A n i m a l W r i t
e s © sm
The official ANIMAL RIGHTS ONLINE newsletter
Publisher ~ EnglandGal@aol.com
Issue # 03/28/01
Editor ~ JJswans@aol.com
Journalists ~ Park StRanger@aol.com
~
MicheleARivera@aol.com
THE NINE ARTICLES IN THIS ISSUE ARE:
1 ~ The Escape by Laura Moretti
2 ~ Advertise in Animals' Agenda
3 ~ Duties to Nature: Animal Rights and Environmental
Ethics by Dr. Steven Best
4 ~ Resources For Activists
5 ~ Greenpeace Founder Dies in Crash
6 ~ Feline Purring Shown To Be Effective Vibrational
Energy Healer
7 ~ Subsidizing Greyhound Racing
8 ~ One By Name by WantNoMeat@aol.com
9 ~ Quote To Remember
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The Escape
by Laura Moretti - Animals' Agenda
The Golden Gate Bridge lived up to its reputation
the afternoon I needed to see it: a spectacular, majestic monument against the
sunlit horizon of the city skyline. It took my breath away. The harbor was
alive with boats, their white sails contrasting with the deep blue bay. I
strolled Fisherman's Wharf, and in particular, the famous Pier 39, with all of
its shops and restaurants.
There was the street fare, dancers and musicians, children on roller skates,
elderly couples just enjoying the view. Angel Island was in the near distance
and, on occasion, a jet airliner passed overhead.
I was envious to think that most people have such relaxing afternoons. Seems I'm always in front of the computer
(as I am writing this), keeping abreast of the news, writing my legislators,
and often forgetting the world out there is anything but the realm of
cyberspace.
It was refreshing to feel the salty air, to hear the bells of trolleys in the
railed streets. San Francisco, in a way, is little piece of New York City,
alive with the unusual.
I would treat myself to lunch in an outdoor restaurant overlooking the bay; I'd
go shopping later before taking the long crawl home, and consider the afternoon
a sorely needed, definitely-hit-the-spot experience. A minivacation, if you
will, from the everyday bombardment of animal exploitation and
activist alerts.
But I spent a good hour reading the posted menus on restaurant doors: crab,
lobster, sailfish, shrimp, and names defining other sea creatures I'd never
even heard of before. I was lucky to find an Italian restaurant on the Wharf
but its fare was mainly steak and veal, turning me off completely to whatever
pasta may have been buried in the fine print. I passed food vendors selling hot
dogs and ice cream. I passed the crab-boiling pots on the sidewalks, the
lobster steamers, the prawn crunchers. What a life: to eat anything you wanted
and not give a damn about how it died.
I heard the sea lions long before I saw them. Crowds had gathered at the west
side of Pier 39 to watch the cumbersome animals emerge from the sea onto docks
reserved especially for them. By now I was a bit sarcastic. When I read the sign that explained how the
seals had taken over the pier but were allowed to stay at the request of
tourists, I got snide about half-truths. Somewhere on that sign, I thought, the
battle it took activists to rescue the sea lions from government guns should
have at least been mentioned.
Humans are fascinated by animals. Carousels and posters and images on T-shirts,
stuffed animals, and statuettes, feeding pigeons and sea lions, buying books
and toys, puzzles and games, all filled with animals, real and imagined. And
yet so few of them have any inkling whatsoever that they're wading neck-deep in
animal exploitation and misery caused by their own hands.
Boy, did I need a vacation from The Escape.
I hadn't felt that alone in the world since I couldn't remember.
Back to my truck I went, longing for the computer screen and my fellow
comrades. San Francisco, enlightened? Hardly. I passed Safeway and hunger drove
me inside (so much for that quaint, romantic lunch on a sunny dock overlooking
the blue harbor and its sailboats). I bought an apple, a jar of green olives,
some sourdough bread, and sun-dried tomatoes. I'd eat in the truck on my way
home, and say goodbye to an other wise waste of a day.
At the counter, the cashier asked me if I was a vegetarian. She said she
noticed I didn't have any meat in my stash, and was just curious; it was
something she often noticed.
"I'm a vegetarian, too," she said after I nodded. "I can't
believe what we do to animals. When people ask me where they can find the meat
section, I point them to the back and tell them the morgue is thataway."
