A more humane president

I wish I could think of something else besides the election and the economy but I can't. Arriving at the Farmer's Market on Saturday, I noticed that the Republicans have now joined the Democrats in handing out buttons and flyers. The Democrat Club has had a presence the last few weeks, several white-haired ladies sitting behind a table of Obama-Biden buttons, but on Saturday there was a horde of young men, in suits, handing out Republican literature. They looked like stock brokers. I immediately had this feeling that I needed to be declaring my affiliation, something I normally keep somewhat private with people I don't know. I went over to the women and bought a button, affixing it to my bag. One lady handed me a flyer to vote YES on Prop 2. I already know all about it, I said, and added that the Humane Society has just endorsed Obama. They have never before endorsed a presidential candidate and posted a detail analysis of his voting record and support for animals:
"The board of directors—which is comprised of both Democrats and Republicans—has voted unanimously to endorse Barack Obama for President. The Obama-Biden ticket is the better choice on animal protection, and we urge all voters who care about the humane treatment of animals, no matter what their party affiliation, to vote for them."

It may not mean much to some people but I say that you can tell a lot about a person by the way they treat animals (and the earth). And so does Obama. He said "I think how we treat our animals reflects how we treat each other, and it's very important that we have a president who is mindful of the cruelty that is perpetrated on animals." Humane Society and Amnesty International are my two charities, the ones I give the most money to and am the most active for. I realized this weekend that they essentially do the same thing, except one for animals and one for people. They fight to end suffering. What I like about both organizations is that they have excellent communications, informative websites and easily understood missions. They are surprisingly unsentimental, given the subject matter, and never condemn. Instead, they rely on the facts to speak for themselves. They understand that if suffering doesn't bother you, no amount of sensationalism is going to change that. If suffering does bother you, only the facts and an easy call-to-action are necessary. Amnesty International "neither supports nor opposes any political party or any candidate for public office and Amnesty does not seek to influence elections" but instead seeks to inform the public about their core issues and encourage them to influence policy. I have to say that the focus by these organizations on the welfare of people and animals is such a welcome respite from the hatred that infuses politics.

The recent behavior of Americans on the McCain-Palin campaign trail has really sickened me. I continue to find it sadly ironic that while we fight the Taliban in Afghanistan, people in this country are constantly trying to reverse our own progress and take us back into the dark ages as well. Had we not "waved the white flag of surrender" in Vietnam all those years ago, McCain might have died in a prison cell instead of coming back a war hero. Had radical women like Hillary Clinton not won out all those years ago, Palin would not be qualified to be a VP candidate because she would be denied the right to vote. Let's not forget how highly volatile these issues were when they were happening! So how is it possible that the people who support these two think they can deny gays the right to marriage, women the ability to terminate their own pregnancy and Obama the respect of a man running for The President of the United States? I refuse to believe that this country contains more hate and anger than it does hope and pride. The country I live in was founded on and has lead the world in many ways to becoming a more humane place and will continue to do so.

This should be a non-issue

I can guarantee that no one is going to die if they can't wear a white fur coat. I can also guarantee that banning the bludgeoning of baby seals (that are often skinned alive) isn't going to kill anyone either. But thousands of baby seals (see, they only have those lovely white coats for four weeks) are going to die a brutal death in a couple of weeks. Nigel Barker, famed fashion photographer and, apparently, judge on America's Top Model is championing this cause. See his pre-bludgeoning pictures and read all about it on his blog.


Please take the pledge to boycott Canadian seafood until they end the hunt by signing the Humane Society petition. Nigel asks you to tell your friends. Oh, Canada!

Kingo the lowland gorilla

Last week I had to make a trip to L.A. I took my National Geographic on the plane and I was reading an article about the Western Lowland Gorilla, a truly magnificent beast. Kingo has a family of ten, four “wives” and their children. He spends a lot of time to himself, sitting in a swamp sometimes for hours eating the tiny green roots of a water plant. His kids rough house while their mothers nap and together and independently they roam an area about 6 miles in diameter, looking for fruit to eat or a good place to nap and play, traveling over a mile a day. One morning the research team found them 100 feet up in a tree having their breakfast!


