The Co-Pilot Who Should Remain Nameless

It emerged over the weekend that the co-pilot who killed himself and 150 others in the Alps had vowed at one point last year to his girlfriend to do something so that “everyone will know my name and remember it.”

In a post last year in response to a different tragedy (Remaining Nameless, October 23, 2014) I suggested that the legal system, the media--and, indeed, all of us--should refrain from using the names of the perpetrators of these atrocities. We absolutely should not give them the fame that they craved.

Let him be known as Co-Pilot X, and let any other name be never said, never remembered.

The Real Dirt on Farming

I have just sent the message below to the Farm and Food Care Foundation, which--unbelievably--has status as a charitable organization in Canada. Their flyer "The Real Dirt of Farming" arrived with today's newspaper.In the newspaper itself the organization has taken out a full page advertisement that references the flyer: "we've got straight answers to your questions about food and farming." Straight answers? Nothing could be further from the truth. Yet in Canada, such organizations are granted full status as charitable organizations, while organizations devoted to fighting against the cruelties of intensive farming would not be granted charitable status; under the Harper government such activity would be defined as "political," and charities are not allowed to devote more than 10% of their resources to such activities--a provision that the Canada Revenue Agency is spending a lot of time enforcing against progressive groups. Things are different for Big Agriculture's charity: no doubt it would confidently proclaim that the money it spends on advertising to give Canadians "straight answers" is in no way "political."

Dear Farm Care Foundation

Your “Real Dirt on Farming” flyer arrived with this morning’s paper. It is one of the most misleading publications I have ever seen. Here’s what it says about how non-human animals are treated:

Farmers, like all animal owners, must follow laws for humane treatment—including those in the federal criminal Code. Neglect and abuse of any kind is against the law, and most farmers do a great job of looking after livestock and poultry.

But as you must know, while neglect and abuse may be against the law, causing suffering to farm animals is not; the law only prohibits “willfully causing or permitting to be caused unnecessary suffering or injury.” That “unnecessary” is the legal loophole on which the cruelties of today’s intensive farming rest. A fair defense of what you are doing would begin with a recognition of the suffering you cause, and argue that Canadians are willing to accept that suffering in the interests of having low prices. I wouldn’t agree with that defence, but at least I could respect it. The line you have taken is entirely dishonest.

I cannot believe that this sort of propaganda on behalf of big business is done under the guide of a charitable institution. Shame on you!

Yours sincerely

Don LePan

PS Your website claims that emails sent to this address will go to all directors; I certainly hope so. I will also be copying in the federal and provincial ministers of agriculture, their opposition critics, and as many other interested parties as I can think of. I will also be making a complaint to the Globe and Mail.

The Inescapable Message of You Can't Take it With You

The Kaufman and Hart play You Can’t Take It with You is surely one of the most pernicious works of the Depression years. When it was revived on Broadway last year the chorus of praise was near-universal—“one of the most persuasive works of pure escapism in Broadway history” raved Ben Brantley in the New York Times (Sept 28 2014). The audience reaction to the accomplished production Maureen and I saw tonight at Lamb’s Theatre in San Diego seemed to be just as enthusiastic. But it’s a play that sets up a dichotomy between two positions that both, in their way, provide unquestioning support for an unjust system.

The play, which premiered at the height of the Depression in 1936, sets up two poles of opposition. On the one hand we have a repressed Wall Street capitalist and his family (his wife’s main interest is the annual flower show in New York). On the other hand we have a happy family of oddball eccentrics, each pursuing a zany pastime in their always-chaotic (but large and comfortable) home. Where does the money come from to support all the zaniness? The grandfather made a good deal himself on Wall Street when he was younger. He could have become much richer, but he threw it all up in favor of idle amusements; his income now is from rental properties that we hear mentioned only once. We are clearly meant to admire his abandonment of the rat race, and to find his eccentric happy family lovable. Yet none of the family seems to care at all that they are living off the grandfather’s rentier income in a world filled with the real hardships of the Depression.

When the inevitable confrontation comes, the Wall Street capitalist refers to the happy-go-lucky lifestyle of the eccentric family as “communism.” It is their willingness to put their own happiness above all else that is contrasted with his staid capitalist money-making--and the play comes down squarely on the side of thoughtless happiness.

This would be a vapid message in any age, but (as Maureen pointed out to me) it would at least be an understandable message in an era such as the late 1960s, when the majority of the population led more-or-less comfortable middle-class lives, and when materialism was arguably in need of a corrective. In the context of the 1930s, such escapism should have been entirely unpersuasive. 'Forget the troubles of the world and the stresses of your high-paid job; give it all up for a rentier existence in which you can devote yourself to zany hobbies.' What an extraordinary message!

So why was You Can’t Take It with You such a phenomenal success? Could it have been because it played to relatively rich audiences in Broadway and not to the masses? No doubt there were a great many Wall Street business people and rentier eccentrics who found it gratifying to see the world in terms of a conflict between those values and not between rich and poor, socialism and capitalism. And they could afford tickets to a Broadway show.

