Another Plant Peace Daily Contest!

The first person who correctly identifies ALL THREE of these objects wins the prizes! 
An assortment of PPD bumper stickers, the Plant Peace Daily Everyday Outreach book and a mystery vegan treat (last contest it was chocolate)!

Slaves Make a Wonderful Gift....?

 

I have been thinking a lot about the problems that go along with humans thinking that we can own any living being.  Around the world there are still many regions where women are owned by men.  There are other regions where children are owned by parents and are sold into slavery.  As soon as someone becomes property, the owner of this being has the legal right to do anything he or she wants to with this property.  Pretty much anyone reading this blog would agree that no human is property and no human should be in a position to be bought and sold as property.  This is clear.  What isn’t so clear for most people is where to draw the line when it comes to non-humans.  A friend of the folks we are house/horse/dog sitting for came by with his cows yesterday to let them graze on the land there.  He brought the mothers first.  The were stressed and agitated because their nursing babies were not with them.  About two hours later he arrived with the babies and each mother ran to their child who was running to them.  Then they got as far away from that trailer as they could….they literally were heading for the hills.  This farmer sees himself as their owner.  As their owner, he will decide when to separate them and when to send some of them to slaughter. 

I cannot find any logical or caring argument for owning a living being.  We care for our dog, but we are not her “owners” and she is not our property. 

Organizations like Heifer International and Outreach International think that living beings make great gifts and have built their organizations around the idea of ownership of living beings (non-human slaves).  Both organizations also have valuable programs that do not involve the sale, shipping and slaughter of non-human slaves.  Heifer has programs that focus on community gardens.  Outreach International has programs that provide acreage, school supplies, education, sewing machines, clothing, water wells, cooking stoves, carpentry tools, medical supplies, and fruit trees to communities.  If Outreach International would just stick with the non-slave programs, I would love to support them and encourage others to do the same.  But photos of happy people holding cute animals that you can buy and have sent to a community are the ones that really bring in the big revenue. 

So instead of these other valuable programs being enough, goats, sheep, chickens, cows, water buffaloes, fish and other beings suffer and die to supposedly help these communities.  For the whole story on the reality for the living beings sold by organizations like these, go to this link:

http://plantpeacedaily.org/files/The_Reality_of_Heifer_International.doc

Please spread the word between now and the next holiday season.  Let the people in your life know that they can donate to compassionate organizations that support sustainable choices.  They can make a donation to any of a number of groups who are not promoting the use of living beings as property. Also, if you care about ending this type of accepted slavery, please contact organizations that sell living beings as "gifts" and let them know that you would support their other programs if they eliminated the offering of living beings.

I would not want to be thought of as property.  I would not want to be bought and sold to whoever can offer the best price.  I want to be treated as an individual and live a life free of needless pain and suffering.  This is true for all beings.  Even the tiniest housefly will avoid being killed and will choose life. 

There was a time in my life that I would look at a group of animals and just see a species.  A group of cows, a group of goats, a group of birds, etc.  It is different for me now.  I have met too many of them one to one, face to face.  Now, as I look in the eyes of the owned beings on the land we are now parked on, I see individuals, not property.  The same is true as I look at these catalogs selling these beings as products.  I see individuals, not species. 

 

Roger Fouts and Booee

I have been looking for the accurate story of Roger Fouts being reunited with one of the chimps he had taught sign language to.  I had thought it was 60 minutes and the chimp was Washoe.  I actually saw this story on 20/20 in 1995 while visiting my parents....I was frozen in place for an hour after the show with tears running down my cheeks.  I am so  glad to have found the description.

Here is the entire story.  It is so moving I wanted to include all of it here in Roger Fouts own words:

 

Booee is the one on the left.  He is speaking American Sign Language with Bruno.

In early 1995 I got a call from Dean Irwin, a producer of 20/20, the ABC news magazine. While planning a show about the morality of conducting biomedical experiments on chimpanzees, he had learned about Booee and my other former chimpanzee students at LEMS I P, the biomedical lab owned by New York University. He asked me if I would be willing to visit the lab and be reunited with Booee in front of television cameras.

I wanted to say 'No.' I had deliberately avoided LEMSIP since Booee and the others were transferred there in 1982. Seeing them would be agonizing because I knew there wasn't a damn thing I could do to rescue them. As for helping them, I'd tried that already. In 1988 Jane Goodall and I had sent a student of mine, Mark Bodamer, to LEMSIP to start an enrichment and activity program for all 250 chimps. The program was a great success, but unfortunately it was scuttled after Mark left.

Mark never got to see Booee - Booee had been transferred to another lab temporarily - but he did visit Bruno for me. When Mark began signing to him, Bruno answered with two signs of his own: KEY CUT. I wasn't sure if Booee would remember me if we saw each other after more than a decade. But if he did remember, he might well think I was there to free him, something I could not do. It would break my heart and his.

