From the Mailbag

Dr Burgess-Jackson

Don't know where you're at in Texas, but around here (60 miles as the crow flies NW of Chicago), if Danny down the road lets his chickens run free [see here], the coyotes get them.

I also like listening to "Calling All Pets" on NPR, which is a local Madison production. The doggie doctor once told a viewer who described her horses as having a "wild" look, "That's FEAR! Wild horses have bred into them fear of predators. If they are not constantly alert and watching, they die!"

I sum it all up as, "Mother nature is a bitch!"

Frank Borger

Zebras

This post has nothing to do with animal ethics, but I thought you'd enjoy a site devoted to zebras, which are cool-looking animals.

From Today's New York Times

Catching Nell
By VERLYN KLINKENBORG

The other night, just before dusk, I walked across the pasture with a bucket of grain. Two dozen chickens followed me in a mob. Some came running toward me, wings flapping, as if with enough room they might actually take off. I led them into their pen, scattered the grain and closed the gate. Then I drove the ducks and the geese into their yard. "Drove" is too strong a word. I hinted at the direction I wanted them to go, and they went. I opened another gate and led the horses down to the barnyard. When they had been fed, I stepped into the pigpen. The gilt came over for a rubdown, and the barrow flopped down beside her. They lay back to back, eyes closed, pale pink bellies available for scratching.

Some evenings I notice the haze that settles in the valley nearby or the big orange moon coming up over the trees. But that night I noticed how we all fit together, the animals and the humans. The piglets arrive pretty wild. Baby chicks clatter about the brooder house in fear. But time passes, and they all settle down. They seem to tame themselves somehow.

That night I suddenly realized all the ways that they've tamed me. I never rush the ducks. It only confuses them. I never ask too much when herding chickens. The horses expect a certain presence from me, which changes with every situation. The pigs want joy and vigorous scratching.

None of the animals seem to want me to be other than human. But they want me to be a human who knows how the world looks to them and respects it.

All of our animals except one were raised among humans from birth. That one is Nell, the mustang. We bought her not far from our farm here in upstate New York, but she was adopted as a weanling in Nevada—part of the federal adoption program for wild horses.

I've seen other mustangs captured, so I have a good idea what it was like for her. She's 17 now and has lived the last decade with us. She's been trained, trailered, ridden and cared for. And yet it's always a tossup whether she'll let me catch her.

Our animals show their trust in us every day. But sometimes Nell trusts us, and sometimes she doesn't. The freeze brand on her neck isn't the only sign of that long-ago capture. All the rest of us, animal and human, live together in a single place. Nell lives in her own. She somehow reserves the right to withhold herself, to stand apart.

The chickens grow placid, the pigs learn to like us, and the other horses go on with their lives. And yet the most meaningful moments, after all these years, are when Nell crosses over from her world to ours. She walks right up, as if to ask where I've been, and settles her head in my arms. I feel the power of the choice she has made every time she makes it.

Richard A. Posner on Ronald Dworkin

I confess my error in inferring that Dworkin doesn’t like dogs. As a cat person, I am disappointed. I hope I will be forgiven for having thought him distinctly feline.

(Richard A. Posner, “Dworkin, Polemics, and the Clinton Impeachment Controversy,” Northwestern University Law Review 94 [2000]: 1023-47, at 1047 [footnote omitted])

The Beaver

Canadians almost extinguished the beaver. See here.

Peter Singer

Here is Peter Singer's 1985 essay "The Animal Liberation Movement."

Fish

Here is a BBC story about the intelligence of fish. Is intelligence morally relevant? If it is, then there are moral distinctions to be made among humans, some of whom are more intelligent than others. Humans value intelligence, which is understandable, since we have a lot of it; but we should not merely assume that it's linked to moral status. Unintelligent beings can suffer. Isn't that the main morally relevant feature of a being?

