On the Death of Happy—and on How Humans Treat Non-Human Animals

When the 55-year old Asian elephant who had been named “Happy” was euthanized at the Bronx Zoo last month, her death sparked a wide-ranging conversation about many topics, including whether or not humans are justified in confining other animals in zoos, whether or not humans are justified in killing and eating other animals, and the degree to which non-human animals possess high levels of intelligence. I was one of more than two hundred people who weighed in on the New York Times site, commenting on their May 28 article covering Happy’s death. The article noted that Happy had “passed a mirror self-recognition test, touching an X marked on her head with her trunk while looking in a mirror, making her the first elephant to show such a degree of self-awareness,” and reported that “human infants, apes, and dolphins” had been the only others to have passed the test.) My first comment had to do with that self-recognition test:

It's an interesting and informative article, but in one respect it's out of date in the information it provides: the list of species that have had members who passed the mirror self-recognition test is now considerably longer than reported here. In addition to elephants (Happy and two other elephants to a slightly lower degree), humans; all the great apes; and bottle nose dolphins, the list now includes killer whales; the rhesus macaque monkey; some species of fish; and one species of bird (the Eurasian magpie). It's worth noting that the test (which many have criticized as human centric) has thus far been administered to only a small percentage of non-human animal species.

I also commented in response to “Tom” from Moscow Idaho, who made the point that animals such as “hogs are also highly intelligent. Yet we subject them to such cruelty for a cheaper BLT.” Tom wrote that he is “not a vegetarian” but buys “local meat produced as humanely as possible” and “often” chooses “a plant-based substitute.” He added that he realizes “not everyone has the income to do that,” but urged readers to “remember that cattle, sheep, hogs, and chickens are also smarter than we give them credit for.” The following exchange ensued:

Don LePan: Very good point, Tom; they are indeed much smarter than generally given credit for! Pigs and chickens, for example, have both demonstrated an ability to use mirrors in a variety of ways—and “passed” many other intelligence tests too.

The concept of meat produced "as humanely as possible" is deeply problematic, though. Imagine a species from another world coming to earth and farming humans--killing humans and eating them, and rationalizing it by saying that the humans were treated "as decently as possible" until the time came when they had to be killed and eaten. We can get our protein quite easily from so many plant-based sources now; let's let the animals live. (Healthier for us, and for the planet too!)

And the low-income point? Many forms of a plant-based diet are actually very low priced. Lentils, chick peas, kidney beans, soy beans--these legumes are far less expensive than animal-based sources of protein. Instead of ground beef (or plant-based fake "ground beef"), we can put lentils in our spaghetti sauce, and just leave out the carne in our chili.

“Mattson” (responding to Don LePan): Please beware of the little white lie. Legumes are NOT a good source of high quality protein. They are an incomplete source of amino acids. When legumes and grains are combined, then together the amino acids are complete. (Such as rice and beans). Between Celiac Disease, Soy allergies, and a genetic disease involving beans-please get nutritional counseling if you want to go Vegan.

Don LePan (responding to “Mattson”): It's not quite right to say that legumes are an incomplete source of amino acids. Every legume contains all the nine essential amino acids in at least some quantity--though most legumes contain very little methionine and/or tryptophan. It _is_ right to say that combining legumes with grains (rice, bread, pasta, etc.) results in a complete amino acid profile nutritionally--and it's worth pointing out that one need not worry about combining legumes and grains at every meal; if you consume legumes and grains over the course of the day at whatever meal, that should be fine. The one thing that typically does require a supplement when one adopts a vegan diet is vitamin B12.

Nutritional counselling for any diet is probably a good idea. It's unfortunate that such counselling tends to be recommended far more often for those adopting or considering a plant-based diet than it is for those subsisting on an omnivorous diet, when the health harms from the standard North American omnivorous diets (increased risk of heart attacks, strokes, diabetes--the list is a long one) are much, much greater.

Justine Marie, from Queens, NYC (responding to Don LePan): Yes! Vegan since 2007 and thriving. Only wish I'd done it sooner. May Happy rest in peace, now that she is finally free, and may all beings be happy and free from harm.

I was pleased to see that, overall, there were far more people commenting on the inherent cruelty of zoos than there were people commenting in defense of zoos.

P.S. My thanks to Maureen for bringing me up to speed on the nutrition facts front!

Happy the elephant (Wikicommons, Nonhumanrights.org.)

The Art That's Hidden Away

The Globe and Mail published the first part of this essay as an opinion piece in their 23 May 2026 issue (I wrote the rest of it after I'd submitted it to them). Some interesting comments were posted online this weekend--including about the Vancouver Art Galley, which I was pleased to hear has just opened a new exhibition of works from its permanent collection. I will echo hazlit64's comment: "Finally. Indeed, it is about the best thing the VAG has done in ages."

