This is extent of interaction allowed between piglets and their mothers “living” on modern factory farms:

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After January’s “fur hag” post, I’d like follow up with several examples of anti-fur ads that I like - albeit, with a few caveats.*

While I’m rather ambivalent when it comes to PETA’s nude “I’d Rather Go Naked Than Wear Fur,” “Turn Your Back on Fur,” (and similar) campaigns, I quite like anti-fur ads which depict fur as the bloody, murderous mess that it is. (In theory, anyway…hence the forthcoming caveats.)

For example, this recent series from IndyAct:

Each ad features a thin, white, conventionally attractive, stylishly dressed woman, decked out in a fur coat which once belonged to various animals. The knife-wielding women are covered in blood spatters - bright red blood, everywhere. The woman in the first ad is, inexplicably, rubbing the knife along her chin, as if in contemplation of fellatio (?). Needless to say, I prefer the other two ads in the series.

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Last week, I started reading Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson’s The Pig Who Sang to the Moon: The Emotional World of Farm Animals. Well, not so much “reading” as “listening to the audiobook.” (Hey, how else am I supposed to occupy myself while I clean the house?) I read Masson’s When Elephants Weep a long time ago - back when I was a newbie vegetarian - and enjoyed it immensely. I figured I’d like The Pig Who Sang to the Moon as well, and so far, so good.

Masson structured the book so that each chapter covers a different species of farmed animals: pigs, chickens, sheep, goats, cows and ducks, in that order. He juxtaposes information about the animals’ emotional lives - thoughts, feelings, sentience, capacity for joy and sorrow, etc. - with the brutal reality for the vast majority of these “owned” animals. Treated like milk and meat machines, dehumanized and objectified, their individuality obscured and their needs ignored, farmed animals suffer the worst of humanity’s whims and wants.

Though I’m only about a third of the way in, a theme which keeps resurfacing is the extra-special abuses (the collective) we mete out to the female members of the species. With brutal precision, farmers routinely turn the reproductive systems of female animals against them, finding newer and more callous ways in which to exploit them as science and technology allow. This isn’t to suggest that males don’t suffer as well - they do. But their suffering isn’t as prolonged or extensive as that of their female counterparts; veal calves, for example, are tortured for sixteen weeks and then, “mercifully,” (relatively speaking) slaughtered. Their sisters, meanwhile, are exploited as baby and milk machines for three to four years, after which they become ground beef. First, their babies and their babies’ food is stolen from them; and, finally, their lives are snatched away as well.

By the mere fact of their sex, sows, hens, ewes, does, nannies, cows and heifers - not to mention mares, bitches, jennies, jills, etc. - are ripe for especially brutal and prolonged exploitation. Oftentimes, this involves a constant cycle of pregnancy, birth, nursing and baby-napping, culminating with the female’s own death when she’s no longer able to breed or “produce” to her “owner’s” satisfaction.

Certainly, we recognize that the theft of a mother’s child is an atrocity when the victims are human mothers and children. At the same time, we argue that non-human animals deserve no rights because they are mere brutes, “lesser” beings, ruled by instinct and instinct alone. Yet, what is the drive to reproduce and parent if not an evolutionary instinct? And if we follow the popular line of reasoning - i.e., animals are creatures of instinct - does it not stand to reason that the maternal instinct is especially powerful in non-human animals?

100 million pigs are birthed, raised and slaughtered for “pork” annually - just in the United States. 100 million piglets are stolen from their mothers. Mothers who, without a doubt, grieve for their disappeared babies. These poor mothers are forced to relive the trauma over and over, as each new litter is stolen from them. This is what I mean when I say that a female’s - a mother’s - suffering must surely be the most painful to bear.

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This C. David Coats quote (from the preface to his 1991 book, Old MacDonald’s Factory Farm) has been floating around the animal rights blogspherz for a few weeks now. While I think Coats is dead-on in his analysis, his choice of phrasing strikes me as a little…curious, shall we say.

Take a look:

Isn’t man an amazing animal? He kills wildlife - birds, kangaroos, deer, all kinds of cats, coyotes, beavers, groundhogs, mice, foxes, and dingoes - by the millions in order to protect his domestic animals and their feed. Then he kills domestic animals by the billions and eats them. This in turn kills man by the millions, because eating all those animals leads to degenerative - and fatal - health conditions like heart disease, kidney disease, and cancer. So then man tortures and kills millions more animals to look for cures for these diseases. Elsewhere, millions of other human beings are being killed by hunger and malnutrition because food they could eat is being used to fatten domestic animals. Meanwhile, some people are dying of sad laughter at the absurdity of man, who kills so easily and so violently, and once a year sends out a card praying for “Peace on Earth.”