I couldn't speak for a moment. I just stared at her and bit my lip.
"Are you all right?" she asked, somewhat puzzled.
I smiled at her. "I am now."
We're out there, aren't we, in little pockets here and there, in the middle of
it all, doing our own work, some of us in quieter ways? That's why I'd come to
San Francisco: for the reminder.
Keep fighting the good fight.
“Reprinted with permission from The Animals’ Agenda, P.O. Box 25881,
Baltimore, MD 21224; (410) 675-4566; www.animalsagenda.org.”
Email: office@animalsagenda.org
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Advertise in Animals' Agenda
Spaces
available for advertising your organization or upcoming event in the May / June
2001 issue of The Animals' Agenda, The World's PREMIER Animal Rights Magazine.
Deadline for submitting artwork is April 9th, 2001.
A non-profit discount is given to all companies / organizations that
qualify. All first-time advertisers will receive an additional 15%
discount for the May/June issue.
Please contact Shannon Bowman for a free media kit and additional information
301-865-9575 or by email at shannon@animalsagenda.org
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Duties to Nature:
Animal Rights and Environmental Ethics
by Dr. Steven Best - sbest1@elp.rr.com
"The great fault of all ethics
hitherto," argued scientist and humanitarian Albert Schweitzer, "has
been that they believed themselves to have to deal only with the relationships
of man to man." Happily, this tragic and myopic outlook which has shaped
so much of Western history is changing decisively today. Human culture is in
the midst of a paradigm shift from a human-centered (anthropomorphic) to a
life-centered (biocentric) outlook that dethrones "Man" from his self-assigned
Kingdom and recognizes the
inherent value of all living beings. Humanity is broadening the boundaries of
the moral community such that more and more people are recognizing that
nonhuman animals too have rights and that the earth is more than just a
warehouse of materials for human consumption.
The crisis in the human relation to nature is blatantly manifest in a world of
global warming, rainforest destruction, species extinction, overpopulation,
desertification, pollution, resource scarcity, and the rise of disease. At the
root of the human crisis and our spiritual malaise is our alienation from the
living world from which we emerged and a pathological Western worldview that
believes our mission is to dominate nature, lord over all life, and reduce
everything to mere resources for human use. In conjunction with the current
global capitalist system predicated on incessant growth, accumulation, and
resource extraction, this worldview is directly responsible for the numbing
spectacle of ecocide currently unfolding on this planet.
Other hominids such as Neanderthal and Cro-Magnon have become extinct, and
nothing guarantees homo sapiens will not meet the same fate. Unless human
beings dramatically change their methods of energy production, consumption patterns,
and population rates, they will continue to devastate their planet and soon
find themselves living out a dystopian Mad Max or Waterworld scenario. But we
cannot heal ourselves until we heal our relation to the earth and our fellow
species. Thus, it is in our own interests to transform our violent and degraded
sensibilities, but, more profoundly, the court of ethical reasoning is bringing
forth solid arguments that other sentient beings too have rights and these
place direct obligations on us to respect their needs and interests.
While anthropocentrism has been the hegemonic heritage throughout Western
culture, there has always been an underground, counter-tradition, that argued
sympathy and respect for other living beings and the natural world. Certainly,
the main Eastern religions -- Jainism, Buddhism, Taoism, and Hinduism --
professed an ethic of ahimsa (non-violence) as their core teaching. But from
Pythagoras, Plato, and St. Francis of Assisi to Tolstoy, Darwin, and Einstein,
many of the great Western figures have challenged
standard ethical views about animals and nature.
The turning point for animal rights in contemporary times clearly was the
publication of philosopher Peter Singer's book Animal Liberation in 1975. Widely credited with starting the
present-day animal rights movement, Singer argued from utilitarian grounds that
all sentient animals should be protected from the multiple modes of suffering
human beings inflict on them. Part of the great power of Singer's book is
not only his forceful arguments to bring animals into the moral community, but
also his vivid and appalling descriptions of their suffering in hellholes like
commercial laboratories and factory farms. While Singer presents health
arguments that one should be a vegetarian, he mainly roots this conclusion in
ethical reasons relating to the obligations we have not to cause unnecessary
harm to animals, and in the fact that there is no nutrient in animal products
that cannot be attained in plant-based foods.
