Animals are not Accidental

We are immersed in a culture of exploitation of animals. How did we get there? It wasn’t an accident.

Often when good conscience demands profound cultural change, we mistakenly think of the status quo as a natural state of affairs. You don’t have to be religious to think that way; you just have to be human. We people tend to like stability and a system of values we can view as good, true and enduring.

Racial segregation in the Southern United States seemed in the first half of the 20th century to be just the way things were, always had been, and ought to be. Women throughout much of modern history were expected to do the housework and obey their husbands. Homosexuality was viewed as perverse, immoral or insane because love between same-sex couples simply wasn’t “normal.”

Similarly, our laws and foundational values regarding non-human animals are also taken for granted as part of the “natural” world. As we did with blacks, gays and women previously, we view animals as social constructs in addition to being sentient beings over whom men have dominion.

But there is no natural and normal way things have always been for animals. We people have decided – based on our interests and our ignorance– what animals are: property.

As a culture, we view animals as among the things that are subject to ownership, like land, lamps, cars and chairs.

Just as this property notion has changed for slaves and women, so can it change for animals. In fact, it is changing. We have come to a grudging acceptance of the protection of animals on wildnerness preserves. There, they may have a home where they are not subject to capture and property claims (although they are certainly subject to anthropogenic environmental impacts).

Outside of the shrinking and threatened wilderness and outside the emergency provisions of laws like the US Endangered Species and Marine Animal Protection Acts, however, animals are still subject to property law and regulation. We claim animal carcasses by hunting, fishing, breeding, capturing and -- above all-- mass-producing them for slaughter in the meat industry.

Let’s make a little progress every day. Here’s one example of an animals rights advance stemming from a horrifying tragedy:

WASHINGTON (Feb. 24, 2009) — Eight days after a chimpanzee kept as a pet attacked and critically injured a Connecticut woman, the U.S. House of Representatives passed the Captive Primate Safety Act, H.R. 80, introduced by U.S. Reps. Earl Blumenauer, D-Ore., and Mark Kirk, R-Ill., to stop interstate commerce in primates as pets. The bill passed by a vote of 323 to 95. The bill now moves for consideration to the U.S. Senate, where the effort to pass the legislation is being led by U.S. Sens. Barbara Boxer, D-Calif., and David Vitter, R-La.

The Humane Society of the United States and the Humane Society Legislative Fund expressed thanks and appreciation to Reps. Blumenauer and Kirk for introducing the bill, and to Insular Affairs, Oceans and Wildlife Subcommittee Chairwoman Madeleine Bordallo, D-Guam, and Natural Resources Committee Chairman Nick Rahall, D-W.V., for their leadership in bringing the measure to the House floor so expeditiously.

The effect of this law is to make the private ownership of primates illegal. They will still be used in medical experiments, but they won't be kept as pets. Fewer will be exploited.

Genesis and Animal Rights

God said, Let the waters bring forth abundantly the moving creature that hath life, and fowl that may fly above the earth in the open firmament of heaven. And God created great whales, and every living creature that moveth, which the waters brought forth abundantly, after their kind, and every winged fowl after his kind: and God saw that it was good. —Genesis 1:20-21

It’s low tide and the birds are abundant. I am awake to gulls and sandpipers, in awe of unknowable animal consciousness.

The journey to justice, dignity and rights for nonhuman animals begins in humble contemplation and wonder.

It’s almost always imprudent to make pronouncements about the limits of science. What once seemed inscrutable and hopelessly beyond comprehension has turned out—time and again—to be knowable, accessible and of vast practical consequence. The progress of scientific knowledge and the development of new technologies are so fast and vast that it would be foolish to make predictions even 10 years out, much less than 100, 1,000 or 10,000.

If I had a crystal ball I wouldn’t be surprised to find in the blink of an eye at the end of the 21st century enormous advances in addressing the problems we face today: global warming, overpopulation, degradation of the environment, disease, ageing, world hunger and war. We may have much longer human lifespans, colonies in space, brain-boosting drugs and a world running on energy sources we’ve barely begun to develop today.

Of course, dystopian outcomes are also possible. We may fail to address climate change; we may blow ourselves up with nuclear weapons; we may be wiped out by a virus. We may be too aggressive, xenophobic, reckless or unlucky to survive.