Twenty Years Ago

25 August 1984

Professor Peter Singer
Department of Philosophy
Monash University
Australia

Dear Professor Singer:

I am an attorney and a graduate student in philosophy at the University of Arizona, and I want to thank you for inspiring me so with your books Animal Liberation, Practical Ethics, and The Expanding Circle. Your books have provided me with excellent teaching material in my Introduction to Philosophy courses (primarily on animal rights and famine relief), and I was so persuaded by your arguments in Animal Liberation that I became a vegetarian even before I had completed the book (three and a half years ago). Unlike most other writers on ethics, your arguments are clear, succinct, and persuasive; we would all do well, in my opinion, to emulate your style. Personally, I try to model my own writing after yours.

I understand that you were a visiting professor at the University of Colorado this past semester (Spring 1984). Although I did not get a chance to meet you then, I look forward to meeting you one day and discussing ethical issues. In the meantime, keep up the good work, and thank you for the inspiration. I will be watching for future books and articles from you.

Cordially,

Keith Burgess-Jackson
7424 East Speedway Boulevard
Apartment G-126
Tucson, Arizona 85710
United States of America

From the Mailbag

Hi!

As you know, I’ve been compiling a list of animal rights/environmental bloggers who will be able to put out occasional postings related to campaigns that we are running.

1. I have a favour to ask. I need to find more AR blogs! Could you please give my email address to any bloggers who you know that might be interested, or even post a blog entry calling for people to contact me? It is likely that many of your readers run their own blogs that might be relevant.

2. When I send out an alert, would you prefer to receive all of the information in an email, or would it be better if I set up an RSS feed that you could syndicate?

Thanks!

Chris Anderson
Campaigns Officer - Animal Aid
The Old Chapel, Tonbridge, Kent, TN9 1AW

Meat-Eating Is Bad for Humans

Even if you care only about humans, you should be a vegetarian. See here. (Thanks to Khursh Mian Acevedo for the link.)

Animal Rights

I'm not sure whether I linked to this essay by Roger Scruton. If I did, I apologize for linking to it twice.

Nancy E. Snow on Compassion for Animals

My thesis is that it can be, and frequently is, rational for humans to feel compassion for nonhuman animals. Compassion for animals can be explained by examining several modes of connection between humans and other animals. The connections encompass modes of identification between humans and other animals, for example: imaginative reconstructions of their subjective experiences, beliefs about humans and other animals, including beliefs about similarities between species, other emotions toward animals, such as kinship feelings, and outlooks or ways of life that reflect value judgments about and attitudes toward nonhuman animals. To feel compassion for animals is to be connected with them in an especially complex way.

(Nancy E. Snow, “Compassion for Animals,” Between the Species [spring 1993]: 61-6, at 61)

The Asiatic Black Bear

Here is a site that contains information about the Asiatic black bear, which the Chinese farm and use for various purposes.

Cat Restaurants

It was bound to happen: cats in restaurants. See here.

The Elephant Sanctuary

Did you know that there is an elephant sanctuary in, of all places, Tennessee? See here. I'm sure these good folks would appreciate donations.

From Today's New York Times

Save the Whales! Then What?
By ANDREW C. REVKIN

CAP DE BON DESIR, Quebec, Aug. 11—A few miles from this spit along the pink granite coast of the Gulf of St. Lawrence, there is a sheltered cove that has witnessed the full span of the human relationship with whales.

Nearly 500 years ago, fleets of Basque whalers, venturing ever farther from their home waters in Europe's Bay of Biscay, set up camp on the arc of gravelly beach. They had depleted domestic stocks of the right whale, a blubbery species that conveniently floats after it is killed, and found plenty of targets in the 900-foot-deep water just offshore.

They towed the harpooned giants into the shallows on the rising tide. When the water receded, they stripped fat from flesh, boiling it to extract precious lamp and cooking oil. The next high tide carried the carcasses back to sea.

