Putting the HR in Animal Rights

The term HR has become something of a joke, referring to a department within every company that works hirings and firings and occasionally organizes a holiday party. So it’s easy to forget the concept behind “HR” which is the idea that human beings, people, individuals are a vital resource to any company or endeavor. Without people we are small, weak, easy to ignore. But people bring their collective knowledge, their experience, their brilliance, their wild creativity or analytic logic to our efforts. They supply the steam and the enthusiasm behind every effort.

Those of us working for animals should take note of the changing climate within corporate America. Where once employees were considered a disposable resource, easily renewed with fresh recruits, many innovative companies are discovering that it is actually much more costly to replace their people power. There is time and effort lost training those brand new people, and it’s doubly hard to get the new people up to speed if the people already versed in the information and tested in the field aren’t there to help them along.

The entire Animal Rights/Vegan community isn’t a single company that can enact an employee assistance program, but we do benefit from retaining people and keeping them involved and active.

I’ve been to a number of discussions on burnout, discouragement, depression, and despair among animal activists. In general I found these discussions to focus around the concept of individual weakness, the idea that some activists just aren’t cut out for the tough work of standing up for animals. Generally the people expressing this view did have it very rough themselves, they were vegan when vegan wasn’t cool so to speak. Many came up through an animal control or humane society environment and possibly participated in putting thousands of animals to death themselves. They might think they had to toughen up so everyone else should too.

But a smart HR strategy is to meet people where they are, find ways to utilize their particular skills, engage and train them to strengthen those skills, and then retain them, keep them doing what they do well. Some people are very tough and they have a role to play. Others bring a different skill set, different talents and we need to keep them engaged as well.

Many animal organizations have become quite good at fundraising. They know which types of appeals bring in money, so they keep hitting the button that produces the bucks. They know how to work with businesses to raise money. They know put on benefits. But we should also keep in mind that if fundraising is a piggy bank that we keep adding to, keep dropping coins through the top slot, then losing supporters, losing activists is like a huge leak in the bottom of that piggy bank.

Each time someone finds themselves in so much despair over animal suffering that they just turn away, we lose their voice from our chorus. Every vegan who goes back to being an omnivore because they’re too burnt out to think or even feel at the moment is not just one ex-vegan eating animals. Through that one ex-vegan we lose access to all those she might have influenced. Another living example of how livable and fulfilling veganism can be drops off the map. Every person so disillusioned with the in-fighting and dishonesty in the corporate animal rights realm that they dissociate from animal rights altogether is a huge loss to the animals.

If we are all trying to plug into a network to pool our collective knowledge, information, skills, and talents, then we need to keep as many people as possible plugged in. Each connection that goes dead leaves us that much more isolated. People are a resource more precious than money for our movement, we need to find ways to keep them with us, keep them involved, and support them so they can be the best activists possible.

Vicious Animals

This is a picture of me with some rescued feral kittens that I like to show off because I tend to photograph horribly, but this actually looks decent. It’s kind of old now and my hair isn’t that long anymore, but there we are.

I bring this up because I showed the picture to my grandmother right after it was taken and she said of Torty (the tortoiseshell in the picture) that “this one looks like a vicious cat.”

I’m not sure what that means. I think now I’ve been bitten by more cats, dogs, and rabbits than I care to think about. I’ve also been kicked by a turtle. I’ve been scratched and some of them had really sharp claws, and I have the scars to prove it. But each and every incident has one thing in common: the animal didn’t know I was trying to help him. All he saw was a big old scary human hovering over him with a carrier, collar, or in some cases my huge scary hands. Incidentally no permanent injuries resulted, I don’t have rabies, all fingers are still accounted for.

I’ve had many close encounters of the rodent kind. I’ve had more than one really nasty spider bite. Even after all of this there’s no non-human animal who can scare me the way a human being can. Animals react to certain situations—me reaching for them, me accidentally stumbling through their web at night or accidentally setting my hand on them. Carnivorous animals sometimes pursue other animals in ways that seem incredibly cruel to us as observers. I’ve never encountered a lion in real life, but I imagine if I did and the lion thought I looked tasty, that would be pretty terrifying. Yet, seriously, human beings are scarier.

Anyway a couple of things spurred me to think about this topic. One was a brief mention of Sharon Stone wearing a huge fox fur drape which surely caused the deaths of 30 foxes. In the comments on it someone said that people should not be against the killing and skinning foxes for their fur because foxes are “vicious.” Vicious how? Because they eat smaller animals? The person making that comment likely eats animals, and far more than any fox. Because a fox doesn’t want you to pick him up and give him a hug? Guess what. I don’t want strangers or large creatures of other species to rush up and grab me either.

The other thing that spurred my thinking about this was Gary from Animal Writings talking about the bad qualities some humans ascribe to animals, among them the term “mean” which led me to vicious. If you’ve ever been unlucky enough to observe first hand the workings of a slaughter house, or more likely watched on tape as hundreds of animals are forced forward to their excruciating deaths, then you know how badly slaughter house workers react when an animal they are trying to kill fights back and actually manages to bite them or kick them. The animal is vilified, called vicious of mean for doing something that comes to all of us instinctively, trying to save his own life, fighting desperately against being ripped apart physically.

Hunters use the word vicious to describe a bear or boar who, wounded and in agony, lashes out in a futile attempt to drive away his killers. But if someone were trying to kill me, I would react much in the same way, first I’d try to get away, and if I found I could not get away I’d try to frighten my attacker off, and then I’d really try to injure them, to give myself some kind of slim chance of escape, and failing that I’d try to kill them. Some of us think we would not, and in fact many animals die quietly in shock and pain, unable even to turn and look at their killers. But I do think most of us, if we still had the strength in us would fight back.

But it’s just so accepted to many people that we kill animals and eat them that they are unable to process the concept that the animal wants to live, just like a person wants to live. Their reaction isn’t empathy, but outrage. “Your role is lie down and die, how dare you do anything else?”

It confuses me though. Do we really have to prove an animal is noble and has a pleasant personality for that animal to have any right to live? I don’t think we should kill alligators, not because I want to cuddle with one, but because they have their own intrinsic value, because they are alive and want to live, and because it’s not my role to play clean-up cop to the natural world. Let alligators be alligators and do what they will. I’m smarter than an alligator, I can read philosophy, I can ponder ethics, I can think about the impact of my actions on others and on the world around me. So I can choose to be vegan and I do.

Small Family Farms and Old Fashioned Values

Something I hear over and over again lately is that many people, like me, are opposed to factory farming. The public is far more aware today than in previous years about the cruelty involved in the intensive confinement of thousands of animals. There is also growing concern about the environmental damage of large scale animal agriculture.

Unfortunately many people think that these problems can be avoided by buying animal products at farmer’s markets, thus supporting smaller, local farmers.

The Washington Post unwittingly dispelled that myth on October 26 when they did a front page story on the effort to bring around Mennonite farmers to more environmentally friendly ways to handle animal waste. The message came through loud and clear with the photograph that accompanied the story: emaciated cows with protruding ribs stood in a dank feedlot, standing in their own waste without a blade of grass in sight.

The Mennonites are much like the Amish, a religious community that eschews certain trappings of modern life. But make no mistake; they are still as dedicated as any factory farmer to wringing the last dime from their animals with the least amount invested.

