“Hog producers are greater threat to U.S. than Osama bin Laden,” says RFK Jr.

July 1, 2002 Dylan Forest Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, July/August, 2002:

WHITE PLAINS, N.Y.–Four months after telling an April 5
rally in Clear Lake, Iowa, that “Large-scale hog producers are a
greater threat to the U.S. and U.S. democracy than Osama bin Laden
and his terrorist network,” Waterkeeper Alliance president Robert F.
Kennedy Jr. shows no sign of backing away from his remarks–and has
posted not just one but two denunciations of factory-style hog
farming originally issued in April at the <www.keeper.org> web site.
The conservation-oriented Water-keeper Alliance is only
peripherally involved with animal issues other than protection of
habitat from pollution, and Kennedy himself has rarely said much
about animals, but after other Waterkeeper Alliance spokespersons
tried to tone down his Clear Lake statements or claim they were taken
out of context, Kennedy spoke equally forcefully on April 18 at
Briar Cliff University, a Catholic institution in Sioux City, Iowa.

Maneka Gandhi faces showdown with idols of science & religion

June 1, 2002 Dylan Forest Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, June 2002:

NEW DELHI–“I am again, in a battle for my life!” Indian
minister of state for animal welfare Maneka Gandhi e-mailed to ANIMAL
PEOPLE on May 24.
“We raided the premier AIDs research lab in India last week
and found a chamber of horrors, rescued the animals, and took them
away. We found starving monkeys with no fingers and teeth, bleeding
from their bottoms, with maggots in any food they had. Now Health
Minister C.P. Thakur and many scientists and journalists are
denouncing me all over the place,” Mrs. Gandhi elaborated.

Dalai Lama hits sport hunting

May 1, 2002 Dylan Forest Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, May 2002:

DHARAMSALA, India–Making perhaps his strongest statement
yet on behalf of animals, the Dalai Lama on March 29 reminded
Buddhists that sport hunting is contrary to the teachings of the
Buddhist religion.
The Dalai Lama had been asked to address the growth of trophy
hunting in Mongolia by Fund for Animals spiritual outreach director
Norm Phelps, who practices Tibetan Buddhism. Phelps outlined the
recent heavy investment of trophy hunting outfitters in promoting
safaris to kill argali sheep, snow leopards, Bactrian camels and
other species, many of which may not be legally hunted anywhere else.

The Pope is asked to help save sea turtles

April 1, 2002 Dylan Forest Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, April 2002:

LOS ANGELES, HONG KONG –The Sea Turtle Conservation Network
of the Californias on March 13, 2002 appealed to Pope John Paul II
to clarify to Roman Catholics that sea turtles are not “fish,” and
should not be poached and eaten at Lent.
Mexican poachers alone kill as many as 5,000 endangered sea
turtles a year during Lent, Wildcoast founder Serge Dedina said at a
Los Angeles press conference, out of an estimated annual toll of
35,000 turtles poached. Seconding Dedina was Homero Aridjis,
founder of the Mexican environmental protection organization Grupo de
100.

Hindus, Sikhs, veggies settle suit vs. McDonald’s

April 1, 2002 Dylan Forest Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, April 2002:

SEATTLE, AHMEDABAD– With smoke still rising from the ruins
of Muslim neighborhoods in Ahmedabad, India, neither the McDonald’s
Corporation nor Seattle attorney Harish Bharti and his 12 Hindu,
Sikh, and vegetarian clients wanted any more trouble.
As Ahmedabad cremated the remains of 56 Hindus killed when
Muslim militants torched a train on March 1, and buried the remains
of more than 400 Muslims killed the next day in retaliatory attacks
by Hindu mobs, McDonald’s agreed to pay $6 million to vegetarian
groups, yet to be named, and $4 million to charities serving
Hindus, Sikhs, children’s nutritional needs, and kosher dietary
teachings.

“What kind of God asks for the blood of the innocent?”

December 1, 2001 Dylan Forest Leave a comment

“What kind of God asks for the blood of the innocent?”

