HELP IN SUFFERING

January 1, 1998 Dylan Forest Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, Jan/Feb 1998:

JAIPUR––The Indian view of animals, Help In
Suffering director Christine Townend admits, both morally
empowers her work and at times greatly complicates it.
“Many Brahmins, as well as Jains, cannot feed their
dogs meat due to their religious belief in vegetarianism,” she
explains, and do not feed cats at all. “This means cats and
dogs are often brought to us in advanced malnutrition.”
Euthanizing the animals is also difficult, Townend
adds, as many Brahmins and Jains also believe that they “may
not take the life of a dog even if the dog is suffering acutely and
is sure to die.”
Townend works in the shadow of paradox. The Help
In Suffering shelter is at the opposite end of Jaipur from the
Amber Fort, the palace-turned-tourist-trap of Akbar the Great,
a Charlemagne-like illiterate who consolidated the Mogul
empire, encouraged learning, protected wildlife, and abolished
suttee, the ancient custom of burning widows alive.

Ahimsa won’t be cowed

January 1, 1998 Dylan Forest Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, Jan/Feb 1998:

BOMBAY, JAIPUR, DELHI, JALGAON,
AGRA––We missed the fleeting chance to snap a photo, as
our driver sped through an intersection almost in the shadow of
the Taj Mahal, but won’t forget the sight of a huge Brahma
bull placidly chewing his cud amid the blaring horns of heavy
traffic, dodging around him.
We took the November edition of ANIMAL PEOPLE
to India with us. An article in it described how Chicago
Animal Rights Coalition founder Steve Hindi has repeatedly
captured on video the use of electroshocking devices by rodeo
stock contractors to make Brahma bulls buck.
We expected the revelation of bull abuse in rodeo to
shock our Indian hosts, but we didn’t expect to meet the difficulty
we did in even explaining what rodeo is. The idea that
adults of normal intelligence and sensibility might try to ride a
bull was foreign enough; the idea that others might pay to
watch the effort, over and over, stretched credulity.

RELIGION & ANIMALS

December 1, 1997 Dylan Forest Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, December 1997:

The National Conference of Catholic Bishops Pro-Life
Committee on November 11 called for a return to meatless Fridays as a
token of opposition to abortion, human euthanasia, war, violence,
drugs, and other “attacks on human life and human dignity.” Perhaps
not noticing that three of the four ranking Catholics quoted in
Associated Press coverage spoke for eating fish instead, which causes at
least as much animal suffering, In Defense of Animals president Elliot
Katz on November 14 endorsed the proposal. Katz is Jewish.
The men of some Orthodox Jewish sects mark Yom
Kippur, the Day of Atonement, by swinging live chickens over
their heads. Reported Melissa McCord of Associated Press from Israel
on Yom Kippur 1997, “Many Jews, including those belonging to other
streams of Orthodoxy, reject the practice. Rabbis have ruled that cash
or even credit cards may be used in the atonement ritual,” which ends in
either the chicken or the money being given to the poor.

A LAME DUCK SHALL LEAD THEM

July 1, 1997 Dylan Forest Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, July/August 1997:

MONTGOMERY, Texas––Not the
nail of Confucian proverb who sticks up, so is
hammered down, Yong Gwinn wasn’t thinking
about religious or cultural context when
she called minister Jean LeFevre recently
about an injured duck. She was just thinking
about the duck. A cake decorator at the
Woodlands Executive Conference Center and
Resort in Montgomery, Texas, Gwinn knew
LeFebvre and her husband Lawrence rehabilitate
birds at the nearby St. John’s Center, so
she picked up the telephone and became
involved.
As the duck later waddled free,
greeted by his surprised and delighted mate,
the San Francisco Board of Supervisors Rules
Committee moved to de-escalate a year-long
flap over the sale of live animals as food by
dropping two of the four members of the
Commission for Animal Control and Welfare
who unsuccessfully pushed to ban such sales.
Although the ban cleared the Commission last
November, the Supervisors never voted on it.

BOOKS: Bless All Creatures Here Below

March 1, 1997 Dylan Forest Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, March 1997:

Bless All Creatures
Here Below
A Celebration for the Blessing of the Animals
by Judith Gwyn Brown
Morehouse Publishing (POB 1321, Harrisburg, PA
17105), 1996. 32 pages, illus., hardcover, $15.95.