But I also knew that visiting Booee would make for some very good television. We could take millions of people inside a biomedical laboratory, which I'd dreamed of doing since I toured Sema seven years earlier. If there was any chance that this wide exposure might improve conditions or help Booee, then I would do it.

A few months later, I found myself in the back seat of a long black limousine, sitting next to anchorman Hugh Downs as we drove to LEMSIP. A soundman and cameraman, seated across from us, taped our conversation. I couldn't help thinking that the back of the limo was bigger than Booee's cage. Hugh Downs wanted to know ifBooee would remember me. I didn't know.

I couldn't begin to guess what thirteen years alone in a cage would do to someone's mind and personality. But the closer we got to LEMSIP the more I hoped that Booee would not remember me, that he would see me asjust another lab-coated visitor passing through. I didn't want to sign GOODBYE to Booee. I was sure I would break down.

When we got to the lab, we were instructed to put on white gowns and caps. Then Dr James Mahoney escorted Hugh Downs, the cameramen and me to Booee~s windowless barrack. Booee lived in a hot unit', where all the inmates were infected with one virus or another. He was infected with Hepatitis C, a virus that can cause progressive liver disease. Through the door I could see my friend sitting alone in his cage.

He looks the same, but bigger, I thought.

The last time I saw Booee he was a young teenager like Loulis. Now he was twenty-seven.

This is really happening. It's too late to turn back.

I hesitated for another moment, then entered the room in a low crouch. I approached Booee's cage uttering gentle chimpanzee greetings.

A big smile lit up Booee's face. He remembered me, after all.

HI, BOOEE, I signed. YOU REMEMBER?

BOOEE, BOOEE, ME BOOEE, he signed back, overjoyed that someone actually acknowledged him. He kept drawing his finger down the center of his head in his name sign - the one I had given him in 1970, three years after NI H researchers had split his infant brain in two.

YES, YOU BOOEE, YOU BOOEE, I signed back. GIVE ME FOOD, ROGER, he pleaded.

Booee not only remembered that I always carried raisins for him, but he used the nickname he had invented for me twenty-five years earlier. Instead of tugging the ear lobe for ROGER, he flicked his finger off the ear. This was like calling someone Rodg' instead of Roger'. Seeing him sign my old nickname floored me. I had forgotten it, but Booee hadn't. He remembered the good old days better than I did.

I gave Booee some raisins, and the years just melted away, the way they do between old friends. He reached his hand through the bars and groomed my arm. He was happy again. He was the same sweet boy I met on that autumn day decades earlier when Washoe and I first stepped on to the chimpanzee island at Lemmon's Institute. That was before everything, before the stun guns and Dobermanns, before the adult colony and Sequoyah's death, before Yerkes and Sema. I was a young know-it-all professor then, right out of graduate school. I yelled at Booee one day, and he humbled me in front of my very first college students by lifting me off my feet and letting me dangle there. For twenty-five years I'd been telling my students about how Booee embraced me and forgave my anger toward him.

Look at him now, I thought. Thirteen years in a hellhole and he's still forgiving, still guileless. Booee still loved me, in spite of everything that humans had done to him. How many people would be so generous of spirit?

As we signed back and forth and played CHASE and TICKLE through the iron bars, I forgot about the cameras and the millions of people who would be watching this. For one wonderful moment I even forgot where we were. But only for a moment.

I MUST GO NOW, BOOEE, I signed after a while. Booee's grin changed to a grimace, and his body sank. I MUST LEAVE, BOOEE. Booee moved to the back of his cage. GOODBYE, BOOEE.

As we left LEMSIP, I shook hands cordially with the director, Dr Jan Moor-Jankowski, as if we were two colleagues who had just transacted some mundane piece of business. I was overwhelmed by shame. I was ashamed of Booee's hepatitis, ashamed of the professionalism of Moor-Jankowski and myself, ashamed of the respectability that hung over all this suffering.

After our limousine pulled out through the heavily barred security gate, no one spoke for the whole drive back to the hotel.

 

Canines to Love, Canines to Kill

We are house/horse/dogsitting in southern AZ.  The house has lots of reading material, which is always a plus.  I have been reading a National Georgraphic from March 2010 that I found on an end table here.

The cover story is Wolf Wars.  The problem with wolves is that the silly creatures like to eat and survive.  Can you imagine?  They kill cattle.  This makes for some very unhappy ranchers.  The ranchers want the wolves outta there.

We have been around lots of people who are over-the-top dog lovers everywhere we park our home on wheels.  Most of the same folks who feel their dogs are family, will consume animal products that are the demise of many other, just as wonderful, canines. 