But it wouldn’t have worked in a movie; no wonder Frank Capra made the family of eccentrics working class, and added a storyline that puts their house in danger due to the machinations of the rich capitalist. It’s Capra’s storyline that succeeded with the masses—and no doubt it deserved to. The original Kaufman-Moss play, for all that it has a number of funny moments, has a storyline that we should escape from, not to.

Globe Nutrition Columnist in full Support of Going Vegan

Very good news indeed: the Globe and Mail's nutrition columnist, Leslie Beck, who until fairly recently was not so very supportive of going vegan, has entirely come round. Here are links to two recent articles:

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/life/health-and-fitness/health/the-not-so-simple-reasons-for-becoming-vegan/article23123391/

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/life/health-and-fitness/health/tips-for-making-the-switch-to-a-plant-based-diet/article23123858/

Hats off to Beck--and to David Jenkins too!

Comfort Food

Take a baby from its mother. Kill it, and cut it up into fillets. Dip the fillets into flour and/or bread crumbs, and into milk. (The latter can be procured from the baby's mother, who now no longer needs it.) Cook in a tomato sauce, add lots of parmesan cheese. and serve. (The said cheese, of course, has been made from the milk of other mothers whose babies have been taken from them and killed.) Presto, veal parmigiana.

Of course not all veal parmigiana is equally good. For today's New York Times article on comfort food--veal parmigiana, above all--experts were consulted:

The sequence makes a huge difference," said Lisa Bamonte, whose family owns Bamonte's restaurant in Brooklyn. "You need the flour to make the egg stick, and the egg to make the bread crumbs stick." (Melissa Clark, "Comfort Blanketed in Red," Feb. 4 2015, D1)

Do we really need any of this in order to have food that comforts us? I'm in New York on business this week, and I happened to read this Times article in a restaurant in Brooklyn that's very different from what Bamonte's must be. It's a wonderful neighborhood Latin vegan restaurant on Fifth Avenue near DeGraw. Salsa and amazing chips to start, and then for the main course a warm and wonderful mix of kale and chickpeas and tofu (plus a taste of ginger and coconut), with quinoa om the side. And with salsa; the bottle gets left on the table, so those (like me) who appreciate additional warmth with their comfort food have it to hand. And with two glasses of an excellent red--more comfort on a cold day in early February.

Maybe humans could have comfort food without killing babies and taking the mother's milk that would have gone to the little ones for ourselves. Actually, scratch that maybe.

We could. We can. We should.

In Rememberance: Dennis McKerlie

For many months I've been meaning to write something about an old friend who died last spring. On New Year's Eve I finally got around to it. I've sent this in to the Globe and Mail in the hope they may publish a shorter version in their Lives Lived series. Here is the full piece.

One day in the fall of 2011 Dennis McKerlie checked himself into a Calgary hospital. A philosophy professor, McKerlie had been telling colleagues and friends for many months that he was having trouble remembering things, and that he thought it might be serious. He was barely into his sixties; no one really believed him, and on some days he wasn’t sure he believed himself. But on this day he found he couldn’t remember the way home.

McKerlie spent the rest of his life in institutions, as a rare form of Alzheimer’s destroyed his mind. From the Foothills Hospital he moved to a foul-smelling seniors’ home in Bowness, then to a luxuriously bland seniors’ home near the river in central Calgary, then to a succession of homes in and around Saskatoon (home of his brother Kent—his closest relative).

McKerlie was possessed of one of the brightest minds in a department filled with very bright minds. He was unfailingly modest about his abilities—and it was a modesty honestly felt; he genuinely believed that he was nothing special. But until those last years he possessed extraordinary powers of reasoning, a vast body of general knowledge, and remarkable powers of recall. Even when he had lost the ability to find his way home he could follow complex philosophical arguments—and recall the names, positions, and strengths and weaknesses of virtually every major league baseball player of the 1950s.

Dennis was also possessed of one of the kindest and gentlest hearts I have ever known. He grew up in small town Manitoba and never developed the presumption or the sense of entitlement that so many extraordinarily gifted people acquire on their way to success. He was in many ways an Eeyore. Living alone and without the sort of love that most of us think of first when we think of love, he was often sad, but never bitter. He loved golf and jazz and baseball and philosophical discussion and wry humor and the poems of Philip Larkin, and the process of thinking things through. And he loved his brother and his nephew and his friends—though in that sort of context he would never use the word “love.”

Dennis would gently smile or laugh when other people said or did funny things but never when he was funny himself, which was often. One day his friend and colleague Ann Levey wondered why he was looking down all the time. “Are you depressed, or what?” she asked.

“I don’t know,” said Dennis. “I guess I like my shoes.”

As the disease ate away at his mind Dennis could no longer be very funny, or find much of the world funny, or put thoughts together very well. “Is the food any good here?” I asked him when I visited him this past spring, only a few weeks before he died; by then he had been moved into a friendly little seniors’ home in Langham, Saskatchewan. “I don’t know. But that might be because I’m not very interesting.”