God’s Covenant with Animals:
A Biblical Basis for the Humane Treatment of all Creatures
by J.R. Hyland
107 pages. $14.00 paperback.

The Bible According to Noah:
Theology as if Animals Mattered
by Gary Kowalski
128 pages. $12.00 paperback.

Judaism and Vegetarianism
by Richard H. Schwartz, Ph.D.
256 pages. $18.00 paperback.

All from Lantern Books (1 Union Square W., #201, New York, NY 10003), 2001.

Ordained evangelical minister J.R. Hyland brings to her work among prisoners and farmhands an enduring passion for animals and feminism. Her previous books include The Slaughter of Terrified Beasts: A Biblical Basis for the Humane Treatment of Animals (1988), and Sexism is a Sin: the Biblical Basis of Female Equality (1995). From 1996 through 1998 she edited the magazine Humane Religion.

A reprint of The Slaughter of Terrified Beasts forms the opening section of God’s Covenant With Animals, which digs deeply into troubling aspects of Biblical history that some of us might prefer to forget. Hyland first extensively covers animal sacrifice in Judaism. She explains that just as Judaism forbade human sacrifice, Jesus tried to end animal sacrifice. She postulates that Jesus overthrew the tables of the moneychangers, his only recorded aggressive act, because the slaughter of animals in the temple offended him. The sale of animals for ritual sacrifice was, however, the economic foundation of Jerusalem. Just four days later Jesus himself became the “sacrificial lamb” of Christianity on the cross.

Hyland goes on to compares her interpretation of the intent of the 10 Commandments with actuality. Hyland points out that even in times of peace, “Thou shall not kill” is not obeyed in the Christian world, where hunting is not only tolerated, but is often even encouraged as a church activity. “Thou shall not covet or steal” is not followed either, Hyland argues, when people wear furs to church. Unfortunately, the people who may need Hyland’s sermons most are those least likely to attend them or read her writings.

Hyland argues that God intended for humans to be vegetarian. “The eating of flesh is a pervasion of God’s law,” she writes, “indulged in by a fallen human race.” Animal activists may find her study useful in preparing for outreach to religious communities, such as the Northwest Animal Rights Network pro-vegetarian leafleting campaign outside Seattle churches. In 2002 NARN plans to send speakers to address Unitarians and members of other progressive Christian denominations.

Gary Kowalski, author of The Bible According to Noah, also wrote The Souls of Animals, a 1991 category best-seller, and Goodbye Friend: Healing Wisdom for Anyone Who Has Ever Lost A Pet (1997). A Harvard-educated Unitarian minister, Kowalski exhibits a prolific imagination and a poetic nature. The Bible, for Kowalski, is just a point of departure. Each chapter opens with a Biblical excerpt, but he then goes off on many tangents, sometimes only
casually related to the Biblical passage, and ends the book with his own biocentric rather than human-centered interpretation of Biblical teaching.

Though I share Kowalski’s views about the obscene way that animals are treated, I found some of his digressions rambling to the point of discomfort. He seems to use Biblical reference mostly just to tie together the many important things he has to say. Nevertheless, Kowalski packs many engrossing facts about nature, stories of indigenous people, and personal reflections into this small volume.

Kowalski explores blind obedience to authority, from Nazi doctors experimenting on Holocaust victims to current laboratory animal research, through the example of Abraham agreeing to sacrifice his son Isaac to win the favor of God.

“The greatest strength of the modern animal rights movement,” Kowalski writes, “has been its willingness to raise fundamental and far-reaching questions–questions that had been studiously ignored or considered settled beyond dispute for far too long. It is almost as though a long conspiracy of silence has been broken, or as though Abraham had suddenly cast off his docile demeanor and begun to raise objections: ‘What kind of God asks for the blood of the innocent?'”

Kowalski imagines many things that might have gone through the old man’s thoughts as he stood trembling at the altar; but that finally, “Abraham fingered the razor’s edge and looked into the little lamb’s eyes [the animal in the Biblical version is a ram], before putting down the knife.” We can envision Issac and the lamb walking away unharmed from the sacrificial table and now everyone can cheer.

