaning over the water and extending your appendages. Go get your glasses.”

* I don’t think any of us would consider a place where people can suddenly hunt us for sport to be a refuge.

The creepiest ad

The advertisements featured in the 2004 mockumentary C.S.A.: The Confederate States of America, an alternate history in which the Confederacy has won the US Civil War, are among the movie’s most striking elements:







They hit home through the familiarity of their form and their resemblance to real commercials today (as the first video above notes, some are based on real twentieth-century brands; the reference of the last should be obvious).

For those who know the reality of dairy and meat production, the new Freschetta Pizza ad evokes a somewhat similar dystopian sensation. Meet Tilly Mae:



Commercials like this seem to be reviving tropes - like the plantation “family” and the “happy darky” - developed in the eras of slavery and Jim Crow. This seems particularly to be the case, for some reason, when they feature cows and chickens.

COWSPIRACY

Now on Netflix:

Quote of the day: state-backed censors

“Protecting the private interests of a powerful industry, which produces the public’s food supply, against public scrutiny is not a legitimate government interest.” – Judge B. Lynn Winmill, striking down Idaho’s unconstitutional ag gag law

Hooray! The first domino to fall. You can read the whole decision at the link here. It’s a lesson in the First and Fourteenth Amendments.

Congratulations and thanks to the ALDF and all the other plaintiffs.

Interlude – the tenderness of patient minds

Wilfred Owen:

Anthem for Doomed Youth

What passing-bells for these who die as cattle?
Only the monstrous anger of the guns.
Only the stuttering rifles’ rapid rattle
Can patter out their hasty orisons.
No mockeries now for them; no prayers nor bells,
Nor any voice of mourning save the choirs, -
The shrill, demented choirs of wailing shells;
And bugles calling for them from sad shires.

What candles may be held to speed them all?
Not in the hands of boys, but in their eyes
Shall shine the holy glimmers of goodbyes.
The pallor of girls’ brows shall be their pall;
Their flowers the tenderness of patient minds,
And each slow dusk a drawing down of blinds.

I’m still reading Pat Barker’s beautiful Regeneration, drawing it out slowly. I’ve just read the scene in which Barker depicts Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon in Owen’s room at Craiglockhart discussing and revising what would become “Anthem for Doomed Youth.”

As an animal liberationist surrounded by the horrors of industrialized animal exploitation, I find the first line more rather than less poignant.

Quote of the day

“‘You gotta quit naming them cows, Renee. You don’t name them things you eat’. I’m like, well, we ain’t gonna eat ‘em.”

– Renee Sonnen, co-founder of Rowdy Girl Sanctuary in Texas


ABC News Videos | ABC Entertainment News

Story here.

“If you see something, say something…to a government agency and we’ll put you in jail”

In other threats-to-free-speech news, Wyoming’s new environmental/ag gag law:

[T]he new law makes it a crime to gather data about the condition of the environment across most of the state if you plan to share that data with the state or federal government.

…

The Clean Water Act and other federal environmental laws recognize that government officials lack the resources and sometimes the political will to address every environmental problem. Ordinary citizens therefore play an integral role in carrying out these laws. The statutes authorize citizens to bring lawsuits against polluters and recalcitrant government agencies, and citizen scientists have long played an important role in gathering information to support better regulations.

The Wyoming law transforms a good Samaritan who volunteers her time to monitor our shared environment into a criminal. Idaho and Utah, as well as other states, have also enacted laws designed to conceal information that could damage their agricultural industries—laws currently being challenged in federal court. But Wyoming is the first state to enact a law so expansive that it criminalizes taking a picture on public land.

The new law is of breathtaking scope. It makes it a crime to “collect resource data” from any “open land,” meaning any land outside of a city or town, whether it’s federal, state, or privately owned. The statute defines the word collect as any method to “preserve information in any form,” including taking a “photograph” so long as the person gathering that information intends to submit it to a federal or state agency. In other words, if you discover an environmental disaster in Wyoming, even one that poses an imminent threat to public health, you’re obliged, according to this law, to keep it to yourself.

Anyone with a passing familiarity with our Constitution will recognize that the Wyoming law is unconstitutional. It runs afoul of the supremacy clause because it interferes with the purposes of federal environmental statutes by making it impossible for citizens to collect the information necessary to bring an enforcement lawsuit. The Wyoming law also violates the First Amendment’s guarantee of free speech because it singles out speech about natural resources for burdensome regulation and makes it a crime to engage in a variety of expressive and artistic activities. And finally, it specifically criminalizes public engagement with federal and state agencies and therefore violates another right guaranteed by the First Amendment: the right to petition the government.

By enacting this law, the Wyoming legislature has expressed its disdain for the freedoms protected by the First Amendment and the environmental protections enshrined in federal statutes. Today, environmentally conscious citizens face a stark choice: They can abandon efforts to protect the lands they love or face potential criminal charges. [links removed]

Another take.

Cowspiracy directors Kip Anderson and Keegan Kuhn on Democracy Now!

