A diver swims alongside a Greenland shark, a rarely-seen species that looks like it has been etched from stone. They can survive for more than 200 years at depths of up to 600 metres under Arctic ice. They grow to 23-feet long and are so fearsome they have even been known to eat polar bears. Picture: Doug Perrine/Seapics.com/solent
Filed under Animals
Thanks to national geographic for the photo of a living turkey
An advertisement for Turkey bowling jumped out at me today. I said the words aloud to see if they made any more sense: “Turkey bowling. Turkey bowling.” Hmm, not really.
A local casino is offering a promotion where punters attempt to throw a frozen turkey down a makeshift bowling alley. Huh?
Easy enough to explain: animals become objects when killed. To insulate reflection against the ethics of the dead animal erupting, humans are encouraged to treat the newly-deceased animal as a stand-in for some other object. Reflection about the mass slaughter of turkeys is less likely when the turkey becomes the bowling ball.
Filed under Animals, communication, representation
I’m a vegetarian. Don’t eat the thanksgiving bird. It’s easy. If a being had a mom and has a face — don’t eat it.
Filed under Animals, communication, juxtaposition, representation
Nintendo’s new Mario video game apparently contains some animal violence. Humans, playing the game can kill a tanooki raccoon dog and wear it’s skin to get special powers. I’ll probably skip playing the game.
I thought the defensive reaction was pretty interesting.
While it is true that at points in the game, Mario dons a raccoon-ish looking “Tanooki” suit that enables him to float in the air and swat bad guys with his tail, he never slaughters an animal to get it.
Instead, as MSNBC’s In-Game blog points out, “the magical Tanooki suits that [Mario] wears in the game typically spring from magical squares that magically hover in the air. These squares magically give up the suits, (which at first look like magical leaves), when Mario bumps his head into them.”
via PETA takes on Nintendo’s Mario and his Tanooki suit – latimes.com.
This is an interesting take on the notion of suicide food. I’m not buying the argument that abstract violence against animals in the fictional world is any less significant because the realism has been distorted. In particular this is the slaughterhouse-as-magic-box theme. I think this idea only fuels the disconnect between eating meat (or wearing fur) and the killing of the animal.
Filed under Animals, media, nature, representation
Buddy and Pedro are two male penguins who bond and nest together. The Toronto zoo is breaking up this male/male relationship to force the penguins to reproduce with female penguins.
Buddy and Pedro are originally from a zoo in Toledo, Ohio, and were bonded before the reached the Metro Zoo. Twenty-one year old Buddy had a female partner for ten years with whom we produced offspring but she is now deceased. Ten year old Pedro has never produced offspring and the zoo feels it’s their job to ensure that the penguins are matched with females and bred.
Buddy and Pedro are not the first same-sex animal pair, nor even the first same-sex penguin couple. In 2004 a pair of same-sex chinstrap penguins named Roy and Silo at New York City’s Central Park zoo incubated, hatched and raised a chick together, a female named Tango. Tango’s birth was the subject of a popular and controversial children’s book called And Tango Makes Three by Peter Parnell and Justin Richardson.
A pair of male penguins at a zoo in Germany also successfully hatched a chick. It is almost rarer to find an animal species wherein there is not same-sex pairing than it is to find a completely heterosexual animal species. Same-sex pairings have been observed in elephants, giraffes, dolphins, apes, lions, sheep, swans, hyenas and vultures. The list of same-sex pairings in insects and marine species is too long to list.
via » Marriage of the Penguins Gender Focus – A Canadian Feminist Blog.
Humans like to use specific animal case studies to help confirm their own stories about how humans have to act. In essence by finding animals in the world who act in certain manners, humans extrapolate that there is a universal drive or that particular behavior is natural in other species. This is biological essentialism.
Considering this case of same-sex animals, one might ask if the science is being used by leftists to support the naturalness of human homosexuality?
Sure, I guess that is probably true in this case. Humans are story-loving animals, and we generally want to gather information which supports our prevailing points of view. But how we get the stories which are the foundations of our own beliefs — in this case nature or nurture — is the real question. Schools, clergy, parents, books, authority figures, and anecdotes we’ve collected invite us to invest in some particular ways of understanding. Some communications corrode against other communications. One example is same-sex coupling in animals:
For more than a century, this kind of observation was usually tacked onto scientific papers as a curiosity, if it was reported at all, and not pursued as a legitimate research subject. Biologists tried to explain away what they’d seen, or dismissed it as theoretically meaningless — an isolated glitch in an otherwise elegant Darwinian universe where every facet of an animal’s behavior is geared toward reproducing. One primatologist speculated that the real reason two male orangutans were fellating each other was nutritional.
via Can Animals Be Gay? – NYTimes.com.
Sexuality in nature appears to be quite diverse and hard to map out in any deterministic fashion. Language, words and the human desire for classification spin stories from observations. These lived realities then influence how we exist in the world.
Communications give birth to us. They also mark the ideas of the past, making visible our often embarrassing intellectual histories. The desire to open up those old ideas with more thoughtful understandings is valuable. More importantly, it is fruitful to be reflective about how we self-constitute our ideas about sexuality.
Filed under Animals, communication, human rights, learning, nature
I think Carol J. Adams is one of the most important thinkers of this century.