The focus of the article was the damage from Mennonite farms to local streams and creeks from animal waste run off. The article touted the success of working with some farmers to create systems to hold the waste in pools rather than let it run into the streams. Though it’s certainly better not to kill off every living thing in our local streams, I was troubled that the article ignored an important fact. The issue of animal waste disposal is becoming a crisis essentially everywhere we have animal agriculture. Storing the waste in pools on the farm is good for the streams, but still bad for the environment over all. Further there is just more animal waste than the environment can absorb. The only long-term solution to this issue is to stop raising so many animals for people to eat.

This article is timely because several members of my own family have hopped onto the trend of heading out to an Amish market (a one and half hour drive each way, at least) to buy “more humane” and “more natural” meat, cheese, and butter and egg-laden desserts for the holidays. I will certainly be showing them this article. We like to think back on our agrarian past as a utopia. The Mennonites and the Amish, because they wear old fashioned clothing and forgo many modern conveniences, bring to mind a happy myth of the family farm. But this article clearly shows it was always a myth. Even when horses plowed our fields and women wore bonnets while milking cows, animal cruelty has always been part of animal agriculture, and always will be.

The only way to avoid this cruelty and environmental devastation is to stop paying people to raise and kill animals for you. Whether you’re paying the grocer down the street or driving to the farmer’s market, when you buy eggs, milk, cheese, meat, or any animal product you are paying someone else to wring the maximum profit from animals even if that means under-feeding them, confining them, crowding, allowing them to develop disease, mutilating their bodies, or beating them if they don’t cooperate. The money you pay for these products ensures that more of these animals will be bred into this life. The money you pay rewards someone for polluting ground and water that other people and animals depend on.

If you want to go to the farmer’s market buy local organic produce, vegetables, lettuce, herbs. The answer to our ethical and environmental concerns about animal agriculture are not to be found in “smaller farms,” “local farms,” or “old fashioned farms” any more than they can be found in industrialized farms. The answer is to stop eating animals and animal products and eat a vegan diet instead.

Why No Kill Matters In Animal Rights

Seeing Nathan Winograd speak and subsequently reading his new book Redemption was uplifting in a way we rarely experience in work to help animals. For the first time we’re hearing someone address a seemingly unsolvable problem, companion animal overpopulation and the endless killing that goes along with it, and he is saying “we can solve this, we can make a difference.”

One of the things I enjoyed most about this is that Nathan Winograd isn’t some kind of pie-in-the-sky optimist. He speaks of our horrible history with animals, from drowning masses of stray dogs to people who hurt animals for the joy of inflicting pain. He sees all the selfishness and cruelty around us today. But what he sees is more good people than bad, and tells us that good people can make a difference. With humor and humility he demonstrates that sometimes those good people might not know what to do, they might be misguided, misinformed, flat broke, or terribly confused. But with that proper help, they can step up to the plate and be part of the solution. They might not know how to help animals, but we can teach them how.

He breaks things down into simple manageable steps and then starts dismantling the road blocks. To apply this to my own community: we know that many of our neighbors are not going to get their own companion animals sterilized, much less the strays and ferals they feed. So we have to do it for them, and because we, Sean and I, are limited in our funding, time, and energy, we need help to accomplish it. So we reached out and found help.

Recently a fellow activist asked me if I ever felt like work on companion animal issues was sort of a waste of time considering how many more animals suffer terrible fates and are eventually slaughtered for food. I agree in essence that more animals are affected by animal agriculture and that is indeed the larger problem. That’s why I keep trying to promote veganism. However, I also know that many, many people love companion animals. These could be the only animals they have first hand experience with, the only animals they have learned to feel empathy for. So expanding their understanding of companion animal issues, and reaching out to them through that empathy can be a first step to expanding their understanding of all animal issues.

But there’s another important reason we can’t just ignore companion animal issues. In animal rights we are continuously trying to convince people that non-human animals are individuals, that they feel, love, and suffer. We want them to see chickens as fiercely protective, affectionate mothers, not egg machines. We want them to recognize the bond between cows as similar to the bonds within their own human families. So if we keep saying over and over that animals matter and are important, then we need to make sure our actions match our words. We can’t convincingly tell people it’s wrong to kill a cow because you like the taste of beef, but it’s ok for us to kill hundreds of dogs because they are inconvenient. We can’t tell people that chickens deserve a life not shut in dank barns, packed wing to beak, but then say it’s ok to exterminate feral cats. If we say that animals are individuals and their lives matter, then we can’t dispose of companion animals just because it’s difficult to come up with solutions or because their care is costly.

Of course their care is costly and there are more dogs, cats, rabbits, ferrets, and every other type of companion animals than there are homes. Does that mean it’s ok for us to take them out of sight, kill them, and guiltily stuff the thousands of bodies into the trash? We rail against the people who abandon their animals, and accuse them of viewing living, feeling creatures as disposable. So we need to send the message that they are not disposable. And we need to make the communities see and understand the consequences of the current system and of their individual actions.

The only way to get ahead of the curve on this one is by paying for massive sterilization programs. We have to let go of the idea that people should be responsible and pay their own vet bills to get their cats and dogs spayed and neutered. Many already are responsible, but others just aren’t, and it only takes a few animals continually breeding over their lifetimes to flood us with unwanted kittens and puppies. So we need to do the sterilizing ourselves.

We also need to put breeders out of business. Breeders sell animals to anyone who has the money without regard to whether that person will care for the animal his or her entire life. Breeders promote the myth that shelter and rescue animals are inferior, therefore condemning more to die. Breeders glut certain areas with puppies and kittens for sale and then hand over the ones who don’t sell to the shelters. Breeders also sell inbred animals more prone to disease and hyperactivity, so they are distributing animals more likely to be abandoned or dropped off at shelters.

But as we work on the effort to reduce the new animals being born into homelessness, we also need to follow Nathan’s advice on being more aggressive with placing rescued companion animals. We need to do the PR to show people how truly wonderful they are. We need to dispel the myth that people with children need puppies; in fact an adult dog is often the best choice for young families. We also need to consider the image we project of ourselves as rescuers, shelter workers, etc. We need to show people we’re working with animals AND people to find good homes and help everyone. We can work with people to educate them.

Hopefully all this will bear fruit, not just in reducing the shameful numbers of healthy, adoptable animals we kill just for the crime of being born in the wrong place, but will also set an example for how compassionately solve seeming intractable issues involving animals. How can we ask people to not advocate killing deer in response to car accidents and Lyme disease if we ourselves kill kittens just because there are so many of them. How can we ask people not to promote kangaroo meat as an alternative to eating cows when we kill dogs just because their guardians got tired of them? How can we ask people to think of the feelings of a chicken if we ignore the feelings of entire bonded colonies of feral cats who are content and healthy where they are?

This is why “No Kill” matters to the entire animal advocacy movement and why all of should take a little time out and read Redemption.

“I have never tired of manna falling from above”

Maybe it’s because it’s Fall I’m finding it hard to write so much about animal issues right now. Maybe too much of my mind is taken up with memories and the free association bouncing off the shortening days and beautiful colors. So what the heck, I’m giving in and writing free association today.