In the last year or two of his life Dennis was subject to terrible rages, directed always against himself. He would bang his head against the wall, telling the world that he was a terrible person and that they mustn’t pretend otherwise, that he was someone who had behaved horribly to others, that he was someone who had never lived up to his potential, that he was someone who did not deserve to live.

Dennis’ great work was a groundbreaking philosophical monograph, Justice Between the Young and the Old, described by Rutgers philosopher Jeff McMahan as “the most sophisticated, imaginative, rigorous and comprehensive—in short, the best—discussion to date of the problem of intergenerational justice.” The product of three decades of work, it was published late in 2013 by Oxford University Press. The book’s final chapter is “Alzheimer’s Disease.” After that comes “Conclusion,” which ends with this sentence: “When the people we have loved reach the boundary of coherence, we can understand the bitterness of Philip Larkin’s poem ‘The Old Fools.’”

By the time Justice Between the Young and the Old had reached the proof stage, Dennis could no longer read. When the book was published I took my copy along when I visited him in Langham, and asked if he could sign it. He scribbled on a page as a child scribbles. “Is that all right?” he asked.

They tried to move Dennis one last time, in early May, to a seniors’ home somewhere in Saskatoon—a home I never found out the name of. A few days later he was gone.

Dennis was 65 when his life ended—an age that many today would not call old. Dennis was not among them. “The Old Fools,” of course, ends like this:

Can they never tell

What is dragging them back, or how it will end? Not at night?

Not when the strangers come? Never, throughout

The whole hideous inverted childhood? Well,

We shall find out.

Christmas Tradition

In a well-intentioned and well-written recent article, newspaper columnist Sarah Hampson puts the case for family tradition when it comes to holiday food:

Rituals and traditions are a certainty in an uncertain world. They remind us that some things don’t have to change. And they cement our group identity. … They both obviate and trigger emotions. They’re a continuum from the past into the future; an attempt to ritualize love; to make it endure. And they express our need to reach for a past we can never fully recover or precisely remember. (“In praise of ‘bullet buns,’ rum balls, and other odd family traditions,” Globe and Mail, December 22, 2014)

As you might expect, Hampson has little interest in exploring alternatives to the Christmas food traditions of her family: "Needless to say," writes Hampson, "this is not a household that would tolerate Tofurky." The most important implication of that statement is clear, though I imagine it is not one realised by the author. Any North American household that, in the name of tradition, will not tolerate any shift away from egg-based, dairy product-based, and turkey-based foods is a household that gives its unwavering support to the practices of North American factory farming practices. Those practices entail not merely killing endless numbers of innocent non-human animals, but also making them suffer throughout their lives. Unless we eat only the much more expensive meat and eggs and dairy products that we know come from free-range animals (or unless we refrain from eating animal products, which is surely best of all), we are entirely complicit in that cruelty. In the end, no amount of rhapsodizing about tradition can hide that fact.

To be fair, it is a difficult thing to face up to the degree that our food traditions are based on horrific cruelty to non-human animals, and tradition of the sort Hampson describes is something worth caring about. But one can keep the traditions that don't entail cruelty while jettisoning the traditions that do; surely that is preferable to endeavoring to hold on to all family traditions, no matter how much pain they cause others. We all see this point clearly when we hear about certain traditions in other parts of the world--traditions in many parts of Asia, for example, that involve the intensive farming of dogs who are then killed and eaten. Sad to say, our own practices are just as cruel.

One of the best and most warm-hearted discussions of how to change while still being kind to the humans we love is Jonathan Saffron Foer’s Eating Animals. The account in that book of how Saffron Foer deals with his grandmother's feeling that eating chicken is a form of family love when he has come to realise that dead birds reach North American tables only after unspeakable suffering that he cannot accept, is wonderful reading for anyone who cares both about tradition and about animals--human or non-human.

Turkey Eating: Ritual of Unintended Cruelty

The New York Times published today an interesting piece by Marie Myung-Ok Lee that is clearly intended to be warmly celebratory. It focuses on how American Thanksgiving rituals--the Thanksgiving turkey in particular--assumed cultural significance for an immigrant family facing hardship and discrimination in Hibbing, Minnesota. Lee writes of how the rituals of her family's "midwestern diets remained inviolate, on Thanksgiving in particular: [such ritual] gave our family’s embryonic American life structure. It became my parents’ yearly recommitment ceremony to America." ("Eat Turkey, Become American," New York Times, November 26, 2014)

The piece is clearly well-intended, and many readers have responded warmly, calling the author's portrayal of family life "lovely," wonderful," "inspirational." As indeed it may be, so far as the human connections are concerned.

I was not the only one to comment on the place of the bird in all this; I posted this comment late today:

As we celebrate abundance and family, let's think of all our fellow creatures--birds and animals as well as humans. If we buy and eat turkey, for example, we should know that turkeys from "conventional" farms and slaughterhouses (which is to say, 99% or more) are routinely subjected to horrific cruelty. Here are some examples, from undercover work carried out by the courageous Mercy for Animals investigators:

http://www.butterballabuse.com/?lang=en http://www.turkeytorture.ca/

If we don't want to be complicit in this cruelty, we do have options. Those who choose to eat animal products can insist on buying the flesh and milk of animals who have been humanely treated, and whose slaughter has been as humane as possible. Or we can go vegan--great for our health, great for the environment, and one sure way to reduce cruelty to animals.