The MacKenzie Art Gallery in Regina has a far more impressive permanent collection than do the public art galleries in many cities its size. As you’d expect, the collection has a range of pieces by Ronald Bloore and other members of the “Regina Five” from the 1960s, and significant paintings by the outstanding Saskatchewan landscape artist Dorothy Knowles. But the collection also includes work by a wide range of outstanding Canadian artists from all eras: Takao Tanabe is included, as are Alex Colville, Joyce Wieland, David Milne, Prudence Heward, A.Y. Jackson, Arthur Lismer, Lawren Harris, and mid-twentieth century abstract artists Jack Bush, Jack Shadbolt, and Agnes Martin. Some of the finest paintings by early Canadian landscape artist Homer Watson are part of the collection. And that’s just the Canadian side of things. Works by Andrea del Sarto, Irene Parenti Duclos, Eugene Delacroix, Pierre Bonnard, Edgar Dégas, Paul Gauguin, Edvard Munch, Pablo Picasso, Paul Klee, Frank Stella, Jasper Johns, and Andy Warhol are all part of the collection too.*

Homer Watson, The River Drivers (1914), part of the permanent collection of the MacKenzie Art Gallery.

And how many of those works were on display when I visited in early March? None. Other than a special exhibition of works (“Death Boat and other Stories: The Kampelmacher Memorial Collection of Indigenous Art”), there was nothing whatsoever on display from the permanent collection. The rest of the space was devoted to two large special exhibitions: a selection of photographic and conceptual art by Plains Cree artist Joi T. Arcand, and a selection of work (again, primarily photographic and conceptual) by recipients of the 2025 Governor General’s Awards in Visual and Media Arts.

I have no desire to criticize anything in the three exhibits on display. The background to the Arcand exhibit is interesting, and so are some of the pieces; particularly striking is an installation piece of a wooden chair inside a field of wheat inside the bare wooden frame of a farm building. Jin-me Yoon’s images of herself in front of iconic Canadian landscapes (part of the Governor General’s Awards winners exhibition) are striking too and, in the “Death Boat” exhibition of Indigenous art, Ananaisie Alikatuktuk’s 1976 stonecut of the Inuit sea goddess Taleelayu and her family is quite wonderful. The Joe Fafard cows in the outdoor sculpture garden are quite wonderful too. There are good things on display at the Mackenzie.

But a public gallery with a large permanent collection should surely be making an effort to represent the full range of our artistic heritage—and a full range of genres. Like many other public galleries across Canada, the MacKenzie has chosen not to do that. Canada’s Indigenous heritage is of vital importance, and it should always find expression in our public galleries. But so too is our heritage of European art and of art influenced by the traditions the European settlers brought with them. Implicitly, the MacKenzie suggests that the only heritage of great value in Canada is that of Canada’s Indigenous peoples.

Implicitly, too, the MacKenzie suggests that there is little value to the genres that for centuries were accorded pride of place in our heritage: painting (and in particular, oil painting), works on paper (whether watercolors or prints), and sculpture. Photographic art and video art, together with installations and other forms of conceptual art, now dominate much of the art scene. They should surely be represented in any public gallery, but they are not everything. Bonnard, Gauguin, Munch, Picasso, David Milne, A.Y. Jackson, Dorothy Knowles—to have all that wealth hidden away in your vaults and not show any of it? It’s an extraordinary imbalance.

It’s not as if the MacKenzie is short of exhibition space; a visitor can’t help but be struck by the amount of empty wall space in the foyer, the hallways, and so on. It would be easy to display a modest selection of works from the permanent collection without reducing one bit the amount of exhibition space devoted to the other exhibitions.

I’ve had very similar experiences elsewhere; in public galleries across Canada, our artistic heritage (with the notable exception of Indigenous art) is often all tucked away in the vaults; modern photographic art, video art, and installation and conceptual art are what’s on display. There are some in the art world who might suggest that there is a hint of the philistine, or even of the reactionary in anyone who still wants to see work by the Impressionists, or Alex Colville, or the Group of Seven, or Andrea del Sarto. But most of us who would like to see a broader representation of our art heritage on display do not want to push out the contemporary art and the Indigenous art; we would like to see it on display together with Indigenous works, and together with various sorts of contemporary art.

You can, of course, find work by artists such as Lawren Harris and Arthur Lismer and A.Y. Jackson in the MacKenzie Art Gallery, in the same part of the gallery in which they are to be found in every gallery across Canada: reproduced on postcards and teacups in the gallery shop. It seems crazy, but people still buy this stuff, in whatever form. It would be great if they could see the real thing as well as the postcards and the teacups.

