The Milk of Human Kindness

This week I've been reading The Human Stain, and I'd like to thank Philip Roth for reminding us exactly how similar women and cattle really are:

The creamy-colored cows...for whom chomping at one extremity from a fodder-filled trough while being sucked dry at the other by not one or two or three but four pulsating untiring mechanical mouths - for whom sensual stimulus was their voluptuous due. Each of them deep into an  experience blissfilly lacking in spiritual depth: to squirt and to chew, to crap and  to piss, to graze and to sleep... the aura they exuded of an opulent, earthy oneness with female abundance...

Yeah, Philip, I know where they're coming from. But cool as these sisters are, they're not as right-on as Liz Jones's heifers. Jones, a self-castigating Daily Mail columnist who I'm pretty fond of, has started selling dairy products whilst under the impression that she is actually working for the animals, or at least that they have formed a vocal trade union. I'm a bit of a fan of animal rights but even I don't believe that a cow is entitled to an 'income' and a 'pension'.

Jones is equally in touch with other members of the farmyard community: "Our eggs will be from hens that can fund their retirement by selling us their eggs." Well done Liz. No one's going to think you're an idiot after that little gem.

Obviously, a cow is not an entrepreneur. If we  are going to use milk there is no point pretending that it isn't exploitation; what is at steak  (HA! HA!) is how cruel the exploitation will be.

Jones and her business partner's new brand, Cow Nation, will produce small quantities of high-price organic whole-milk. What it won't do is slaughter the calves that cows are made to produce regularly so they will lactate, or feed cows damaging growth hormones that cause mastitis and birth-defects. Also apparently the milk will be creamy and delicious, just like it was in the olden days blah blah blah.

Given the increasing popularity of zero-grazing dairy farms in the UK, in which cows are kept indoors or undergound in battery conditions, Jones's enterprise seems timely. Cow Nation is not a realistic solution to the problems of large scale food production but it's a good thing to raise awareness about the ethics of dairy farming, and encourage people to buy Soil Association certified milk in the same way that many buy free-range eggs. This should be a curb on zero-grazing practices.

In general, though, the dairy industry is horrible. Drinking milk may seem wimpy but it's tied up with the slaughter of cows in infancy or,  if female, after about 1/6th of their natural life-span, by which time their bodies are crippled and depleted from drugs and overmilking. Life parts from Philip Roth's fantasy of placid superabundance: female milk, like female patience, can run out.

The right to own and the need to kill

Yesterday a 62 year old man, Terry Thompson, turned 56 exotic animals loose on his Ohio neighbourhood and then killed himself. At the time of writing the animals - apart from a single monkey - are no longer a danger to the public. 48 of them have been shot dead.

The slaughtered animals include 18 Bengal tigers and 17 lions. Numbers of tigers have been reduced by 95% since 1900; every sub-species of tiger is on the critically endangered list. The combined actions of Terry Thompson and the Ohio police have, in 24 hours, significantly added to the waste of a dying species.

The police have defended their shoot-to-kill policy: the animals had been abused and underfed; they were dangerous and aggressive and were roaming in a domestic area. One unspecified 300.lb animal was shot with a tranquiliser dart and subsequently "went crazy" and had to be killed anyway.

The rights and wrongs of the mission to destroy a menagerie of exotic mammals could be debated; the police have a duty to defend the public and feel no such obligation to value the lives of wild animals. The unbelievably weak restrictions on exotic pet ownership in Ohio - among the weakest in the United States, which is saying something - are indisputably to blame for this episode, which is not exactly unprecedented: Thompson had been in trouble before about animal escapes, and a neighbour was quoted as saying she had been living in fear for her family's safety. Besides, Ohio has one of the highest rates of injuries and deaths caused by exotic pets.

Once again, the price to pay for our lack of respect for animals, and their right to live a natural life in a safe and protected habitat, has been paid by the animals themselves. Their deaths reward our stubbornness and stupidity, and the misguided sense of a human right to ownership that was encoded in Ohio's very lack of legal restrictions.

The last monkey, by the way? It has "a herpes related disease". So when it is found, as a safety measure, it will probably be shot.