Theology as if animals mattered is what Kowalski offers. His epilogue beautifully describes the lost paradise of Biblical times, when abundant wildlife roamed a region which is now mostly desert. The Middle East then formed a land bridge between the animals of Africa and the similar but now long separated species of Asia. Mesopotamia, in modern-day Iraq, was especially fertile ground. Here, however, archaeology reveals that the domestication of goats and sheep brought about one of the first human-made ecological crises, as deforested hills eroded, allowing silt and salt to ruin
the land. Kowalski’s hope is that the rest of the planet does not go the same way, and that through drawing on the wisdom of all beings we can revise our spiritual traditions to avoid destroying whatever is left of Eden.

Adopting vegetarianism is imperative, and Richard H. Schwartz, Ph.D., shows the way in his latest of several updated and revised editions of his 1982 classic Judaism and Vegetarianism. Schwartz covers all the basics: a vegetarian view of the Bible; how Jewish vegetarians can help animals, their own well-being, the struggle against hunger, the environment, and the cause of peace; the history of Jewish vegetarianism, including the stories of many well-respected rabbis; biographies of other well-known and often much-loved Jewish vegetarians; and the details of how to be an observant Jewish vegetarian, along with facts about vegetarianism and health.

I wish that every rabbi and synagogue could be given this valuable book. It can inspire and guide Jewish people in taking the next obvious step, for those who are not already vegetarian, toward the way of peace that Judaism teaches, and in the direction that the laws of kashrut (kosher) lead.

Schwartz explores some intriguing ideas from various rabbis as to how human meat-eating began, and came to be condoned by the Bible. The Torah prescribed how animals should be killed and meat should be prepared, since humans were determined to eat meat, but many passages indicate that vegetarianism has always been a more holy
choice, and that once the Messiah arrives, the whole world will be vegetarian.

In view of the ecological devastation wrought by livestock agriculture, the notorious health problems meat eating brings, and the pain inflicted upon animals by modern agribusiness, which makes authentic kashrut impossible, Schwartz asks the obvious question: Why not become vegetarian now?

Schwartz even covers one little known Jewish esoteric reason for eating meat, which may be summarized as the notion that a holy person could, by consuming flesh, elevate the “sparks” of the being who is consumed toward higher consciousness. This is part of tikkun, or healing-of-the-world, and explains the phrase, “Only one who understands the Torah can eat meat.” This belief somewhat parallels the Tibetan Buddhist rationale for eating meat. Yet in both cases
these esoteric teachings are often misunderstood by those who cite them, and have absolutely nothing to do with present-day meat consumption. Here one can argue how much more of a mitzvot (blessing) it is to save an animal’s life, rather than try to help the spirit of the animal after it is dead.

Schwartz reviews Jewish and non-Jewish views of the link between heavy meat eating and violence among people, and how vegetarians can fit into and influence both the Jewish and non-Jewish world. He also includes information about Jewish vegetarian societies and Israeli animal rescue groups.

Jim Mason, co-author with Peter Singer of the 1980 classic Animal Factories (revised 1990), opines in the November/December 2001 edition of Veg News that it is not too far fetched to imagine that churches, mosques and synagogues will pray for animal liberation in the near future because there are signs that these religions are reawakening to the concept of compassion for all beings that Hyland, Kowalski, and Schwartz argue was within Judeo/
Christian religious teachings from the beginning, albeit corrupted by centuries of meat-eaters trying to rationalize their behavior.

These and other recent Lantern Books titles explain from a variety of theological perspectives what we did to exile ourselves from the Garden of Eden, and what we must do to get back there.

–Eileen Weintraub

BOOKS: The Lost Religion of Jesus: Simple Living & Nonviolence In Early Christianity

December 1, 2001 Dylan Forest Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, December 2001:

The Lost Religion of Jesus:
Simple Living & Nonviolence In Early Christianity
by Keith Akers
Lantern Books (1 Union Square W., #201, New York, NY 10003),
2001. 260 pages, paperback. $20.00.