* * *

Some may feel (and understandably so) that many of the artists represented in these permanent collections don’t deserve any more time in the limelight, that the Tom Thomsons and David Milnes and Paul Gauguins of the world—the white males who dominated for so long—have had their time in the sun, and deserve now to spend a good long time in the vaults. But it’s not just the long-dead white males that are being hidden away in the vaults; it's living artists too, very much including women artists and non-white artists. Check out the galleries that provide information on what’s in their permanent collection and you’ll find a vast store of works by Canada’s finest living artists—Angela Grossmans, Takao Tanabes, John Hartmans, and many more.

Not every gallery takes the same sort of approach that the MacKenzie does, of course. The National Art Gallery, The Museum of Fine Arts in Montreal, and the Art Gallery of Ontario are notable exceptions among our largest public galleries, as is the Beaverbrook in Fredericton, which boasts on its website that its “permanent collection’s core … has remained on view for most of the gallery’s 60-plus year history.” The Glenbow in Calgary promises to again be an exception when it reopens in 2027. And several others are at least partial exceptions; the Art Gallery of Victoria, for example, displays works from its permanent collection in at least two of the gallery’s seven exhibition spaces.** But take a look online at what’s on at the main public galleries in St. John’s, Halifax, Trois Rivières, Kingston, Peterborough, Guelph, London, Windsor, Thunder Bay, Winnipeg, Regina, Saskatoon, Edmonton, Kamloops, Kelowna, Vancouver, Nanaimo. Many of these galleries hold excellent permanent collections. Few if any make available much space to show the works in those permanent collections to the public.

Why not? Gallery curators have a ready answer; they just don’t have enough space.*** And it is indeed true that many galleries across Canada are short both of exhibition space and of storage space—in some cases critically so. But the assumption seems always to be that new, temporary exhibitions must take priority. Is there any good reason for that assumption? Why not look at things the other way round? If you have a truly outstanding permanent collection, why not give priority to that? However large or small your available exhibition space may be, why not devote at least one third of that available space to a permanent display of certain of the most important works from your permanent collection?**** Another third might be devoted to rotating displays of other works in the permanent collection. That still leaves a third for temporary exhibitions. In the United States the majority of public galleries seem to devote over 70% of their exhibition space to works from their permanent collection; in Cleveland and Portland, it’s 90%; in Minneapolis it’s 93%. In Winnipeg, on the other hand, it’s estimated to be less than 60%; in Quebec City, less than 50%. In Victoria, it’s 45%; in Vancouver it’s often less than 10%. In Peterborough, Lethbridge, Nanaimo, and various other Canadian cities, it’s often 0%.

* * *

In closing, I’d like to return to the T.C. Douglas Building in Regina, in which the MacKenzie Gallery is housed. Arguably the most interesting pieces of art on display in the entire building are Miki Mappin’s nine wonderfully evocative sculptures of human figures. They’re on permanent display, positioned on benches in the building’s atrium, which you pass through before you enter the gallery, and again when you leave. Reminiscent of the white plaster sculptures of George Segal, these figures are made of dark concrete; they have apparently been popular among visitors to the building ever since they were installed in 1982. There’s nothing there to identify the sculptor, but an extraordinarily informative attendant at the information desk provided me with a good deal of background information—including a photocopied article from the 18 November 1982 issue of Western People about the installation of the sculptures.

“Thanks so much for the information,” I said to her before I left. “These are really quite extraordinary—better, perhaps, than anything else on display in the gallery.”

“Oh, but these aren’t the gallery’s sculptures,” she said. “They were commissioned by the Ministry of Health.” She pointed to the other side of the atrium. “The Health Ministry occupies that half of the building—nothing to do with the MacKenzie Gallery.”

*A nicely produced 2013 book edited by Timothy Long & Stephen King, The Vaults: Art from the MacKenzie Art Gallery and the University of Regina Collections, provides a wealth of information on what’s hidden from view at the MacKenzie.

**Also on display in Victoria at the moment is an exhibition advertised in the 14 March issue of the Globe and Mail with a detail from Mary Pratt’s Cut Cake: “Historic and Post-War Canadian Art.” But that’s an exhibition at the Madrona Gallery, an outstanding commercial gallery; the works are all for sale. It’s an interesting commentary on the current art world in this part of British Columbia that, when it comes to nineteenth and twentieth-century Canadian painting, there are often far more important works to be seen at commercial galleries and auction houses—Heffel Fine Art in Vancouver as well as Madrona—than there is at any of the public galleries. One of the many ironies of the current art world is that many works of art that have been donated to public galleries in the expectation that they will be thereby be enjoyed by more people than if the works were sold off at auction, end up being seen by no one at all other than the gallery staff.

