“Eyes of Thailand”

by Kim W. Stallwood Posted on May 30, 2009
Motala, a landmine victim now cared for by Friends of the Asian Elephant.

“The Eyes of Thailand” is a color, 45-min HDV documentary that explores the issues facing the Thai Asian Elephants at the world’s first Asian Elephant Hospital, founded by Soriada Salwala and operated by the Friends of the Asian Elephant (FAE).

The goal of the film is to advance Asian Elephant conservation by motivating the international community to pass protection laws in Thailand that align with the FAE’s mission to save every elephant in Thailand from abuse, injury, and exportation. While other documentaries have focused on the plight of elephants, “The Eyes of Thailand” goes behind the walls of the FAE Elephant Hospital and provides the audience an opportunity to look the injured elephants in the eye and meet the courageous founder, Soraida Salwala. This allows them to see their plight through new eyes and adds a sense of urgency to the mounting crisis: if laws protecting the Thai Asian elephants are not created immediately, the species will become extinct within the next 50 years producing devastating effects on the environment, as well as the social and cultural structure of the country.

Also check out Friends of the Asian Elephant.

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Guardian’s Love Affair with Animal Killing Continues

by Kim W. Stallwood Posted on May 26, 2009

I was holding a pig-out for friends: a grand dinner with a startlingly well-balanced menu, so long as it was pig. We started with a pig’s liver and lean meat terrine, encased in trotter jelly and the strutto fat, and served with capers and gherkins. On top I laid snippets of Spideypig’s ear, brined for five days, and fried till they were crisp. That went down all right. Then there was a bonne bouche of roast pork fillet slices, with a spicy apple sauce. Gone in a second. Finally, served on a mound of puy lentils which I’d boiled in pork stock, the great baby’s arms of the cotechini. And they scoffed the lot of them – the sausages surprisingly pungent for something made largely of skin and fat. Everyone got a going-home present of half a dozen salsicce. I think it was the best dinner party I’ve ever cooked.

And what of the children, you might wonder. There have been neither tears nor nightmares. They’ve declared Spideypig’s bacon very good – my son, who likes to cook breakfast on Saturday, is impressed that when you put it in the pan there’s no need to add any cooking oil. And no evil white gunk comes out. He thinks roast pork may be a competitor for his usual favourite meat: beef steak, well done. And my daughter? As we drove home from the pig-butchering she looked out of the window at the first of the spring lambs. “Can we get a lamb? Please!” she asked. We waited expectantly for her next line. “We could eat him.”

All the bacon sandwiches … with none of the hard work

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Peter Singer Profiled in The Guardian

by Kim W. Stallwood Posted on May 25, 2009

The world, he writes in The Life You Can Save, “would be a much simpler place if one could bring about social change merely by making a logically consistent moral argument.” Have his views on the power of argument changed over the years? “Yeah, you could say that I’ve become more of a realist about that. When I published Animal Liberation, I thought – and I still think – that the argument was completely irrefutable, rationally, and that people should have just said, ‘Oh, yes, well, this is obviously true, we’ve got to become vegetarian or vegan and change many things.’ Well, some people have done that – I have no idea what the tally is, but it must be tens or hundreds of thousands of people. But, you know, it’s still a minority view.”

What scale of response to the new book would satisfy him? Singer laughs through his nose. “Look, I don’t really know in terms of figures.” If the number of pledges on his website reach five figures, “that would please me, but I don’t know about completely satisfy me. That would” – his voice rises in a way that’s humorous but also wistful – “have to be many millions, I think, to completely satisfy me.”

A life in philosophy: Peter Singer

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