Denver vegetarian advocate Keith Akers, best known for compiling A Vegetarian Sourcebook (1983), earned his B.A. in philosophy 30 years ago at Vanderbilt University. He turned to computer programming to make a living, but never forgot his philosophical interests. Decades of meticulous study later, Akers has joined the growing legion of historians and theologians who are coming to believe that the real focal issue of Jesus’ life and death was opposition to animal sacrifice–and, by extension, to all meat-eating, since animal sacrifice was practiced in Judaism as a means of sanctifying the consumption of any flesh. According to Genesis, God explicitly excluded meat from the human diet at the time of Creation. Only through the invention of animal sacrifice, purporting to “share” meat with God at God’s alleged own request, could the Hebrews rationalize transgressing their oldest commandment.

Others have made the same argument, but Akers’ examination of the evidence is unusually free of sectarian bias, since– unlike most Biblical scholars–he is not aligned with any one religion. Akers seeks the truth of Biblical history by painstakingly finding and removing corrupted bits to resolve each system conflict. Comparing the Biblical accounts of Jesus clearing the temple, Akers notes that, “There are several groups whom Jesus directs his anger against, and the moneychangers are nowhere at the top of the list. In Luke they are not even mentioned. Rather,” Akers reminds,
“it is the ‘dealers in cattle, sheep, and pigeons,’ ‘those who sold,’ or ‘all who sold and bought’ who are his primary targets. In John, he speaks only to the dealers in pigeons, and in Luke he speaks only to ‘those who sold.’ The primary practical effect of the cleaning of the temple was in John to empty the temple of the animals who were to be sacrificed, or in the synoptic gospels, to drive out those who were taking them to be killed or were selling them. We must remember,” Akers emphasizes, “that the temple was more like a butcher shop than like a modern-day church or synagogue. ‘Cleansing the temple’ was an act of animal liberation.

“The conventional interpretation of Jesus’ motivation,” Akers writes, “is that the moneychangers and dealers in animals were overcharging Jews who had come to the temple to make a sacrifice…Nowhere else in the New Testament is there any suggestion that profiteering by animal dealers was a problem.” Jesus did not visit the temple as a consumer advocate, Akers believes. Rather, “Jesus did something that struck at the core of temple practice. The priests wanted Jesus killed, and even after Jesus was dead, they wanted to destroy his followers. Was all this effort simply to safeguard some dishonest moneychangers? It is much more plausible that Jesus objected to the practice of animal
sacrifice itself…It was this act, and its interpretation as a threat to public order, that led immediately to his crucifixion,”
Akers argues.

Objecting to animal sacrifice, Akers explains, was consistent with the interpretation of Judaism that Jesus otherwise
advanced, following a line of Biblical prophets including Ezekial and Isaiah. Opposition to animal sacrifice, moreover, was a growing trend within Judaism at the time, possibly though not necessarily as result of increasing commerce with India, where many Jews fled less than a century later after the Diaspora.

Apocryphal stories and some scholarly investigators long have postulated that Jesus spent part of his youth in India, and that the Golden Rule was a recast form of ahimsa. Akers, however, believes from examination of Jesus’ words about animals that he did not need to go so far to be immersed in similar teachings: they were already current in his time and place. Akers cites passages indicating that, “The principle of compassion for animals is a presupposition of all
of Jesus’ references to animals…Jesus in the gospels does not argue the question of whether we should be compassionate to animals; rather, he assumes it from the outset.”

As Akers portrays Jesus, he was not well-traveled and worldly. Having possibly grown up away from animal sacrifice, he suffered a profound shock upon encountering it in the temple. He responded in outraged naivete, and was in effect sacrificed himself because of his apparent innocence of the force of the institution he challenged.

