A n i m
a l W r i t e s © sm
The
official ANIMAL RIGHTS ONLINE newsletter
Publisher ~ EnglandGal@aol.com
Issue # 04/22/01
Editor ~ JJswans@aol.com
Journalists ~ Park StRanger@aol.com
~
MichelleRivera1@aol.com
~ sbest1@elp.rr.com
THE EIGHT ARTICLES IN THIS ISSUE ARE:
1 ~ Make This Earth Day Animal Day by
KMBwolf@aol.com
2 ~ High Noon at the Island of Dr. Moreau:
Technofantasies Confront
Complexity by
Professor Steve Best
3 ~ Autumn by Christy Caballero
4 ~ Bovine spongiform encephalopathy (mad cow disease)
by country
by Barry K. Mackay
5 ~ Essay Contest
6 ~ Statement by Senator Barbara Boxer
7 ~ This Old Cat
8 ~ Memorable Quote
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Make This Earth Day
Animal Day
by KMBWolf@aol.com
There
are several things you can do this Earth Day to help the animals of the world.
* Go Vegan for a Day -- If you're vegetarian, go vegan for Earth Day.
You'll be saving lives, as well as natural resources
* Help the Homeless -- Donate food, time or money to local no-kill
shelters. This is puppy and kitten season. They need lots of help!
* Charity -- Make a donation to a no-kill shelter or animal rights
organization, and make it a large one!
* Teach -- Teach people about the meat industry, fur, leather, animal testing,
puppy mills, hunting, fishing, etc. Many people don't know the real deal.
Ignorance leads to bad decisions. You might be surprised at how much people
don't know.
* Get the Kids into it -- Give your kids things to do: clean litter around the
neighborhood, collect cans and bottles for redemption and donate the money, let
them try new vegan meals, let them "adopt" a cow, etc.
* Buy to Help -- Buy clothes, CD's, keychains, and other items from
charities.
* Become a Human Billboard -- Wear a shirt with a strong animal rights
message and post stickers and leaflets around public places
Earth day is not just about honoring the physical planet upon which we live,
but also its inhabitants, human and non. By engaging in these very simple
activities, you will be helping Earth's creatures, thereby living in the true
spirit of Earth Day. And best of all, these activities can easily be
conducted within your everyday affairs.
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High Noon at the Island of Dr. Moreau:
Technofantasies Confront Complexity
by Professor Steve Best -- sbest1@elp.rr.com
"Strange as it may seem to the unscientific reader, there can be
no
denying that ... the manufacture of monsters -- and perhaps even
of
quasi-human monsters -- is well within the possibilities of
vivisection."
H.G. Wells
"You cannot recall a new form of life."
Erwin Chargaff
Everywhere in popular culture today, one finds deep-rooted anxieties about
science, technology, and the fate of the human. Thus, in recent films such as
The Fly, Jurassic Park, Species, Godzilla, and Deep Blue Sea, as well as in
shows like Prey and, of course, The X-Files, the focus is on biological
mutations, experiments gone awry, and the creation of monstrosities.
Such media texts are responding, in part, to a chemically saturated,
increasingly synthetic, ozone thinning, global warming world that has produced
frogs with one eye or five legs, encephalitic babies, lower sperm counts in
men, and diseased and diminished human beings affected by environmental
chemicals that mimic their hormones and disrupt biological processes. They are
also articulating fears of a powerful technoscience developed without restraint
in the service of profit.
Already, science has engineered overgrown mice, cows, and pigs;
"pharmed" crippled animals to exploit as drug factories for human
medicine; bred millions of acres of genetically modified crops (some mixed with
viruses and bacteria) that are spreading beyond control, polluting neighboring
fields, crossbreeding with weedy relatives, harming insects and animals in
laboratory tests, threatening famine and disease. At the same time,
xenotransplantation, the mixing of animal blood and organs with humans,
continues to erode species boundaries and portends new plagues.