But whether the next century brings us peace and prosperity or misery and megadeath, animal consciousness will remain largely impenetrable to us. What it’s like to be a fox, a bat, a dolphin or a parrot will remain both wondrous and distant.

We may gain enormous knowledge of the psychology and biochemistry of other animals, but we won’t grasp their inner life. The species barrier will remain. Intersubjectivity—communion—is beyond science.

Although we can communicate with animals, we’re too different to share an inner world. We cannot experience camels and eagles or even fellow Great Apes the way we experience other human beings. We don’t share body and mind with other species. Thus, our communion with them is the stuff of intuition, deep empathy and ultimately, the imagination.

But don’t despair. The intersubjective gap can be filled by love and respect. When we stretch our compassion, our imagination and our awareness, we learn that somebody is home in animal sentience. We don’t quite know who or what she feels, but she’s there. On the inside. Sacred. Alive.

When we contemplate living creatures like these gulls and sandpipers we find them lovable; and our capacity for love expands to meet them. That is awe. That is wonder.

Radical wonderment is the message I take away from the Biblical creation myth – not that man has dominion over the animals, but that “God” saw Creation in wonder. “God saw that it was good.”

God—the contemplator-in-chief—saw the sandpipers, the dolphins, the parrots and every creature in the wondrous intuitive light of empathy.

This is a light, I believe, that will eventually guide us to reject dominion over animals and honor their rights. Let there be light.

Paradigm Shift: Animals Have Their Own Interests

During a lull in the heavy rain I watched a dozen White Egrets in the grass south of Lake Casitas. Two families of deer were prancing on the hill above them at the forest’s edge, no doubt delighted with the replenishment of the grasslands. Across the road stood a solitary, statuesque Great Blue Heron. I carried with me an essay explaining how it is that we come to own wild animals. When the rain started up again, I went home to pet and hold Shanti, the 9-month old wild animal I live with. He's starting to greet me with “Hello.”

The dominion we grant ourselves to exploit every living creature on Earth is regulated exclusively for human benefit. We have crafted some exceptions to the general rule that animals are ours for the using and killing. For example, animal fights for human entertainment are banned in the United States, and laws against cruelty to animals limit some obvious and egregious abuses. We have also protected some animals through instruments like the Endangered Species Act and the Marine Mammal Protection Act.

But for the billions of hunted, slaughtered, tormented and abused animals outside these statutes, it’s basically tough luck. They have little legal recourse. Wolves may be protected from being shot, plowed or urbanized into utter extinction, but only because such protection is viewed as a public (i.e., human) good. Rarely, if ever, are the animal’s own interests taken into consideration.

One problem is that legal theory reserves the concept of rights for “persons.” Animals have no standing in court. As a result of being defined out of the game, animal interests are by definition subservient to human interests.

The paradigm needs to shift. Animal rights must be represented—-first in our imaginations and then in our courts and legislatures--independently of human interests.

Until this happen, no one is safe. Not the herons, not the deer, not the parrots, not the people, not the Earth.

The Magnitude of the Meat Challenge

Every year about 9.5 billion animals are slaughtered to produce food in the USA. That’s about 3 pigs and 266 chickens per second, 24/7, 365 days of the year. Another way of grasping the magnitude of the number is to observe that all the human beings who died in all the wars of the 20th century represent about 1% of the number of animals killed per year in one country, the USA.

How can we calculate the suffering and pain? With an oxymoron ("humane slaughter") and a burp, apparently, because all that flesh winds up on our plates.

Factory farming also causes enormous pain to the environment. Meat requires vastly more land, water and encroachment on native habitats of endangered species than vegetarian alternatives. Meat production pollutes the air and heats the planet. Our descendants may deeply regret their carnivorous heritage.

How does factory farming compare to other means of using and killing animals? By comparison, all the rest is a mere drop in the bucket of blood. We are rightly appalled by the number of animals killed for sport, product testing, hunting, trapping, dissection and fur farming. We are rightly concerned about those animals euthanized in shelters and pounds. We are rightly skeptical of the abuse of animals in medical experiments. But all of the above amounts to about 2% of the 9.5 billion meat deaths per year.

What can we infer from the billions of animal corpses? That if we only focus on the most egregious instances of exploitation of animals like bullfighting, fur coats, dog racing and cosmetics testing, we will barely scratch the surface. We must also address and answer for our massive slaughter of animals for meat. Doing so requires a huge shift in consciousness and culture. It requires that we all pay attention, change our habits and help each other overcome our prejudices, our sloppy thinking and our addictions.