Drawing the Line

 If you asked me what my most dearly held principle is, I would say, "That we should respect life and that all  life is sacrosanct," and then I would assume an expression that combined smugness with wounded piety and gaze, for the next ten minutes, into the middle distance. If you showed me I spider I would run, screaming "Kill it! Kill it! Before it kills us!"


Does this make me a bad person?


Yes.

It is quite instructive for a vegetarian actually to want something to die, and be willing to kill it - usually by proxy because I am too cowardly to do it myself. There are some people who will think that I'm worse than Hitler for this propensity; many others will think that I'm making a fuss about nothing. I certainly believe that I shouldn't kill spiders, I also know that I have done so and very possibly will do so again.

It's hard to feel that smashing the odd insect really matters, but you're on dangerous ground if you consider that one thing is qualified to live but that something else is not. I think that the only time you're justified in killing something is when it's about to kill you, and despite my attavistic convictions, the average British household minibeast isn't going to do that. Killing like this is one of the small brutalisations that make us live in a horrible world with horrible people in it. But the world's a pretty violent place, with or without humanity, and in a way it feels a bit precious to want to tiptoe through this gory battlefield, patting things on the head.

We should probably try. There's a certain providence in the fall of a spider, and by drawing inept and hideous pictures of them, maybe I will inure myself to their vile anatomies. Maybe I'll feel the love.

Failing that, I hear conkers are a good natural spider repellent. I'll pin my hopes on that.

A New Hugh

I don't know whether to feel annoyed or vindicated. Presumably prompted entirely by my cartoon of him looking like a pig when eating pigs, then looking like a fish when eating fish, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall appeared in  yesterday's Guardian dressed as a cabbage, to announce that these days he is almost completely vegetarian.

Since you are obviously reading this, Hugh, congratulations. Your article finally acknowledges that  "we need to eat more vegetables and less flesh because vegetables are the foods that do us the most good and our planet the least harm." He (I think I can drop the vocative now) still believes in "being a selective omnivore", which seems to me pointless dallying when he's already admitted that meat eating is cruel  and environmentally damaging, but I'm ready to call a truce. I'm just glad that I didn't completely miss the opportunity to roundly insult him before he went public with his "small revolution."

It looks like my years of passionately loathing this particular man are over, but nevertheless I am pretty glad. His unexpected conversion from the church of bacon is a single step in a slow but inexorable movement away from meat. It may be that his aubergine and green bean curry looks like dog-sick with grass in it, but I am the last person to discourage anyone from eating it.

The Badger as Geezer

When AC Grayling invites me to become a fellow of his private university, New College of Humanities, I intend to accept, though, like Richard Dawkins, I will only be in it for the money. I see a future for myself as a professor of Badger Studies. In the absence of a job, conventional hobby or social life, I would like to relate my findings on the portrayal of badgers in various media, and the impact of this woodland critter on the popular consciousness.

Unit 1. The Badger as Geezer.

Anyone who was a child in the early 90s has to be against the badger cull. To us, the idea that badgers live in the countryside at all is strange and unnatural, since our young minds were formulated under the influence of a badger who is far from rural in his lifestyle. Badger is a perennial child, mischievous innocent and lovable cockney. For us, to kill the badger is psychologically unhealthy. To kill the badger is to kill yourself.


Unit 2. The Badger as Gentleman.

Kenneth Grahame's Badger, in The Wind in the Willows (1908) is more of an establishment figure, treated with deference and senior to his companions both in age and wisdom. His outlook is conservative. It surprises me that any patriot or traditionalist can be in favour of culls, when surely Badger is the embodiment of a nostalgic ideal. It suggests to me that conservatives who favour the culls were not read to enough in their childhoods, and this parental neglect expresses itself in an attitude to authority which both espouses old-fashioned values and vents their subconscious desire to kill their fathers, who wounded them with emotional detachment.


3. The Badger as Fear.

 Now we have it. This is the badger as chaos, as enigma, as a threat in teddy-bear's clothing. Notice how the badger multiplies uncontrollably, and is associated with poisonous elements of nature. The twenty-first century badger combines the menace of wildness with the alienation of highly developed technology. It is a subversion of the friendly and humanised badger of the twentieth century. It may even be in some sort of gang. It's starting a riot.

Unit 4. The Badger as Badger.

That's better.