“[N]o matter what issue you care about, whether it’s ocean dead zones, species extinction, habitat destruction, rain forest [destruction], literally the list goes on and on, animal agriculture is at the forefront of the issue. Why aren’t these organizations talking about it?” - Keegan Kuhn

Read or watch the interview here, or watch below:



You can watch Cowspiracy online for a small donation at the film site. I haven’t yet, but plan to soon.

Would you eat them?

A hypothetical* question for carnists: Were hybrid dogpigs or catcows to be created, would you eat them? Why or why not?

* And rhetorical, both because I’m closing comments and because I hope people give some thought to their reasons.

The far right, the government, the media, the ranchers, and the environmentalists: some historical and philosophical context

This week, Rachel Maddow featured two related segments about radical rightwing movements in the US and the responses of the government and the media to these movements. On Tuesday, Maddow asked why the government hasn’t been more focused on violent, terrorist white supremacist groups and has been largely unwilling even to recognize the far right as a political movement.*





“Why,” she asks, “are we so willing to not be afraid of the threat of rightwing extremism in this country?” I’m pleased that Maddow’s calling attention to this, but somewhat surprised that she’s at all puzzled. It’s not that governments have done nothing historically to address these groups and their terrorism. But politics, ideology, racism, misogyny, and speciesism have always determined the direction of the government’s attention and their treatment of different groups, to the extent that they’ve often ignored obvious indications of conspiracies and terrorist plans on the right while obsessing over nonexistent threats from leftwing or minority activists.

Will Potter, in Green Is the New Red and on his blog of that name, has focused on this in detail; I’ve described various episodes in the history of harassment of leftwing academics and others here. In fact, successive US administrations (including Obama’s) have welcomed and supported movements of the far right that refuse to recognize and even seek to overthrow the democratically elected government – as long as it’s a leftwing government in Venezuela, Honduras, Haiti,… It’s really not much of a puzzle.

Last night, Maddow talked about rightwing media coverage of the government standoff with Nevada rancher Cliven Bundy, arguing that the story is being hyped and that the reports could contribute to an escalation of violence.





Meanwhile, some environmentalists seem to believe that the ones to blame in this situation are…the cows, who deserve to be disparaged and threatened with (more) violence.

What’s missing in all of this is some historical context, both in terms of the involvement of ranchers in politics and in terms of the moral failings of some environmentalist philosophies. So, for those who want a better understanding of the issues involved, I have two reading suggestions. First, David A. Nibert’s 2013 Animal Oppression and Human Violence: Domesecration, Capitalism, and Global Conflict:



Second, the chapters “License to Kill: An Ecofeminist Critique of Hunters’ Discourse” by Marti Kheel and “Beyond Just-So Stories: Narrative, Animals, and Ethics” by Linda Vance in Animals & Women.

*Unfortunately, Maddow considers the problem from an entirely US-centric perspective.

Move along, nothing to hear here.

Ecorazzi reports:

A lot of “strange noises” were coming from the Sunshine Dairy Farm in Newbury, Massachusetts, earlier this week, causing some alarm among nearby residents. Concerned phone calls came into the police department between midnight and 7AM reporting “inhuman” sounds, but callers were told not to worry – they were just the moans from mourning cows who recently had their baby calves taken away from them.

Newbury police Sgt. Patty Fisher said that it’s the annual separation of cows and calves, and the cries and moans are all part of the process. “It happens every year at the same time,” she said.

The concerned phone calls over the sounds prompted Sgt. Fisher to post a message on the police station’s Facebook page:

“Residents in the area of Sunshine Dairy Farm may notice loud noises coming from the dairy cows at all hours of the day and night. We’ve been informed that the cows are not in distress and that the noises are a normal part of farming practices.”

Nothing to say here, either - comments on the Newburyport News article are now closed.

My heart has sunk to my feet

Via Free From Harm: “Saddest Slaughterhouse Footage Ever Shows No Blood or Slaughter”

And by “favorite,” she means…

Recently, I read a fairly informative article about the successful pushback against ag gag:

...According to Matthew Dominguez, a policy expert at the Humane Society of the United States, six states have passed some variety of ag-gag law since Kansas became the first in 1990. If supporters of the movement had their way, that total would have more than doubled in 2013.

Instead, opponents of the restrictive law have had their most accomplished year to date. All of the year’s ag-gag proposals were withdrawn, vetoed or stalled.

Meanwhile, the ag-gag movement was soaked with a wave of negative publicity, including editorials in The New York Times and the Los Angeles Times as well as a biting segment on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart and countless blog posts....

Noting that it quotes Emily Meredith, spokesperson for the Animal Agriculture Alliance, I thought I’d take another look at their Twitter feed.

Meredith was on a visit with the Ringling Brothers circus, spending a little time with some captive animals used for entertainment. (Because if the representative of an organization responsible for the oppression, exploitation, and killing of billions of other animals is going to see elephants, she’s not going to experience them on film or in the wild or in a sanctuary or in some other nonexploitative, respectful setting. She’s going to the circus. Where else?)

So here she is posing with an elephant:

But it’s what came next that took my breath away:

“Who knows what a baby Elephant is called?...HINT: It’s the same as 1 of the Alliance’s favorite barnyard animals.”

One of their favorite animals. Let’s review.

Sin vergüenza.