Presented as an illustrated children’s book, Bless
All Creatures Here Below could also serve as a guide to
assist churches in preparing a blessing of animals, including
verse, music, and prayers for the occasion, all kept
unthreateningly ecumenical. I wondered about the inclusion
of a dragon and a unicorn among the other animals
receiving blessings in the illustrations, but decided that the
mythical animals do belong, together with the religious
symbols a sharp-eyed child may spot in archetectural
details of the backdrop. The author invites everyone to
come and be at pease together, and to borrow and reproduce
one page of the book as a poster inviting animals and
their people to your local blessing ceremony.
––Phyllis Clifton

RELIGION & ANIMALS

January 1, 1997 Dylan Forest Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, Jan/Feb 1997:

Brigitte Bardot, 62, renowned as a film
star but working fulltime for more than twice as long
in animal protection, went to trial on December 18
for allegedly inciting ethnic bias by attacking amateur
sheep slaughter by Moslem immigrants to France in
commemoration of Eid al-Adha, the holiday marking
the end of the month in which pilgrimages are made
to Mecca. Chief defense witness is expected to be
Leila El Fourgi, president of the Tunisia SPA.
“Perhaps the spirit of God that breathed
forth life into the Earth was a lower animal,”
Cardinal John O’Connor told the devout in a
November 24 sermon at St. Patrick’s Cathedral, in
New York City, following up on Pope John Paul II’s
October declaration that the theory of evolution is
“more than just a hypothesis.” Both the Pope and the
Cardinal stopped short, however, of suggesting that
animals share with humans the dimensions of a soul.

BOOKS: CERTAIN POOR SHEPHERDS: A CHRISTMAS TALE

December 1, 1996 Dylan Forest Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, December 1996:

CERTAIN POOR SHEPHERDS: A CHRISTMAS TALE by Elizabeth Marshall Thomas
Simon & Schuster (Rockefeller Center, 1230 Ave. of the Americas, New York, NY 10020), 1996. 126 pp., hardcover, $15.00.

Most noted for The Hidden Life of
D o g s and The Tribe of Tiger, in which she
observed domestic dogs and cats as if they
were wildlife, Elizabeth Marshall Thomas in
Certain Poor Shepherds tells the Nativity
story from the perspective of Ima the goat and
Lila the dog, guardians of one of the flocks
who saw the bright star in the east––along
with a great flight of angels who introduced
them to eating acorns––and commenced their
four-day journey to Bethlehem while their
human master slept.

Religion & animals

October 1, 1996 Dylan Forest Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, October 1996:

Santerian priest Rigoberto Zamora, 59, of
Miami––whose credentials are disputed by some other prominent
Santerians––on July 30 accepted a plea bargain in settlement
of four counts of cruelty filed against him for animal sacrifices
performed to celebrate the 1993 Supreme Court ruling
that although the conditions of such sacrifice may be regulated,
forbidding animal sacrifice itself violates the constitutional
guarantee of freedom of religion. “During the two-hour ceremony
before TV cameras,” Raju Cebium of Associated Press
reported, “Zamora killed five roosters, three goats, two hens,
two pigeons, two guinea hens, and a lamb. Zamora switched
knives midway through the slaughter of one goat, ripped the
head off a pigeon, and slammed a guinea hen against the floor.”
Pleading no contest to one cruelty count, and pledging to
appeal, Zamora was sentenced by Dade County judge Victoria
Sigler to do 400 hours of community service at a Catholic home
for the aged. Objected Zamora, “To send me to a center run by
the Catholic Church,” which regards Santeria as heresy, “is to
violate my freedom of religion, and to force me to do hard
labor is an assault on my health.” Zamora said he is a diabetic,
and has heart disease.

BOOKS: American Nature Writing 1996 & The Soul of Nature

July 1, 1996 Dylan Forest Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, July 1996:

American Nature Writing 1996
selected by John A. Murray.
Sierra Club Books (730 Polk St., San Francisco, CA 94109), 1996.
300 pages. $15.00 paperback.

The Soul of Nature: Celebrating the Spirit of the Earth
edited by Michael Tobias and Georgianne Cowan.
Penguin Books (375 Hudson St., New York, NY 10014), 1996.
298 pages. $11.95 paperback.

A collection of 29 short features,
including a few poems, American Nature
Writing celebrates “the best American nature
writing” of the year. Contributors to this edition
include Jimmy Carter, E.O. Wilson,
Jennifer Ackerman, Frank Stewart, and Barry
Lopez, but the reputations of the authors
exceed the quality of the content. More sentimental
than either passionate or insightful,
American Nature Writing reads rather like a
Reader’s Digest anthology—condensed,
somewhat chirpy, a little bland.

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