But one great writer caught these changes in his perceptual traps well before
they happened, and that was H.G. Wells, who created what Isaac Asimov called
the "science-fiction breakthrough." Well's "breakthrough"
was his earthly vision that science and technology could transgress the
"laws" of nature and create entirely new species from disparate
materials, resulting in terrible and unforeseeable consequences. The changes
soon to be effected in nature and humanity were anticipated in The Time
Machine (1895), which concerns the entropic collapse of human civilization,
sharply divided between two warring species/classes (the privileged Eloi who live
above ground vs. the super-exploited, subterranean Morlocks), in an allegory of
nineteenth century class struggle that mutates into unbridgeable biological
differences, such as eugenics might someday create.
But The Island of Dr. Moreau (1896), is Wells' canonical statement of a coming
rupture in life processes. A multifaceted exploration, it is a powerful protest
against the self-proclaimed right of science to experiment on animals and to
engineer new life forms, a critique of dangerous utopian
visions of "human perfection," and a profound meditation on the
psychic conflicts tearing apart humanity. Above all, it foregrounds what may
happen when science recklessly tampers with genetics and disturbs intricate
natural processes that have evolved over billions of years.
Forced to relocate his barbaric animal experiments to a remote Pacific island
when exposed by a journalist, Moreau undauntingly advances his project to
create new life forms, much as the infamous Dr. Richard Seed has vowed to
continue his research into cloning humans in Japan or wherever necessary.
Moreau describes his island as a "kind of Bluebeard's chamber," an
apt description for vivisection laboratories around the world whose hallways
echo with the shrieks of brutalized animals.
In fact, Wells not only gave voice to outrage growing in nineteenth century
England against vivisection, he anticipated the logical extension of these
atrocities in the near future, as the fictional crimes of Dr. Moreau progressed
into the real horrors of Dr. Mengele. In the words of Edward Prendrick, the
hapless traveler marooned on Moreau's island, Wells asks the terrible question,
"could the vivisection of men be possible?" We know now -- through
Auschwitz; the Tuskegee, Alabama experiments that withheld penicillin treatment
from 399 black men infected with syphilis; the intentional infection of
mentally retarded children with hepatitis-B by doctors at Willowbrook State
Hospital in Staten Island; numerous radiation experiments on unwitting victims
in the U.S.; and countless cases of human "volunteers" for medical
"research" who were not informed of the serious risks they were
taking -- that the answer is affirmative.
Upon arriving to the island, Prendrick hears cries from the "House of
Pain," smells antiseptic, and witnesses the sundry "Beast Folk"
engineered by Moreau, a grotesque menagerie of transgenic freaks that include
mixtures of hyena and swine, ape and goat, bear and bull, and horse and
rhinoceros. Initially, he sees them as humans devolved into animals, but Moreau
informs him that in fact they are animals he is trying to elevate into humans,
changing not only their entire physical reality but also their minds to
prohibit any "regression" to animal behavior -- anticipating how
eugenics tries to weed out of humanity all traits it deems undesirable."
Amidst lush surroundings, Predrick see "the whole balance of human life in
miniature, the whole interplay of instinct, reason, and fate in its simplest
form." On this microcosmic island, symbolic of the isolation of science
from the public, there is a constant battle between instinct and morality,
desire and reason. The chimeras -- the animal-humans -- play out the full
tension of their being, much as human beings today struggle at the crossroads
of past and future evolution, "rational animals" who still have not
evolved beyond the primitive urges of war, violence, killing, hatred, and
social hierarchy. Encountering the shock of "the strangest
beings" he has ever seen, Prendrick realizes the island "is full of
inimical phenomena" and he condemns Moreau as a "lunatic" and
"ugly devil." He concludes that Dr. Moreau, like Mary Shelly's
Dr. Frankenstein, "was so irresponsible, so utterly careless. His
curiosity, his mad, aimless investigations, drove him on."
