Write What you Half Know

When writers write about what writers should or should not do, they are almost always writing primarily about their own experience; writing is an activity about which it is notoriously hard to generalize. Is it even possible to make some qualified generalizations about what is likely to work best for most writers?

I'm not sure that it is. How true (or how helpful) is that well-worn of all pieces of advice given to those trying to write short stories, novels, or plays: "write what you know" (advice often attributed to Mark Twain, though there seems to be no evidence that it originates with him). That may seem sensible advice if one thinks of how Jane Austen or Edith Wharton or Scott Fitzgerald succeeded, but it's hard to see it as a recipe for creating worlds such as those that Theodor Seuss Geisel or Italo Calvino have created. Nor can Kazuo Ishiguro or Cormac McCarthy or Margaret Atwood be said in any literal sense to have been writing what they knew in creating the worlds of Never Let Me Go and The Road and The Handmaid's Tale. Nor, for that matter, can writers of works of historical fiction--whether it's Longbourn, Jo Baker's wonderful evocation of an alternative world within Pride and Prejudice, or Tolstoy's War and Peace or Shakespeare's Julius Caesar--be said to have been writing what they knew.

The rejoinder is of course that one should not take the advice at a literal level--that Atwood was writing about something she knew (the oppression of women) and transforming it, that Shakespeare was writing about something he knew (hubris, betrayal, and so on), and transforming it, that all good writing transforms in one way or another what the writer knows. But surely in that case it is fair to point out that what makes these plays and novels work is the transformation, not the degree to which they are based on something known at the outset.

I want to put forward a different piece of advice: write what you half know. Find, somehow (and the how may be different for almost every writer, almost every time) an imaginative space in which you can both draw on things you know (whether about places, or manners and social nuance, or history, or the human heart), and allow your imagination and your subconscious free rein. Crucially, do not try to shut down the subconscious--the part of yourself that, by definition, you don't know, or don't know well.

In my conscious self I am largely uninterested in the supernatural, and I seem to lack any sense of the spiritual; I'm an atheist who for thirty years hasn't thought much about anything spiritual or supernatural. But when I was writing Rising Stories, something in my subconscious kept pushing to the fore elements that I think it would be quite reasonable to describe as spiritual or supernatural. All I can say about any of that is that I know those elements in the book do not come purely from imagination--that they draw on some part of my subconscious. No, I don't know that. I can't know that. At most I half know it.

More obviously, I only half know Chicago, where the story of the novel takes place. I have often visited Chicago but I have never lived there. Does setting a novel in a city one doesn't know well work against a writer? Or does it benefit the writer by leaving more space for the imagination to fill in? Like so much else, I cannot imagine there to be any rule about this. But if pressed for a phrase that gives an oversimplified expression of what works for me, write what you half know would probably be as good as I could come up with.

Again, that's just me. Write what you know may work for a lot of writers a lot more often than I might imagine. Even Dr Seuss (as anyone who has seen the fantastical plants of San Diego and its environs can attest) was writing about and drawing exactly what he knew far more often than most readers might imagine.

Imagined Cities, Real Cities

After attending the annual medieval studies conference in Kalamazoo for the first time, my partner Maureen and I spent a few days in Chicago last month. I had not been to the city since I started writing Rising Stories. Much has changed, of course--including the skyline, which when I last visited did not include Aqua, or the Trump Tower, or a host of other tall buildings. I was surprised not to like Aqua more (though it's very impressive) and surprised that I didn't hate the Trump Tower (except for the vastness of its Trump sign).

We spent a fair bit of time on the South Side, and I was surprised too at how much better things looked than one is often led to believe (mostly, it seems, by people who don't live there and don't go there very often). Here and there there were signs of bleakness, but these were surprisingly few and far between--whereas interesting and liveable neighborhoods with a good deal of pleasant architecture seemed to abound, and, unlike on the North Side, to have plenty of parking spaces that don't cost a fortune and from where your car won't be towed away immediately for the slightest violation. (A memorable part of our Chicago visit was the time we spent retrieving our rental car from the cavernous auto pound below Lower Wacker, deep under Aqua and the other skyscrapers above.) Maureen and I decided that if we ever did live in Chicago, we would definitely live on the South Side.

I was reminded of when I was starting to get to know New Orleans, and lots of people who lived uptown would say that Bywater (the Upper Ninth Ward) wasn't safe, or that Bywater beyond Press Street wasn't safe, or that Bywater beyond Desire wasn't safe. All of it imagined, none of it true, as it turned out (though perhaps some of it had once been true). In the same way too, a few months ago Maureen and I heard someone who lives in north Nanaimo talking about how seedy and dangerous downtown Nanaimo was; it turned out she hadn't actually been downtown for more than six years.

Rising Stories tries to breathe life into an imagined Chicago that only occasionally bears a close relationship to the real thing. But in two cases I decided after this recent visit that I wanted to make something in the novel more real. I added a short passage describing how the Hancock Building looms over the Oak Street Beach. And I added a short passage describing the view of the downtown from where Marquette hits the park and the lake. The book will be at press within the next few days, so I won't be adding anything more!