Now the same cove is home to a different kind of fleet. Several times a day, fresh assortments of tourists slide into a dozen yellow and red kayaks and paddle away. Their quarry is also whales, but these visitors covet them alive, not dead. Small minkes and giant fin whales spout and feed amid ranks of puffing porpoises and seals.

But even as whales have faded as a resource and cemented their status as an environmental icon, with whale watching now a billion-dollar business, pressure is building to end the 18-year moratorium on commercial whaling.

A small group of countries, led by Japan, Norway and Iceland, says some stocks have recovered sufficiently that they can be both protected and eaten. They say the whales are essentially the marine equivalent of the majestic bison, which was slaughtered nearly to extinction, protected and now is being made into burgers.

It is hard to find a whale biologist who, in terms of numbers alone, disagrees with the contention that some whale stocks are, in theory, harvestable now.

Populations of whales like the 100-foot blue, the largest animal ever to inhabit the planet, remain profoundly depleted decades after intensive hunts ended. But experts say that for certain stocks of sperm, minke and other varieties, the 35-year-old slogan "Save the Whales" no longer applies. They are back.

A decade ago, the International Whaling Commission, created under a 1946 treaty to manage whale harvests, approved management plans with harvesting quotas for some of the more robust populations. A wide array of scientists advising the commission agreed the quotas would not endanger those species.

But most experts say there is a long way between a theoretically safe harvest limit and one that will work in practice. The commission remains divided on how to enact such a plan in a way that prevents cheating, with whaling and anti-whaling countries riven by passion, cultural differences and divergent interpretations of the same data.

Japan and its allies say the moratorium has been transformed by anti-whaling cultures from a strategy for restoring whales to harvestable numbers into an indefinite defense against whaling.

Last month, at the 56th annual meeting of the commission, in Sorrento, Italy, delegates approved a resolution calling for treaty parties to settle on a final management plan and a way to pay for it by their next meeting. Still, for many scientists and most environmental campaigners, there is a "wall of reluctance" to ending the moratorium, said Véronik de la Chenelière, a biologist at the Group for Research and Education on Marine Mammals in Tadoussac, a whale watching and research hub 12 miles west of this ancient whaling outpost.

Many experts still insist it is premature to resume big-scale hunts, given the lack of information on the dynamics of many whale populations and given how rife whaling has been in the past with false reporting and greed. The cultural and historic rifts over whales are even more intense than the scientific and regulatory debate.

Since 1971, when "Songs of the Humpback Whale" became a hit album and groups like Greenpeace were filming factory-scale whaling up close, western countries have grown to revere the animals as a sort of benevolent alien. The whale songs were even sent out of the solar system on the Voyager spacecraft.

But in countries like Japan, where the only meat in school lunches after World War II was fried whale and parboiled blubber, the right to go whaling has become an issue of national pride.

In Norway, which invented industrial-scale whaling a century ago, Halvard P. Johansen, the deputy director general of the fisheries ministry, said reverence for whales and revulsion to whaling could well be a result of the detachment of modern societies from the sources of other meats.

"I grew up on a small farm in the northern part of Norway," Mr. Johansen said. "In the spring we were playing with the lambs, which by any definition are cute animals, but nobody did mind eating them in the fall. That was, and still is, part of life."

Now, he said, "Most people see meat only wrapped in plastic."

Many biologists and activists, however, say whales are a special case.

"A lot of people would like to think of whales as philosopher-poets swimming around the oceans thinking deep thoughts, and that is not true," said Dr. Roger Payne, one of the biologists who first studied the mating songs of humpbacks. "But for some reason, people are deeply, deeply impressed by these animals. It may be their size, and grace has something to do with it. But there really is an air of mystery about them."

The human fascination with whales has led to a new counterweight to the pro-whaling forces—the hundreds of companies running whale-watching operations in 87 countries, including those seeking an end to the ban on commercial hunting.