For many years my great uncle lived in a two room cabin in the Blue Ridge mountains, it had a downstairs with a stove and refrigerator on one wall, a bathroom in the corner (hmm, does that make it three room?), and then a rickety set of stairs leading up to an open loft above with a bed and dresser up there. Then he started having trouble with stairs so he gave that cabin to a woman who helped to take care of him and moved to a one room (or two if you count the bathroom, I’m confused) so that everything could be on one floor. So the space shrank and the world shrank, as his legs no longer carried him across paths and fields or down rocky embankments to stand on cliffs and look out over the valley.

The walking sticks that once poked through dead leaves to chase snakes from his path, or tapped at rocks to test the safety of the footing, were replaced by canes. Then even the canes sat barely used by the front door.

But there was always the sky and the air, and pure water and watercress glistening in the spring next to the house. There were always the animals, the rescued dog at his side, the deer grazing even right next to the porch, comfortable in his quiet and he comfortable in theirs.

The last time I saw him alive I walked into that one room just in time to see a rather fat black snake slipping out the open window at my approach. My great uncle told me he “was just visiting with the old man.” (This was not a moment of senility, he always addressed snakes as “old man,” it was just how he addressed them) Then he spoke joyfully of the hummingbirds that came to his feeder right outside his window and how he could watch them even from his bed. He wondered at how an animal so small could be so beautiful and move so quickly. He said they were great company for him.

Perfect days without regret, sorrow, envy, or resentment, just joy frozen in time. A moment I can call up from memory to guide me through the harder moments.

During that time when things were the worst for me I held onto the thought that there were other happy moments, hummingbirds, and clear days ahead, just that the darkness was what I had to go through to get to the other side. Something like crawling through a tunnel or wading through a swamp. You can’t stay where you are; you have to find the way through.

Some people collect things in life, some people collect money. Some have ten or more houses, some have fancy cars. I know what it’s like to be around someone who seemingly has everything and yet it’s never enough. I know what it’s like to be around someone who is never satisfied. And then I have this incredible gift: I know what it’s like to be around someone who is always satisfied. I know what it’s like to be around someone who finds joy in every space, however small, who can spot beauty wherever it hides. I know what it’s like to be around someone who never saw a single fault in me, never saw a fault in a bird, or a snake, for whom every single sunset and sunrise was new and perfect and unique.

I also know what it’s like to sit next to the dying and write down for them the last few things they want to pass on. I’ve never known someone to say in those moments that they wished they’d been less kind during life. I’ve never seen someone regret compassion.

This connects back to how I feel about veganism, and animal rescue, and any other effort to do good. I’m not going to regret this later. I’m not going to one day wish I’d had a little more cruelty in my diet. I’m not going to look back and say “I wish I’d just kept driving and didn’t stop for that injured cat.” I’m not going to look back and wish I’d cared less or loved less.

It’s not like I got through that swamp and suddenly everything was perfect, but having gotten through that place I know that I can get through some really tough things. In all honesty, becoming a vegan in the first place was a little tough for me. I missed some foods I’d eaten before and I wasn’t sure what I should be eating. I had to go through that to get to this place where I love the food I eat and eat and cook beautiful, artistic, healthy (and sometimes not so healthy) foods. I don’t feel deprived at all, I’m not sorry I made that choice. But I had to trust at a few points that things were going to get easier and easier.

Sometimes we hold the things we know so close that our arms are closed completely, we can’t embrace anything new. Then we let go of something that seemed important so we can take in something better, or just because everything we’re holding onto immobilizes us. We are surprised by everything our hearts can hold. Giving up eating animals can let us view them in a whole different way, to love them in a way that we were afraid to when we still ate their flesh. It doesn’t take any love away from anyone else. We don’t love our friends any less. Instead we let go of the defensiveness, the need to protect our favorite foods from criticism, and letting go of the defensiveness gives us more room to care.

I know, I’m rambling again. When someone tells me “I just can’t be vegan. I don’t have the willpower” or “I like meat too much, I could never be vegan” I naturally think “Of course you could, you just don’t realize how much you really can do.” You’re holding the familiar so close, but you don’t know what you’re capable of, all that you can hold until you open your arms.

Interesting Question: Talking about Veganism

Here's an interesting question that came up in some recent discussion. How effectively can we communicate with people about veganism if there is otherwise a huge gap in our experiences or beliefs?

On the one hand nobody should be immune from ethics or compassion. So I should be able to talk to someone who grew up in communist Russia/USSR about how we treat animals and how we should treat animals. And I have many times had very positive conversations with people who come from very different backgrounds than I do.

On the other hand, what happens if I try to talk to someone and their response is "You just don't understand my situation?" For example, I don't have children--family-wise and career-wise I've spent a lot of time around very small children. But I recently had a conversation with a woman who was trying to slowly ease into veganism, and she said "You don't have kids so you just don't know how hard it is to get a picky four year old to eat anything other than chicken fingers." I've been around some four year olds but never one who insisted on eating only one non-vegan food. So, yes, on a basic level I've never lived her experience.

I do find that in those "you don't understand" situations it's useful to step back and say "Ok, I probably don't understand, can you tell me a little more about it." Maybe I can't solve it for her, but maybe that's not what she wanted anyway, maybe she wanted to look for her own solutions using me as a sounding board.

I do sometimes feel like I'm in my best element for talking about veganism when I can draw heavily on my own life experience and the other person can identify with those experiences and share similar ones of her own. This isn't always about obvious stuff either, I've shared these kinds of "me too!" conversations with African American women who grew up in Brooklyn and neighbors who were born in Iran but fled after the Shah fell. So it's not always about race, gender, social class or anything so easy to pick out. Though it is hard to know how to respond if someone does bring those very issues into the conversation. I know what it's like to not have much money, but I don't know what it's like to be a male teenager and get called names for not eating meat. I can sympathize. I can tell him lots of us got called names but we never regretted sticking to our ethics. But I'm not there with him in that moment...

It's tough. An Atheist can talk to a Christian about ethics, about suffering, about general morality, but can she address the Christian's fears about the possibility that he'll lose the fellowship he feels in his church if he stops eating with them? Maybe we can speak to that in general terms though, about our friends who stuck by us despite differing views, or ways to build fellowship in general.

Can an Atheist really address the issue though of whether Christianity mandates vegetarianism? A true believer can speak from her heart and talk about her interpretation and her feelings on it. Of course, everyone can still ignore her. But can an Atheist really address issues of faith?

Maybe we don't all need to cover every issue though, but just keep saying what works for us and how, and hopefully have some resources handy for the ones we can't address. "You don't know any other vegan Muslims? Check out this website." Or that kind of thing. Or we can just be the sounding board.

Can “Cat Fights” Instruct Us On Larger Animal Rights Issues?

I rescue domestic animals. It’s not an “animal rights” occupation. So many times during the last few weeks, hard core “meat-eaters” and guys who like to fish have approached me to thank me and tell me that “you’re really doing God’s work here.”

But I didn’t start out as a rescuer. I learned about animal rights and animal issues largely from PeTA. I’m one of that generation of activists who grew up in a world where PeTA was active and on the news. I got their mailings. I applied for a job at PeTA but actually ended up working at several other animal rights groups.

During my time working at these groups I was indoctrinated into the sheltering mentality that rescue doesn’t accomplish much and that No Kill isn’t possible. I believed those things and tried to stay away from active rescue.