In the course of his patriarchy blaming, Coats assumes the language of the very patriarchy he’s indicting. Specifically, he continually employs variants of the term mankind when he’s actually referring to humankind: man is an amazing animal; he slaughters wildlife so that he can raise and eat “food” animals; man suffers from dietary-induced health conditions, which leads man to torture millions of “lab” animals in search of cures for these self-inflicted illnesses, and so on.

In fact, Coats only switches from androcentric to gender-neutral terms near the end of the paragraph - when he transitions from describing the actions of the oppressor (man) to the consequences of these actions on other human animals. To wit: “millions of other human beings are being killed by hunger and malnutrition”; “[m]eanwhile, some people are dying of sad laughter” (”at the absurdity of man,” natch).

Possibly, this is an unintentional example of casual sexism - i.e., Coats accidentally employed largely androcentric verbiage when writing this preface. Since this isn’t primarily a feminist blog*, allow me to explain why Coats’s choice of terminology is problematic. By using language which explicitly refers to men - necessarily, at the exclusion of women - we erase women from the public sphere, from our written and oral histories, from our cultural narratives. These seemingly innocuous, male-specific terms have very real, very harmful practical consequences. Language shapes the way we think; words matter. In eliminating women from our discourse, so too do we eliminate them from our consciousness - shoving them from the public (political) to the private (domestic) sphere. “Man,” “mankind” and the like simply are not inclusive, universal terms for “men and women.” Nor is “convenience” an excuse - it’s not very hard to use “humankind” in place of “man” or “mankind,” “people” in place of “men,” etc.

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Valentines Day? Meh. I’ve never been very big on the holiday. Through most of high school, I was boyfriend-less, and thus predictably unimpressed with February 14th. The husband and I have celebrated it on and off over the years, but mostly in a half-assed kind of way: veg*n chocolates here, a dinner in there. One problem I’ve always had with V-Day is the idea of forced, scheduled romanticism. Why should the Mr. and I only go on dates or surprise one another with gifts on February 14th, eh? And why do so on a day in which the prices are all jacked up and the theaters and restaurants, obscenely crowded?

Additionally, in the few years since my budding feminism has blossomed into a thorny, black, man-hating rose, I’ve actively resisted engaging in a commercialized, wasteful and largely heteronormative holiday. Diamonds? Roses? Tacky Bandit Bears? Bargained sex? IBTP.

So, in keeping with my previous re- evaluation and -imagining of the wintry holidays, I’ve been thinking about celebrating Valentines Day in a different way. While I try to pamper my furkids - i.e., my dogs - on a daily basis, I thought it might be fun to celebrate them this Saturday. After all, there is no doggeh equivalent of “Mother’s Day” or “Grandparent’s Day” - so why not transform a lackluster holiday into it?

There are many ways you can toss Valentines Day to the dogs (or cats, rats, gerbils, pigs…whatever species your kiddos belong to). Dogs Deserve Better, for example, holds an annual Valentines Day card drive for chained dogs. During “Have a Heart for Chained Dogs Week,” Valentines - complete with informational brochures, coupons for dog food, etc. - are delivered to the “owners” of chained dogs, with the ultimate goal of freeing these animals and bringing them back into the home. You can donate money to fund the effort, or volunteer by submitting the addresses of homes that have chained dogs, creating or delivering Valentines, and gathering donations of coupons and such. If your heart belongs to a species other than canine, you can donate your time or money to help a local or species-specific organization on or around the 14th.

As for your own furkids, here are four ways you can pamper them this Saturday. Since I’ve got five dogs, these are all canine-specific, but you can adjust accordingly.

1. Take your dog for a walk or hike. Set some time aside for a leisurely stroll, walk, run or hike - or some combination thereof - and let your dog lead the way. Allow her to walk you, wherever she chooses to go (within reason, of course). If she wants to spend five minutes sniffing and marking that tree at the corner of the street, let her. It’s her day, remember? Just enjoy her company, the beautiful weather, the sights and sounds.

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I haven’t been up to blogging lately (for reasons explained below), so here’s yet another crosspost from easyVeganInfo. Never leave your dog/cat/baby/child unattended in a vehicle, people.

Sorry for the lack of posts this week, y’all. I’ve been sick since Monday night, and feel ill-equipped to do much more than the daily link roundups. I imagine that the maxim against blogging while drunk includes blogging while drunk on NyQuil. Anywho, I have a number of post ideas on the back burner, so hopefully I’ll be coherent enough by mid-week next week to resume my regular blogging schedule.

Until then, did anyone happen to catch the latest installment of ABC News’ What Would You Do? Basically, it’s a hidden camera type show, wherein ABC News sets up various discomfiting situations in order to determine how the observers stooges will respond. For example, one segment that got some play on the feminist blogs involved a couple (of actors) who were seemingly out at a bar on a first date. When the woman excused herself to the restroom, the man (quite obviously) slipped something in her drink. Cue the crazy.