I feel a bit sick after this mammal-themed wallow and I think I know why. It's because pictures of animals have little to do with animals. It's because we grow up lavishing affection on Peter Rabbit, or a pet rabbit, but also with the gradual absorption of the idea that it's ok and more adult to enjoy the same creature in the form of rabbit pie. It goes back to what I said about Nim Chimpsky: we enjoy animals when we give them aspects of the human, but take away those fictionalised attributes and leave them as they actually are - real, sentient creatures - and it's ok to treat them with complete callousness. Saying this, as we do implicitly, is saying that we only care for ourselves. Or, that we can admire something cute or beautiful, but the enjoyment we get out of it does not extend to respecting it, or valuing things that are outside of our enjoyment.

I expect anyone who looks at this will have grown out of cartoon animals. It would be nice if adulthood necessarily meant growing into caring about the real thing.

Lions and Tigers and BRICS

While Britain discusses the benefits of taking its poorest and angriest people and throwing them - and their families - out on the streets, international news suggests that our housing problems are going to be upstaged by the end of the century, by which time we will need 'at least another two planets' to 'sustain consumption patterns.'

Two items in the news that have caught my attention this week have been:

1. Reports of the growth of illegal trading in ivory and rhino horns, fuelled by China's economic boom.
2. The Environment Investigation Agency's press release on the 11th of August, accusing China of opening a loophole in its ban on trading tiger pelts.

In case anyone's wondering, this isn't my annual bash-China weekend (I align mine with Morrissey's): these stories relate to the failure of laws protecting endangered animals, and in both cases the market is straining against regulations. As a booming country, it would not be surprising if China had bowed to pressure from commercial tiger-breeders to relax the trading ban, although it has not admitted to doing so. This lack of transparency and discomfort with the world's reception of its environmental and wildlife-related policies is, again, unsurprising.

Both stories fit in nicely with my general sense of helplessness about the future. Summits trying to safeguard the world from the environmental consequences of the development of a new economic A-team (the big players of which will be Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa: BRICS) have shown a tendency to flop. The worst example is the Copenhagen Accord of 2009, a watered-down, ineffectual agreement drafted by the US, China, India, Brazil and SA that is not legally binding but merely to be 'taken note of'. The next big thing on the agenda is the Rio Earth Summit, 2012, but it's hard to be optimistic about its success in forcing developed and developing countries to behave themselves in a big way. The Earth Summit website says 'The current paradigm cannot continue,' but nobody's found a good way to put the brakes on: if a country wants to shirk on or break its promises, we just cannot stop them. I'm blaming capitalism for all this. You can blame something else if you want to.

Today's cheerful message (by the way, it's my birthday) seems to be that tigers are going extinct, and so are rhinos, and so is the earth. C'est la vie. At least we have two new planets to think about. How about keeping things peaceful by giving one to the rich and one to the poor, so that the second ends up like a big teeming council house but the first one is comfortable? And another planet, perhaps, for people who refuse to believe that any of this is happening at all.

Fish Fight: a bit of a cop-out.

Hugh's Fish Fight: The Battle Continues surprised me with Mr Fearnley-Whittingstall's transformation from foodie Etonian pig-in-a-wig to smiley-but-slightly-drawn campaigner for marine conservation.

In a nutshell, Hugh is succesfully drumming up interest in reforming the EU's Common Fisheries Policy. As it stands, the CFP's quota-based system of controlling how many and what kind of fish a fisher can legally bring in to land results in a lot of fish, dead or half-dead, being chucked back into the sea after having been caught. A hideous waste of life, or, as Hugh puts it, of 'lovely edible fish.'

My impression throughout the programme was that Mr F-W is less concerned by the serious ecological consequences of over-fishing (which is destroying habitats, destabilizing and contaminating eco-systems and endangering species) than by the idea that some of the plundered sea-creatures will fail to end up on his plate. Hugh's attitude to most living creatures is a meal-minded form of compassion which is alright in its way, but falls short of a real respect for life (eating a pig is not respecting it, Hugh) and of realistic sustainability: you cannot feed the world from a high-minded smallholding, nor does Fish Fight strike at the heart of the overfishing problem.

Fisheries Commissioner Maria Damanaki has expressed support for Hugh's anti-wasting campaign; she has also said, 'We are not going to fish less because of this ban on discarding.' That is good news for fishermen but does not acknowledge the fact that we're going to have to fish less - a lot less - given that the world is predicted to run out of wild-caught seafood by 2048.