Akers argues that bits of Gospel such as accounts of the miracle of the loaves and fishes and the Last Supper, which seem to show Jesus condoning flesh consumption, were corrupted by the Paulists who took Christianity away from Judaism. Key evidence is that the Jerusalem church first led by James (who claimed to be Jesus’ brother) kept vegetarianism as a central tenet for all of the 300-odd years that it existed.
Akers argues, based on a confluence of geography and teachings about animals, that remnants of the teachings of the
Jerusalem church were incorporated into the Sufi branch of Islam, which much later originated where the last branch of the Jerusalem church had settled after fleeing Jerusalem. “Jesus is not an unknown figure in Islam,” Akers acknowledges, “but the Sufis express an extraordinary interest in Jesus and have sayings of Jesus and stories about Jesus found nowhere in Christianity. Especially interesting and significant is the treatment of Jesus by al-Ghazali, an 11th century Islamic mystic who is widely credited with making Sufism respectable within Islam.”

The Jesus described by al-Ghazali “lives in extreme poverty, disdains violence, loves animals, and is vegetarian,” Akers summarizes. “It is clear that al-Ghazali is drawing on a tradition rather than creating a tradition because some of the same stories that al-Ghazali relates are also related by others both before and after him, and also because al-Ghazali himself is not a vegetarian and clearly has no axe to grind. Thus, these stories came from a pre-existing tradtion that describes Jesus as a vegetarian,” which Akers illustrates with examples from al-Ghazali.

Vegetarian saints, poets, and teachers, including women, have been prominent among the Sufis from the beginning of the tradition. Akers briefly reviews their examples, and explains how the pro-animal descendants of the Jerusalem church could have found a place in Islam after suffering violent rejection by both Judaism and mainstream Christianity –largely due to their vegetarian teachings.

“Notwithstanding the approval of meat consumption and animal sacrifice in Islam,” Akers writes, “animals have a status in the Qur’an unequaled in the New Testament. According to the Qur’an, animals are manifestations of God’s divine will, signs or clues for the believers provided by God. The animals in fact all praise and worship Allah. The beasts pay attention to God and the birds in flight praise him as well. Allah has given the earth not just for human domination, but for all his creatures.

“Animals have souls [in Islam] just like humans, for we read, ‘There is not an animal in the earth, nor a creature flying
on two wings, but they are peoples like unto you…Unto their Lord they will be gathered.’ “Indeed,” Akers concludes, “it would appear that [in Islam] animals can be saved on the Day of Judgement.”

Akers hopes that as growing numbers of Christians become vegetarian, they will return to the religion of Jesus, which he argues was the practice of ahimsa, whether Jesus knew the term or not, and is the oldest and purest theme common to every religion based upon ethical teaching.

“Dog” is “God” spelled backward

September 1, 2001 Dylan Forest Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, September 2001:

The animal dimensions of the September 11 terrorist
hijackings of jetliners and mass murders at the World Trade Center,
the Pentagon, and Somerset County, Pennsylvania, were as evident
as the search-and-rescue dogs sent to each scene to help find
survivors and remains, the bomb-sniffing dogs at airports whose
numbers suddenly seem all too few, and the many pets in transit who
were held overnight in air terminals when their flights were grounded.
Many stranded people probably wished they could hug a dog or
cat during the 30-to-48 hours before air travel resumed, and many of
the animals would have welcomed the attention, but there was no way
for anyone to make pet-sharing arrangements.

The transgenic dilemma: Body or soul?

April 1, 2001 Dylan Forest Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, April 2001:

Are you eating pork when you eat a tomato? Would having fish genes qualify a pig as “not pork”? Is a cow with human genes either more or less holy than a cow without?

In the brave new world of biotech, such questions make careers for lawyers and philosophers–and terrify the faithful. Even as biotech makes food more resistant to viruses, bacteria, mold, and fungi, vegans often find that trans-species
hybridization complicates their effort to avoid all traces of animal products and byproducts. Orthodox Jews, Hindus, Jains, and Muslims may even feel that biotech puts their souls at risk.

The appeal of absolute belief tends to be that it establishes easily understood rules of conduct. The more basic the belief, the simpler the rules: Thou Shalt. Thou Shalt Not. One God. Ten Commandments: no more than can be counted on fingers.