Sometimes when you’re going in one direction the universe hits you over the head with a two by four to get you back on the path you’re meant for, I guess. Apparently I was meant for rescue because I barely take two steps without finding an animal in need of help. My friend Carrie says she looks out for stray animals but never sees them. I don’t have to be looking. Sean and I were driving down the highway exhausted from an all day canoe trip. I was talking excitedly about our plans for the next day when my eye went straight to a speck of black on the overgrown, weedy median strip. “Stop the car!” I shouted. We ended up having to back the car up the shoulder to pull a tiny, five week old kitten out of the weeds beside the highway. Everyone marveled that I had happened to see her. But that just seems to happen. My eye, whether I want it to or not goes toward the living creature in need of help. Sometimes my talent fails me, but it seems that when I don’t spot them or hear them, Sean does. One fall night with patchy fog he and I crawled all over a parking lot because he heard a faint meowing—luckily he managed to grab a tiny kitten from under a parked SUV.

So it seems this was meant to be one way or another. This forced me to consider No Kill and read Nathan Winograd and try to find better solutions.

For someone who had no choice but to get involved in rescue, I’m sometimes reluctant to work too closely with rescue groups for fear of getting caught up in the not infrequent rescue battles. There’s one going on right now in fact that is getting passed around by email, with everyone taking one side or the other. It’s a battle between a fosterer and a rescue group over who “owns” and therefore gets to make medical decisions for a disabled dog.

I myself got swept up in my own rescue battle years ago when I was fostering a very sick cat. The rescue vet diagnosed FIP and gave her days to live. Based on a gut feeling I secretly got a second opinion. But when my decision to change her treatment came to light, the looniest battle ensued. The rescue tried to use every trick in the book to get a gravely ill cat back from me, including ambushing me at the vet’s office and trying to grab her back. I stood my ground because I honestly believed that if they put her back on the former treatment she would soon die. That’s what my new vet who was saving her life told me. I’m too stubborn to lose such a battle and seven years later the cat is still with me, still with medical issues, but I keep her on a steady regimen of herbs, supplements and special food. I’m sad that it turned into what it did, but I can’t be sad that I saved this cat’s life.

You might think this is just me being the stubborn, difficult person that I am, but since that battle, I’ve seen it duplicated over and over. A friend, a person I respected, fought a legal battle to recover a partially blind feral cat from a loving foster home, only to ship her out to live in a horse barn. The loving fosterers were being kicked out of the group because they had argued about the website design and added things to the website without authorization. While I’m sure it’s difficult to work with people who change the website on a whim, demanding the return of the cat was not the best thing for the cat. It was the worst possible thing for the cat.

The common thread here, the refrain in the case of the disabled dog, what the founder of the rescue group said to me, what my friend said to the fosterers, is all about ownership. “But you can’t keep her, because I own her.” Seriously, even if it’s worse for the animal in question, the trump card is ownership.

If someone was trying to hurt my companion animals and rescues, I’d play every card in the deck, including claiming ownership. But in my mind I don’t regard my rescues as animals I own. They are animals I guide and protect. They are the refugees of our terrible system, they came to me for shelter and so I provide it.

These things are of course different from the mass ownership of the poultry farm with the thousands of mutilated and tortured chickens living in dank sheds and stacks of cages. But still the concept of ownership trumps all else. The person who owns these chickens gets to make all the decisions and the person crying out against the inherent cruelty of these operations is told she is interfering with ownership rights, and sticking her nose where it doesn’t belong because she has no financial stake in the operation. Horse riding is about ownership. Dog racing is about ownership, and so on. And the insidious nature of our beliefs about ownership are present even in “animal lovers.” It’s a leap some can’t seem to make to realize that ownership of another living being shouldn’t matter, but what’s best for the animal should be the main concern.

Just musings in the morning—not sure I’m going anywhere with this one.

I for one hope to never again engage in any “cat fights.” I hope to do good things and not get caught up in that kind of battle. Still I can’t say that if I felt a cat I cared about was at risk of harm or even death that I wouldn’t fight. So, I’ll keep my head down and hope for the best.

Tales from Feral Cat City

I wish I had more pictures to post, maybe I’ll get some this weekend.

Talking to people in the neighborhood about the cats is an odd thing. The first lesson is that if you’re talking to an adult and they act hostile or just say “no” and start to shut the door on you, and you’re pretty sure that language is the real issue, ask if they have a kid at home. Talking to people through their teenaged and older kids has been so helpful. Our neighborhood is a mosaic of languages and cultures. Some feral cat organizations have materials in Spanish, which is a huge help, but in our neighborhood people either feeding or having issues with the cats also speak Vietnamese, Urdu, Portuguese, Thai, Oromifa, and Hausa. And that’s just off the top of my head, I might not even know all the languages spoken. We would never get materials in all these languages, so the children who already translate so much for their parents are an invaluable resource.

The second lesson is that when people see feral cats as a problem they have strange ideas about the causes and solutions to this problem. A number of people I spoke to believed that stopping others from feeding would make the cats go away, so I patiently explained that the cats did not become so overpopulated over night, and they were not going to disappear overnight either. Feeding keeps them healthier. More consistent feeding would hopefully keep them out of the trash. And feeding will allow me to catch them and get them fixed and vaccinated. Most people were pretty receptive when I explained this.

Some people seemed very concerned about rabies, and this is apparently amplified in people who came here from places where rabies among domestic animals is still a large problem. They were quite relieved to hear about the vaccinations. Some people said they wouldn’t let their kids out into their own yards without supervision because they were so worried about rabies.

Everyone who didn’t like the cats had an opinion about who was at fault for the feral cat situation. The man who walks a little white dog name Poppy said the cats were here because his neighbor Stuart fed the cats. But Stuart said that he only fed some kittens briefly and then took them to the shelter. I explained to him about TNR and why the shelter isn’t good for feral cats, but it was too late for those kittens unfortunately. After this he agreed to feed the cats that were coming into his yard anyway, so long as I got them fixed. Stuart in turn blamed the problem on his former neighbor Oscar who had bought some cats at pet stores as long as fifteen years ago and then never got the cats sterilized or took care of them. This is likely the real explanation. Oscar since has moved and left behind even his tame indoor cats when he pulled up stakes. Some people blamed Alberta, who feeds, and called her “a cat lady.” But Alberta said she just started feeding a few and then more and more showed up. She was the most cooperative of all the feeders in our sterilization effort. Many people blamed Lam, as she is often seen feeding, but once we got her daughter to translate she had much the same story, she started putting out a little food for one or two strays and before she knew it 20 or more cats were showing up at meal times.

The consistent thread though is that not one of these people got a single cat sterilized before we showed up and started doing it for them.

A nice note about all of this is that even the people who said they didn’t care for the cats or hated that their trash got torn up still asked “You’re not going to hurt the cats, right?” So they do have concern and empathy for the ferals, even as they’re annoyed by the situation.

Alberta told me that she did not used to have cats, but her sister had one indoor cat. The cat was very affectionate, but one day he began kneading on the sister’s head and nuzzling her scalp. This was new and unusual behavior and the sister was worried. She called Alberta and said “Does this mean something is wrong with my cat? He’s never done this before.” Alberta asked if he was hurting her. “No,” the sister replied, “It’s more like he’s massaging and grooming my head, but he won’t stop. He won’t give me a minute’s peace.” Two weeks later Alberta’s sister died of four brain aneurysms. “That’s why I feed the cats,” Alberta told me, “A cat tried to tell my sister she was dying. He tried to save her, but we wouldn’t listen. So now I feed them every night and think about my sister.”