Fish Fight highlights an important issue and has achieved some good things: it was a driving force behind the reformation of the CFP, the new version of which should be put into action from 2013. Nevertheless, it never properly acknowledged the importance of not eating fish, and it has been shown that while it has boosted the sales of 'unpopular' fish it has not dented the overconsumption of endangered ones.

Besides, anything touched by Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall is bound to carry the taint of food-snobbery: that smug whinging over having to be seen holding a Tesco bag; that cringing conversation with fellow organic-fetishist Prince Charles where Charles was appalled to learn that cod is still the public's favourite fish: "They can't get off it!" Shame on you, you nation of plebby cod-heads! Haven't you heard of Hugh's Mackerel Mission?

The fact is that producing meat  and fish ethically, sustainably, cheaply and plentifully isn't an option. Not until they start selling stem-cell meat, that is. But I can guarantee that the organic brigade will be out waving their pitchforks at the first mention of that.

AgriCullture

Very good article in the Guardian today, which describes the badger vaccination programme being deployed in Gloucester over the next five years. As well as starting with a thrilling mini-adventure about a badger called 007 (lured into a cage with peanuts, hence the cartoon) the  article discusses the pros and cons of using vaccination to deal with bovine TB, instead  of culling. On the one hand, it is humane and doesn't cause perturbation, which is a major drawback with the culling method. On the other, vaccination will not result in immediately dramatic improvements in TB hotspots (it's a vaccination, not a cure: there will still be infected badgers) and it is prohibitively expensive.

The coalition government is characteristically uninterested in planning for long-term solutions when it can butcher budgets: five vaccination schemes were cancelled in 2010 on cost grounds, though one potential contractor claimed that estimated costs were inflated by 'red tape and bureaucracy.'

The thing to remember is that bTB is a disease that badgers caught from cows, and cows (or rather, the farming industry) are the reason that we all have to fuss about badgers being poorly in the wilderness. The obvious solution, and one that is much more practicable than taking potshots at a protected, wild, nocturnal animal, is to vaccinate the cows.

Bureaucracy really is the villain here: cows that have been vaccinated against TB may have a positive reaction to the tuberculin skin test, which the EU uses to identify infected livestock. I can identify with this experience - when I was at school I wasn't given the BCG vaccine because when they gave me the skin test I  came up with a rash like a plate of salami. It meant that I was already immune. Because they get these reactions, immunised cows cannot be declared TB-free, according to EU law, and cannot be exported. It's all pretty stupid.

I am in favour of vaccination programmes like the one in Gloucester. I am even more in favour of developing an oral vaccine. But for the speedy easing of a crisis that can cost farmers up to £3.5 k a month, and has demanded hundreds of millions from the taxpayer over the last ten years, changing the EU testing method so that it can distinguish immunity from infection, thus enabling the vaccination of cows, is by a long way the most sensible solution.

Theatre of Blood

Readers who, like me, keep a keen eye on those goofy animal stories halfway down the Daily Mail homepage (stoner chihuahuas, anyone? Chocoholic fish?) will have noticed that bullfighting in Spain is to be 'developed and protected' in the face of well-publicised movements to institute a ban.

A statement made by the Ministry of Culture, which described corrida de toros as 'an artistic discipline and cultural product' reinforces the bloodsport's status as a symbol of Spanish nationalism, and comes as a direct response to last year's banning of bullfights in Catalonia.

The Catalan campaign against bullfighting was itself interpreted as a defiant reaction to the striking down of Catalonia's statute of autonomy in July 2010. The campaign - to extend animal protection laws to include the bulls and horses that are (ab)used in bullfights - was called Prou! - 'Enough!' in Catalan. The language issue highlights the political tensions between Spain and its autonomous communities: public use of Catalan was repressed under Franco and although its usage has been restored and encouraged since 1975 it is still a language that asserts difference from the Spanish mainstream.

Historically bullfighting is no less Catalan than it is Spanish, but corrida in the twenty-first century is posited as a kind of blood-soaked national anthem, and marketed as a tourist industry. Despite its cultural status, it does not necessarily mean much to ordinary citizens: most spectators of bullfights in Madrid are tourists, while in 2010 more than 60,000 inhabitants of Madrid signed a petition calling for a vote on banning them. The regional government's response was to declare the corrida protected as a part of Madrid's cultural heritage.

