Excellent article in today’s Wall Street Journal about The HSUS and its efforts to make animal protection a mainstream political issue. Registration required to access the article at WSJ‘s Web site.
Debate Needed on Euthanasia over Very Sick Babies
The Grumpy Vegan couldn’t help but pause over this report of the ethics committee of the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists call for a debate on ethics of euthanasia for very sick babies.
The college ethics committee tells the inquiry it feels euthanasia “has to be covered and debated for completion and consistency’s sake … if life-shortening and deliberate interventions to kill infants were available, they might have an impact on obstetric decision making, even preventing some late abortions, as some parents would be more confident about continuing a pregnancy and taking a risk on outcome.” It points out that a pregnant woman who discovers at 28 weeks that her baby has a serious abnormality can have an abortion. Parents of a baby born at 24 weeks with the same abnormality have no such option.
Chimpanzees: An unnatural history
Terrific program from PBS’s Nature on our exploitation of chimpanzees and the subsequent rescue and rehabilitation of them. Three cheers to those incredible women who care for the chimps, including Gloria Grow and Carole Noon.
At last! Elephant’s get what they need.
The announcement that the Philadelphia Zoo joins with zoos in Detroit, Chicago, San Francisco and the Bronx in closing down its elephant “exhibit” is welcome news to the Grumpy Vegan. About time. How long have we known that elephants in the wild walk 30 to 50 miles daily? Baltimore Zoo will take some of Philly’s elephants for its enclosure, which they proudly state will be expanded to “several acres and a half-mile walking trail.” Wop-de-do. The remaining elephants will got to the Tennessee Elephant Sanctuary, which has 2,700 acres. That’s more like it!
Animals and Culture
Paul Auster’s Timbuktu is a terrific novel about Mr. Bones, a dog, who accompanies a homeless man, Willy G. Christmas, on a journey. Hugely enjoyable. But the Grumpy Vegan groaned when he read Paul’s article in which he discusses why he writes and the creative process,
But I would argue that it is the very uselessness of art [the Grumpy Vegan believes 99% of art is not worth bothering with] that gives it its value and that the making of art is what distinguishes us from all other creatures who inhabit this planet, that it is, essentially, what defines us as human beings.
The Grumpy Vegan bristles when he hears or reads about someone claiming that such and such makes human’s unique from all other animals. Animals don’t experience emotions. Oh yes they do! Animals don’t think. Oh yes they do! Animals don’t use tools. Oh yes they do! Animals don’t write novels. No, well, they don’t. But isn’t increasingly recognized that animals create their own culture? Dr. Frans B. M. de Waal seems to think that there is a chimpanzee culture.
The concept of culture in a non-human species was first introduced in 1952, when Imanishi suggested that Japanese macaques may develop population specific differences as a result of social, rather than genetic variation. Since then, claims for culture have been made for a wide range of species, including birds, fish, marine mammals, rodents and non-human primates. However, of all the species studied to date, the cultural repertoire of chimpanzees remains the largest. Recent reports from observational studies of wild chimpanzees indicate that there are as many as 39 cultural behaviors that vary between populations, and which have no apparent ecological or genetic explanation. These behaviors include courtship, grooming, and the use of tools.
So, before we humans get too high and mighty about what distinguishes us from the rest of the animals, we should pause and reflect that perhaps we’re not so righteous after all.
Frank Rich
To say that the Grumpy Vegan is a fan of author and New York Times columnist Frank Rich is to understate it. His Sunday column was a must-read — indeed, the only reason to buy the paper — until, well, NYT decided to hide it only to paying subscribers in its Times Select boutique. The toes curled, the wry grin smiled and the brain was amused and stimulated by Frank’s satirical writing style. That’s why all summer I waited patiently for his Greatest Story Ever Sold.
What could be more delicious than an entire book of biting commentary on politics inflamed by a scathing critique of mainstream culture? Greatest Story is a must-read. But it is written in a writing style unlike his columns.
Frank describes how Bush et al took us to war with Iraq. The twist in his narrative is that this is a story of how an administration packaged and marketed the war while it was saying one thing but secretly knew the truth was something else. For example,
That cynical priority was what had dictated the timing of the rollout of the product in the first place: it wasn’t a mushroom cloud that imminent as the White House pressed for a congressional resolution in the fall of 2002, it was the midterms.
And, again,
Reeling from the criticism, Bush pleaded to ABC’s Diane Sawyer that people not “play politics during this period of time.” But just months earlier the president had flown from Crawford to Washington overnight to sign a symbolic bill intervening in the case of Terri Schiavo, a brain-dead hospice patient flogged as a right-to-life cause by the Christian right. He was in no position now to lecture anyone about playing politics with tragedy.
To say that I wished I could write like Frank Rich — specially in the style of his NYT columns — is to understate it.