Hope and Change for Parrots and Other Sentient Beings?

The more I learn about the commercial parrot trade, the more gravely concerned I become about the future of these animals, both in the wild and in captivity. There has been progress in the protection and preservation of wild parrots and some endangered species have even been rescued from extinction. But native parrot habitat continues to disappear at a rate far beyond alarming and as Mira Tweeti explains in her brilliant book , the plight of captive-bred parrots like Shanti is grim. Parrots are daily abandoned and mistreated and the few rescue facilities that exist are understaffed, underfunded and overwhelmed.

We need to begin to look at parrots and other animals from their, not our, point of view. Deep empathy and compassionate listening must extend to animals as well as people. This is an easy concept to articulate, but it’s immensely hard to put into practice.

We are as gods to the beasts of the field and the fish of the sea— an omnipotent, omnipresent and omniscient deity, but not a benevolent one. We bring animals into sentience for the sole purpose of killing them. We raise and slaughter billions of animals every year just in the United States. We create to annihilate.

Factory farming is an economically unsustainable practice that degrades the environment on virtually every level: pollution of the air, global warming, fuel inefficiencies, desertification, extinction of species. You name it. Human meat and dairy consumption are toxic to the planet. Factory farming brutalizes us as it destroys us; we are desensitized to the suffering of animals as we commit global environmental suicide.

Our world is presented to us as if designed for man. But there is no reason to believe that is so. The assumption that evolution culminates in homo sapiens is false. We know it to be false. We know there is no evidence that human interests are superior to monkey or giraffe or trout interests, but we have inherited and constructed a world based on this false premise.

Is another way possible? Is there an alternative to our radical presumptuousness? Is there something other than taking our supremacy and centrality for granted? Is there a way out?

Incrementally we may make progress. Just as human rights have emerged and evolved over the centuries, so too may animal rights. Human slavery, for example, though not eradicated, has been condemned and outlawed by virtually every nation on Earth. Animal welfare has emerged as a public concern of civilized people over the past two centuries, and it has always been a consideration for thoughtful people.

While we are a long long way from ceasing to view animals as commodities and a longer way yet to granting them the fundamental rights they deserve, our values are gradually changing. The conversation has begun; the questions have been raised.

Prof. Cass Sunstein is President Obama’s nominee for director of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs. He has also been mentioned as a possible future Obama choice for the US Supreme Court. Sunstein is extremely fluent in animal rights discourse. He has written, “There can be no question that the relationship between human beings and nonhuman animals is now being fundamentally rethought.”

House Sparrow

It was raining and windy at the beach yesterday, but I felt the need to be with wild birds, so like birders everywhere, I heeded the call, bundled up and trekked on for a bit, leaving Shanti behind.

I followed the willets, terns and Western sandpipers along the shore. The cormorants bobbed on the waves among human surfers; the pelicans flew north to south in silent groups of half a dozen.

It’s always worth the effort to get out among the birds. No matter how exhausted, sad or lonely I feel, the birds and the sea restore me. They pass like angels—winged creatures of light—invariably granting us respite, strength, the capacity to endure another day of outrageous misfortune or shallow mediocrity.

Birds are constant over time. What changes are the human trials and tribulations. What mattered to me a decade or two ago is trivial now. What matters now soon won’t.

Nature, however, is loyal to us, even as we betray, exploit and forget her.

I started bird-watching in Mexico City more than 25 years ago. I remember the very moment the connection was made and the journey began. I sat on the grass in El Parque México, a block from my home, eating a torta and drinking a soda. Suddenly I was stunned by the beauty of a house sparrow, Passer domesticus, a few feet away. The bird didn’t have much going for him. He was a member of a non-native species, a European colonizer; he was shabby and begging for bread crumbs. But it was love at first sight. I was captivated by holiness, elation and love—all contained in a bird.

I rose full of energy and spent the next weeks, months and years learning everything I could about birds. I bought birding guides, binoculars and maps that traced the heritage of generations of birders before me. For years, I spent all my free time observing birds.

Everywhere were birds, and no bird was without grace.

Over the years, my zeal for identifying, classifying and recording every bird has waned. I no longer carry guidebooks or binoculars; I no longer seek rare and previously unrecorded species. Now I mostly watch birds I’ve seen a thousand times—crows, gulls, pigeons, red-wing blackbirds, and species as ordinary as a house sparrow.