***A growing number of galleries are nowadays attempting to address their space issues by adopting a “visible storage” approach for much of their permanent collection, and a growing number too are digitizing much or all of their permanent collection. These are both real steps forward—but they are no substitute for having a significant part of one’s permanent collection displayed in proper exhibition galleries.

****Having too few works from their permanent collection permanently on display is a failing of more than a few public galleries. When space is allocated to works from the permanent collection, it’s often only on a temporary basis. That’s fine for most works in most permanent collections, but truly iconic works should always be on display—just as the Glenbow used to always have on display, Frances Anne Hopkins’s Canoes in Fog, Lake Superior and just as the National Gallery always has on display certain works by Monet, Brymer, Carr, Thomson, Wyle, LeMieux, Colville, Borduas, Riopelle, and Mary Pratt.

Genocidal Intent, and the Quiet Deaths of Millions

Donald Trump’s early April statements of genocidal intent in the war he has waged against Iran have rightly received a great deal of attention—though no major news outlets I’m aware of have dared to describe them as “genocidal.” On April 1 Trump made the following statement: “We are going to hit them extremely hard over the next two to three weeks. We are going to bring them back to the stone ages where they belong.” That was not an offhand remark made in haste through a tweet on Truth Social; the words were part of a prime time address to the nation, and are recorded in the official White House transcript. A few days later (on April 7) he threatened similar action: unless Iran reopened the Strait of Hormuz by midnight that night, he declared, “a whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again.”

Is it going too far to describe such words as statements of genocidal intent? A good many respected authorities have judged that it is not—among them Mathias Risse of Harvard University’s Center for Human Rights: “Trump’s statement,” Risse has written, “is the clearest case of declared genocidal intent in modern international criminal law.”

It’s worth comparing Trump’s words with the words that have been used by others inciting genocide. “If international finance Jewry inside and outside Europe should succeed in plunging the nations once more into a world war, the result will be not the Bolshevization of the earth and thereby the victory of Jewry, but the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe,” Hitler declared on 30 January 1939.” All Tutsis should be "erased from human memory" and "wiped from the surface of the earth," blared radio broadcasts in Rwanda in 1993. The similarities are all too clear.

No one suggests that Trump and Hegseth will kill as many in Iran as the 800,000 who were killed in the Rwanda genocide or the 6,000,000 who were killed in Europe in the Holocaust.

Trump’s other actions, though, may result in the quiet deaths of many more. The most heinous action of the Trump administration—among seemingly endless heinous actions—may may be the decision early on to quickly and brutally shut down America’s foreign aid programs. One report—from the Harvard School of Public Health—estimates that the USAID shutdown has already led to hundreds of thousands of deaths (https://hsph.harvard.edu/news/usaid-shutdown-has-led-to-hundreds-of-thousands-of-deaths/); another—from an equally reputable source, the Lancet—estimates that the shutdown may well result in 14,000,000 deaths by 2030. (https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cx2jjpm7zv8o ).

Quiet deaths from starvation or from lack of essential medicines may not have the worldwide emotional impact that deaths associated with the word “genocide” always seem to carry. But the millions of people dying probably won’t care what words are used to describe the horror.

These, of course, are not deaths in places that the likes of Trump have been in the habit of recognizing as “civilizations.” The great civilizations of Benin, or of the Mali empire, or of Great Zimbabwe are ones that Trump and the world of MAGA seem entirely unaware of. Their traditions are the traditions of what Trump, in one of the most horrific statements of his first administration, called “shithole countries.” Who really cares if people in those sorts of places die in record numbers?

If we do care, we should do more than care; we should press rich world governments not to follow Trump in cutting foreign aid—and we should give as generously as we can to every aid agency that is working to save the people that the Trump administration is happy to let die.

Iran, 1953: Eisenhower, Churchill, Mosaddegh

In discussing the history of US-Iran relations in the context of the current war, many media accounts go back as far as the upheavals of 1979—the overthrowing of the Shah, the installation of an Islamist regime, and the American embassy hostage crisis. Few, sad to say, go back as far as upheavals of 1952-53—the nationalization of the oil industry by Iran’s democratically elected government, led by Mohammad Mosaddegh; the attempts by Winston Churchill’s British government to persuade the US to help them overthrow that government; and the overthrow itself. In the October 9, 1953 entry in his diary, American President Dwight Eisenhower reflected on the nature of what his government (together with Churchill’s government) had done:

The things we did were “covert.” If knowledge of them became public, we would not only be embarrassed in that region, but our chances [of doing] anything of like nature in the future would almost completely disappear.