If this were the rancher’s beloved dogs who were somehow in an area or situation where no human was feeding them, the dogs would kill cattle, too.  And in that scenario the ranchers would be sympathetic.  It is THEIR dogs.  The wolves belong to nobody.  They are not evil when they kill for food.  They are hungry.  They are no more evil than I am when I eat a a bowl of soup because I am hungry.

The other group that is flipping out about the reintroduction of the wolf, and any protective measures for them, are the elk and deer hunters.  

Because of what is considered the “overpopulation” of the wolves, some states are allowing wolves to be hunted up to a certain quota.  Idaho permitted the legal hunting of 220 wolves in the 2009/2010 season.  This is a photo of hunters protesting against the federal protection of wolves.  In the photo one angry man holds a sign that says “Does Anyone Care About Our Deer and Elk Herds?”.  I find the sign a bit ironic coming from the group (hunters) that are the most vocal about the elk and deer population growing out of control if they are not killed by hunters...on one hand.  And, on the other hand, they are saying that the wolves will kill too many.

One of the most popular bumper stickers that the anti-wolf groups have on their vehicles is SMOKE A PACK A DAY. 

There are lots of illogical and ironic parts to this situation.  If a rancher can prove that a wolf killed a calf on his land or while out grazing on public land, he is compensated.  The compensation ranges from $500 to $1000. 

When we were in New Mexico last month, billboards showed the horrible death of livestock killed by wolves.  What the billboards didn’t show is that those killed by wolves were spared the prolonged fear, pain and suffering that awaits those who make it to the next steps of the meat industry.  Separation from family and companions, trucking, stockyards, livestock auctions and slaughterhouses are a fate worse than being taken by a pack of wolves.  When interviewed about the horrible deaths of livestock, it comes down to dollars.  The ranchers want to make money on the cattle and they don’t want to lose any of their cash cows to wolves. 

A part of the story that is rarely told is that only a small percentage of the deaths really are caused by wolves.  Research into the loss of sheep show that wolves account for a very small percentage of the loss.

In Wyoming, Montana and Idaho only 1% of sheep loss is from wolf predation.  As a comparison, 22% is caused by sever weather and 25% is from coyote attacks. 

So, back to this love of one canine and hate of another.  I cannot find how it makes any sense.  It is right in the same category as the people who LOVE their dogs but will purchase fur, animal tested products (often tested on dogs….but not THEIR dogs), and foods that come from suffering animals.

Jacques-Henri Lartigue  1911 Photo

I watched a young fashionable woman walk through the airport last week.  She was wearing a full length fox fur coat and carrying a large handbag made out of snake skin.  In her other arm was her dog.  I assume that she could not see the irony in wearing the skin of a group of canine’s she does not care about while carrying the one who is her “baby”. 

There was a time when I would not have noticed these kinds of inconsistencies in myself or others.   There are still many in myself that I am sure I am blind to.  I would hope that those around me would point them out to me. When they do, I would hope that I would not get defensive.

But, we shy away from being that honest with the people in our lives….whether it is someone we have known for life or someone we cross paths with briefly. 

Do You See What I See?

One week ago in the Denver airport I was in a bathroom stall, the marble floors were overly polished and when I looked down I realized I could see the stalls to my right and left as if the floor was a mirror.  The woman to my right was one of those wild tissue users who pulls off enough paper to clean up an oil spill.  The woman on the left was a conservative paper user.  While noticing this, I realized that the piped in Christmas music was playing “Do you see what I see…..” 

I became the crazy person laughing in her stall, while, I am sure Ms. Big Tissue and Ms. Tiny Tissue watched me on the mirrored floor to make sure I wasn’t as crazy as I sounded.

Years ago I was traveling through Paris by bicycle.  I had left Minneapolis to travel in Europe for as long as my money held out.  I got a one-way ticket to Athens Greece and took off from there for what turned out to be many months.  I kept my apartment in Minneapolis and my Australian friend Helena was staying there before heading back to Australia.

She figured I was in Greece.  This is before the internet and she had no way to find out where I was. 

I was biking through Paris and saw a woman with a backpack and a scarf exactly like Helena’s.  It had to be her.  This woman was looking at a menu outside a restaurant.  I whispered in her ear “you can’t afford this place.”  She whipped around and we hugged.  Before heading back to Australia, she had decided to go to Paris and the UK.  In her pocket was a ticket for the ferry between France and England for the next morning.  In my pocket was a ticket for the same ferry. 

Synchronicity…..

WHAT DO YOU EAT?

"

The cooks

"What do you eat?"

I have been asked this a thousand times in my decades of being vegan....

One visit to Adena and Kate's in Boulder and this question would be happily answered for anyone!

It has been a week of eating bliss......

This is the vegan conversion house.  I wish every human could come experience this food.

Black bean soup with corn and cilantro....yummmmmmmmmmm

First Ever Plant Peace Daily Contest!

The first person to identify this object correctly will win a free Plant Peace Daily Book and the bumper sticker of your choice!

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