Maureen and I also went up the Hancock, which I had never done. It offers a view as close as one can get to that from K.P.'s imaginary balcony in Rising Stories. And it is all quite lovely.

Playing Time

I wrote a few days ago about one idea I had recently about sports statistics. The only other good one I've ever had came to me more than ten years ago; I remember speaking with my son Dominic about this as we were playing darts in the Calgary house we then shared; it must have been around 2004 or 2005. The Vancouver Canucks' Sedin twins sparked the idea. They were both in the top 20 in scoring and I noticed that they were each being given no more than 15 or 16 minutes per game by then-coach Marc Crawford--while most of hockey's other leading scorers were playing 4 or 5 minutes more than that per game. I got out my calculator and figured out that if the Sedins had been playing 20 minutes per game, they would both (assuming the same rate of scoring) be among the league's top handful of players--not merely the top twenty. Why didn't hockey have a statistic that took time into account when measuring productivity?

Now it does, of course; that's been one of the statistics that have been developed in recent years as the sport has become much more sophisticated statistically.

The thought of those numbers and the Sedin twins came back to me this week. For the first few games of the Canucks series against the Calgary Flames the twins were being played for only 15 or 16 minutes. With the Flames were up 3 games to 1 current Canucks' coach Willie Desjardins changed tactics, and played them for roughly 20 minutes each in game 5; it worked, with Daniel scoring and the Canucks winning 2-1. And tonight in game 6? Daniel played for 20:36 minutes, Henrik for 22:18; neither scored and both were minus-2, with the Canucks season ending as the Flames won 7-4. Good as they are, the Sedins aren't the players they were ten years ago. In more than one way, time has to be taken into account.

  

Counting All the Bases

During the Marlins-Mets game yesterday the announcer used a term that's familiar to anyone who follows the game--a "productive out." The Mets batter had hit the ball to the right side and been thrown out at first, but the Mets runner on second base had been able to advance to third on the play. Some "productive outs," of course, are taken account of in baseball statistics; if the batter is thrown out on a play that allows a runner on third to come home and score a run, for example, he is credited with an RBI. But in many, many cases no credit is recorded for runners advancing on the base paths as a result of what the batter has done.

This is not only a matter of what happens when the batter records an out; it also concerns bases advanced resulting from hits and walks. If a batter hits a single or walks with no one on base, he is credited with that single or walk. But no statistic measures the impact of a single or a walk that no only puts the batter on base but also advances one or more other runners. If there are already runners on first and second who advance to second and third respectively on a single or a walk, then the total impact of the batter's single or walk has been three bases advanced, rather than one. (The same would be true, of course, if the batter is hit by a pitch.)

Why not create a new baseball statistic to measure net bases advanced? By this measure that "productive out" which advanced a runner from second base to third base would add one to the batter's net bases advanced total. That single or walk which also advanced runners from first and second to second and third would add three to a player's net bases advanced total. A grand slam homer would add 10 to a player's net bases advanced total (4 for the batter, plus 3 for the player who had been on first, 2 for the player who had been on second, and one for the player who had been on third.) Stealing second base would add 1 to a player's net bases advanced total--but being caught trying to steal second would reduce a player's net bases advanced total by 1, since the play wipes out the effect of his having gotten on base in the first place. Striking out or flying out or hitting a ground ball out would not affect the total--but hitting into a double play would subtract 1 from a player's net bases advanced total, since the net effect would be to remove a teammate from the bases.

This is one of only two sports statistics ideas I have ever had; the other one can be the subject of another day's post. So too can be my reason for watching that Mets-Marlins game in the first place--the speedy and graceful and charming Dee Gordon.

Making the Poor Poorer: An Index

The government of British Columbia declared recently that BC would do as most other provinces do: index the minimum wage to the Cost of Living index. No longer will the working poor see their earnings decline in real terms year after year; this way they will finally be able to keep up.

Not so fast.

One problem with this reasoning has been pointed out by many commentators: since BC's minimum wage is far below a living wage, indexing it to the cost of living will guarantee it remains far below a living wage.

What has not been widely recognized is that indexing to cost of living will condemn the working poor not just to staying the same distance back of the average worker, but to falling further and further behind. The reason? Annual changes for the average worker reflect not just price inflation, but also economic growth; in most economies most of the time productivity keeps improving, and--over the medium or the long term--wages and salaries increase by considerably more than do prices. In the United States, for example, GDP per person increased by almost 50% between 1995 and 2013. Such gains deserve to be shared by all workers--including those making the minimum wage.

A much fairer way to index the minimum wage, then, would be to use that yardstick: GDP per person. Very rarely, the minimum wage might go down year-over- year using that approach. But most years it would go up--and go up by more than the cost of living. If we used that index, minimum wage workers would share more equitably both in the occasional economic downturn and in the much more frequent phenomenon of modest economic growth. Using prices as a means to set wages, on the other hand, is a recipe for making the poor slowly but steadily poorer and poorer and poorer in relation to the rich and the middle class.

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.