In the 1960s, social protest movements erupted throughout the United States and
the entire world. Along with the liberation movements of women, students,
people of color, colonial nations, and gays and lesbians, there emerged an
environmental movement that brought to public awareness the extent of
environmental degradation and the urgent need for change. As popular concerns
became translated into law, the 1970s became the environmental decade"
that passed important laws such as the Clean Air and Water Act.
But a debate soon erupted as to whether the mainstream environment movement
could accomplish the goal of protecting nature and achieving a sustainable
society. Could legal reform and technological fixes truly stop the assault on
nature waged by capitalism, or would a more radical approach be needed?
As activists and theorists debated the merits of a "shallow" vs.
"deep" ecology approach, with the latter calling not only for legal
and technological changes but also a revolution in our consciousness and
relationship to nature, the "greening of philosophy" was
underway. Environmental ethics, along with animal rights, became
considered legitimate, relevant, and important topics of philosophical
analysis. Consequently, numerous people were rediscovering the importance
of Aldo Leopold's work, especially his seminal essay "The Land Ethic"
from his book A Sand County Almanac (1949).
In "The Land Ethic," Leopold advocates an extension of human ethics
to include an environmental ethic that assesses human actions from the perspective
of whether or not they help sustain the natural world and biodiversity. From
this new table of value, human actions considered acceptable or even good --
such as building a new shopping center to promote economic growth and provide
jobs -- would have to be revaluated in terms of their impact of the
environment. Thus, Leopold says that "A thing is right when it tends to
preserve the integrity, stability, and of the biotic community; it is wrong
when it tends otherwise."
Leopold believes the human species will not survive unless it develops such an
ethic, and he is attempting to promote a new sense of connectedness to nature
that many premodern and nonWestern peoples possessed, but is conspicuously
absent throughout Western culture. Leopold makes the
profound observation that in the great human journey of moral evolution, it has
taken millennia to develop a "decent man-to-man ethic," as he wonders
how long it will take to develop a sound "man-to-land ethic."
Clearly, time is running out and the next stages in human moral evolution must
involve both animal rights and environmental ethics.
To grasp the connections between these two issues, to demonstrate how in eating
animals we are destroying the environment, one needs to read Jeremy Rifkin's
selection, "Cattle and the Global Environmental Crisis," from his
provocative book Beyond Beef: The Rise and Fall of the Cattle Culture (1992).
While many people are aware that animals are horribly abused by agribusiness
and that a meat-based diet is the principle contributor to heart disease,
cancer, strokes, diabetes, and other serious conditions, few understand that
raising animals for food is the primary cause of global environmental
destruction. As Rifkin describes, animal agriculture not only is a tremendous waste
of land, water, and energy resources, it also erodes the topsoil, releases
enormous quantities of waste into water systems, demands killing potential
"predators" of cattle and razing vast tracts of land to graze the
future burgers and beefsteaks, and creates ozone destroying gases.
Thus, as individuals, as a culture, as a species, we have momentous and
profound choices to make, choices that will greatly effect what kind of future
we and other species will have on this planet and, indeed, if we will have a
future at all. What we're beginning to learn now in this exciting adventure of
change and evolution is that at root of these decisions lie the kinds of food
choices we make, and the sensibilities that underlie them. We're learning
that the earth is not a cornucopia of inexhaustible resources that we can
exploit at will without grave consequences, that what we do to the animals and
the earth ultimately we do to ourselves, and that a meat-based diet is
unsustainable and hostile to life.
We need a new ethic to guide our relations to other species and to the land, an
ethic rooted in reverence for animals and respect for the earth and living
processes from which have come, an ethic that unavoidably demands a vegetarian
lifestyle. I invite you to join the growing legions of enlightened human beings
in this profound process of change.
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Resources for Activists
from - Cheryl Ross - cross@hsus.org
The
Humane Society of the United States is involved in a number of projects, and
produces materials that may interest you. We will be regularly updating you of
some of these. The following list refers mostly to issues concerning the
use of animals in education or research, but please feel free to contact us for
additional information on any topic.
1.