It’s the stuff that just gets to you, huh? I don’t think Alberta likes the ear-tipping, but in a colony with maybe sixty cats where three quarters of them are black and white, the ear tipping is vital. It’s an uphill battle, but we need to do it.

As long as I'm on a roll, with tartar sauce...

Tonight, despite exhaustion, I made beer battered tofu to celebrate completing the first leg of our feral cat effort. Some people come into my blog searching "beer battered tofu recipe." So, what the heck.

Um, I never measure anything. ever. But this is my best attempt.

Beer Batter:
One bottle beer (whatever you like or choose)
approx 1 1/2 cups flour (I used white flour, organic, unbleached but white)
1/2 tsp salt
1 tablespoon or more paprika
about 5 cloves garlic mashed
finely chopped fresh rosemary, I picked like five sprigs from my rosemary plants

Whisk it up.

Cut the tofu into thick slices. I use extra firm tofu, put it on dish towels and press it with a stack of plates. I cut my 1 lb block of tofu into five slices, I could have done six because they ended up kind of thick.

I heated canola oil in a pan, I put the oil pretty deep, maybe 1/3 inch... When it was really hot I spread beer batter on the top and sides of a slice of tofu then put it in the pan batter side down. Messy. Then using the spoon I spread batter all over the top and exposed sides. When it's ready it will have bubbled on the sides and stopped, flip with a spatula. Messy. Repeat until all slices are done.

Tatar Sauce

Seriously, I never measure anything

I put tofutti cream cheese, like two glops of it in a bowl
I put in slightly more veganaise
I squirted Dijon mustard all over the top of it

I blended with a hand held blender until smooth.

I put in finely chopped onions, dill, and parsley, blended some more.

I tasted and squirted in some more Dijon mustard and dumped in some sweet pickle relish. Stirred, tasted, was satisfied.

Serve beer battered tofu on buns with lettuce, tomato, and tartar sauce. Messy, but yummy.

Omar the feral is famous

Washington Humane has a blog and they featured a really gorgeous photo of the feral Omar that I brought to the clinic this past Sunday.

I'm happy to be putting Omar back into the colony because the feral female I previously sterilized, named Pookie, is very passive. Pookie is so passive that we even tried to keep her in for a while after we got her fixed but she just cowered and wouldn't eat or budge from behind the toilet. It seemed kinder to return her to Stuart's feeding area, where she had friends and felt comfortable and was able to eat.

She was good friends with Buddy, in fact Buddy protected her from other cats that tried to take her food. But I took Buddy out because he was tame and adoptable. For a while Pookie was really lonely and I had to stand guard (at a distance) so she could eat. Finally she struck up a friendship with Omar. Getting him fixed now, while he's still young will help him stay friends with Pookie, instead of having him get all hormonal and start fighting and roaming. From the looks of them, practically identical, Pookie and Omar are likely siblings anyway.

(below is a picture before we took Buddy inside, with Buddy in front and Pookie hanging back)




















Some of the other ferals I brought in are also shown further down on the Washington Humane blog.

I like the figures they give for how many kittens this prevents. If nothing else I was thinking that the eight females I got fixed this time (and Pookie at the prior clinic) could each have three kittens in each litter (we've had several four kitten litters here actually), and at least two, maybe even three litters a year. Most are young and would at least have kittens for seven to ten years. Here the population keeps increasing because so many people feed. But there are also dangers these cats face, like illness from being so crowded, and the one psycho who poisons cats. So any reduction in the population is a positive thing.

Also removing Melissa from the colony, getting her sterilized, and finding her a good indoor home further reduces the population. Even though Melissa was not feral, she could have quickly produced a lot of feral kittens.

It's just the tip of the feral cat iceberg around here though. Still Sean had a major breakthrough today in communicating with some of the feeders who don't speak English. Their adult daughter happened to be there and translated for him. It seems actually my guess that they were Vietnamese was accurate. Anyway, even though I thought I had let them know I was finding homes for the cats I took they somehow thought I might be letting my dogs kill cats. So today I stuck some pictures with notes written on them in their door. Hopefully they'll believe us that we're helping, not hurting the cats.

It's heartbreaking in many ways though. The cats are so crowded and densely populated around the main feeding centers that younger cats are constantly drifting off and living in ones and twos throughout the rest of the neighborhood. One very small female we put back out, even though she seems very isolated from the rest of the colony. We will make a special effort to make sure she gets food. This is the sad part of a colony that has been fed but never controlled in an urban area like this. When I tell people that I estimate we have sixty unaltered cats here, most don't believe me, but it seems like I keep noticing new cats all the time. I might walk the dogs down a street I don't normally use and there are skinny cats tearing up trash.

Exhausted

Let's see. Over the weekend Sean and I placed one cat, Melissa, in a very good home and then trapped, sterilized and vaccinated eleven feral cats (eight of them female). There are more out there though.

I'm really thrilled with the home we found for Melissa thanks to petfinder. We could not have asked for nicer people or a better home.

Yesterday was not a good day really, but I had not expected it to be good.

I can barely keep my eyes open.

I kept having dreams where I'd won free samples of amazing cleaning products which made a miraculous difference in our grungy, old home. Yes, I seem to be cleaning even when I'm asleep.

No Guarantees

Recently a distressing situation came to my attention involving someone I used to know quite well but had fallen out of touch with. I hope it’s ok to blog about this, but since she’s put her petition online and could certainly use some help, I thought I’d spread the word.

The courts recently terminated Nancy’s parental rights and put her child up for adoption even though her child was never in serious danger and she has been cleared of all neglect charges (which were trumped up in the first place).

The situation simply is that after birth Nancy’s baby lost a small amount of weight. This is actually a fairly common problem with newborns, but does need to be addressed. Nancy, like any good parent, was concerned and sought medical help, after the initial treatment didn’t work, she checked her baby into the hospital. Despite the prompt treatment and the baby’s immediate improvement in the hospital social workers removed the baby from Nancy’s home and placed her in foster care.

Since then the case has dragged out for over two years. As I said, Nancy and her now husband (not the baby’s genetic father, but nonetheless a devoted and caring father) were cleared of any wrong doing in the case.

How could this happen? Apparently it has to do with the courts and the social workers concentrating on Nancy’s diagnosis with Pervasive Developmental Disorder. This diagnosis is sort of a catch-all diagnosis for people who fall on “the autism spectrum” without a diagnosis of a more defined disorder like autism or Asperger’s syndrome.

This is troubling to me for a number of reasons. The first is because this is sort of a catch-all diagnosis it can apply to people who are significantly impaired in daily functioning all the way to people who, for lack of a better way to explain it, are essentially normal, independent, capable, but have a few quirks. The second reason this troubles me is that I really feel you can probably find a doctor who could diagnose any ill-defined syndrome in anyone, but I’m not sure what that really proves.

One gross generalization that people sometimes make about individuals with autism spectrum disorders is that people with these disorders have an impaired ability to feel empathy. They’ll say this is a concern when it comes to parenting, since they might be less responsive to the child’s needs. But knowing Nancy it’s hard for me to think of a person who expresses more empathy and compassion. So that generalization doesn’t apply to her at all.