The article said we didn’t know much about them because it takes years for a human to gain their confidence enough to observe them. Despite their size, it took a team of four local trackers to find Kingo and his family but it took six years for Diane Doran-Sheehy (responsible for saving this piece of the forest that Kingo and his family live in) to originally find and name them.

Then I came across this sentence, “Even though all gorillas found in zoos around the world are western gorillas, little is known about their behavior in the wild.” I just started weeping, right there on the plane. The image of this complex and incredible animal in a concrete cage, without his family, without his swamp and trees, without his six miles to roam and wander, without the peace and privacy to take his daily nap, just broke my heart. We don't even know enough about his behavior in the wild to even ATTEMPT to replicate his environment. How, I ask myself, how do we justify that? I had to force myself to try to think of something else, anything that would keep me from crying.

A few days later I was reading an article about the natural science museum finally opening this year in Golden Gate park. It's an impressive and beautiful building with a living green roof and solar panels, it's being touted as a highly responsible ecological building and yet, they are going to feature 38,000 animals in their aquariums. Granted they're growing coral and using local seawater but still, a space the size of this building must surely be much smaller than their complex and vast natural habitat, the ocean. I understand that we want to educate people about animals but I just haven't seen the data to support the theory that animals in captivity on display have helped any in the wild. By my count, the wild animals of this world are vanishing at an extremely alarming rate.

Then I was in Berkeley with a friend of mine. We passed an older hippie guy on the street with a clipboard. He was wearing the kind of socks that have toes in different colors, and Birkenstocks. He was collecting signatures for a farm bill; I know the one because I’ve already signed it and because I’m a Humane Society member. I thanked him and walked on. Another guy passed him and I heard the hippie ask him to sign a petition for a bill that would allow farm animals to move around in their cages. The guy just shook his head and moved on.

About an hour later, we were in a furniture store while my friend was looking for a bed. I heard the hippie in my head asking for help so the animals could “move around in their cages.” It made me sick, I thought it’s like asking for less torture, more humane captivity, the irony is ridiculous. I can’t believe we have to fight for this, that we have to try to convince people to care enough to not torture their animals before they kill them. I was overwhelmed with grief and had to leave the store. I couldn’t stop crying and my friend didn’t even believe me when I said it was because of the animals.

A few weekends ago, I almost volunteered to be that person collecting signatures. Can you imagine? What would someone do if they didn’t sign the petition and I started crying? I wonder. So today I was reading an interesting article in The New York Times Magazine about morality. The author says that we are genetically moral creatures. That we universally believe in certain principles that are possibly biologically motivated to keep us alive. Universally, we feel that it is wrong to harm others, we believe in fairness, we value community and loyalty, we respect authority and we revere purity. Where it gets tricky, however, is in the ranking and weight of those morals.

There are instances, for example, where certain cultures allow harm to those who are considered impure. Or where fairness is denied to those who disrespect authority. The upholding of these morals can be wildly divergent even if the basic motivation is the same. Liberals, for example, tend to rank fairness much higher than purity or loyalty. Also very interesting, was the fact that certain behaviors cycle in and out of morality.

Smoking has become morally bad since the emphasis on second-hand smoke whereas getting a divorce is more or less accepted as a fact of life. And certainly we have widened the net of who deserves humane treatment as time goes on. Slavery, once an acceptable economic practice, is now reviled pretty much the world over. I have a dream, in the words of our Martin Luther King, Jr. that someday we’ll consider keeping an animal in a cage as barbaric as selling a man on an auction block.

A McKinsey survey published in The Economist showed that out of 15 major issues of the next five years, the environment is number 1 globally but the top issues after the environment are safer products, retirement benefits, health-care benefits and affordable products. These are pretty much the same things we've always been concerned about. Ethically produced products is near the bottom of the list and I assume that the welfare of animals falls in that category. So we want to protect the environment, meaning that we don't want to die, but aren't really concerned about everything else dying? I think we feel that we can't care about everything, that we have to pick our battles.