But simple rules require simple definitions. And in transgenic and xenographic science, there are none. That makes the traditional Jewish and Islamic prohibitions on consuming pork and the Hindu proscription against eating beef a series of religious, philosophical, and political battlegrounds. The Jain prohibition on ingesting any living being in any form, always hard to obey because of the dfficulty of seeing small insects, already became impossible for strict literalists with the discovery of microbes, but the injunctions against pork and beef have endured centuries, withstanding translation into every language and transplantation into every human culture–until now.

Now they are confounded by medical and agricultural practices which have become routine in some parts of the world while still unknown in others. Pigs’ heart valves have been implanted in humans for more than 25 years, for instance, and skin grafts from pigs have been used to help burn patients. Until recently, such techniques often took decades to
perfect. But biotech advances seem now to be accelerating to warp speed the research, development, and testing phases of transgenic and xenographic procedures.

When pigs fly

Just over three years ago, in March 1998, 38-year-old James MacDonald, of West Lafayette, Indiana, received the first
transplant into a human of small intestinal submucosa from a pig, as part of a surgical knee reconstruction. In February 2000 the Food and Drug Administration approved the use of pig small intestinal submucosa as a patching material for almost any sort of soft-tissue wound–even eye injuries and some types of stomach ulcer. Now SIS, as it is called, has been used to treat more than 25,000 human patients, and is well on the way toward even more common use.

A similar product made from a matrix of collagens taken from the livers, stomachs, and urinary bladders of pigs has been used to make replacement larynxes, intestines, and other organs for about 30 dogs whose original organs were removed as part of the study, Purdue University Department of Biomedical Engineering senior researcher Stephen Badlylak disclosed on March 22. This product too is believed to be on the fast track to FDA approval and general use.

In 1998, doctors disclosed experimental use of pig livers to keep human liver transplant candidates alive pending receipt of livers from human donors; transfusions of pig blood into humans; transplants of cells from genetically modified pigs to treat human spinal cord and brain injuries; and injections of fetal pig brain cells into the brains of Parkinson’s Disease patients.

Experimental use of fetal pig tissue to treat diabetes began in mid-2000, under direction of Diacrin Inc. researcher Jonathan Dinsmore. If that treatment works, it could improve the quality of life for 1.5 million Americans, plus millions more people abroad. At about the same time in mid-2000, researchers in Japan, Scotland, Virginia, and Wisconsin separately announced the births of cloned pigs, a first step toward mass production of pigs genetically modified to supply replacement organs for people. Reports indicate that any or all of these procedures could soon follow SIS into frequent application.

The market for human use of genetically modified pig parts is believed to be so potentially lucrative that the Hormel and Smithfield pork-packing empires have invested millions of dollars in related research, with partners including the Mayo Clinic, Baxter Healthcare, and ProLinia Inc. The pork barons are hoping to catch up to the Imutran, Infigen, and Geron Bio-Med research empires, whose scientists are believed to be the leaders in research and development.

People who eat pork are not expected to have ethical qualms about accepting transplants from pigs–and that includes most of the population in the most affluent parts of the world. For those who object to pig parts, alternatives may eventually be developed, grown in other species. Researchers, ethicists, and investors tend to believe that anyone who eats meat will readily accept transplants and other products modified through the use of animal genes, as soon
as they are proven safe.

PERV throws curve

Animal welfare concerns are not considered to be much of an impediment to transgenic biotech either–because most of the source genetic material can be taken from animals who were raised to be butchered anyway; because animals raised specifically to provide organs for transplant must be kept in healthier conditions than meat production facilities afford; and because the advent of genetic modification enables researchers to use far fewer animals in each new
product safety test. The effect of procedures or substances on human organs may now be studied by inserting human genes into the bodies of test animals to give their organs human properties.

Conventional wisdom in the biotech field is that genetic research is far more compatible with animal welfare than the search for drugs and surgical treatments. In August 2000, however, concern about the liabilities associated with pig endogenous retroviruses (PERV) caused the Roslin Institute of Scotland and Geron Bio-Med of California to drop out of the race to produce replacement human organ in pigs.