Rejoice, for birds are everywhere.

Top 10 Reasons for Never Buying a Parrot

I’ve written a lot about the many joys of life with Shanti. Here, however, are a few of the hard truths you should know before acquiring a parrot.

1. You don’t own a tropical forest. You can no more simulate a parrot’s native habitat in your home than you could simulate a European vacation by putting a human being in a dungeon on the moon and giving her a plastic replica of Big Ben.

2. You don’t socialize with hundreds of other parrots. A parrot in the wild spends its entire life among its flock. Parrots are highly social animals and are never alone in nature. Never.

3. Although the importation of wild parrots to the US and Europe is outlawed (a good thing), domestic breeding of parrots is widespread and millions of parrots have been raised for sale as pets. Breeders profit from producing and distributing parrots even though they know the birds will inevitably end up in inadequate—if not horrific and abusive—conditions.

4. Breeder parrots have a horrible existence. They are confined for life, in isolation, often in darkness, with only one other bird. The pair is coerced into copulating and mass-producing as many offspring as possible. If they fail to perform optimally as baby-parrot factories, they are killed.

5. Any parrot you buy in the US or Europe will have been stolen at birth from its parents, who are devastated by the loss.

6. Any parrot you buy from a breeder will have been deprived of even minimal parental care and nurturing. Mine was taken from his parents before he opened his eyes. This practice is promoted to the public as “hand-feeding,” a technique that is supposed to produce happier, better-adjusted, less aggressive parrots.

7. Parrots don’t like living being locked-down indoors, dependent on the schedule, moods, whims, health and stability (or lack thereof) of their human companions. They like living in a cage about as much as you and I would.

8. The essence of a bird’s life is flight. Even if you refrain from clipping your bird’s wings and build her a beautiful aviary, you can never re-create the freedom of flight in her natural habitat.

9. Your captive parrot will never do what s/he was designed to do: find a lover, mate and raise babies. S/he will be celibate and alone from birth to death, which might be fifty years or more. No love, no sex, no parenting, no descendants.

10. In its fifty-year lifespan, your parrot is almost certain to pass through several human hands. Your best-laid plans for his/her welfare are nonenforceable by law and likely to be blithely violated by future “owners” of your parrot. Your parrot has no rights, no legal protection and will have to be extremely lucky to avoid abuse and abandonment.

If you must get a parrot, take the high and hard road. Adopt one that already been abused, abandoned or rescued.

If you’re like me and found out the truth too late, or knew it and went ahead anyway, love and cherish your parrot forever.

The Sanctity of Parrot Life

In the year 2000 the International Union for Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources and the World Parrot Trust published their “Action Plan.”

Noting that “No other group of birds has been subjected to more exploitation, numerically and financially, than parrots,” the WPT called upon the millions of ordinary people who keep psittacines to “accept more responsibility for the survival of parrots in the wild and the welfare of existing captive parrots.”

I’m one of the millions of ordinary people who live with a parrot, so I’m going to try to do my share.

According to journalist Mira Tweti, author of "Parrots and People," there are between 40 and 60 million companion birds in the USA alone, perhaps half of them parrots. If just 1% of us bird "owners" began to lobby vigorously for the conservation and protection of parrots, we’d have an enormous influence.

But we can’t do it alone. We also need the cooperation of the parrot industry—those who profit from parrots. They includes cage and accessory makers, food suppliers and distributors, pet stores, and of course breeders.

On the conservation side of the equation, 28% of the 330 known parrot species are threatened with extinction. The parrots we love are decimated by the bird trade, destruction and fragmentation of native habitats, and hunting for food, feathers or for crop protection.

Parrots did fine for many millions of years before they ran into people.

Birds in general are perhaps the only living dinosaurs. They survived the extinction events that finished off other dinosaurs because they had the most powerful brains. That made them more adaptable, more capable of prospering in emerging ecological niches.

European parrot fossils have been dated at 54 million years, although modern parrots may be “only” 20- 23 million years old.

Parrots flourish in warm regions of South America, Africa and Australasia. They love the sun, the verdant tropical forest and the open sky.

What got them in the most trouble with us? Their brains, their looks and the fact that we want their land.

But conserving their habitat and outlawing their importation is only half the battle.

We also have the vast responsibility to protect those many millions of parrots who live in captivity.