Knowledge of what they had done did eventually become public, and historians are nowadays all in agreement as to the basic facts. The summary in Brittanica says it well enough:

In 1951 … the Iranian parliament, led by Mosaddegh’s nationalist and democratically elected government, voted to nationalize the country’s oil industry. Seeing its interests thus threatened, the UK embarked on a secret campaign to weaken and destabilize Mosaddegh. At first the British government tried to convince the shah to remove Mosaddegh from office by engineering a parliamentary decree, a ploy that both failed and enhanced Mosaddegh’s reputation while diminishing the shah’s. When the push to remove Mosaddegh evolved into the idea of a coup to overthrow the government, Britain, reluctant to shoulder the responsibility alone, persuaded the U.S. to join forces by playing on Cold War fears that Mosaddegh, an avowed anticommunist, was aligning himself with Tudeh, the Iranian Communist Party.

The United States took the leading role in a covert operation, called Operation Ajax, whereby CIA-funded agents were used to foment unrest inside Iran by way of the harassment of religious and political leaders and a media disinformation campaign. These efforts, formally approved by President Dwight D. Eisenhower, came to a head in August 1953 when Mosaddegh and his government were overthrown and Mohammad Reza, a pro-Western monarch, was returned to power.

It’s no wonder that resentment of America runs deep in Iran.

An interesting footnote to all this is how Churchill has almost entirely escaped blame for his part in the coup. Notice in the Brittanica summary that Eisenhower is named, but Churchill isn’t; that omission is entirely typical of most accounts of the coup. The American presidents who appear in the standard narrative (Truman, and then Eisenhower) are identified by name, but the British Prime Minister is not. In this as in a number of other respects (notably, the Bengal famine of 1943, in which Churchill withheld relief supplies in a famine that killed millions), Churchill remains history’s Teflon leader, remembered above all for the undeniable greatness of his leadership in 1940, while somehow sloughing off any close association with less flattering episodes.

The Woman Problem at the London Review of Books

I sent this letter to the London Review of Books March 22. I had assumed it wouldn't be published--since the LRB did publish a couple of other letters on Seamus Perry's 19 February article in their 19 March issue. (Interestingly, those letters continue the pattern of Perry's own piece; together they mention or reference eleven male writers, and no women.*) The LRB remains in many ways a wonderful publication, but when it comes to a fair representation of women it sometimes feels fifty years behind the times. Or indeed a hundred years. But I was happy to be surprised when they did in fact pubish a lightly edited version of the letter below in the 23 April issue. They cut my rather-too-snarky last sentence--just as well.

It is an extraordinary irony that, in an article on modern ideas of pluralism and diversity and on the “quality of sheer plenitude” in modern poetry (LRB, 19 February), Seamus Perry devotes twenty-three of his twenty-four paragraphs entirely to the writings of white males, all of them British or American (or, in the case of Auden and Gunn, a bit of both). The exception is the fifteenth of the twenty-four, which is also mostly devoted to the writings of British and American white males (Robert Browning chief among them), but which includes seven-words quoted from Elizabeth Bishop and six-words quoted from Dorothy Parker.

One wishes that Perry had either given a much narrower title to the piece or—better still—taken the time to dip into the work of a much wider range of modern poets. From Rossetti’s “Goblin Market” all the way to Brooks’s “The Lovers of the Poor” and beyond, there’s a wondrous range of “sheer plenitude” to be discovered. Much of it of high quality, and much of it of real interest—possibly even to white male writers at Balliol.**

*An extended quote from Chas and Dave's 1982 song "That's What I Like" is offered by one letter writer as a fine example of verse that evokes the "rich ordinariness of the modern world." They're nice enough lines, but nowehere near as nice as lines from any one of dozens of Carol Ann Duffy poems that evoke the rich ordinariness of the modern world.

**Seamus Perry, a professor of English literature at Oxford, was elected in May 2025 to become Master of Balliol College in July 2026.

Letter to the Globe: The Joy of Children - and of Parenting

The Globe and Mail published this letter February 21.

Re “Policy Alone Won't Fix Canada's Fertility Crisis": (14 February): Robyn Urbach is so right when she calls for not only a range of child-friendly and parent-friendly policy changes but also an attitudinal change—less emphasis on the costs of having children and the burdens of having children (real though those certainly are), and much more emphasis on the many ways in which raising children is a wonderful experience. Children are indeed a joy—and so is parenthood.