BOOKS: Parrot Culture

July 1, 2004 Dylan Forest Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, July/August 2004:

Parrot Culture by Bruce Thomas Boehrer
University of Pennsylvania Press (4200 Pine Street, Philadelphia,
PA 19104), 2004. 224 pages, paperback. $27.50.

The parrots who were popular in Greco-Roman imperial times, and
thereafter in Europe during the Middle Ages, came from India. But
the overland traffic in parrots slowed after the rise of Islam,
partly because Mohammed taught against caging birds and partly
because warfare between Christians and Muslims significantly reduced
the chances of moving fragile species through Central Asia alive.
Bruce Boehrer’s research shows that the parrots who flooded
into Europe after the Renaissance came from the New World, as a
direct result of Christopher Colum-bus’ voyages of discovery.
Over two millennia, the reverence with which captive parrots
were originally treated disappeared and the birds later became
objects of ridicule and satire. Boehrer delves at some length into
depictions of parrots in art and literature over the ages. Included
is the famous Monty Python “Dead Parrot Sketch.”
Renaissance writers transformed parrots into comic figures,
and some painters of the period did the same thing. Parrots appear
in numerous paintings by great masters including Rubens, Van Dyk,
Manet, and even some of the French impressionists, notably Renoir.

Animal Welfare awareness of Chinese youth

May 1, 2004 Dylan Forest Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, May 2004:

Animal Welfare awareness of Chinese youth
by Peter Li, Zu Shuxian, & Su Pei-feng

In early 2002 five bears at the Beijing Zoo were attacked on
two separate occasions with sulfuric acid by a mysterious visitor.
For months Chinese media gave extensive coverage to the incident,
including the eventual prosecution and conviction of perpetrator Liu
Hai-yang.
Coming from a single-child family, Liu Hai-yang was among
China’s 80 million “little emperors” who reputedly harbor an
inordinate sense of entitlement. A science major at Beijing’s
prestigious Tsinghua University, Liu showed no signs of remorse. He
questioned his detention, demanded his release, and defended his
act as a “scientific experiment.”
To animal advocates, the incident illustrated why the
passage of anti-cruelty legislation must not be delayed any longer.
Yet others, including some Chinese officials, argued that
proposals to legislate animal welfare are beyond what China is ready
to accept.
The Liu case was among the topics most discussed at an
October 2002 symposium on animal welfare held in Heifei, Anhui
Province. Responding to the issues raised there, with
co-sponsorship from the World Society for the Protection of Animals
and the University of Houston downtown campus, we surveyed Chinese
college students to investigate whether the alleged “little emperor”
syndrome can actually be found in attitudes toward animals, and what
the prevailing attitudes toward animals are likely to be in coming
decades, as today’s college students become China’s future leaders.

Asia
Culture

Dog-eating and my culture

November 1, 2003 Dylan Forest Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, November 2003:

Dog-eating and my culture by Bing A. Dawang

Just before World Animal Day, which coincides with the feast
of St. Francis d’Assisi, the patron saint of animals, a local
newpaper defended the dog meat trade in the Philippines, in
particular in Baguio City and the Cordilleras, by claiming that dog
eating is a part of the Igorot indigenous culture.
As a full-blooded Igorot, I take offense.
The newspaper quoted Isikias Isican, said to be curator of
the St. Louis University museum, as saying that there is a clear
cultural basis for butchering dogs because they were “butchered by
Igorot tribes before going to war, or to cure certain afflictions.”
Isican generalized that dog-eating is a part of Igorot
tradition by recalling that in 1904 a few Igorot men and women were
displayed at the Louisiana Purchase Exhibition (“world’s fair”) in
St. Louis, Missouri. Described as as heathen pagans, they
butchered a dog as part of the show.
In the same article Hanzen Binay, formerly defense counsel
for several dog meat traders and now a Benguet prosecutor,
questioned the wisdom of the Philippine Animal Welfare Act.
Objecting that the law was supported by British animal advocates,
Binay asked rhetorically why Britain does not respect the Igorot
culture.

BOOKS: Monster of God

November 1, 2003 Dylan Forest Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, November 2003:

Monster of God:
The man-eating predator in the
jungles of history and the mind
by David Quammen
W.W. Norton & Co. (500 5th Ave., New York, NY 10110), 2003.
384 pages, hardcover. $26.95.