Although PERV does no harm to pigs, and so far does not appear to infect people, British virologist Robin A. Weiss proved in 1997 that cross-species infection can occur via test tube. Since PERV invades cells in much the same manner as HIV, integrating itself into the genetic program of the host, there are scary implications should people ever become vulnerable to a PERV strain.The PERV problem seemed to be solved in December 1999, when Bio-Transplant Inc. researcher Clive Patience announced that his team had bred a genetically modified pig which does not carry PERV.

The London Sunday Times reported in August 2000 that, “The use of pig organs for transplant to humans is poised to win governmental approval.” But the BioTransplant claim has apparently not yet been independently confirmed. And even as Sunday Times reporters Jonathan Leake and Lois Rogers wrote, the British Natural Environment Research Council revealed that Imperial College researchers Michael Tristem and Joanne Martin had found evidence that some pig retroviruses jump species barriers in the wild.

“When viruses jump species, they usually acquire pathogenic properties,” Tristem told London Observer science editor Robin McKie.The Boston-based Society for Heart and Lung Transplantation reinforced the British findings with a warning about PERV in December 2000. In February 2001 the third annual report of the United Kingdom Xenotransplant-ation Interim Regulatory Authority cautioned that due to PERV and unsolved tissue rejection problems, “The likelihood of whole-organ xenotransplantation being available within a worthwhile time frame may recede.”

Commented Interim Regulatory Authority member and heart transplant surgeon John Dark, of Newcastle, “Xenotrans-plantation is the future of transplants–and it always will be.” But even if people never receive replacement organs
cultivated in pigs, surgical use of other pig parts is likely to keep growing.

Hybrid cowboys?
Applications of biotech involving cattle to human health care were relatively slow to emerge. The emphasis of genetic research with cattle has mainly been on producing more lucrative dairy and beef breeds. Ethical discussion remained subdued until October 1998, when Vandana Shiva of the New Delhi-based Research Foundation for Science, Technology, and Ecology warned India that the Roslin Institute had applied for a patent on the genetic properties of the vechur cow. The vechur is a rare Indian breed, found mainly in Tamil Nadu and Kerala states.

Shiva urged the Indian government to assert a claim to the genetic properties of all native Indian animals and plants.
Other commentators soon linked the scientific, legal, and economic issues that Shiva raised to ethical concerns involving the treatment of the “Mothers of India.” Especially offensive to many Hindus would be the use of genes
from Indian cattle to make cow slaughter more profitable.

On the far side of the world, Advanced Cell Technology chief executive Michael West, of Boston, was successfully melding human DNA with a cow’s ova to produce a hybrid cell of potential utility in growing organs in cows which will be compatible with human bodies. Concern that the procedure might produce a hybrid fetus or lead to cloning humans was so prominent in news coverage during November 1998 that then-U.S. Presi-dent Bill Clinton sought the advice of the National Bioethics Advisory Commission. A hearing was held in Miami, a non-committal report was issued, and the work proceeded.
Unmollified, prominent voices from the Christian right have persistently demanded that the National Bioethics Advisory Commission be dismantled–which would actually diminish public oversight of genetic research.

Low average

Michael West, meanwhile, claimed in April 2000 that while sheep cloned by the Roslin Institute have shown symptoms of premature aging, his cloned cattle seem to be free of the problem. That might make them better candidates than pigs for use in growing replacement organs. But West had produced a calf fetus in only one of 271 attempts. The major anticipated application of biotech to cattle for human medical benefit would be the use of cows as living bioreactors,
who would be genetically modified to secrete human proteins used in drugs.

As this essentially involves only making medicines from milk, a classic Vedic procedure, there is no Hindu resistance to it in concept. Nor is there evident opposition in principle within the U.S. except from opponents of any genetic modification. Neighbors concerned mainly about manure and traffic and only secondarily anxious about biotech have put up the only visible resistance so far to plans by the Dutch pharmaceutical firm Pharming Group N.V. to build $37 million worth of facilities to produce drugs from genetically modified cow’s milk at Craig, Virginia, and at Virginia Tech University.

The Pharming Group project was first announced in early 1999. In August 1999, Agresearch Inc. outlined a similar project that it wanted to start near Wellington, New Zealand, on land leased from the Maori tribe. The Agresearch proposal met heavy resistance. Two members of the Ngati Wairere subtribal council delegation supported Agresearch;
five were opposed.