Happy American Thanksgiving to everyone!

Having Sex and Having Babies in Captivity

For many years strong arguments have been put forward against the keeping of captive whales, dolphins, and porpoises in aquariums. Earlier this year it looked for a while as if they might have persuaded the powers that be in Vancouver, and that the Vancouver Aquarium would get out of the business of keeping captive cetaceans. But the mayor and his party have recently backed away from their earlier, more courageous stance--and now the city is unlikely even to take the much more modest step of putting an end to breeding in captivity.

Why the focus on sex and reproduction? Many would like the aquarium to simply release all cetaceans into the wild; others want them to keep things just as they are. The intermediate position that until recently seemed likely to prevail would have allowed the aquarium to keep and display animals who had been rescued and were considered incapable of surviving in the wild, but would have prohibited "captive breeding"--the practice of allowing the animals to reproduce while in captivity. From one angle it might seem cruel not to allow animals to carry out such a natural and important function--and so indeed aquarium staff have argued. The aquarium's CEO, John Nightingale, suggests that the Aquarium's policies are all about allowing what is "natural":

The Park Board’s use of the word breeding implies that we carry out some sort of planned, regulated or artificial reproduction program. We don’t do that at the Vancouver Aquarium. Our animals do mate, just as they do in the wild, because we keep them in natural groupings – just as they live in nature. Mating is the most natural thing in the world. In fact, sex and reproduction play an important role in our research and in our education programs. ("Park Board Picks a Fight with Mother Nature," Aquablog, August 1, 2014)

Mating may be the most natural thing in the world--but captivity isn't. It's the captivity part of it that makes everything problematic; if anyone has "picked a fight with Mother Nature," it is organizations such as the Vancouver Aquarium, which keep other animals in captivity throughout their lives. And, it should be added, throughout the lives of their children, and of their children's children. Once the aquarium has placed animals in an unnatural state of captivity, the key question regarding reproduction becomes "What happens to the children?" Perhaps it is the case that all the mature adults already in captivity have been rescued and could not be safely returned to the wild. But if they have children, will the children then be forced to live their entire lives in captivity? Releasing young cetaceans into the wild without their parents in the hope that they may find a pod that will accept them and that they will survive is nothing if not problematic. But if an aquarium is not committed to doing that, and if cetaceans in captivity are allowed to breed, what then? In practice, what the aquarium is really arguing for is an endless generational cycle of captivity, in which the whales and dolphins and porpoises will never be allowed to be free. But of course the Aquarium can't argue directly that captivity is "the most natural thing in the world." So they argue instead for sex and reproduction; who could be against that?

Jane Goodall is one of the many who have spoken out against the Vancouver Aquarium's policies. She notes the "high mortality rates" evident in aquarium programs that allow breeding, and deplores "the ongoing use of these animals in interactive shows as entertainment." More generally, she points out that

the idea that certain cetaceans “do better” in captivity than others is misleading, as belugas, dolphins and porpoises are all highly social animals which can travel in large pods and migrate long distances. In captivity, these highly vocal and complex communicators are forced to live in a low-sensory environment, which is unable to fully meet the needs of their physical and emotional worlds.

Vancouver Aquarium staff do not rely only on the "sex is natural" argument, of course. They also argue that breeding should be allowed because it's so interesting for other animals to watch and to study--specifically, for human animals to watch and to study. When head veterinarian Martin Haulena, speaking to a November 13 lecture audience, was asked about the aquarium's policy regarding the breeding of two harbor porpoises being kept in captivity, this was how he answered:

Reproduction is so incredible.…That’s what we’re heading into with our two [harbor porpoises]. So reproduction, gestation, development—all of that stuff is so interesting in these animals. ... [I and my staff are] banking on them getting along for the next few years. (as reported in "Vision Sends a Mixed Message on Aquarium," The Georgia Straight, November 20-27, 2014)

We can be quite sure that Haulena didn't mean "so interesting" for the porpoises themselves, though no doubt it is. The key thing is to what degree it interests us. And if human animals find it interesting to watch and study other animals having sax and having offspring, then we somehow feel it is justifiable to keep those other animals in captivity. As John Nightingale puts it in the remarks quoted above, "sex and reproduction play an important role in our research and in our education programs." By now humans have amassed decades worth of high quality film of these animals in the wild. Why should watching that film footage not be enough? Why should we need, generation after generation, to see them in captivity, actually mating and giving birth before our eyes?

There is of course no good reason. But it's all "so incredible." So we tell ourselves that we must see them making children, and that our children must see them making children. "Education," is what we call it. In the same way, of course, we could learn a very great deal more about the breeding habits of different sorts of humans if we kept them in captivity and watched closely as they mated and gave birth. But there, of course, we apply different ethical standards.

