As a way of helping the Eastern Shore Sanctuary get some publicity in the midst of our more expensive than anticipated relocation, Mickey Z wrote up an interview with me for OpEd News. It covers trauma and recovery, rooster rehabilitation, the social construction of gender by way of animals, and the origins of the sanctuary. Read it. Rate it. Share the link. Thanks, Mickey!
The right-wing rhetorical flap over the nomination of Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court puts me to mind of the failed nomination of Lani Guinier to the position of Assistant Attorney General back in 1993. As I wrote at the time,
One minute, [Lani Guinier] was a respected law professor and Justice Department nominee; the next minute, she was the “quota Queen.” Never mind that she had never advocated quotas; it was a catchy phrase, so the name stuck. In short order, Guinier was history. The truth was no defense against the orchestrated perception of her as a quota-slinging “reverse racist” hell-bent on destroying the very fabric of democracy.
Then, as now, liberals rushed to correct the record, clarifying and contextualizing Guinier’s positions on race-related questions. Then, as now, such efforts mattered not at all in the realm of right-wing rhetoric.
Don’t get me wrong, I think that Sonia Sotomayor will be confirmed to the Supreme Court. But that will be because, unlike Bill Clinton in 1993, Barack Obama has sufficient political capital and is willing to spend some of it on supporting his nominee. When Sotomayor ascends to the bench, it won’t be because Rachel Maddow won the argument with Bill O’Reilly. Nor, as we have already seen, will well-documented corrections of the record in any way dissuade opponents of Sotomayor from making misleading and even counter-factual claims about her.
I mention this because liberal defenders of Sotomayor — using facts, quotes and video clips to prove that Republican presidents have valued empathy too; that conservative Supreme Court nominees have said that their ethnicity and life history matters; and that, um, yes appeals court judges do “make law” routinely, whenever they issue precedent-setting rulings — remind me so strongly of advocates of veganism rushing to seize every opportunity to point out the ethical, environmental, and health benefits of plant-based diets.
All of that is necessary and important. But it’s not enough. When powerful political and economic forces are at play, rational suasion only goes so far. That’s why I and the Eastern Shore Sanctuary have always advocated a multifaceted, knowledge-based approach to the long-term project of converting a world-food system currently dominated by animal agriculture to the cruelty-free world of food for everybody we all want to see. Please visit the agriculture reform page of the newly renovated sanctuary website for details. And please do support the sanctuary generously if it is within your means to do so.
On Memorial Day weekend 30 years ago, I moved out of my mother’s home and into my first apartment, the lease for which I had signed illegally, being only 17. Since it was 1979 and I was 17, you can probably guess why my memories of that weekend, while colorful, are blurry. My roommate and I lived right around the corner from the gay discotheque, The Pink Hippopotamus. Enough said, yes?
On Memorial Day 2001, 24 multicolored roosters flew into the Eastern Shore Sanctuary from the informal sanctuary where they had been living in the trees, occasionally taking shelter in an open barn. The retired animal control officer who had taken them in over the course of years had lost the lease to the land and was moving to Florida. The birds came from cockfighting busts, cruelty cases, and one “4H experiment gone horribly wrong.”
Nobody else would take them. Back then, many farmed animal sanctuaries strictly limited the number of roosters they accepted and none would take former fighting roosters. Some operated under the (false) assumption that roosters cannot live together in harmony and would accept only one rooster at a time no matter how many hens were there to balance the gender scales.
Since we took in escaped “broiler” chickens from local poultry operations, accepting any bird who found his or her way to us, regardless of sex, we’d already learned that roosters can and do flock together sociably, as of course their wild relatives must. Still… 24 roosters?!? All at the same time?!? Their rescuer assured us that they’d been living together peacefully for years. If we didn’t take them, they’d have to be euthanized. She cried. We said yes.
They arrived in a rattle-trap collection of cages crowded into a battered pick-up truck. I’ll never forget the reaction of the hens — red and white egg factory refugees who had never seen a rooster other than the big white “broiler” roosters at the sanctuary — as we let the roosters out into the yards in turn, each seeming more colorful than the last. Red roosters with black markings, yellow roosters with brown markings, black roosters with iridescent green tail feathers. Striped roosters! Spotted roosters! Tropically multicolored roosters! One group of red hens stood in a row along a fence, their beaks literally gaping open in surprise.
And everybody got along fabulously. Here’s a shot of some of them sleeping in the trees:
So, when the real challenge came, we were ready. Later that summer, we got a call about roosters who had been confiscated during a cockfighting bust. They were very aggressive, flying at each other and even at hens, and were thus being held separately. Could we offer even a few of them sanctuary? The young woman on the telephone was desperate. Couldn’t we at least try? We thought about what we had learned so far; I thought about what I knew about ethology, bird psychology, and trauma and recovery. We came up with a tentative rehabilitation program. Since our back-up plan was to give each bird his own little coop and yard if the rehab effort didn’t work, we couldn’t take many. Just three. It was a start.