As is often the case, what should be a question about fundamental animal rights has been overshadowed by different political and emotional issues, in this case disputes about regional autonomy and national identity. Ideally EU animal protection laws would be stringent and comprehensive enough to protect all animals under its jurisdiction; the right to life should not be subject to cultural relativism. It is disgraceful that a tradition that involves the torture and slaughter of goaded and frightened animals can still be defended and even praised as an 'artistic discipline and cultural product.'

A country can embrace its history of warfaring, imperialism, slavery or head-shrinking, as the case may be - the  past should not be forgotten or censored, good or bad. The continued development and protection of a practice that is clearly in breach of internationally accepted standards of animal welfare cannot be justified or, I hope, sustained.

Initial Developments

It's fatal to show too much emotion when talking about an ethical issue unless there is an almost complete cultural consensus that it is worth being emotional about. People who care about animal rights risk being thought of as hysterics or sentimentalists if they show that they care.

A pretty pithy way of discussing the current situation in the world of animal experimentation is to simply define a few initials. Here are some topical ones:

• AMS - the Academy of Medical Sciences,  which has just released a report on ...
• ACHM - Animals Containing Human Materials. These do what they say on the tin: we've all seen those mice with ears on their backs, but that was just a grafting of human tissue. Today's experimentation tends to involve more complex transgenic procedures, blurring the distinction between humans and animals at a genetic level. Not, of course, that lab rats and 'knockout mice' are all quasimodo - in many cases it is impossible to find effective cures for human diseases using research based on artificial versions induced in other species.
• HM - I found out about this one recently. GM animals means genetically modified; HM animals are the 'Harmful Mutant' category, who have had heritable defects hardwired into their genetic makeup. HM excludes those animals who have been altered to exhibit non-heritable defects. Basically these animals are designed and created specifically to be unwell, sometimes in unpredictable/accidental ways if they are engineered to have too many defects.

I'm not a bitch - I have no objection to finding a cure for cancer. But looking at these initials reminds me that I'm deeply uncomfortable with the sweeping argument that the end justifies the means.

A lot of people are able to accept that. Fortunately, science is taking us to a point where we can have our cake and not torture  it, through the development of absolute (non-animal) and relative (using only animal tissue and cells) replacements. Unfortunately, as this excellent article points out, ethically undernourished reports by institutions like the AMS are serving to delay the development of these replacements, which they officially support.

The Talking Animal

I've been reading a bit about Nim Chimpsky, the chimpanzee whose life is now the subject of a documentary, Project Nim, by the film-maker James Marsh. As a bit of a spoiler, the animal was taken from his mother in infancy by a psychologist, Herbert Terrace, who wanted to teach him sign language, and was initially raised pretty much as a human. When this went wrong, he was caged up in a research centre, and finally in a zoo, where he died prematurely from a heart attack, possibly caused by all the joints he used to smoke with his 'parents'.

His name is, obviously, a pun on Noam Chomsky, the linguist. Now, if I don't love a terrible pun then I don't love anything (I have long dreamed of having two  dogs called Philip Ruff and Virginia Woof) but this smart-alecy naming of 'Chimpsky' signals the misguided nature of the whole experiment. 'Nim Chimpsky' is a bastardisation of a man's name, and there is no way that a talking ape, in little trousers and all, was ever going to be anything but a grotesque parody of a human.

That is not because chimps are  grotesque. The problem lies in the anthropocentric outlook that led to this animal being seen as an unevolved human, rather than a fully evolved ape. Some animals can communicate with humans but, as Terrace was forced to conclude, not in terms of human conversation; they communicate according to their own needs.  It seems to me that a lot of cruelty is rooted in a divided view of animals, either as completely other - they are not people, so we can do what we like with them - or as inferior versions of ourselves that we can narcissistically relate to but do not have to respect because they are incomplete.

I find it particularly chilling that after his unnatural early life in the bosom (sometimes literally) of a human family, the animal was transferred to a research facility, where he was caged among other apes (having been totally separated from his own species since he was born) who were destined to be sold to a research lab for Aids and hepatitus vaccine experiments.

