The media is abuzz about Oscar, the cat who predicts when nursing home patients are going to die.
The Grumpy Vegan can’t help but think about all the animals who know that they’re about to die at the hand of men and women.
Well, here’s the photograph you’ve all been waiting for …
This is Emmy, rescued more than 10 years ago from the basement of the house next door, on the Queen Mary 2 somewhere in the Atlantic. Emmy is the last in a long line of rescued cats and dogs we had living in the United States. He got his “pet passport” and entered the U.K. in Southampton without going into quarantine. We wouldn’t fly him because on trans-Atlantic flights you’re not permitted to take companion animals into the cabin with you. Our only option was the QM2.
Cunard, which runs the QM2, were excellent with regard to how they looked after Emmy and the one other cat and four dogs in the liner’s kennels. We were able to visit Emmy several times a day. In fact, we spent quite a lot of our time in the kennels and on the outside deck where the dogs walked with the human companions. Many of these people were like us: English returning home to live with their cats and dogs.
After a disastrous start, Cunard took care of our needs as vegans with well prepared and delicious meals.
We’ve never taken a voyage like this before and unlikely to do so again. The most beneficial aspect was that we had one week between leaving the U.S. and arriving in the U.K. when we were basically enforced to relax. But it was a bit like being locked up in an up-market shopping mall with 3,000 elderly people.
Comment on Today’s NYT Article
In 1996 I wrote an essay, “Utopian Visions and Pragmatic Politics: Challenging the Foundations of Speciesism,” which was published in Animal Rights: The Changing Debate edited by Robert Garner (Macmillan).
My central thesis was — and still is — that in order for the animal advocacy movement to be optimally effective we must develop and implement a strategy that balances simultaneously the utopian vision of a vegan world of personal lifestyle choice with the pragmatic politics of institutional change by advancing public policy in such arenas as politics and business.
Today’s article in The New York Times and several other key developments (e.g., the successful prosecution of stag hunters under the Hunting Act 2004) demonstrates the animal rights movement is at last maturing into an effective social movement.
The balance of fundamentalism and reality is the bane of all social movements and political initiatives and we are no different. Whatever may be thought about ex-British Prime Minister Tony Blair I was struck recently by reading part of a speech he gave in 1995 when he urged the Labour Party to rewrite a historically important section of its constitution as part of an initiative to modernise the party in order to make it electable
I did not come into the Labour Party to join a pressure group. I didn’t become leader of this party to lead a protest movement. Power without principle is barren. But principle without power is futile. This is a party of government, and I will lead it as a party of government.
Yes, we are a protest movement advocating and personally demonstrating the principled position of veganism. But, also as a protest movement, we must also gain power to influence government to achieve institutional change.
This is why today’s NYT article is so important. It reports on the tensions between these two positions and documents the progress made to date by such companies as Burger King and Whole Foods Market and such institutions as the National Council of Chain Restaurants and the City of Chicago.
Don’t get distracted by the reality of three-steps-forward-and-two-steps-backward process(e.g., Chicago reconsidering its foie gras ban) because this is how progress is achieved. And don’t get upset by the industry’s claims that they are only affected by consumers and not the pressure from our movement (aren’t we consumers, too?). But understand my further point that fundamentally social change is achieved in five stages:
Stage One — Public Education: The Burger King campaign
Stage Two — Public Policy: Burger King announces animal welfare policies
Stage Three — Legislation: In the U.S., there is progress to report at the state level (e.g., Florida’s ban on the gestation crate) but there is still a tremendous amount to accomplish at the federal level
Stage Four — Litigation: There is some action here (e.g., Waterkeeper Alliance suing large pig farms) but not enough but keep an eye on HSUS’s legal department
Stage Five — Public Acceptance: When everyone says that this is what they thought all along
For more on this, please email the Animals and Society Institute at office@animalsandsociety.org and ask for a copy of The Animals’ Platform.
Posted in Eating, Organising
Tagged Animal Protection Movement, Animals in Agriculture
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Remembering Apollo
The Grumpy Vegan received this message from the chimpanzee expert Sarah Baeckler and was so moved by it that I want to share it with you.
July 23, 2007. On this day, we remember Apollo, who died when he was 7 years old, one year ago today. Like many captive chimps, he had a tumultuous life. He was born at the infamous and now-defunct Coulston Foundation, where he was probably taken from his mother within hours of birth, only to be slapped in with bunches of babies and raised with limited maternal influence. The babies would line up in a row and hug each other, front to back, rocking. Around 18 months, Apollo was used as a bartering chip – he’d be given to a Hollywood chimpanzee trainer in exchange for a rosy documentary about his not-so-rosy birthplace. It was the first of many exchanges in which Apollo would play an unwitting role. If he hadn’t been a part of that exchange, he’d probably have been used for invasive experiments. So his new trainer was “saving” him from research. But even in salvation, he couldn’t survive.