Aquariums also make much of the claim that it is "necessary" for the purposes of research to keep these animals in captivity. But a majority of scientific opinion now seems to have swung round to the view that such research is not only not "necessary"; it can be positively harmful to the whales and dolphins and porpoises, since it may lead researchers to draw false conclusions as to how cetaceans will behave in the wild, based on how they behave in captivity. Increasingly, these are recognized as being very different things.

On the ferry from Nanaimo to Vancouver yesterday the captain called the attention of passengers to a pod of dolphins swimming near the ferry. Along with many others, Maureen and I rushed to the ferry's starboard side and were thrilled to see dozens and dozens of animals, powerfully jumping again and again as they swam. At the speed they were going, I can imagine they would have gone from one end to the other of the largest aquarium tank in the world in a few seconds. But they had the whole Salish Sea to swim in, and beyond that, all the seas of the world. Maureen and I and the other ferry passengers weren't on a "whale watching cruise" chasing and bothering the animals; we were simply going about our business, and they were going about theirs. If I feel I need more education than that about the lives of dolphins, I'll watch a film or read a book.

Dairy Farmer?

I will post here a comment I just posted on the Globe and Mail site, in response to a feature about becoming a dairy farmer.

Dairy farmer? Why would you want to make it your life's work to take from a mother the milk meant for her children? To kill all the male children and sell their young bodies to be eaten? To imprison the mother in a world of concrete (the modern factory dairy farm)? To bio-engineer her body so that life will be extraordinarily uncomfortable for her, but so that her body will produce vast amounts of inexpensive milk, all of which will be drunk by another species--your own? The cruelty is almost beyond belief.

Make it a career? Destroy your soul.

Remaining Nameless

As Doug Saunders ("Lone Wolf" - The Globe and Mail, Oct. 25) and various others have pointed out, sensational acts of violence such as the killing of a soldier in Ottawa last week are often in large part motivated by a hope on the part of a mentally deranged person that the violent act will make him (it is almost always a him) famous. And we play right along: from the assassinations of a long line of politicians, to the 1989 École Polytechnique massacre, to the Columbine High School killings, to the Utøya island mass murder in Norway in 2011, and through to the events in Ottawa last week, we keep splashing the names and photos of the killers across our front pages and our television screens. Why can we not simply say, “The killer, whose name cannot be revealed, was a 32-year old Caucasian, an Ottawa native with a history of instability and drug abuse, who had converted to Islam.” No name, no photo, and no chance of becoming famous through committing deranged acts of violence.

Our laws already recognize one important circumstance (youthful offenders) that we regard as providing sufficient justification to trump freedom-of-speech principles when it comes to revealing names. It’s time to add another.

Screening out the World

I began to spend a fair bit of time in the air when I entered book publishing in 1975. I was in my early twenties, and things were different then. On a flight of more than three hours there would always be a complimentary hot meal served—and there would always be at least a few people cheering as the plane landed. But the most striking difference? People looked out the window. A lot of people were wowed by the wonder that is the world from 35,000 feet up in the air.

I’m starting off on a business trip to New York as I write this; I’m writing from the rear cabin of a Boeing 777 traveling from Vancouver to Toronto. We’ve been taking the southern path for this route—across the northern States. For the past three hours I have been alternately reading and looking out (and up and down and ahead and back) at the mountains of Montana; at meandering little rivers and their ox-bows; at tiny endless squares of green and yellow and brown, of all the greens and yellows and browns that are in the fields of America; at the gentle, sweeping curves of the Red River as it rolls north toward the Canadian border; at the rounded shores of Red Lake; at light skittering off the silver of the thousands upon thousands of ragged lakes in the north of Minnesota. From ground level such wilderness lakes are a beauty without pattern, a jumble. It is only from the air that we can see the patterns and the beauty of their geology, their shared history in the earth’s crust.

In this particular cabin of this particular plane there are almost 200 people—20 rows, each nine across, almost all the seats full. If all the shades were up, perhaps 80 of those people could see something of this beauty—those in the window seats, plus those one seat in. Everyone could at least share in the sunlight of a lovely afternoon. But of the 40 windows, mine is the only one with the shade not lowered right down. There are screens on the backs of the seats. In the darkness that the passengers have imposed on themselves, almost all the screens are being watched.

When I was young, window seats were the most desired. Now, the aisle seats are much preferred. Oh, I know, it’s more convenient if you want to get up and go to the bathroom. And make no mistake, I like going to the bathroom as much as the next person. But complete convenience in going to the bathroom at any moment, like complete convenience in watching television screens and computer screens at any moment, is with us every day on earth. Even for relatively frequent flyers like me, it’s not every day we get to see the world in sunlight from 35,000 feet up. It’s still something magical; it will always be something magical, even if most of us decide we want to screen the magic out.

Causing Pain to Non-Human Animals: A North American Brand

Earlier today I came across the following, which I had submitted a couple of years ago to The Globe and Mail in response to an article by Fred Stenson, but which had never been published. It struck me that it would do no harm to post it here on the blog.

“We owe it to animals to treat them well,” says Fred Stenson in his article “In Defence of Branding Cattle: Alberta Ranchers on a Burning Tradition” (The Globe and Mail, June 23, 2012). But apparently what we owe to non-human animals is easily trumped by our own self-interest.