A new book by Dr. Jonathan Balcombe, titled "The Use of Animals in
Higher Education: Problems, Alternatives, and Recommendations," is
available in a printed version and on our web site:
http://www.hsus.org/programs/research/monograph.html
This book provides comprehensive coverage of the issue, including a detailed
critique of traditional animal-consumptive methods, a synthesis of the evidence
supporting humane alternatives, and recommendations for reform. Containing over
350 citations from the published literature, it will be a must-have resource
for those involved in life-science education, especially anyone wanting to
challenge the status quo on dissection and other harmful uses of animals in
education.
2. Our 44-page, illustrated booklet titled "42 Ways to Help
Animals in Laboratories," released in 1999, is available for $4.50 ($3
plus shipping and handling). The booklet guides the reader through helpful and
pro-active steps designed to help you help animals who are the unfortunate
subjects of laboratory use. We will send promotion cards for this booklet to
any student group who requests them for use at a tabling event.
3. The Humane Education Loan Program (formerly the Alternatives
Loan Program) which is located at: http://www.hsus.org/programs/research/animals_education.html
provides students and educators with up-to-date alternatives to classroom
animal dissection and live animal experimentation. The HELP inventory currently
contains over 75 items for loan.
4. The Animal Research Issues web page is located at: http://www.hsus.org/programs/research/.
Our web site carries information on Animal Research, Animal Testing, and Animal
Dissection in the classroom. It also includes, regularly updated news
briefs of current events.
5. One of The Humane Society of the United States' keystone projects is the
Pain and Distress Initiative. The initiative's objective is to work with
scientific experts, research institutions, oversight agencies, funding
institutions, and animal advocates to eliminate pain and distress in animal
research and testing by the year 2020. For more information please go to:
http://www.hsus.org/programs/research/pain_distress.html
6. Animal Channel is a HSUS web site that offers continuous news
reports on animal related issues and events. One can view Animal channel
at: http://www.hsus.org/channel
Cheryl Ross, Research Assistant
Animal Research Issues
The Humane Society of the United States
Phone #: 301-258-3042
Fax #: 301-258-7760
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Greenpeace Founder Dies in
Crash
from - rabbit@iinet.net.au
THE
Canadian founder of the environmental campaign group Greenpeace, David McTaggart,
was killed today [March 24, 2001] in a car crash near his home in Italy.
McTaggart's car was in a collision with another car carrying two people at
Castiglione del Lago, in the central region of Umbria, police said.
The driver of the other car, 71-year-old Dino Belli, died in hospital soon
after the crash. Belli's 74-year-old wife was in a critical condition in
Perugia hospital, doctors said.
McTaggart, 68, was traveling alone when the accident happened. He had lived in
Umbria for several years at a farm near the town of Paciano.
"We are all deeply shocked by this news. Greenpeace would not be what it
is today without his amazing force behind it," Greenpeace's interim
international executive director, Gerd Leipold, said in a statement issued in Amsterdam.
McTaggart co-founded Greenpeace in 1972 as a direct action organization,
initially to protest against French nuclear tests at Moruroa in the South
Pacific in 1972.
Pressure from the organization finally resulted in the atmospheric nuclear
tests being canceled.
In a statement, the group also described him as key to the campaign to stop
commercial whaling and the creation of the South Ocean Whale Sanctuary.
"His work to achieve lasting protection of Antarctica from commercial
exploitation of it's mineral wealth is perhaps one of his greatest
triumphs," the group said.
"Greenpeace would be unthinkable without his force of personality. He
built up the organization into the international pressure group it is today,
opening offices in the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, when no one
believed it possible," added Leipold.
"Not only is he a great loss to Greenpeace, but also to the environmental
movement worldwide."
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Feline Purring Shown To Be
Effective Vibrational Energy Healer
by David Harrison, Environment Correspondent
http://www.telegraph.co.uk
Scientists
have discovered that the purring of cats is a "natural healing
mechanism" that has helped inspire the myth that they have nine
lives. Wounded cats - wild and domestic - purr because it helps their
bones and organs to heal and grow stronger, say researchers who have analyzed
the purring of different feline species. This, they say, explains why cats survive
falls from high buildings and why they are said to have "nine
lives". Exposure to similar sound frequencies is known to improve
bone density in humans. The scientists, from the Fauna Communications Research
Institute in North Carolina, found that between 27 and 44 hertz (a measure of
the number of cycles per second) was the dominant frequency for a house cat,
and 20-50Hz for the puma, ocelot, serval, cheetah and caracal. This reinforces
studies confirming that exposure to frequencies of 20-50Hz strengthens human
bones and helps them to grow. Dr Elizabeth von Muggenthaler, the president of
the institute, said: "Old wives' tales usually have a grain of truth
behind them and cats do heal very quickly. The healing power of purring seems
to explain their 'nine lives'. "The scientists say that sound waves
created at a particular frequency trigger the healing process in feline bones.