Whale watching from boats began off San Diego in 1955, with the gray whales migrating offshore drawing 10,000 viewers in that first year. Nearly 50 years later, the activity draws nearly 10 million people annually.

Starting last year, the companies involved began showing up at the meetings of the whaling commission, trying to make the case that whales are worth more alive than dead, and that their use of live whales should have just as much consideration in managing populations as the killing of the animals for food or other products.

Even so, every year it is clearer that the 1986 moratorium will not prevent rising numbers of whales from being hunted and eaten. Growing numbers of scientists say the only way to see this resumed whaling happen in a controlled way is for anti-whaling countries and groups to concede that the blanket ban must be replaced by a stock-by-stock management plan.

Whaling has already been steadily increasing as pro-whaling countries have used clauses in the treaty, which critics call loopholes, to keep hunting.

Norway never stopped commercially hunting certain stocks of minke whales, exercising a right in the treaty to object to a moratorium. The country is planning to expand its harvest.

Japan and Iceland are now killing minkes and some other varieties in growing numbers under a treaty clause allowing lethal hunts for research, and allowing the resulting meat to be sold.

Critics say the research, which is not reviewed by peers, is a sham, although, as Japanese officials are quick to point out, the commission is using the resulting data.

Whaling countries want to expand their catches from hundreds a year to several thousand in all, mainly pursuing the minke, a small species, about the size and length of two Hummers, that is thought to number one million or two million worldwide.

Japan has recruited a lengthening list of small island nations, many without whaling traditions, to join the commission. Many end up receiving development assistance from Japan. Almost all the newcomers have sided with it on votes, although Japanese officials say there is no quid pro quo.

The total count of commission members is 57 countries, and the number of pro-whaling votes has gone to 21 in 2003, from 9 in 2000, according to environmental groups.

At the July meeting, Japan threatened to pull out of the commission altogether in 2006 if it did not enact the new management plan and end the moratorium.

During the meeting, Yoshimasa Hayashi, a member of Japanese Parliament from the ruling party, crystallized the Japanese position in an interview with the BBC. "In Japan we have pet dogs," he said. "But we don't tell the Koreans to stop eating dogs. Nor should people tell us to stop eating whales."

Environmental and animal welfare groups, facing the rise in whale numbers, the expanding hunt in the name of research and erosion of the whaling commission's support for the moratorium, have split into two camps.

Some agree that commercial whaling is possible to consider now but only with ironclad tracking and enforcement methods that some whaling countries oppose.

Richard Mott, vice president for international policy of the World Wildlife Fund, said whales are more akin to elephants or mahogany than to fish or other marine resources—slow to reproduce, extremely valuable and harvested by anyone with access to the species habitat. A shutdown of a global market can help restore such stocks, he said, but added that when markets in these kinds of commodities are reinstituted, history tends to repeat itself.

Animal welfare groups argue that any whaling, managed or not, is inherently cruel. They say it is impossible to hunt semi-submerged mammals by shooting explosive harpoons from heaving ship decks without causing some to die slow, agonizing deaths.

Pro-whaling countries and their supporters attack both sets of critics, saying proposed hunting levels are so conservative that stocks could not be depleted again. They say the unbridled hunts of old, conducted by powerful countries seeking valuable oils, would never be repeated by a few countries seeking a source of meat.

They add that the hunting methods are far more lethal and humane than most of the big-game hunting that takes place in many anti-whaling countries. Japanese officials contend that, overall, wild-killed whales have a far better life, and death, than most livestock or poultry.

Rollie Schmitten, the top American government official on the whaling commission, said there has been "more progress in the last year than the last 10 years" on ways to prevent illegal harvests. He said Japan and the other pro-whaling nations have agreed to a plan for putting independent observers on whaling vessels and are close to agreeing on a system for using DNA tests of whale meat in markets to make sure it came from animals killed by the rules.

Other technological innovations can help, he and other experts said. Ships can be equipped with position-indicating beacons that reveal if they are straying from permitted waters, just as a felon on probation can be monitored with an ankle bracelet.

