Category: Culture

Editorial: Opportunities for humane education

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE, November 1995:

News clips from readers provide our best index of public concern about current
events. Our regular clippers notice anything about animals, no matter how small and
buried, but when clips flood our desk from folks who don’t even read ANIMAL PEOPLE,
yet find out about us in their desperation to address an outrage, we know a groundswell of
concern can be channeled into positive action.
Four events in particular have lately brought tidal waves of clips, faxes, e-mail,
and telephone calls. One was the torture-killing of Duke the Dalmatian in Bucks County,
Pennsylvania, by three Beavis-and-Butthead imitators. The second was the death of a pig
at a county fair in Tyler, Texas, when an adolescent pushed a hose down the animal’s
throat and turned on the water, hoping to achieve last-minute weight gain sufficient to win a
prize. The third case was the September 14 torture-killing of a quarterhorse named Mr.
Wilson Boy in a pasture near Silsbee, Texas. Ten boys and a girl, ages 8 to 14, chased the
horse into barbed wire, beat him to death, and bragged about it.

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Michigan stats confirm hunting, child abuse link

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE, October 1995:

LANSING––Michigan children are nearly three times as likely to be neglected and
are twice as likely to be physically abused or sexually assaulted if they live in a county with
either an above average or above median rate of hunting participation.
Michigan sells two times more hunting licenses per capita as upstate New York, a
closely comparable region, but has seven times the rate of successfully prosecuted child
abuse, and twice as high a rate of sexual assault on children.
Michigan and New York, exclusive of New York City, have similar per capita
income ($20,453 for Michigan, $20,124 for upstate New York), unemployment rates (7.0%
for Michigan, 7.7% for upstate New York), and population density (164 people per square
mile for Michigan, 228 people per square mile for upstate New York).

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Editorial: Humane is for humanity

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE, October 1994:

The Roman Catholic Church recently published a new Catechism, an event of
importance to more than one billion people worldwide, about 19% of the global human
population, because the Catechism is the reference that governs the daily conduct of devout
Catholics, interpreting everyday situations in accordance with what the Church believes to
be divine will.
Like secular law, the Catechism is founded largely on precedent, derived from a
combination of codified dictate and ajudication. As the instrument of an institution whose
practical purpose is conserving moral order, the Catechism cannot be expected to break
abruptly from tradition to tell the faithful that most must radically change their lives. Even
small changes are therefore noteworthy. Such a small change comes in Passage 2415,
which extends moral consideration to animals, plants, and habitat. “The Seventh
Commandment enjoins respect for the integrity of creation,” it asserts. “The use of mineral,
plant, and animal resources cannot be separated from respect for moral imperatives. Man’s
dominion over inanimate and other living beings granted by the Creator is not absolute; it is
regulated by concern for the quality of life of his neighbor including generations to come; it
requires a religious respect for the integrity of creation.”

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Sex and animal protection

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE, May 1994:

Chances are, most of the people who attended the seminar on “Differences
between men and women” at the American Humane Association’s annual training confer-
ence last fall wondered what this had to do with animal protection. Presenter Judy Lang
asked the same question––after delineating the many behavioral differences found by recent
l research. By then the audience was bursting with examples of specific situations where a
better understanding of sex differences might significantly help.
One difference of note, applicable to both humane education and anti-cruelty
enforcement, is the disparate degree to which men and women recognize personal feelings.
As Lang pointed out, women have a much stronger neurolink between their brain hemi-
spheres, which results in greater capacity for connecting thought with emotion. Thus
women are less likely to blindly react. Some research suggests women are less likely to
abuse children and animals in part because they are more likely to recognize their own anger
and frustration before it emerges in hostile behavior, and are therefore quicker to use empa-
thy as a brake upon negative feelings. Men commit both violent crimes and suicide far
more often; women are far more likely to seek psychological help. Lang stressed that the
physiological difference is a matter of degrees, not of absolutes, and should not be consid-
ered a handicap or an excuse for inhumane behavior: men can and must be taught to
“count to a thousand” before reacting. What is important is recognizing that men often need
to be taught a mode of responding that for women may be inuitive.