Moreau, of course, has a different image of himself. Although he has perfected
the art of scientific detachment, and is exquisitely indifferent to the pain he
inflicts on his victims, he imagines himself -- in the bad faith of so many
animal experimenters and genetic engineers -- as a benefactor to the world, as
one who is trying to realize his utopian vision of a perfect humanity. For
twenty years, Moreau devoted himself "to the study of the plasticity of
living forms." Rejecting any belief that nature and species
boundaries are fixed, he seeks to "conquer" nature, to bend it to his
will, to become God-like in his power to design species, while admitting that
he has "never troubled himself about the ethics of the matter."
Nothing today could better summarize the mentality of many genetic
engineers/venture
capitalists.
In an uncanny anticipation of xenotransplantation and genetic engineering,
Wells, speaking through Moreau, imagines that "it is a possible thing to
transplant tissue from one part of an animal to another or from one animal to
another, to alter its chemical reactions and methods of growth, to modify the
articulation of its limbs, and indeed to change it in its most intimate
structure." Yet, every time Moreau's chimeras seem to verge toward
"triumphs of vivisection" ("genetic engineering" was not
yet in the scientific vocabulary) they revert to animality. Despite
Moreau's conditioning that he believes makes it impossible for the chimeras to
disobey his will, they regularly break his laws, and in time rebel and kill
him. The Beast Folk rampage out of control, as scientific reductionism cannot
fathom biological complexity and humans prove unable to control powerful
technologies that ultimately destroy them.
At the end of John Frankenheimer's 1996 film version of the novel, the
empathetic Prendrick, upon leaving the island, tells the subhumans he will
bring back the best of Western science to help, but a victim of this very
science implores: "No more scientists, no more laboratories, no more
research ... We have to be what we are." One can easily imagine a real
Moreauvian island of genetic pariahs in the very near future, a place where the
botched experiments and mutilated satyrs and subhumans live out their pathetic
lives, condemned to labor or endure further experimentation.
As if enough animals are not already confined, tortured, and slaughtered in the
laboratories and factory farms of the world, U.S. and Europe are now
"pharming" an array of animal-human composites for their blood, milk,
and organs. Gruesomely, scientists have created headless embryos of mice and
frogs, dispensing with their superfluous heads so that they harvest only their
organs -- a practice biologist Richard Slack imagines could easily be used on
human embryos also grown as mere organ sacks for their genetic donors.
The Island of Dr. Moreau deserves to be re-read today. It is a brilliant
meditation on technology out-of-control, of unethical usages of
"objective" science, and of mutations to come in nature and humanity
as technoscience aggressively embarks on its explorations into microcosmic
reality, unimpeded by legal regulation or public debate. Here, the disparity
between technical ability and philosophical wisdom may well make today's sci-fi
fantasy tomorrow's living nightmare.
Steve Best is Associate Professor of Philosophy and Humanities at the
university of Texas, El Paso. He is Vice-President of the Vegetarian Society of
El Paso, a long time vegan and animal rights activist, and author of numerous
books and articles in the areas of social theory, postmodernism, and cultural
studies. Some of his writings are posted at
http://utminers.utep.edu/best/.
This article originally appeared in "Life Giving Choices," the
newsletter of the Vegetarian Society of El Paso (VSEP).
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Autumn
by Christy Caballero
from Chibob44@aol.com
*
What do we do when our loving pets face the last leg of the race?
* We do all we can to help them finish well, of course. We take time to
read the unspoken needs of the friends we've come to know so well.
* We give the simple reassurance of a loving touch when the old pup seems
confused for no reason.
* We groom them faithfully, but more gently, as age brings muscle wasting, and
the arthritic bones aren't so well padded.
* We learn to slow down for their sake, as they enjoy the scent of the wind, or
track a visitors trail across their yard.
* We expect to be inconvenienced, and aren't angry when it happens.
* We watch for pain and treat it, watch for changes in vision and hearing and
do what we can to help preserve those precious senses for as long as possible.
* We take care of their teeth, and make sure their food is a manageable texture
for them.