“It’s a mixing of whakapapa between species which is culturally inappropriate,” explained Agresearch foe Jacqui Amohanga. But the Agresearch project went ahead, under former Roslin Institute researcher David Wells. The goal is to use milk to produce human myelin basic protein, used to treat multiple sclerosis.

Use of actual parts from cattle in human medicine has distantly paralleled the use of pig parts. The first use in the U.S.
of a bovine valve in a human heart, for example, occurred in May 1999, following a procedure previously used in Europe. A valve from a bovine neck was used instead of a pig’s heart valve because a pig’s heart value would have been too large for the patient, a 13-month-old boy who was born with a severe congenital heart defect. He will have to receive the larger valve later, at about age 10.

The biggest subsequent development in cow-to-human xenography, announced on February 22, 2001 by PPL Therapeutics, was a technique for altering so-called stem cells from cow’s skin to produce heart muscle. Commented Donald Bruce, director of the Church of Scotland’s Society, Religion, and Technology Project, “This is an encouraging
breakthrough in the search for replacement cells to treat serious diseases without the need to use human embryos. It is obviously still too early to say that this is the solution we have been looking for, but it is certainly a step in the right direction.”

Tossing tomatoes

Researchers and the medical products industry would mostly prefer that the public continue to believe that pigs are pigs if they look like pigs; cows are cows if they moo and give milk; pig and cattle products are taboo for Jews, Muslims, and Hindus only if ingested as food; and people can otherwise do as they wish with livestock.

Fundamentalists are not so certain. Few fundamentalist leaders, of any religion, have ever fully trusted science. The
scientific method requires questioning certainties of the faith, while the findings of science tend to push the realm of God–the unknown–ever farther from daily human existence. Science shrinks the authority and prestige of priests. Science upsets the social order.

Science means trouble, in short, and when it comes coupled with putting parts or genetic information from one species into another, it also takes the form of an ancient dirty trick: causing thr religious to transgress a taboo unawares. It is said that the Buddha, who ate no meat, died when someone slipped pork into his begging bowl–a story which may least concern Buddhists, many of whom eat pork.

Some of the bloodiest riots in the history of India resulted from rumors that British troops had given Moslem and Hindu recruits weapons greased with lard and beef tallow. As recently as January 23, 1999, alleged Hanuman worshippers burned to death Australian missionary Graham Staines, 58, and his sons, ages 6 and 10, over evidently completely unproven rumors that they had tricked Hindus into eating beef, thereby “forcing” conversion to Christianity.

So what happens when a Jew, Moslem, or Hindu receives a transgenic or xenographic medical treatment? Or eats a genetically modified vegetable? Is such an act sinful? The question may have arisen first in Israel, where surgeons
began implanting pig heart valves in humans about 20 years ago, soon after the procedure was introduced in the U.S. and Britain. It came up again in April 1998, in discussion of a proposed pig-to-human heart transplant which would not have been done in Britain, at the time, because of concern about PERV.

“We as Jews are not supposed to eat the meat of a pig, but there is no reason not to use it to save a human life,” said Shear Yashu Cohen, chief rabbi of Haifa and of the Ariel Institute, a rabbinical training center. Universiti Sains Malaysia theologian Wan Salim Wan Mohd Nor, Ph.D., and associate professor of medicine Mohd Nizam Isa, M.D., likewise argued for tolerance at an April 2000 symposium. “When there is no other option, it should be all right to use pig organs,” Nor said, putting the obligation to protect human life ahead of dietary law.

Added Isa, “We cannot afford to close an eye to technology. To debate the issue in relation to moral, ethical, religious, and economic implications, we must first understand what the technology is all about.” But in June 2000, Muslim genetic engineering opponent Chamnong Buanien, of Thailand, invoked the alleged use of a gene from pigs to keep tomatoes fresh as a hoped-for ultimate weapon against the introduction of genetically modified crops in the
southern provinces of Satun and Songkhla, where most Thai Muslims live.

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