It worked. (Read all about it here.) Since then, we’ve rehabbed many former fighters and convinced other sanctuaries to be more generous in offering homes to roosters. Now, more and more local authorities seek to place confiscated roosters in sanctuaries rather than killing them automatically. (See the story — including video — of the latest former fighters to come to the sanctuary here.)
Be careful what you wish for. Now we’re in the sticky situation where local authorities want to rescue roosters, but sanctuaries have no room for them. And so, in part to be able to rescue more roosters (but also to free me from the unhealthy rural isolation in which I’ve been living alone for the past couple of years), sanctuary cofounder Miriam Jones will be taking over and relocating the sanctuary side of the Eastern Shore Sanctuary & Education to a larger property. (Get the 411 on the move here.)
Me, I’ll be helping the birds to move and get settled into their new location. (The move is in mid-June and I will stay with them at the new place through July.) Then I’ll be moving on to Minneapolis, the virtues of which I’ve been singing here for some time. I’ll continue to work on the “Education Center” side of the organization and to visit the sanctuary frequently.
If you support the sanctuary, our important work with roosters, and/or our longstanding commitment to social and environmental justice along with animal liberation, please consider making a donation at this time. Moving is expensive and will be a lot less stressful for all of us if we don’t have to be quite so worried about money.
And, please do visit the new and improved sanctuary website. We’ve still got some “projects” and “connections” pages to add, but it’s mostly built and it’s going to take you a long time to work through all of the new content that’s already up.
Last week, Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lisa Jackson as on The Daily Show last week, laughingly assuring the American public that the EPA won’t be regulating cows. Jon Stewart laughed along and they moved on… right past the opportunity to tell people something they really need to know.
Ever since methane’s role in climate change became known, the meat and dairy industries have been making jokes about cow farts and cow burps, thereby reducing the idea of regulation of their industry to the nonsensical image of the government ordering animals not to belch or pass gas. As long as we are laughing about fart cows, we’re not thinking about how it is that their flatulence adds up to climate change.
According to this EarthSave report:
By far the most important non-CO2 greenhouse gas is methane, and the number one source of methane worldwide is animal agriculture.
Methane is responsible for nearly as much global warming as all other non-CO2 greenhouse gases put together. Methane is 21 times more powerful a greenhouse gas than CO2. While atmospheric concentrations of CO2 have risen by about 31% since pre-industrial times, methane concentrations have more than doubled. Whereas human sources of CO2 amount to just 3% of natural emissions, human sources produce one and a half times as much methane as all natural sources. In fact, the effect of our methane emissions may be compounded as methane-induced warming in turn stimulates microbial decay of organic matter in wetlands—the primary natural source of methane.
With methane emissions causing nearly half of the planet’s human-induced warming, methane reduction must be a priority. Methane is produced by a number of sources, including coal mining and landfills—but the number one source worldwide is animal agriculture. Animal agriculture produces more than 100 million tons of methane a year.
So, the regulation of animal agriculture is really a rather urgent matter for the EPA. The meat and dairy industries are lobbying hard to exempt animal agriculture from the EPA’s new regulation of greenhouse gas emissions under the Clean Air Act.
EPA Lisa Jackson’s laughing dismissal of the regulation of cows signals that the meat and dairy industries may have found favor with her. Read this Eastern Shore Sanctuary Action Alert for more information and to learn what you can do to voice your views now while the EPA is still accepting public comments on the question of Clean Air Act regulation of greenhouse gases.
As the Eastern Shore Sanctuary blog reports, scientists have detected antibiotic residues in plants grown in fields fertilized with animal manure. So, yo, fellow gardeners: Unless you like your home-grown veggies seasoned with Sulfamethazine, skip that bagged manure-based “organic” fertilizer in favor of cruelty-free and earth friendly gardening techniques. See my previous posts here and here for details, links, and tips.
I keep forgetting to mention that I’ve got an article in the Winter 2008 issue of Soho House Magazine. Entitled “Taekwondo in a Hijab: Muscular Feminism in Iran,” it looks at the achievements of a couple of Iranian sports stars in the context of the ongoing struggle for women’s rights in that country. The magazine has a nifty Flash reader that works well in my browser, but if you have any trouble accessing the article, let me know and I’ll post a pdf.
I’ve also got a chapter in the new Contemporary Anarchist Studies reader just published by Routledge. I’ve not had a chance to delve into my contributor’s copy yet, but the table of contents offers a plethora of thought-provoking possibilities.
Also, I’m in the midst of a long-overdue rebuild of the Eastern Shore Sanctuary website and, in the process of that, have posted various reports and talks, including white papers I wrote for the sanctuary and for the Global Hunger Alliance, to Scribd.
Just in time for Mother’s Day, a couple of my students have contributed heartrending blog posts related to mothers and grandmothers. Check out Letter from Your Gay Granddaughter and Mothers in Prison and the Children Left Behind for some non-traditional Mother’s Day reading. And, please do show the authors of those posts and other contributors to Read This Or Else some comment love.