Purring is believed to have a similar effect to ultrasound treatment on humans.
Dr von Muggenthaler said: "We are starting to solve a 3,000-year-old
mystery as to why cats purr. The next phase will be to explain the mechanics of
the process."
Almost all cats purr, including lions and cheetahs, though not tigers. Dr
von Muggenthaler said that purring had to be advantageous to a cat to survive
natural selection, but there seemed to be no obvious advantage for a cat merely
to display contentment. A natural capacity for increasing bone growth and
strength and reducing healing time was, however, "clearly
advantageous".
Cats' ability to survive and recover quickly after falling from tall buildings
is well documented. One recent study, published in The Journal of the American
Veterinary Medical Association, found that out of 132 cats that fell an average
of 5.5 stories, 90 per cent survived, including one that fell 45 stories. Other
scientific teams are researching whether "sound treatment" could be
used to halt osteoporosis and even renew bone growth in post-menopausal women.
Dr David Purdie, from Hull University's centre for
metabolic bone disease, said that the human skeleton needs stimulation or it
begins to leak calcium and weaken. "Purring could be the cat's way
of providing that stimulation for its own bones." He said that it was
difficult to devise physical exercises for old people suffering from
osteoporosis and speculated that it might be possible to create a mechanism to
use cats' purring to help strengthen elderly bones.
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Subsidizing Greyhound Racing
by Associated Press, 3/15/2001
BOSTON (AP) A proposal to cut racing taxes and
increase what the state pays to promote greyhound tracks would amount to an $8
million subsidy to track owners, anti-greyhound racing activists said Thursday.
''This is the most obvious form of political back-scratching,'' said Carey
Theil of the group GREY2K, which sponsored last year's ballot question banning
greyhound racing. The measure was defeated.
Theil pointed to the $110,445 donated to lawmakers by people working in the
greyhound racing industry in the past three years. During the same time, he
said, the industry spent about $448,333 lobbying lawmakers.
Track owners say they pay more taxes than many businesses. Besides sales and
corporate taxes, race tracks also pay taxes on each race, according to Richard
Dalton of the Wonderland Greyhound Park in Revere.
''They are out and out lying. They are describing this business as having a
subsidy. We are a taxpaying industry,'' Dalton said.
One proposal on Beacon Hill would cut the tax on live races from 5 percent to
2.75 percent, cut the tax on televised races from 2.5 percent to .75 percent
and increase state payments to greyhound racing promotional and improvement
funds from $1.3 million to $3.73 million, activists said.
Dalton said the industry itself has yet to agree on their own proposal.
The industry is hoping to have a new law in place before the end of June, when
a law allowing betting on televised races, known as ''simulcasting,'' expires.
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One By Name
by WantNoMeat@aol.com
Other customs often appall
self-righteousness blinds us all
We dislike what they eat
our loved pets they call meat
Other customs, other places
all that differs are the faces
We point and we judge so quick
calling them cruel and sick
They may eat cats and dogs
but what of our cows and hogs?
They eat the ones we adore
does this mean they suffer more?
All of them suffer til they are dead
and the life's blood is just as red
Do they not die the same
though we only call one by name?
We accept our brutal way
and judge our equals everyday
Still we blindly refuse to admit
it matters not whose throat was slit
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Quote To Remember
"Animals
have the same source as we had. Like us, they derive the life of thought, will,
and love from the Creator."
~ Francis of
Assisi
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Susan Roghair - EnglandGal@aol.com
Animal Rights Online
P O Box 7053
Tampa, Fl 33673-7053
http://www.geocities.com/RainForest/1395/
-=Animal Rights Online=-
&
Advisory Board Member, Animal Rights Network Inc.,
not-for-profit publisher of The Animals' Agenda Magazine
http://www.animalsagenda.org/
The Animals' Agenda Magazine: WebEdition
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