This development shows a more extreme form of the exploitation that arises from finding the links between humans and other large mammals. They can be interesting to us both egotistically and scientifically, though their usefulness as the subjects of experiments is limited by the same fact that made this experimentation acceptable: they aren't human. We are well aware of the similarities and differences between humans and animals. It is taking a long time to reach the conclusion that neither similarity nor difference justifies a sense of ownership, and that animals are neither hilarious hairy little men, nor material for experiments.

Big Top Society

Just a  few words about the recent agreement by MPs to introduce a ban on wild animals in circuses.

It's an excellent motion: it isn't binding, it isn't an 'immediate possibility' (in the words of Ministers who tried to scupper it, despite its being backed by parliamentary and public opinion) and it isn't going to happen until after the outcome of a legal challenge to a similar ban in Austria has been decided.

The official reason for the government holding back on the ban, preferring to mumble about the possibility of reinforcing existing laws, is that a ban might infringe the rights of circus owners under European Law, though as Allegra Stratton points out, the European Commission does allow individual members to make exceptions on animal welfare grounds.

Mary Creagh, Shadow Environment Secretary, described the government's handling of the motion as 'confused.' This presumably refers to the botched three-line whip that the Conservatives put out against voting in favour of the ban, and to their policy of acknowledging the obligation laid on them to take action while persisting in their obvious unwillingness to do so. It could be said that their sympathies lie with entrepreneurial circus-owners (and the performing animal company in Cameron's constituency) but it seems to me this is typical of the way the Tories tread water over animal welfare issues, in a way that ultimately does no good to man or beast.

Take their handling of the impending badger cull, which Caroline Spelman is 'strongly minded' to back. If the current government had shown more strength of mind they might be offering to deliver on the previous government's promise of an oral vaccine for badgers by 2015. This solution would be more reliably effective than the hugely expensive culls (likely to cost in the region of £92 million), which carry with them the risk if not likelihood of perturbation (whereby TB escalates in  areas surrounding the culling hotspots). The government seems to have put the kibosh on vaccination, and is apparently committed to frustrating progress in animal welfare whenever it can.

The Conservatives' behaviour over the circus issue seems particularly characteristic because the preservation of old-style circuses fits in with the Enid Blytonesque aesthetic of Cameron's fantastical Big Society, where we all head down to the Big Top for some big laughs. Never mind a bit of entrenched cruelty or injustice, it's all in good fun.

Notably the embarrassingly chippy Tory MP Mark Pritchard - a self-described 'little council-house lad' and leader of the Parliamentary campaign for the ban - does not have a place in this vision.

Notes on a Pledge

Yesterday Lynne Featherstone reaffirmed the  reaffirmation she made on the 29th March 2011 of the government's pledge to ban the use of animal testing in the making of household products. VP awaits concrete action, but is not holding her breath.

 The initial pledge, made in the coalition's 2010 programme for government was taken from the Lib Dem Manifesto, and is the only one of three pledges therein to have made its way into the coalition programme. Given the general reluctance of the Conservatives to engage in animal welfare (compared to the other main parties, Tory MPs have shown the least support for animal protection EDMs), it seems unrealistic to expect any quick movement on the testing ban, although it is an obvious and uncontroversial move. I suspect many people  would be surprised that a practice that has been banned in the production of cosmetics is still officially acceptable in the production of washing-up liquid.

It turns out there are ethical products that can be identified by a 'leaping bunny' logo. Ever  heard of it? Thought not. The brands associated with the BUAV 'Cleaning up Cruelty' campeign (2008) can be found on their website, but not in any supermarket I have ever been to. Admittedly this is because I have only ever been to Tesco (the Co-operative and Marks and Spencer are predictably virtuous) but then, I am a  woman of the people.

And there is a benighted minority who don't go to expensive supermarkets, or moniter ill-publicised Home Office statements. Animal rights, as an ethical issue, is less prevalent  than it seems, and vivisection more so. The recherche nature of the brands that have voluntarily opted out of the use of animal testing, or ingredients whose production involves it, reflects the problem with consumer-led morality: going about your business without unknowingly propogating cruelty and exploitation involves more money and research than most can spare. Especially over  such an unglamorous issue as household cleaning.