* We remind them of the need for a potty walk when they seem to forget.
* We remember the little rewards. We scratch the graying ears and tummy,
and go for car rides together. When the pet we love has an unexplained
need for comfort, we give it freely. When infirmities bring a sense of
vulnerability, we become our old guardian's protector.
* We watch their deepest slumbers, when dreams take them running across
long-forgotten fields, and we remember those fields too. When they cannot
stand alone, we lift them. When their steps are uncertain, we steady
them.
* And if their health fails, it falls to us to make the choice that will gently
put them to rest. But until that is absolutely necessary, we pause to let
the autumn sun warm our old friend's bones. And we realize, autumn is not
a bad time of year at all.
* Old age is not a disease or a reason to give up. It is a stage of life
that brings its own changes. Autumn can be a beautiful time of harvest.
* And, sometimes, the harvest is love.
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Bovine spongiform
encephalopathy
(mad cow disease) by country:
United Kingdom: 180,725 cases
Republic of Ireland: 599
"
Portugal
503 "
Switzerland
366 "
France
248 "
Germany
20 "
Belgium
19 "
Netherlands
9 "
Spain
5 "
Denmark
3 "
Italy
3
"
Liechtenstein
2 "
Luxembourg
1 "
Other
4 "
Total
182,507 "
Countries that imported British beef blood products:
Brazil
Brunei
Dubai
Egypt
India
Ireland
Morocco
Oman
Russia
Singapore
Turkey
BSE by year:
1987 - 446
1992 - 37,316
Cases in first fortnight of `01 - 19.
Humans with confirmed Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease:
Britain - 94
France - 3
Ireland - 1
Countries with alerts and testing for BSE:
Australia
New Zealand
Malaysia
Taiwan
South Korea
China
Bulgaria
Morocco
Slovenia
BSE cases outside of Europe:
Canada 4
Oman 4
Falklands 4
(all were imported cattle)
Note obvious under-reporting from Asia.
Barry Kent MacKay
International Program Director
Animal Protection Institute
www.api4animals.org
"Barry K. MacKay"
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Essay Contest
from janpierce@aol.com
An essay contest for students 18 and under is
being sponsored by the Vegetarian Resource Group. First prize in
each of three categories is a $50 savings bond. Categories are: age 8 and
under, 9 to 13 and 14 to 18.
Entrants should write a two- to three-page essay on any aspect of vegetarianism
or veganism. Vegetarianism is not eating meat, fish and fowl. Vegans are
vegetarians who do not eat such animal products as dairy or eggs.
Entries should be based on interviewing, research and/or personal opinion. You need not be a vegetarian to enter.
Submissions should be postmarked by May 1.
Send entries to The Vegetarian Resource Group, Box 1463, Baltimore, MD
21203. Include your name, address, telephone number, grade, school
and teacher's name. For more information on vegetarianism, please visit
http://www.vrg.org/.
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Statement by Senator Barbara Boxer
On President Bush's Environmental Record
March 22,
2001
from Mary Zoeter - anmlntwk@erols.com
In an interview with the New York Times,
President Bush said "Prosperity will mean little if we leave future
generations a world of polluted air, toxic lakes and rivers and vanished
forests." [New York Times, 4/4/00]
Well, after 60 days of the Bush Administration prosperity is in trouble, air
quality is in trouble, lakes, rivers and forests are in trouble and our
drinking water is in trouble too.
Let's look at President Bush's environmental record after only 60 days in
office.
* He wants to drill in a wildlife refuge.
* He backed down on a promise to the American people to curb the
greenhouse gas, C02.
* He moved to block efforts to protect a third of our national
forests from roads and logging.
* He repealed the rule that requires mining companies not to
destroy the environment or endanger public health.
Now in a stunning announcement, the Bush Administration repealed tough
scientific based standards for arsenic in drinking water. I've been in
elected office for 25 years and I have never met one person who defends high
levels of arsenic in our drinking water.