Most of that job is educational. We need to teach our children that parrots are not commodities, not things. We need to acknowledge the sanctity of parrot life. As awareness increases, we’ll become better (and surely fewer) parronts. We won’t buy and sell parrots on a whim. We won’t release them to fend for themselves or kill them when we get bored with them. We will treat them with the respect we accord to people, to each other. They will join our “each other,” our community of consciousness and conscience.

Illustration: Sinornithosaurus millenii, a flying, feathered dinosaur ancestor of modern birds

Shanti, the Vet and the Seagulls

Shanti left our house today for the first time in six weeks. We went to the vet. I was extremely nervous. My daughter Eva, who’s more of a grown-up about doctor visits, accompanied me.

The main challenge I anticipated was getting Shanti from his house into the carrying cage. Since the good news for inveterate pessimists like me is that things usually work out far better than we could ever imagine, the maneuver went well.

Eva sat in the backseat with Shanti. We covered him with a blanket, and he appeared to go into sensory-deprivation shutdown mode, as if it were the middle of the night.

I flashbacked to when I was two years old, had croup, and my parents rushed me to St. Francis Hospital for an emergency tracheotomy. “Where are we going, Mommy?”

“It’s a surprise,” she replied.

I hoped that if Shanti ended up as traumatized by the vet’s prodding as I did by the tracheotomy, he would do better than I at erasing or repressing the memory. That sensory shutdown mechanism seemed like a nice side benefit of avian evolution.

On the way to Dr. M’s office we saw scores of seagulls on the shoreline. How strange it is to care, I thought, so intensely about one little being like Shanti in the vast context of millions of kindred creatures flying about, vulnerable in the skies, whom I would never care about individually. We live out our short lives mostly in mutual oblivion.

How radically limited is our capacity for intimacy, empathy and bonding. Eva and I have been bonded as father-daughter for 21 years, and now we both love this new and unexpected family member, Shanti. Yet our total bonds are few. Eva—taking imprinting literally— wants tattoos of Shanti and our deceased cat Luna. But the permanence and sanctity of tattooing only underscores the limits of our bonding. How many persons and animals can we bond with before our love is so attenuated as to be meaningless?

Saints are said to feel love and a bond with all humanity. I have my doubts. I’m sure there are people with special powers of empathy – an emotional intelligence far greater than mine. We run across such admirable human beings from time to time – healers, teachers, parents, clergy – who connect deeply with many others. But our empathic IQ has an upper limit; we can only include so many. Most of us who teach or heal learn to establish some emotional distance. Not every student is our child; not every bird is our beloved. Otherwise, our hearts would break. There is too much tragedy to bear, too much pain, too much death. The mass of seagulls must remain an abstraction.

That’s why we need a more inclusive and empathy-based politics to guide us when our emotional distancing kicks in. We need to codify antidotes to our infantile tribal xenophobia and chauvinism. We need a framework of justice and inclusion when love is numb, to teach us responsibility to each other, as if we knew and loved intimately.

We cannot love each individual seagull with the passion we reserve for the beings we hold close. We cannot learn their names, but we can acknowledge their rights. We can protect their species, their skies and the continuum of consciousness.

Whales and Dogs

The fin whale is the world's second largest animal, growing to 27 meters in length (88 feet). It's an endangered species, and the International Whaling Commission has banned its commercial hunting. Iceland and Japan don't seem to care. Fin whales migrate throughout the oceans and live in groups of 6- 10. Like parrots, they sing beautifully. The world population of fin whales is estimated at around 50,000-60,000.

Iceland just announced plans to kill 150 fin whales. You can help persuade Iceland not to do so by boycotting its export products, mostly sweaters, vodka and fish. Find out how you can help here.

If that's too sad, here's some good news from the LA Times on how to treat your depression:

Two researchers from Japan's Azuba University report that dog owners feel the same surge of emotion when looking at their pets as mothers do when they see their human infants. Miho Nagasawa and Takefumi Kikusui studied two groups of dog owners during play sessions with their dogs -- one group was told to make eye contact with their pets; the other was told to avoid eye contact. Those who made eye contact were found to experience a 20% rise in oxytocin levels, while those who avoided it experienced a slight drop in oxytocin. "Oxytocin is known as the 'cuddle chemical' or 'love drug', it has been found to dampen stress, combat depression, and breed trust in humans.