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BOOKS: Jim Mason on the nature of unnatural acts

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE, April 1994:

An Unnatural Order: Uncovering the Roots
of Our Domination of Nature and Each
Other, by Jim Mason. Simon & Schuster
(Rockefeller Centre, 1230 Ave. of the Americas, New
York, NY 10020), 1993. 298 pages, $24 hardcover.
“The Slave,” a powerful sculpture by Michelangelo,
depicts a man struggling to break free of the stone from which
he is partially formed. This image is repeatedly brought to
mind by An Unnatural Order, for the heart of Jim Mason’s
argument is that humankind is a coldly perverse and destruc-
tively struggling entity as a result of a futile effort to distance
ourselves from the natural and animal world from which we
evolved.

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Editorial: Culture is no excuse for cruelty

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE, Jan/Feb 1994:

It is with further disgust that we note the opobrium cast upon Afro-American nov-
elist Alice Walker, a distinguished defender of animals, abused women, and children, for
attacking ritual female genital mutilation in her new books Possessing The Secret of Joy and
Warrior Marks. From 85 to 114 million women alive today, mostly black African
Muslims, have suffered the excision of all or part of their clitoris and labia minor in a rite
performed by elder women, without anesthetic or antiseptics, when girls of their culture
reach adolescence. Millions more suffer this procedure each year. Many die of resultant
infection. The purpose of the abuse is to make young women marriageable in a genuinely
patriarchal society by insuring virginity at marriage and chastity thereafter through making
sexual intercourse painful or uninteresting.

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Editorial: When hunters come out of the closet

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE, December 1993:

On Sunday, November 14, at about noon, I was showing our three-year-old
son Wolf the difference between oak and maple leaves, near our home on the New
York/Vermont border, when two four-wheel-drive vehicles filled with hunters came up
behind us and slowed down as the occupants yelled sexually explicit threats. They
began with whistles, proceeded to observe that Wolf has blond hair and I have a pony-
tail, and when we ignored them, advanced to suggestions that they should stop and
sodomize us. I listened in initial disbelief––I’m used to locker room humor, having
spent much of my life as an amateur athlete––but I’d never heard a jock proposing to
rape a three-year-old, even in jest. The encounter came to an abrupt end when I rather
unwisely turned, faced them directly, and used an emphatic variant of sign language to
invite them to get out of their vehicles and debate the subject. They accelerated away in
a cloud of flying mud and gravel.

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BOOKS: A View to a Death in the Morning: Hunting and Nature Through History

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE, October 1993:

A View to a Death in the Morning:
Hunting and Nature Through History, by
Matt Cartmill. Harvard University Press (79 Garden
St., Cambridge, MA 02138-1499), 1993. 331 pages,
hardcover. $29.95.
A traditional fox-hunting song, “D’ye ken John
Peel,” gave Matt Cartmill his title; it appears in a stanza in
which the hunters follow their dogs “from a find to a check,
from a check to a view, from a view to a death in the morn-
ing.” Despite the title, Cartmill spends little time on fox-
hunting, boar-hunting, bear-hunting, wolf-hunting, bad-
ger-hunting, coon-hunting, fishing, fowling, and falconry.
The theory, practice, myths, and effects on its practition-
ers of deer hunting are the focus of his chapters about hunt-
ing, from the ancient Greeks to Bambi . Those chapters
which concentrate on nature are more diffuse.

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Editorial: Find more men to teach love

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE, September 1993:

Three Brazilian military policemen shocked the world July 23 when they
machine-gunned 45 homeless children who were sleeping in front of the Candelaris Church
and Museum of Modern Art in the fashionable part of Rio de Janeiro, killing seven. So
great was the outrage that three days later the suspects were arrested. And that was the real
news. In 1992 alone, 424 children were killed in Rio de Janeiro––as many as half of them
by police, many of whom liken the murder of a street orphan to shooting a stray dog. As
the very first issue of ANIMAL PEOPLE reported, the killing has previously been done
with impunity. People trying to help the children and attempting to bring the police to jus-
tice have also been killed. Elsewhere in Brazil, and in other parts of Latin America, the
situation may be worse, but only Brazil keeps good statistics, recording the murders of
more than 1,000 children a year––mostly poor semi-orphans. In all, 700,000 Brazilian
children don’t live with their mothers, and 460,000 of them don’t live with either parent.
More than four million don’t go to school, and more than 10% of adolescents can’t read.

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