The arsenic standard that the Bush Administration has put into effect as of
now, is a standard set in 1942. It ignores years of scientific research.
And it does not come close to meeting the worldwide accepted standard of 10
parts per billion. Every one of our trading partners in the European Union
has this 10 parts per billion standard that he is repealing.
Yesterday, Christie Todd Whitman said the 10 parts per billion standard wasn't
based on science and it was done too quickly. Well, here is the 10 parts per
billion rule as published in the Federal Register. It is 92 pages long and is
based on at least 5 years of Congressionally mandated studies.
Let's be clear. We believe that George W. Bush has declared war on the
environment. But, we are here today to tell him that we will fight him in that
war -- regulation by regulation, legislation by legislation, standard by
standard, confrontation by confrontation.
We know that exposure to unsafe levels of arsenic causes all kinds of
cancer. Lung cancer, skin cancer, and bladder cancer.
We know that it causes other severe health problems, including damage to the
central nervous system and cardiovascular disease. We know that it can cause
reproductive problems and birth defects.
Studies conducted by the National Academy of Sciences have shown that 1 in
every 100 people who drink water containing arsenic at the old standard may
develop cancer. That's a risk factor 10,000 times higher than the amount
allowed by EPA in food.
Congress recognized the undeniable health threats posed by arsenic several
years ago, passing the Safe Drinking Water Act Amendments of 1996. This
legislation, which passed unanimously by the Senate, called upon EPA to update
its standard for arsenic in drinking water by January 2001.
EPA followed through with this task by setting a new drinking water standard in
January at 10 parts per billion. This standard is based on a decade of sound,
peer-reviewed science and will improve drinking water for 13 million people
once fully implemented. We need this standard.
But instead, the Bush Administration has ignored the science.
That is why my colleagues and I are announcing several steps that we plan to
take to ensure that this standard is not repealed by the Bush Administration.
First, we are asking Acting EPA General Counsel Anna Wolgast to defend
Administrator Whitman's cancellation of this new standard.
Second, we are prepared to use the Congressional Review Act to overturn the
Bush Administration's repeal of this new standard.
Third, I have drafted legislation with Chuck Schumer that would set the same
standard for arsenic levels in our drinking water at 10 parts per billion,
recommended by EPA in January. I understand that Bill Nelson is working on
similar legislation.
As a long time supporter of efforts to reduce arsenic levels in drinking water,
I urge Administrator Whitman and the Bush Administration to reconsider their
proposal to withdraw this standard.
President Bush, we will NOT stand by while you turn back the clock on our
public health standards. But rest assured: If you won't do what is in the best
interest of the American people, we will.
Handwritten letters are the most effective. To find out who your lawmakers are
and their contact information visit:
http://www.vote-smart.org/index.phtml
You can also send email comments directly to the President at:
president@whitehouse.org
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This Old Cat
Author Unknown
I'm getting on in years, my coat is turning gray.
My eyes have lost their luster, my hearings just okay.
I spend my whole day dreaming of conquest in my past,
Lying near a sunny window waiting for its warm repast.
I remember our first visit, I was coming to you free,
Hoping you would take me in and keep me company.
I wasn't young or handsome, two years I'd roamed the streets.
There were scars upon my face, I hobbled on my feet.
I could sense your disappointment as I left my prison cage.
Oh, I hoped you would accept me and look beyond my age.
You took me without pity, I accepted without shame.
Then you grew to love me, and I admit the same.
I have shared with you your laughter, you have wet my fur with tears.
We've come to know each other throughout these many years.
Just one more hug this morning before you drive away,
and know I'll think about you throughout your busy day.
The time we've left together is a treasured time at that.
My heart is yours forever. I promise . . . This Old Cat.
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Quote To Remember
"Everyone that useths milk is unskillful in the word of righteousness, for
he is a babe. But solid food belongeth to them that are of full age, even those
who by reason of use have their senses exercised to discern both good and
evil."
~ King James Version of The Holy Bible,
HEBREWS: 5:13-14
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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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