As I said, knowing Nancy and knowing the kindness she brings to every aspect of her life, I can’t imagine why she would be considered unfit to be a parent. I can say with confidence that not only would she never hurt anyone, much less a child, I also don’t think she’d ever yell at a child or say unkind words. She’s just a very gentle and loving person. She is also not significantly impaired in any way, she holds a responsible job, lived independently for years before getting married, is a tireless activist for social justice, and has friends and family standing by to help and support her. It’s worth noting as well that her husband and her mother are both dedicated to helping active roles with Nancy’s daughter, and neither of them have any disabilities. We aren’t talking about someone who is helpless, or a shut in, or isolated with no support system.

Still Child Protective Services saw fit to take her child away and give her to another family.

I’m sure we’ve all known parents with disabilities who made excellent parents. The mother of a friend of mine when I was a child had lost her leg in a car accident, but that never stopped her from being a loving, involved mother. A roommate’s mother had a debilitating disease that left her in a wheel chair and slowly robbed her of her speech, and yet with support from other family members she was still a very good mother. There is a whole rainbow of parents out there and many of them might have stumbling blocks in their lives, but it doesn’t stop them from raising their children.

I guess I’m also confused because I see so many cases on the news about parents who are violently physically abusive and yet their kids keep getting sent back, taken away again, sent back again in some kind of ludicrous revolving door approach that gives them so many chances.

There are some problems I think really do interfere with parenting. Active substance abuse problems strike me as one that’s really damaging because not only are children who watch their parents abusing drugs and alcohol more likely to have these problems themselves, but also parents desperate to feed their addictions don’t always take great care of their kids and might even endanger them. In people that already have violent habits, drugs and alcohol make them more likely to lash out physically.

But in Nancy’s case I feel like it’s not really about active danger, it’s more an effort on the part of the social workers to pick and choose this picture perfect family. When we talk in theoreticals it’s easy to say that every child ought to have perfect parents. Then we get back into the real world and understand that there’s no such thing as perfect parents. Might life sometimes be hard for a child with a disabled parent, no matter what type of disability? Of course that’s a possibility. On the other hand a parent who has learned to work with or around her disability to lead a full and active life could be an inspiration to her child.

And then there’s the fact that there are no guarantees in life. We could pick the best parents we could find. We could make sure they’re not even slightly odd, but are attractive, normal in every way, physically fit, educated, whatever. But that can always change at any time. Someone could get sick or get in an accident. The parents could split up and drag the child through a bitter divorce. We just don’t know the future and we can’t always make everything perfect. So long as there is not active harm being done to the child, perhaps it’s good for them to see people deal with real problems and work through them, or learn that that it’s ok for people to look or act or speak a little differently from others and that’s nothing to be afraid of.

It’s really sad to see families unnecessarily ripped apart and hearts and homes broken in this way. If you agree you can sign Nancy’s petition here:
http://www.thepetitionsite.com/petition/978924093

And read more about her story here:
http://ourstory.com/story.html?v=118329

Cool Article: Vegan in Anacostia

Yesterday's Washington Post featured a really nice article about a woman teaching vegan cooking and selling vegan catering and even winning an omni chilli contest with her vegan chilli. Her name is Levita Mondie-Sapp and she teaches school and spreads the vegan message.

I know that prior to the revitalization Anacostia didn't even have many stores that sold produce so one big complaint from people who lived there was that they had to cross the bridge to eat healthy food.

I hope Ms. Mondie-Sapp experiences tons of success in her ventures!

Bad, Wrong, and Vegan

Bad, Wrong, and Vegan

Like I said yesterday, I’m having trouble trusting my words at the moment. Those of you who know me, know that I have a lot on my plate at the moment and it’s making it hard to be the blogger I’d like to be. So forgive me if I misspeak here.

More than a decade ago I moved into a group house in the Mt. Pleasant neighborhood, before that neighborhood was so trendy and yuppified. I was grateful for a place to live, with seemingly nice roommates. So I decided to cook a meal for all of them. I didn’t make very much money but I wanted to do something nice for my roommates.

Unfortunately sometime during that meal one roommate, a guy, decided to play quiz the vegan. Somehow this wound up with him extracting from me the information that six or so years prior to that meal I had done something that really wasn’t good for animals. I admitted that I had done this thing and also said that I deeply regretted it and considered it a terrible mistake. At the same time I reflected that in an odd way, doing something wrong had been the thing that probably set me on the path toward veganism.

My roommate was incensed. He pounded his fist on the table. He yelled that I was a hypocrite and in his opinion I might as well give up being vegan because I was a sham. He then yelled that I could never make up for what I’d done and he despised me. This after eating my food and drinking my wine, but there it was.

I was deeply hurt. Not because I didn’t know the wrongness of my prior actions and not that I didn’t live with constant regret. But I was hurt because I thought I was doing something nice, feeding everyone a home cooked meal, and I felt I was paid back in a confrontation that was mean, unfair, which more or less ruined the evening for everyone, and given the fist pounding and the significant size difference between myself and this guy, felt fairly physically intimidating to me.

The other roommates had looked uncomfortable and then positively ill and then drifted away as the confrontation continued. A friend who dropped by for the food but didn’t live there looked uneasy, his eyes got huge, he kept opening his mouth as if to say something, then stopped and just drank more wine instead.

What was my terrible crime? Years before, my boyfriend at the time had given me a gift of a baby rabbit purchased at a pet store, and I, even knowing pet stores are terribly wrong, and it’s wrong to financially support them, fell in love with the rabbit. I was nineteen and a vegetarian. I was old enough to know better. I knew everything wrong with the whole thing and yet I did it anyway. I organized no great protest of the pet store. We did not return and demand our money back. Yes, I know there’s everything in the world wrong with that story, but that’s what happened.

Happily he did no try to pry further back into my life to learn I had previously gone fishing, eaten animals my father had killed, eaten rabbits my father had killed, eaten animals I had raised and loved, worn fur trim, worn leather, carried a purse made out of crocodile that I’d found in storage in my parents’ house. I can’t even imagine how much fist-banging would have been involved then. I don’t think I can possibly list anything and everything I did wrong. I generally say of all of this that I was very young and just didn’t know better and had been raised to accept all of these things. But I’m not sure age is the relevant factor. Most of us live our lives one way, the way we are taught, until something transformative happens at some point and opens us up to empathy and compassion. And opening up to those things can really be ego-crushing because to change requires admitting something was wrong in the first place. So many people find that kind of examination incredibly painful and try to avoid facing it.

In any case I managed to eventually work out my differences with that roommate and we ended up getting along. Not that I condone fist-banging ever.

The H Word: Hypocrite

I tend to think we’re all hypocrites, some less than others, but still we all have our issues. It’s not just that I’ve done things in the past that weren’t good to animals. I really value being good to people and not acting in an underhanded, passive aggressive way. In fact I wrote an article about how damaging gossip is. Yet, I’ve caught myself gossiping. The thing is that doing better and being better is a work in progress. It’s easy to fall back on bad habits and it’s generally difficult to break them. Shocking as it sounds, I find it easier to be vegan, because at this point it’s largely habit for me, than I find it to always be empathetic to people who don’t present themselves well, for example people whose mental illnesses make them disruptive, angry and aggressive. In cases like that I often have to take a deep breath, step back, and remind myself that nobody chooses to carry around those kinds of burdens.

Does the fact that it doesn’t always come perfectly naturally to me mean it’s hopeless and not worth pursuing? I really don’t think so, because if nothing else, the effort I put in matters to me and matters to those immediately around me. And also I hope for the cumulative effect of many people putting effort into kindness and compassion.