Stenson is under no illusions as to the pain that branding causes. “The smoke rises, the calf bellows. If the hair catches fire, someone brushes it with a gloved hand. The calf wobbles away, shaking its head and sorrowful.” Indeed, Stenson sees it as a virtue that ranchers do “this harsh work themselves: feel themselves inflict the pain. It is less hypocritical,” that way, Stenson argues, than it would be if ranchers were to have someone else inflict the pain on their behalf. No doubt it is. But does the pain really need to be inflicted at all?

The current American Veterinary Medical Association policy on livestock identification recommends that "a high priority be placed on using alternatives to hot-iron branding." And, as Stenson reports, there are indeed alternatives to branding with a hot iron: a method of freezing the brand on, and ear tag ID markers (which since 2005 have been mandatory in Canada). Not all studies agree that freeze branding is significantly less painful than hot-iron branding, but ear-tagging and micro-chipping are universally agreed to be far less painful.

Why are these not sufficient? Because the traditional hot-iron brand is easier for the rancher to read at long range. “We still need a brand for a quick ID,” Stenson quotes rancher Dave Lowe as saying. Otherwise, ranchers “would have to catch” a calf that strayed onto a neighbor’s property in order to be sure of the identification. Stenson accepts that as sufficient reason to continue the practice of branding all calves with a hot iron:

If the purpose of cattle branding were only about tradition and not practical at all, I would have to be against it. But that time is not here yet. In the meantime, I shall continue to respect it as necessary work.

Necessary? That an act of considerable cruelty saves us from some slight inconvenience does not make it necessary. It would certainly be more convenient for me to be able to identify my cat Frankie at long range if he were branded; Frankie not infrequently strays onto the neighbor’s property, and there are at least two other neighborhood cats who look very like Frankie at long range. It can be a real inconvenience for me to take the time to be sure it is Frankie in the neighbor’s yard. But that’s no evidence for the necessity of burning Frankie with a branding iron—any more than a slight inconvenience to ranchers justifies the pain they inflict on calves.

Shipping Guilt Overseas

I'm currently traveling on business in California. Over dinner tonight I was reading an extraordinarily moving book edited by Ann Argersinger--The Triangle Fire: A Brief History With Documents. I had known the basic facts about this horrific episode in our history for many years, but the first-hand accounts leave you with tears in your eyes, even a century and more on.

Why does this matter today? Above all, it matters because the sorts of sweatshop oppression that were the norm on Washington Place in New York a century ago are still the norm in today's world. The Triangle tragedy may be more than a century ago; the sweatshop tragedy in Bangladesh is little over a year ago. That was only the highest profile of many, many appalling sweatshop tragedies in recent years--and, sadly, it does not seem that conditions have improved much in the eighteen months that have passed since over a thousand workers lost their lives at Rana Plaza. Seven of the companies that sourced products from the Rana Plaza sweatshops have made at least some contribution to the compensation fund; the others (more than twenty of them) have given nothing. And so it goes. With our tacit approval, an industry that relies overwhelmingly on near-slave labor forges forward.

We are used to the rhetoric of it being a bad thing to "ship jobs overseas." But even worse is when we ship our guilt overseas. Just as we allow ourselves to not think of how non-human animals are treated if they are hidden away in feedlots or dairy barns, we allow ourselves to not think of sweatshop oppression if it's in Bangladesh rather than Brooklyn. We are happy to reap the benefits; we're fine with the low, low prices of milk and eggs and shirts and jeans. But we would prefer not to think of what is done in order to make these things cheap--we would prefer to outsource the guilt.

What can be done? Press our own governments to act, yes. And speak up any way we can. But also press ourselves to think of these things--and not to reflexively buy the cheapest, or to buy any clothing without asking where it came from.

I am having to work to do this myself; it does take work to break the buying habits of a lifetime. But it can be done--just as we can give up factory farmed animal products, and keep going until we are vegan. If we push ourselves, we truly can make the world better--for the workers in sweatshops overseas, for non-human animals, for all of us.

Justin Trudeau: Appearance and Reality

Earlier today I was reading an Erin Anderssen column in The Globe and Mail on how too much attention has been paid by the media to Justin Trudeau’s appearance, and too little to issues of substance. Absolutely. But if too much media attention to his looks is the issue, do we need a full column on how we should pay less attention to his looks? Why not make that an aside in a column about, say, his ruling out any increase in corporate taxes (now at their lowest levels in more than half a century)? Trudeau did say last week when interviewed on the CBC that if there were loopholes [my emphasis], "then of course we'd have to look at that." Notice that verb "look." No commitment to doing. The appearance of a commitment to fairness and justice—that's one area where it really matters if appearance is all that people pay attention to.

Paws (and Feet and Hooves) for a Cause

Every year in British Columbia the SPCA holds "Paws for a Cause" walks in many locations as a way of raising awareness and raising funds. This year I handed out a flyer (with the message below) to people in Nanaimo as they gathered at Maffeo-Sutton Park last Sunday morning. I received a very friendly reception from almost everyone I spoke with--including one fellow from Europe who was just passing through but said he would now eat "nothing but free-range."