So I’ve learned that there isn’t anything wrong with me and there isn’t anything wrong with everyone else for that matter. It’s just that our moral barometers are all set differently. Looking at my five spheres of morality, by far the largest would be harm, followed by purity, which I think is where my love of nature comes from. The spheres of fairness, loyalty and authority are there but much smaller. If I had to choose between having money for retirement and seeing animals roam free, I'm afraid I'd choose the animals over myself.

Scaling the walls

On Christmas day, a Siberian tiger escaped its enclosure at the San Francisco Zoo and attacked three teenage boys, killing one, before police shot and killed it. The zoo claims the teen and his friends were throwing things, harassing the tiger, and had evidence of drugs in their car. But the real concern seems to be whether the walls should be higher; clearly the public isn’t safe around a caged wild animal.

Yesterday, the paper reported that since the attack, in two separate incidents, a 600-pound polar bear scaled the wall of her enclosure and nearly escaped and a snow leopard, while being moved between enclosures, chewed a 4-inch hole in the mesh cage and stuck its head and paw through. The zoo administrator denied these reports as escape attempts or anything to be worried about. Of course, they mean that we don't have to worry about ourselves. We should still be worried about the animals.

Most of the animals that people like to see in zoos are mammals. Mammals are the only species that need touch from other mammals to survive. Our social structures are built around that touch – how and when and who can touch us. These majestic animals that we love to look at - gorillas, tigers, lions, elephants and polar bears – have incredibly complex social structures like our own. Think about your life. How many people you see on a daily basis, how many you talk to, how many are your friends and your family. Think about how many miles you travel, all the different kinds of foods you eat and the places you go and look at.

Now imagine that you instead you spent your whole life in an apartment with one person you don’t even know and might not even like. Your keepers expect you to mate and have children with that person! Should you actually like this person enough to do so, it's very probable that they'll take your child or sell you to another zoo. They feed you the same thing every day. You never leave, you never see anyone different, you weigh twice as much as you do now, and you sleep all the time because you’re depressed.

Now imagine that six days a week visitors came to look at you. They yell at you, pound on your windows, take pictures of you and sometimes throw things. They want you to do something entertaining, to make them laugh or smile but they get to leave and you will always be there. Would you regard that life as anything but torture? Wouldn’t you also scale a wall or chew a hole through your cage and attack someone? Wouldn’t you do anything you could to get out of that situation?

I have said before that PETA is too extreme but on this issue, I agree with them one hundred percent. Zoos are pitiful prisons and they should be closed. All of them. The position of the Humane Society, whom I normally support, is pathetic and contradictory:

The Humane Society of the United States strongly believes that under most circumstances wild animals should be permitted to exist undisturbed in their natural environments. However, we recognize the widespread existence of zoos and acknowledge that some serve a demonstrable purpose in the long-term benefit of animals, such as the preservation and restoration of endangered species, and the education of people to the needs of wild animals and their role in ecosystems. [Emphasis mine]

But then they go on to say that not only is it impossible to simulate an animal's natural environment, only 10% of facilities are accredited to humane standards - and even that doesn't ensure humane treatment! Their focus is to work for better treatment of animals in zoos. It reminds me of the tobacco companies who, when their sales are dropping, ask how they could get people smoking more and never question whether they should even be making cigarettes. That's what we should be asking here, why are there zoos?

Zoos fail at everything they claim to do. They don't educate. Where's the education is seeing an animal in a cage? It's not going to do anything it does in the wild and people don't want to learn anyway, they want to be entertained. Zoos don't preserve species. Even if they breed endangered species, those animals can never be released into the wild because if they're raised in captivity, they aren't really wild animals! In Guns, Germs and Steel, Jared Diamond says that the animals that are domesticated are domesticated because it was possible, because it was easy. Wild animals are not meant to be raised by humans.

How many people, I wonder, after learning that an animal they've seen in the zoo is endangered, like the Siberian Tiger that killed the teenager, go home a write a check for preservation, or find out what they can do to help that species, get involved or write a letter? Are people really more concerned about poaching and encroachment and loss of habitat when they've just seen a majestic animal pacing in a cage like a creature that's lost its mind? Clearly it only sends a message that it's acceptable to torture animals.