We all screw up. We all fall down. We all make mistakes. But the belief that we have to be perfect all the time is paralyzing. If we believe we must be perfect at everything we do, then it can be an excuse to do nothing. It means we can’t experiment, learn, and grow.

To go back to the idea of being a nice person, we can recognize that we have failed in the past, and might fail again, but still acknowledge that it’s important to keep trying. Knowing that we can’t be perfect isn’t a carte blanche to be as awful as we’re capable of being. Instead, it’s an incentive to keep trying and to also be able to apologize for the mistakes we make along the way. Likewise with veganism. Most of us weren’t born vegan, we might have even done very non-vegan things in the past. We might screw up tomorrow and accidentally eat something that isn’t vegan. But we’re going for the balance here. We want to keep trying to do our best and not let the mistakes paralyze and disempower us. Mistakes are also learning experiences, when we mess up once we know to look out for that problem next time.

Also, what does hypocrite mean? It refers to a person who holds one value, but behaves in a way that is opposite to that value. So, Thomas Jefferson was a hypocrite to own slaves while calling slavery immoral. Many of us looking at history are deeply disappointed by his personal failings and participation in one of history’s truly great wrongs. However his own participation in a deeply immoral system doesn’t mean he was wrong to call slavery unethical. The message was still valid, even delivered by a deeply flawed human being.

So the call to prove our own lives free of hypocrisy before we can talk about anything, much less veganism, is another red herring. Most of us don’t fall in the Thomas Jefferson category either in the extent of our influence nor in the depth of our hypocrisy. However, we can make mistakes but still have valid concerns and a valuable message.

“Just one drop and I’m falling apart again”

If the bad actions of my younger self, or my occasional laziness, gossip, grumpy mood, whatever, today are the worst things I ever do in my life, I suppose we’ll all be pretty lucky. The gift of wrestling my former self and making changes in my life is that I know in a very real sense that I can be wrong. I can be wrong, I can be stubborn, I can be mean and selfish. Since I know this possible I can try harder to avoid it. But if I fall down and screw up, I’ll get back up and try harder.

I once knew a guy who went to 12-step. He’d been sober five years and then one night had a dessert that had been spiked with some liquor. Since he’d fallen off the wagon anyway he went ahead and had a few beers, and then a few more the next night. Later he said he’d given up on the whole idea of 12-step, he liked drinking and it was too hard going to all those meetings and always watching what he did. I’m hardly in a position to judge who has a drinking problem and who doesn’t, but I do know that sobriety had been important to this person, both due to actions of his own while drinking that he regretted and a family history of alcoholism. But he felt if he couldn’t be perfect and spotless he’d just toss in the towel.

But veganism, compassion, kindness, trying to do better for the environment, etc. aren’t necessarily things anyone should chuck out the window due to one mistake, particularly a mistake from lack of information or a moment of inattentiveness. But I’m consistently amazed at how many people (despite voicing their own strong opinions) think that before I can express an opinion on veganism I must prove my complete blamelessness in every aspect of my life.

I’d love to be perfect and it’s never going to happen, which doesn’t mean I can’t try to be “better.” It just means I’m a flawed person in a flawed world and sometimes even my best isn’t going to perfect. Other times all the choices available to me are bad in some way and it’s so hard to find the one that’s least harmful. Still we have to muddle through somehow and keep hoping the balance falls in the good.

You’re Not Making A Difference

Many people lately, vegans and non-vegans alike, have told me that my being vegan really makes no difference. It spares only a small number of animals, and maybe not even those animals as others are “eating my share.” Further, they say, veganism will never catch on with large numbers of people, so therefore veganism doesn’t really make a difference.

I think that my being vegan makes a difference in the fact that I’m a living example that someone who didn’t come from an animal-friendly environment can be vegan. I show that vegans can eat well, hold normal jobs, need not be socially isolated, and can have a sense of humor, and so on. Being vegan shows other that veganism is possible.

Likewise, buying a hybrid car really doesn’t accomplish that much, individually. Instead, people hope that by buying into hybrids they encourage more to be made, that others start driving them, and that more and more people will use them. Because one hybrid, not a big difference, you’re hoping lots of people do it.

My earlier point was that hybrids are not accessible to many. I’d love one, but I can’t afford one. Many people are also faced with similar financial constraints. But anyone can be vegan. It doesn’t require special equipment or a down payment, and foods can be as simple or as gourmet as one chooses.

But there it is: if you’re the only person recycling are you accomplishing much? Maybe not. But if you’re the first in your community to recycle, but you teach others, push for curbside recycling, find ways to make it easy, or even hold neighborhood recycling days and make it a social event, then maybe that’s something.

None of us do so much all by ourselves, but we teach others and spread the message.

There is the other aspect too. When my father commented that I wasn’t accomplishing anything with animal rescue because I’d found and saved so many animals, but still the homeless, abandoned, starved, and sick animals kept coming, he entirely missed the point. It might not send huge ripples through the entire world, but to each animal I save it means everything.

As long as we're all talking about cupcakes

I don't trust my words today, but here's something to hopefully make you smile.

Yes, I know they're defective and only have one arm apiece--I was in a rush.

Clicky for bigger image

Sorry I've Been Quiet

This extra cat fostering, especially since Obi (not a foster) needs extra medicating and care at the moment and Melissa (foster) needs extra care, and then all the special needs cats as well.... Anyway, I'm exhausted and hardly capable of putting together a coherent sentence.

However, I am still amused and so I pass this on to you today, take a moment to consider the plight of the neurotypical.

I wonder if resistance to veganism can be traced to an inordinately high need to conform, which might be tied to an alarming rate of neurotypical spectrum in the general population.

I kid, I kid. Have a nice weekend everyone.

Interesting: PBS's The War

I don't know if anyone else is as huge a nerd as I am, but I watched much of the PBS miniseries "The War" about World War II.

I wish I'd caught this part better, but I was in the midst of running around medicating cats and a part came up about a soldier from the Pacific theatre of the war. (correction) His name was Eugene Sledge. But he came home and had trouble fitting back into society and suffered depression and alienation.

They brought up that before the war he had been an avid hunter, but after the war he said something like he could no longer bear to terrorize and kill animals who could not defend themselves against him. He finally recovered from his depression when he decided to go back to school and become a biologist.

I find this interesting because with the men in my own family who hunt I'd always taken this attitude that they couldn't be reached because of their service in wars. I'd say "Well the government taught him to kill people, so what else is going to happen except that he comes home and kills animals."

This brief portion of an otherwise really tragic documentary gave a glimmer of hope that maybe some people can see horrors and make something good out of it. That they can be taught to kill and then turn away from it.

Interesting.

Insensitivity to Humans

File under: I'm not making this up

Ever get that sinking feeling like you’ll never get through to people? I talk so much about animal issues that sometimes my readers might not realize I talk about other issues too. Sometimes I think it’s going to be really hard to get people to listen to our message about animals when so many people don’t seem to care about other people.

I declare this blog entry a chance to rant on the stupid and insensitive comments people have made to you regarding human issues. We’ll get it all out and hopefully feel a little better realizing that those “I clawed my way to the top of the food chain” type comments are not limited to animal causes. Nope, folks can be pretty heartless when in comes to their fellow homo sapiens as well. Either that or we’ll all sink into a deep depression from which we’ll never emerge. I’m not sure.