Certain to be classified by most librarians as “natural
history,” Monster of God has already been mistaken by many reviewers
as a screed in defense of “sustainable use.”
Monster of God is actually a book mostly about faith,
exploring the influence of the human evolutionary role as prey upon
concepts of religion, and of the more recent human ascendance as a
top predator on our ideas about conservation.
David Quammen is profoundly skeptical that humans and
predators capable of eating us are capable of coexisting for longer
than another 150 years. He presents a strong circumstantial case
that the protohuman concept of God evolved as a psychological
response to swift and seemingly random predator strikes. Sacrifice,
Quammen suggests, began as appeasement of predators, and in some
remote places continues as such.
Others have written extensively about the emergence of
sacrifice as the ritual sustenance of a learned priestly class,
coinciding with the rise of animal husbandry, and have discussed
especially the role of religion in rationalizing slaughter. Without
taking much note of of this, Quammen explores the role of the
earliest monarchs in recorded history as lion-slayers, pointing out
that the dawn of civilization coincided with the emergence of humans
as quasi-apex predators, able at last to do with weapons what
natural predators do with tooth and claw.

Dog and cat eaters hide behind foreign media gullibility

October 2, 2003 Dylan Forest Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, October 2003:

Dog and cat eaters hide behind foreign media gullibility
by Sunnan Kum

I recently received some photographs of dogs at a Korean
market, courageously taken by Mark Lloyd of the London Daily Mail.
I have seen so many photographs of abused animals before
these that I already felt wearied, and thought I had virtually no
more capacity for sadness.
Once again I saw the eyes of the caged dogs, their faces
full of sadness, fear and loneliness. Yet I also saw hope from the
same eyes: hope that someone may one day bring them home and love
them.
I told myself that these dogs were by now already at peace
and had finally found the release they so deserved. I tried to
console myself with this belief, but whenever I thought of their
loving, trusting eyes, I dissolved into tears. I felt that their
images were somehow urging me to do more for other animals still
living.

Animals in China: from the “four pests” to two signs of hope

October 2, 2003 Dylan Forest Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, October 2003:

Animals in China: from the “four pests” to two signs of hope
by Peter Li

In February 2002, a college student in Sichuan province
microwaved a four-week old puppy, reportedly in retaliation against
his wayward girlfriend.
Five zoo bears were at the same time viciously assaulted with
sulfuric acid at a zoo in Beijing. The perpetrator, Liu Haiyang,
was a student at Tsinghua University, whose alumni include President
Hu Jintao, former Prime Minister Zhu Rongji, and Chairman of China’s
legislature Wu Bangguo.
The public was outraged in each instance, but found solace
in the belief that these were isolated cases.
The subsequent outbreak of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome
awakened China to the cruel reality of wildlife exploitation across
the country–and put the acts of deranged individuals into the
uncomfortable context of being not far different from business as
usual at live markets and in the traditional medicine trade.
Wildlife has been used in China for human benefit for more
than two thousand years. Because wildlife use is part of the Chinese
culture, it has been widely viewed as politically untouchable.

Editorial: Shelter killing & regional values

July 1, 2003 Dylan Forest Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, July/August 2003:

On page 17 of this edition ANIMAL PEOPLE presents our tenth
annual casualty count in the 131-year-old battle by humane societies
against dog and cat overpopulation.
For the first 100 years after the Women’s Humane Society of
Philadelphia became the first U.S. humane organization to take an
animal control contract, there was no visible progress. Even after
the numbers of dogs and cats killed in U.S. shelters and pounds began
to fall in the early 1970s, there was little recognition of
improvement. The numbers everywhere were still higher than almost
anyone could bear to study in any kind of depth.
As recently as 1993, the American Humane Association,
Humane Society of the U.S., and PETA still erroneously asserted that
the shelter killing toll was going up.

BOOKS: They Shall Not Hurt Or Destroy

June 1, 2003 Dylan Forest Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, June 2003:

They Shall Not Hurt Or Destroy
Animal Rights & Vegetarianism in the Western Religious Traditions
by Vasu Murti
Vegetarian Advocates Press (P.O. Box 201791, Cleveland, OH 44120), 2003.
140 pages, paperback. $15.00.

They Shall Not Hurt Or Destroy author Vasu Murti traces the
struggle for animal rights and vegetarianism back to antiquity. The
great prophets of Israel, Pythagoras, and Plato spoke out against
slaughter.
The cause was then taken up by the early leaders of the Christian
church and their Jewish counterparts, demonstrates Murti.
Separate chapters deal with Jewish, Catholic, and
Protestant teachings, from medieval times to the present.
Says the Jewish Talmud, “Adam and many generations that followed
him were strict flesh-abstainers; flesh-foods were rejected as
repulsive for human consumption.”

Finding the sentience of fish

June 1, 2003 Dylan Forest Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, June 2003:

Credit scientific discovery. Credit
People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals.
Credit Finding Nemo, the latest pro-animal
animated production in a 64-year string from Walt
Disney Productions.
Whatever the reason, humans around the
world are suddenly talking about the suffering of
fish as never before.

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