"But the kids LOVE the zoo!" No, kids don't love zoos, they love animals. They come out of the womb loving animals but they have to be taught to love the zoo. Whenever I’ve gone with my nephew, we spend more time trying to get him excited about the exhibits than anything else. “Look Jonathan, look over here!” we yell while he seems perfectly fine to look at the plants, climb on a rock or watch other people.

Our pets are treated ten times better than these animals. They're domesticated for one thing, so human company is something they choose and enjoy. (Except for some states like North Carolina that allow ownership of wild animals including tigers.) They get to eat all different kinds of foods, or whatever food they want. They get out into the world, get to socialize with other animals, get love and affection and new experiences. Even so, we've all seen what happens when a dog is tied up and neglected. They're mean, they bark and bite and attack. Why? Because it's inhumane to restrict an animal's movement and deprive them of social interaction. Even domesticated animals have been known to escape from the slaughter house.

So I find it really sad that people love zoos. A Google search of "I love zoos" turned up 225,000 results while "I hate zoos," only 26,400. Ten times more people find the idea of building bigger walls and restricting the animals even more to be preferable over closing the zoo altogether. We put people in prisons as a punishment but what did the animals do to us? I say if you really like animals, boycott the zoo, donate to WWF, watch animal shows like Planet Earth, buy your kids a subscription to National Geographic Kids and take them hiking where you can see wild animals in their own habitat.

Here's the way kids should enjoy lions!

San Francisco is more humane!

I am proud to say that I am living in the most humane city in America. No wonder I love this place! The Humane Society of the United States ranked 25 cities by a dozen different criteria of how the population treats animals - number of vegetarian restaurants (good), doggies in the windows of pet stores (bad), fur for sale and on display (also bad), and state representatives who vote compassionately in the case of animals (very good), being some of the criteria - and found the most humane cities on the west coast. They're all my favorites too: 1) San Francisco, 2) Seattle and 3) Portland.

I am constantly in discussion with myself about my relationship to animals. Tonight I heard a dog get hit by a car, I didn't see it because I averted my eyes but it might be worse to hear something like that without a visual. Apparently he bounced off and went running off with his owner chasing after him. I was on a street corner and two people with dogs on leashes were holding them and their dogs were wrestling. Then they stopped and for some reason the owner of the larger dog let go of the leash. He was all riled up from the wrestling and hopping around on the sidewalk while the owner tried to get the leash.

I watched while waiting for the light to change, talking to a friend that was walking with me from the bus stop. It honestly didn't occur to me to try to get the leash but all of a sudden the dog started running toward the street, his owner trailing behind. I thought about lunging for the dog or the leash but I didn't move and before I knew it he was in the street, loping along like he was drunk, running right into oncoming traffic. People screamed and gasped, I turned around to avoid seeing it and BAM, I heard the whack. It was awful, really awful, and I found myself saying "a city is no place for an animal."

This weekend, I was putting around my apartment drinking coffee and I heard a little mewing sound. I love kitties and eagerly looked out the window hoping a kitty had come from somewhere to pay me a visit. What I found though was a mother cat and three fluffy kittens. They were hobbling around like they were just learning to walk. When I came down they scattered into a thicket of bamboo growing in the back. The mom jumped over the fence and watched me warily from the other side. She must have given birth to them here but they only just now came out. I immediately went out to get some cat food at the corner store and put it out. Momma cat ate it and then nursed her babies.

Then I started to wonder what my civic duty is to these animals. Clearly this cat needs to be neutered. And these babies need to be adopted or the city will have three more cats out there procreating in someone's back yard. After some calls, though, it's not as easy as just picking up the phone. This is where my love for animals is seriously tested. Am I willing to go to a store and rent a humane trap and maybe spend a week training the cat so that it will go into the trap? Then take it to the SPCA to be neutered and bring it back? In addition to capturing all the babies (they need to be delivered in separate humane cages) and delivering them to be adopted? I don't really have the time, but what choice do I have? I have to do my part to maintain the most humane city in America!