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The ScotiaBank and BCSPCA Paws for a Cause Walk to Fight Animal Cruelty is a great way of raising funds, as well as raising awareness of the importance of taking a stand against cruelty towards non-human animals.

But let’s not restrict our compassion for our fellow creatures to dogs and cats. The average North American is complicit in the cruel treatment of over a thousand individual animals over the course of his or her lifetime; for each North American every year, well over two dozen birds and mammals are cruelly treated in factory farms before being slaughtered. The advertising campaigns of the companies who are responsible for breeding, raising, and slaughtering these animals either make no mention of the conditions the animals are subjected to, or suggest that they are raised in the way that farm animals were generally raised until the 1960s—in natural conditions, with lots of time spent out of doors and lots of room to move around; without breeding programs that make animals heavier and less comfortable in order to produce meat and dairy products in greater volume at less cost; without regular doses of antibiotics and growth hormones; and with a great deal of compassion.

That’s still the way farm animals are raised in much of Europe. But it hasn’t been the way most pigs or chickens or turkeys or dairy cows or beef cattle have been raised in Canada or the United States for a very, very long time. Well over ninety-five percent of the animal products in most North American supermarkets are products of the cruelties of modern “intensive” farming. The cruelty involved is surely reason enough to take a stand against these products. But it’s worth knowing that they’re also bad for the environment—and that they’re bad for human health. (If you don’t yet know how animals are turned into these products, information is available on sites such as humanesociety.org, mercyforanimals.org, cetfa.org, and ciwf.com; in films such as Food Inc.; or in books such as Eating Animals. If you’d like to know more about what the products do for human health, information is available on sites such as nutritionfacts.org.)

How can we fight the cruelties of factory farming?

Go vegan. This is by far the best way to be sure you are not complicit in the cruelties of factory farming. (More and more studies are also suggesting that a whole foods vegan diet is best for promoting the health and the happiness of humans.)

Go free-range: insist on only free-range meat, eggs, and dairy products when you are shopping, and when you are eating in restaurants. Free-range products are far from perfect, but on average they are produced with considerably less cruelty than are “conventionally farmed” products. (In many areas of British Columbia you can also buy directly from local farmers, many of whom use only humane methods of raising animals.)

Go dairy-free. Many people imagine that dairy farming is the least cruel way of producing food for humans from the bodies of non-human animals. “We just take some of the milk away from the cow,“ people think; “where’s the harm in that?” Where to start when it comes to describing the harm? Perhaps with the fact that most dairy cows in North America live their entire lives in a small area of concrete—they never see a green pasture. Perhaps with the breeding of the modern dairy cow, which has been done so that the udder will always produce lots of milk inexpensively—and be horribly uncomfortable for the animal. Or perhaps with the most uncomfortable fact about all dairy farming: the milk is only available for human consumption because the cow’s babies have been taken away from her.

"Directors' Cuts": Short Story Long

When did you ever hear of a "director's cut" of a movie in which anything was actually cut? Instead, the director's cut is always longer than the popular release--usually much longer. The assumption seems to be that the true artist creates a full, rich work of art, and crass commercial pressures then lead to a shortened, artistically inferior product.

The truth is surely the exact opposite almost every time. How often do we come out of a film thinking "It would be so much better if it were quite a lot longer"? Surely it is far more common for all of us to think "If only they had made it shorter!"

I'm not just thinking here of films such as Take Shelter—a case where an otherwise remarkably interesting and well-made film is essentially ruined by a misconceived last couple of minutes. I'm thinking primarily of that far larger category—films in which a natural ending point is reached after 90 minutes, and then another after 110 minutes, and then another after 130 minutes, and still the film staggers on. Take Spielberg's 141 minute Catch Me If You Can. For the first hour or more, the film is arguably one of the most entertaining dramatic comedies ever made. Indeed, it would not be difficult to come up with an "audience cut" that would result in placing the entire film among the best dramatic comedies ever made. I would suggest ending the film at the moment Carl lies and Frank is arrested overseas, and then summarizing the rest of the story (Frank working for Carl at the FBI and so on, as well as the material already summarized in the existing film) in writing on the screen before the credits roll—but no doubt a good case could be made for other moments. It's not that the last half hour or more of the film is bad. It's just so much less interesting than what has gone before. It meanders; it tells us little of substance about the characters that we didn't already sense; it ends up detracting from the overall effect rather than adding to it.

Here's an example in the other direction, which my partner and I also saw recently: the 1944 Murder, My Sweet. Starring Dick Powell and filmed in a wonderfully economical fashion by Edward Dmytryk. With one wonderful comic/romantic twist at the end. One, not three or four. The whole film? 95 minutes. A plea to Steven Spielberg; release a 95 minute "audience cut" of Catch Me if You Can. It will be one of the best things you've ever done—and one of the best movies ever made.