Still, Mr. Schmitten said, big hurdles remain to ending the moratorium. In return, he said, loopholes in the treaty, like the lack of restrictions on whaling that is labeled scientific research, must be eliminated.

Many whale biologists, while agreeing that some stocks of some species are thriving, still oppose an end to the moratorium, saying the history of whaling contains too many incidents of unrecorded kills, falsely labeled meat and questionable science.

"A few years ago, I would have said I don't see the problem, but now I see reason for being cautious," Ms. de la Chenelière in Quebec said. "There is a lot of pressure that rises when something becomes a big industry. We've seen it again and again with fish stocks. Human beings have historically shown they can't follow rules and stick to what is reasonable."

In the end, it is still perceptions that most deeply divide those in the whaling debate.

Off the coast near Cap de Bon Desir, whale watchers from Paris and Toulouse, France, marveled as several fin whales surfaced, each nearly three times the length of a kayak.

Each animal spouted explosively five or six times, like some hybrid of submarine and steam engine, before diving to feed. A cheer echoed over the sea.

In a new book promoting the Japanese point of view on whales, published by The Japan Times, a section on the "tastiest of all whales" describes the gustatory merits and drawbacks of various species.

The tastiest? The fin.

Plastic Surgery for Animals

Here is a BBC story about plastic (i.e., cosmetic) surgery for animals. What do you think? (Thanks to Dan Gifford for the link.)

Confusions and Fallacies About Animals, Part 18

A few years ago, I had a discussion with a friend (and fellow philosopher) about comparative wrongdoing. I asked him whether a person who eats only fish is doing less wrong than someone who eats fish and other animals. It seems obvious to me that these sorts of comparative moral judgments make sense, but he resisted. I gave an analogy. Imagine two men, I said. One rapes twenty-four women. The other rapes one woman. Isn’t the first man worse, morally speaking? Doesn’t he do more wrong than the second?

My friend finally—reluctantly—conceded the point. He said that the man who rapes only one woman does less wrong than the man who rapes twenty-four women, but he quickly added that that’s not good enough. He shouldn’t rape any women! We agree that nobody should rape. I just wanted him to admit that fewer rapes are better, morally speaking. Why, then, is it not better to eat only fish than to eat fish and other animals? I think my friend thought that by admitting this, he would be endorsing fish-eating. But he wouldn’t. Saying that A is morally worse than B isn’t to say (or imply) that B is morally acceptable.

Here’s the kicker. This same friend thinks it’s moral progress to get egg-laying hens a few more inches of cage space. But shouldn’t he resist this judgment just as strenuously as he resisted the judgment about the rapists? Shouldn’t he say that there shouldn’t be any hens in cages? Many of us think that PETA and other organizations are making things worse by agitating for more cage space for hens. PETA thinks this improves the lives of the hens, or at least makes them suffer less. Perhaps this is so, but what is the long-term effect of agitating for more cage space? Isn’t it to reinforce the idea that there is nothing intrinsically wrong with confining hens for the purpose of collecting their eggs?

Imagine working for improvements in the lives of slaves rather than for the abolition of slavery. That’s outrageous. Why don’t we say the same about improvements in the lives of factory-farmed animals or animals kept in laboratories? PETA might say that there is no inconsistency in working toward both goals. Is this correct? What evidence does PETA have that working for improvements in the lives of factory-farmed animals or animals kept in laboratories leads to abolition of those institutions? I’ve never seen such evidence. In fact, there’s reason to believe that working for improvements decreases the likelihood of abolition by reinforcing the idea that animals are resources for human consumption. People who care about animals must stop sending mixed messages. Don’t try to get more cage room for hens. Work to get hens out of cages.

Turkeys

Here is the website of a turkey farm. Here is the Humane Society page on turkey farms.

Koko

Mylan Engel, the talking human, sent this story about Koko, the talking gorilla.