As mentioned in a prior entry, the number one completely insensitive heartless comment I get regarding humans is:

When I tell people that I love to eat Ethiopian food, I cannot tell you how many people have responded “I didn’t think they HAD any food! Ha ha! Ha ha ha!” Yeah, that’s right, they are essentially laughing at other people dying of starvation.

Next grossly insensitive comment. I was talking with someone regarding how some African countries are losing an entire generation of people to AIDS, and how this situation is actually made worse by some multinational mining companies who rob these nations of their natural resources, leaving most of the population in poverty and without access to health care of any kind, and forbid families from living in the mining camps but encourage prostitution in the camps (and often that prostitution involves women and young girls forced into prostitution). And the answer I got was “Well, I’m not sure that we should worry too much about AIDS in Africa. They were overpopulated and this is nature’s way of reducing the overpopulation.” OMG.

Talking with a woman about the huge need for education and job training programs in prisons I remarked that one reason for the high recidivism rates on drug crimes (I consider violent crimes a somewhat different problem) was the lack of other options for those fresh out of prison. She remarked that she felt it would be wasting money to invest in education programs for prisons. I replied that from my time doing volunteer teaching in prison not only did I feel many would teach for free if they could get through the red tape, but that also many of the women I taught had been abused as children, had been in abusive relationships as adults, and then wound up in prison. I felt that we owed it to these people to increase their opportunities in life. The person I was speaking with replied “Lots of people have had rough lives without turning to crime. If we reward people in prison by coddling them with classes and training then that punishes the people who’ve also been abused but aren’t in prison.”

In speaking with a self-described Republican about the health care crisis in this country she told me she didn’t want to pay for other people’s health care, especially if these people were lazy free-loaders. I made the point that one reason for better access to health care, no matter how that is achieved, is that we want to safeguard the health of children, who are deserving no matter what their parents may have done. She replied “If people want their kids to have health care, then they should have gone to college and gotten good jobs.” Hmmm, yes, my favorite hobby is also punishing children because their parents didn’t go to college… Never mind that 1) there are people who went to college who find themselves unemployed for reasons they have no control over, 2) some good jobs, like plumbing, require training, but not college, and 3) none of that has anything to do with the kids who lost the parent lottery and were born into impoverished homes, whether those parents are disabled, unemployed, educated or not, abusive or sweet and loving...

Twice in my life now, at different jobs, I’ve had a male co-worker remark that battered women must enjoy being beaten since they so often stay with their abusers. I would have smacked them and asked how they liked that, except I try to not be violent, and besides I had to gather up all the little exploded pieces of my brain off the floor.

Final one, drum roll please, on an internet art board we got into a heated discussion about some anti-death penalty art. As one woman argued that the Bible encouraged the death penalty, I made the good old “what about the wrongfully convicted?” plea. Her answer was that if someone was wrongfully convicted of a murder, she felt they’d have to be a pretty bad person anyway. She claimed that law abiding, god-fearing people who do the right thing are never even accused of a murder they didn’t commit, so to be wrongfully convicted the person must have been doing something pretty bad. At that point I suffered a stroke from massive insensitivity overload and couldn’t even manage to type “thou shalt not kill.”

I need a warm compress for my head at this point.

Please share with me the stunningly insensitive comments others have made to you.

Wherein I Talk About the Weekend

What a weekend I had. We spent the last month anxiously looking forward to hearing James LaVeck speak at the Poplar Spring open house, only to have a vet emergency Sunday morning. We got there just as he was wrapping up.

But first things first.

A few days ago, our youngest cat Liam bit his older “brother” Obi, leaving a nasty bloody spot on his back. Obi and Liam love each other, but sometimes they play way too rough. As an apology Liam decided to help Obi groom his wounded back, and between the two of them they completely licked the whole area raw and wouldn’t let it heal. Our solution was to cut the sleeve off an old shirt of Sean’s, cut leg holes in it and have Obi wear it as a shirt. It has been working—his back is healing now. It’s so adorable though, I’m going to have to post a picture of Obi in his little shirt.

Saturday we tried to take Buddy, the foster cat to a new home, but it didn’t work out and so he came back home with us.

Then Melissa, the foster kitten, pulled from the feral colony in our neighborhood pulled out the stitches from her spay. She went to the ER vet and got fitted with an e-collar. She kept getting out of her e-collar and picking at the area more until it looked really scary. After spending all morning (and some of the afternoon) at the vet on Sunday, she got to come home. However it took a friend telling me to tie on the e-collar “harness style” to solve our wily kitty problems. She now cannot get the collar off. Why didn’t the vet help us with that part too? Sean thinks I should call them because maybe it just didn’t occur to them.

By the way, Melissa is still looking for a good home, and she’s just a kitten still. Kittens tend to integrate well into homes with other cats. She’s very friendly and very loving. Just sticking that plug in for her!

Then we went to Poplar Spring, loaded down with apples, sweet potatoes, and carrots for the pigs, and cut up strawberries for the chickens. When I was feeding the strawberries to the birds, the turkeys wanted some too of course, and it was so sad because one of the turkeys had been de-beaked, and she wanted strawberries, but she couldn’t seem to pick them up or hold onto them. I had to more or less mush up the strawberries and slip them into her mouth for her. I wonder how anyone can see stuff like this and still eat animals.

The pigs were so sweet and loved getting their treats. Despite being huge, most took the food very gently from my hands. Other pigs were shy and kept their distance, so I had to throw handfuls of food out into the field for them, where they happily gobbled it up.

Although we sadly missed James LaVeck’s talk, we did get to meet him and Jenny Stein and they gave us a copy of The Witness. I used to live in NYC, so I knew Eddie Lama and even went out to do Fauna Vision with him once, yet I’d never seen the movie. We watched it Sunday night. It both inspired and depressed us. I think one sad aspect of it was thinking how much the movement has changed in the last decade or so. It used to seem like we all had very common goals and the outreach we did was on target and hard hitting. Now I just don’t know.

It’s all given me tons of food for thought. The conversation with James LaVeck and Jenny Stein left me wondering again about my role in this effort: What do I have to contribute and how can I best fulfill that obligation?

Then I got the Taste Better Newsletter in my inbox, where Jason Doucette talked about reading The Earth Is Flat, and how he thinks it’s helpful for both veganism and activism. I want to read the book so I’ll add it to the wish list. One important point he brought up was finding outside help when we need it for our activism. I think in the AR movement in the US there’s a strong (and mostly positive) strain of “I’ll do it myself.” But of course there are times when we all need a helping hand.

For me this was a particularly powerful point because my time is limited, so I want to help, but I want to help in ways that are effective, utilize my particular skills, and fill in areas that others might not cover. That sounds like I’m being difficult and picky, but I reached that conclusion after some considerable floundering.

The wrap up to my weekend was a phone call from my Dad who remarked on our efforts to rescue and help animals “You guys never seem to get anywhere, it’s money and effort, but it doesn’t make much difference.” But when I went home and saw all the faces for whom it made all the difference in the world, Sean reminded me that sometimes it is about the individual. Yes, there are still so many cats out there that need help, but we saved these ones. Is this typical of our culture that people somehow just can’t see animals as individuals? Is that one of the primary things we need to fight?

Anyway, I want to talk about The Witness more in depth, but that will be an entry all by itself.