Carnivorous Wasps

Reason number 483 for going vegan: wasps don’t pester you when you’re eating a summer meal outdoors. Maureen and I were commenting the other evening on how the wasps never seem to stick around nowadays. They amble by, but as soon as you wave a hand vaguely in their direction, away they go. What a contrast to the meals we remember all too well from years gone by when the wasps just wouldn’t stay away from a plate filled with burgers and potato salad.

The reason? Social wasps (the kind that tend to want to socialize with humans at mealtimes) are omnivores, with a special fondness for animal products. Other than insects they don’t eat live flesh but they love to carry off little chunks of the dead flesh of a bird or a cow or a pig, cooked or uncooked. They will eat fruit too, but if our plate has nothing on it but veggies and legumes, they have virtually no interest.

(Human) Animal Health, Disease, and Diet

I’ve never paid as much attention as I probably should to the benefits to human health that going vegan offers; my partner Maureen is very largely responsible for keeping me up-to-date on the evidence. And—much as the meat and egg and dairy industries do everything they can to convince us otherwise—the evidence continues to grow that a plant-based, whole foods diet is the best choice for human health. (Note the “whole foods” part; it’s perfectly possible to eat very unhealthily if your plant-based diet is largely made up of processed sugars and starches.)

Most people are aware that there’s a correlation between eating animal products and high cholesterol. So it shouldn’t be a surprise that a plant-based, whole foods diet tends greatly to improve the condition of your heart and blood vessels. What may be more surprising is that there is now substantial evidence that such a diet can dramatically slow the progress of other diseases: diabetes, for example, Alzheimer’s, and even some cancers. In the case of diabetes and heart disease, such a diet can in many cases even begin to reverse the damage caused by disease.

If you’re interested and would like to check out some authorities that aren’t funded by the meat and egg and dairy industries, let me mention two great sources. T. Colin Campbell and Colin M. Campbell’s best-selling The China Study: Startling Implications for Diet, Weight Loss, and Long-Term Health is one. The China Study, one of the largest epidemiological efforts ever undertaken, was sponsored by Cornell University and Oxford University as well as the Chinese Academy of Preventive Medicine. It collected a vast range of information connecting disease and diet and lifestyle in thousands of different ways. T. Colin Campbell describes himself as he was before he directed the study in this way: “I was a meat-loving dairy farmer in my personal life and an ‘establishment’ scientist in my professional life. I even used to lament the views of vegetarians as I taught nutritional biochemistry to pre-med students.” The evidence convinced him, though, of “the multiple health benefits of consuming plant-based foods, and the largely unappreciated health dangers of consuming animal-based foods.”

Let me also mention Michael Gregor’s nutritionfacts.org—perhaps the best single source for ongoing updates on the latest research in all these areas. His August 1 video summary of information, http://nutritionfacts.org/video/from-table-to-able/ is a good place to start.

Jeanne Gang: Rising Stories and Women Architects

In the round of cuts and revisions to Rising Stories that I’m working on this summer (the final round, I hope!) I think I will probably cut the line “You don’t even have to have a penis to build skyscrapers. Not any more.” The line is not all that funny (and I’m not sure that it fits the character). But what’s truly unfunny is that so much of the architectural establishment seems still to think that penis-possession should be a prerequisite to skyscraper building. Two cases in point: Zaha Hadid and Jeanne Gang.

Hadid remains the world’s most celebrated woman architect, but has never built a skyscraper. Though so far as I am aware she has not publicly said that she has never been asked to build one, it’s hard not to suspect that to be the case. Here is what she is reported to have said (in a 2013 piece in The Guardian):

[Hadid] said it was frequently assumed that a woman architect could not take on a big commercial project and that she was better suited to residential properties, public buildings or leisure centers. "I am sure that as a woman I can do a very good skyscraper," she said. "I don't think it is only for men."

And what sort of building is Hadid famous for designing? You guessed it: residential buildings, public buildings, leisure centers.

That same article references a survey in Britain by the Architects' Journal that revealed that at least sixty percent of women respondents reported both that they had experienced an insidious culture of bullying at work and that clients in the building industry were unwilling to respect their authority.

Jeanne Gang may at this point be the world’s second most famous woman architect; she is surely the most famous to have been the lead architect for a major skyscraper. Her 82-story Aqua in Chicago (which K.P and Robin look out on and talk about briefly in Rising Stories) is surely one of the world’s most extraordinary and most wonderful skyscrapers.

You might think that Gang and her company would have been in high demand to design skyscrapers since Aqua was completed to near universal acclaim in 2009. Evidently not. Not until this year has her firm been hired to design another skyscraper; early in 2014 a Chinese firm (Wanda Group) announced that they had hired her to build a residential tower in Chicago, and a San Francisco company (Tishman Speyer) has also hired her to design a 40 story condominium tower. Her design for 160 Folsom in San Francisco was unveiled this past week—a tower of swiveled peaks and curls that may well be as impressive as Aqua. Here’s a link: http://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/place/article/Famed-architect-s-plan-for-rippled-S-F-building-5614053.php. It’s a design that lifts the spirits, and we should be celebrating. But there is an unhappy backstory that tugs in the other direction: in the world of skyscraper design Gang remains the only significant player who is not a man. It’s long past time for that to change.