I first met Apollo when I was working undercover. At first sight, I knew I’d fall in love with him. He was the trouble-maker of the group, and those boys are always my favorites. Sweet and smart, but misunderstood and mistreated. My kind of guy. I wanted to get to know him better but since he was marked as the bad boy, I wasn’t always allowed to interact with him. I remember one special day when I was sitting on the lawn grooming him. He head-bobbed at me. It’s a fun, happy signal: Play with me! Before I could stop myself I accepted by head bobbing back. But the trainer grabbed me. “Don’t do that! It means he’s about to attack!” He had no idea what it meant.
Apollo was so curious and mischievous. He always wanted to look up peoples’ shirts – especially women’s shirts. He wanted to play, he wanted to wrestle. He was smart. He bit people. Of course he did. He was a juvenile male chimpanzee. He had all the natural, normal impulses. He tested his limits constantly. As a result, he received the most brutal beatings I saw when I was undercover. I saw him punched, kicked, beaten, and more. Big, grown men tried to assert their dominance over him constantly. Once, when he bit a trainer, he suffered greatly. Though I didn’t see the beating, I saw his face afterwards. It was so swollen. He looked at me without his usual glimmer. We were alone so I said outloud – “Are you okay?” There was a heartbreaking acceptance in his puffy eyes. That was his life and he knew it. He was only 4 years old at the time.
Early on, he was used on TV and in movies, in advertisements and at celebrity parties. But his mischief was hard to control, so his “jobs” declined over the years. At the end of his short life, he was living in a cage at a compound out in the desert. I’m told he was alone in that cage. He should never have been there. His mom shouldn’t have been used as a breeding machine. He shouldn’t have been born into biomedical research. He shouldn’t have been tossed off to Hollywood. He shouldn’t have been forced to “smile” on cue so we could laugh at him. He shouldn’t have experienced what he did.
I was devastated when I learned that he died suddenly, still under his trainer’s care. I hadn’t helped him. I hadn’t made a difference for him. A few months later, his compatriots at the compound were rescued and retired to sanctuaries. He should have gone with them – a small “thank you” after so many years of suffering. I couldn’t help him.
There are many more Apollos out there. In labs, in training compounds, in back yards. I tell his story today because we must help them.
On this day, let’s remember Apollo.
Acampora on the Implications of Moo
New York’s Long Islanders have been following the story of Moo, the steer who dodged death in the slaughterhouse and found salvation in an animal sanctuary. Usually such stories are treated with puzzled amusement by the media. It’s not sure whether it should laugh or cry.
So, the Grumpy Vegan was pleased to see a thoughtful and thought provoking op ed by Ralph R. Acampora, The steer who escaped into our conscience.
But I really shouldn’t be so surprised because I’m proud to report Professor Acampora’s long association with the Animals and Society Institute. He is an Associate Editor of Society &Animals, the leading journal of Human-Animal Studies, and a member of the board of editors of the HAS book series published by Brill.
What did Ralph have to say that was so insightful?
I think Moo tapped into this desire of ours to rediscover some indomitable force that survives even our best efforts at control, that can’t be expunged even by the machine of exploitation to which farmed animals are routinely subjected.
The predicament to which I refer is not new to humanity – it’s an old story, really: Domination breeds alienation in the master, which in turn makes him anxious and ambivalent about his underlings and himself.
So what are we post-domestic people to do?
There are two main options available: full-speed ahead with our program of biotechnical mastery and the mental pathologies that go with it – or else ease up, tread lightly on or with our fellow earthlings, and maybe the species-schizophrenia will evaporate.
Our reaction to Moo is a hint that the second alternative is probably worth a try.
British Furrier Found Guilty
Respect for Animals reports that
Michael Moosah, owner of Gale Furs, in Primrose Hill, was fined only UKPounds 1,000 after pleading guilty at City of Westminster magistrates court to trading the skins illegally. Moosah, 65, of Camden, was arrested in October last year when officers from the Metropolitan Police’s Wildlife Crime Unit swooped on his store following a tip-off. They confiscated eight coats, including ones made from a snow leopard, a eurasian lynx, tigers and ocelots. Staff at the shop in Regent’s Park Road insisted they had done nothing wrong as the coats were antiques passed on by customers but Gale Furs was fined after pleading guilty to trading the skins illegally. The sentence could have been five years’ imprisonment and UKPounds 5,000 fine.