Her work as a feminist vegetarian ethicist has helped me better understand how violence against animals is a fruitful comparison available for those who hurt humans.
Consider the US soldiers who killed Afghani civilians and then took parts of their bodies as souvenirs.
In his testimony, Gibbs denied responsibility for the killings, but did admit to slicing off body parts from Afghans, including the fingers of a man, and keeping them or giving them to other soldiers as trophies.
“In my mind, I was there to take the antlers off the deer. You have to come to terms with what you’re doing. Shooting people is not an easy thing to do,” said Gibbs.
via US ‘kill team’ trial: jury considers Calvin Gibbs verdict | World news | guardian.co.uk.
Filed under Animals, communication, feminism, human rights, representation
Interesting article in the LA Times about rising pork prices in China. Good opportunity for analysis from the article on nationalism and meat eating.
China, by far the world’s biggest producer of pork, is home to about half the world’s porcine population with 460 million pigs. That’s about seven times more than the United States, the second-largest producer.
But it hasn’t been enough to keep a lid on prices, which have risen steeply since the middle of last year. That’s when Chinese farmers reduced production in response to high feed costs and shrinking profit margins. A spate of hog diseases also cut into the supply.
China’s government is so sensitive to the country’s appetite that it maintains a strategic reserve of 200,000 tons of frozen pork. It has tapped that secret stash in recent weeks to increase supply. But analysts said it will make little difference in a nation that consumes 100,000 tons of pork daily.
via China’s pork shortage hitting close to home, affecting economy – latimes.com.
My first thought is that this indicates the importance of pork consumption to the idea of the nation. In the USA we keep some strategic oil reserves to ensure that there is a backup, but also to reassure Americans that their government is thinking about their oil future oil consumption. It reassures and encourages healthy consumption. Similarly, China’s frozen pig reserve indicates a selling of the idea of regular animal protein consumption to the citizenry.
After wondering if other meats will replace the value of pig in Chinese food, David Pearson, the article’s author, includes this reply:
Fat chance, said Shi Zhijun, owner of a Beijing restaurant that sells pork-filled steamed buns.
“Eating pork is good for people,” said the rotund 45-year-old, who uses pork for half the items on his menu. “Everybody should eat at least a half-jin [500 grams] every day. It’s very nutritious…. It helps people grow. If you don’t eat pork you will be very thin and weak.”
via China’s pork shortage hitting close to home, affecting economy – latimes.com.
This seems like another interesting western media strategy — the quirky ignorant quote from a foreigner. I’m not going to scrap with this idea on the factual basis — pork as health food is in fact silly. Instead, the quote’s inclusion seems like a key element of American media’s colonialist lens. The notion of exotic other people who don’t know better, is the foundation of judgement and intervention.
It is this precise notion — they don’t know what they are doing — that lends to the well-intentioned, but devastating difference and quite often some sense of we must help. The impulse to act to help is at the core of the colonial mission. Of course, a pork bun seller would never suggest that his product was harmful.
In this case, the geopolitics associated with China make it unlikely that the United States will send a chicken promotional team to China (although stranger things have happened).
Filed under Animals, capitalism, colonialism, food
Critically endangered vultures in India are still at risk of exposure to the anti-inflammatory drug diclofenac, through widespread illegal sales of the drug.
The Indian government banned use of the drug for veterinary purposes in 2006 after it brought vultures to the brink of extinction. Vultures were being poisoned after eating the carcasses of cattle that had been treated with the drug. The manufacture of diclofenac for human purposes is still allowed.
via Nature News Blog: Illegal drug sales threaten vultures in India.
Thanks to booksinc for the image.
I’m almost done with Robert Clark’s biography of James Beard. Beard was a crucial figure in american cookery — celebrating local ingredients and providing American cuisine with a serious shot of epicurean style. Beard was also one of the first celebrity chefs and he took the corporate money for endorsements. It is an interesting read — at times it bogs, but the rewards from digging into the history of the people like this are the visibility of ideology in the text.
At one point in 1953, Beard is working out the rough ideas for a paperback on outdoor cooking. He writes the following to a collaborator:
Here is the idea: 1. Definition of culinary terms and barbecue terms and certain dishes . . . some of the mouthwatering terms men like. 2. Cold and hot weather menus and recipes featuring masculine dishes and fish and meat. 3. Recipes for sizzling platters and rotisserie junk. 4. A glossary of drinking terms–also how to use whiskey with recipes and man-sized portions (most men drink less than women but I supposed we must say man-sized–and be male). No fancy schmancy drinks but drinks which are good and full and really wonderful (152).
I’m fascinated by the clear articulation of what he expects to be successful. Again, Beard actually is the American chef who wrote the book on barbecue. But the articulation of masculine desire maps a series of assumptions and ideas about masculinity and men in the fifties.
Lets note James Beard’s obvious appreciation for communication and rhetoric. His idea of “mouthwatering terms,” points suggestively about a language keyed and cued to shared desire between men. It would be a worthwhile excavation to cruise through Beard’s half dozen barbecue editions and track the changes in language.
The connection between male entitlement and food has been mapped by Carol J. Adams. There is still work to be done about making these ideas visible. If you haven’t read The Sexual Politics of Meat yet, go get it out of the library.
It’s a worthwhile quote if only for the drinking commentary and the notion of “rotisserie junk.”
Filed under Animals, communication, food
Life of refinement 