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 All of the year’s ag-gag proposals were withdrawn, vetoed or stalled.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.

Superstition ivory

Thousands of elephants killed for creepy religious gewgaws.

[via Tim Zimmermann]

"Living in Alien Worlds," moderated by Carl Zimmer, this Friday in New York

Animals experience their worlds in ways we cannot understand—with senses we have lost long ago or never had. They define their worlds with exquisite senses of smell and hearing, with vision that sees what we can't imagine, or with responses to chemical or electromagnetic properties that we are insensitive to. By these yard sticks, many animals are far smarter than we are.

“Living in Alien Worlds” will be a panel discussion this Friday (April 13th) evening at Hunter College West in Manhattan, organized by Thinking Animals and moderated by Carl Zimmer.

I’m sad I can’t make it to New York for the event, but I hope they record it and make it available online! For the fortunate people in the area who can attend, it seems tickets are $25 ($35 for the reception to follow). Probably best to reserve online as soon as possible in case they sell out.

This looks like a great series of talks. I wish I’d known about them sooner. The last one apparently featured Marc Bekoff, whose The Emotional Lives of Animals I just read.



(I’ll probably have more to say about it in the near future.)

And this panel includes Katy Payne, interviewed in this piece:



Speaking of books, the topic of this discussion brings to mind Jacob von Uexküll’s A Foray into the Worlds of Animals and Humans, which I’ve been debating buying for what seems like forever.



If anyone’s read it, let me know what you think.

Oh, and an elephant video: Shirley and Jenny

This is from 2008, but someone sent it to me just recently and it's moving and relevant to what I've been writing about.



They're at the Elephant Sanctuary in Tennessee.

Fear of the Animal Planet, Jason Hribal

…Topsy had no choice but to continue to resist. Her final act was charging after a group of Italian construction workers. A week later, several ‘very matter-of-fact electricians from the Edison Company’ arrived at the park and began setting up for the execution...On the afternoon of January 4th, Mr. Edison’s executioners attached electrodes to the elephant’s feet. At 2:45 pm, they flipped the switch. ‘There was a bit of smoke for an instant’, a New York Times reporter noted. ‘Topsy raised her trunk as if to protest, then shook, bent to her knees, fell, and rolled over on her right side motionless’. Two minutes later, she was declared dead. (43)

This is a radical book. It should make most readers, if they can get past the fact that the cover quotation is from the president of PETA, see things in a radically new way. By no means is this to say it’s a perfect book. The criticisms in the Amazon ratings are largely accurate: It needed (much better) proofreading and editorial guidance. Far more importantly, neither the fascinating preface by Jeffrey St. Clair ("Let Us Now Praise Infamous Animals") about the history of animal court trials nor the text itself contains any footnotes at all. You could say that it’s a polemical work, a pamphlet of sorts, so strict academic standards don’t apply, but such a work is far more effective when well and carefully documented. Even the most skeletal standards of scholarship require quotations to be sourced. (Disappointingly, it doesn’t contain any photos, either.)

Nevertheless, Hribal’s sad account of animal resistance is compelling. It tells the stories of animals – elephants, primates, and sea mammals - and their acts of, I’m convinced, defiance and resistance. Its approach poses problems for those visions of animal welfare or cross-species understanding that present nonhuman animals as mute or passive objects. (It doesn’t seem strange to speak of these as patronizing after reading the book.) It speaks to epistemic injustice, especially in the all-too-brief sections on proposed explanations for the animals’ angry, willful, and often ingenious actions. It speaks to moral progress.

It’s a seditious history from below, in the spirit of the histories of oppressed human groups (really - read that link); indeed, Hribal often talks about the animals as workers and discusses their acts in the same terms as we talk about labor struggles. This is a key element: most of us can recognize individual animals’ acts against specific people as something more than instinctual, but this book leads us to consider them in terms of (sometimes effective) patterns of resistance to systemic violence and exploitation.

Some of the stories I’d heard on the news or read about, but seeing them from a vastly different perspective elicited a different emotional reaction. In some cases, I found myself cheering them on in their acts of escape, sabotage, and even violence.