I only caught the last twenty minutes or so Tuesday night’s episode, but that was more than enough to make me wish I hadn’t. In the last segment, “Dog Left Inside a Hot Car,” a large, fluffy Golden Retriever is left inside a car parked on a suburban street on a hot summer (spring?) day. (The car actually has a hidden A/C unit cranked, and the dog’s trainer is lying on the backseat floor, covered by a blanket.) The windows are cracked so the dog’s barks are audible, and the dog’s “owner” walks to and from the car several times in order to see whether observers will confront him. Strategically placed hidden cameras record passerby reactions.

Unfortunately, ABC News doesn’t appear to allow embedding (grrrr!), so here’s the part where I send you to their website to watch the video.

So, what are your thoughts? How do you think the passerby handled the situation? Did the results exceed your expectations, or fall short? And wtf about those firefighters, eh?

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Via ecorazzi, singer Neko Case of The New Pornographers has persuaded her record label to donate $5 to Best Friends Animal Society every time a blogger links to her new single, ‘People Got a Lotta Nerve.’ So link, people!

Of Best Friends, Neko says:

“Best Friends took the Michael Vick dogs,” Case points out. “That’s a big deal because a lot of supposed animal welfare organizations like PETA — who can blow me — said you should euthanize the dogs immediately. But it’s not the dogs’ fault that they were fighting dogs — they’ve been abused. Pit bulls are muscular and big, but they’re not man-eaters.”

By the by, of the 49 Vick pit bulls, only one was deemed too vicious to save and was killed. Subsequently, 25 were placed in foster homes and/or adopted, and 22 found permanent sanctuary at Best Friends. Those 47 lives might be a drop in the ocean to PETA, but their abuse makes them no less deserving of life than the “food” or “fur-bearing” animals PETA typically focuses on. More so than their “naked ads,” their stance on the Vick dogs, as well as their forays into animal rescue and “adoption,” has been and will likely remain an objection of epic proportions that I have with PETA.

PETA, I might add, is an animal welfare group - not an animal rights group. Yes, there’s a difference - and it’s a biggie.

(At the most fundamental level, they appear to support Peter Singer’s philosophy of utilitarianism, which is a form of “progressive animal welfarism” - not animal rights. See also: PETA’s support of breed-specific legislation; their continued insistence that killing the Vick dogs would have been the right thing to do; and their “humane” killing of shelter animals rather than spend the time, money and effort to rehome them.)

And can I just say that I also f—ing love Neko for correctly identifying PETA as a welfare group? f—ing love her, I do!

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Of all PETA’s campaigns, I think I find the “fur hag” meme most offensive. While feminists can (and do) disagree on whether nudity and porn can ever be empowering for women, “fur hag” is a rather obvious gender-based slur, and draws upon a number of age-old stereotypes about women - which PETA further elucidates with their “fur hag” artwork.

To be fair, I have no idea whether PETA actually invented the term “fur hag” - but they’ve certainly been quite influential in launching “fur hag” into the mainstream. Wherever fur-wearing celebs are trashed - on gossip blogs, in fashion show protests, or even on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, “fur hag” is inevitably bandied about as an insult. Oftentimes by other women, who apparently see nothing sexist about denigrating women they dislike with misogynist slurs.

Let’s start by looking at the word “hag.”

Dictionary.com defines “hag” as:

1. an ugly old woman, esp. a vicious or malicious one.
2. a witch or sorceress.
3. a hagfish.

The first definition is obviously problematic: a hag is “an ugly old woman, esp. a vicious or malicious one.” While I have no qualms about calling people (women and men) who wear fur “vicious” or “malicious,” the term “hag” also attacks the fur wearer’s physical appearance and gender - a “hag” is “an ugly old woman.” In fact, the primary aspect of this definition involves appearance and gender - a “hag” is “an ugly old woman,” especially [but not necessarily] “a vicious or malicious one.” “Vicious” and “malicious” are somewhat extraneous to this definition; a “hag,” then, is chiefly “an ugly old woman.”

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Oh, yays! Today marks the 36th anniversary of Roe v. Wade - and it’s also the fourth annual Blog for Choice Day!

Over at easyVegan.info, I spent quite a bit of time examining reproductive rights as it relates to animal advocacy, but I fear I only scratched the surface. Volumes can be - have been! - written about the exploitation of women’s and non-human animals’ sexuality separately; methinks we’d need an entire encyclopedia set to fully examine the parallels and intersections between the two together.

For example, I didn’t even touch upon Nestle’s exploitation of new mothers in impoverished nations by convincing them that unaffordable, dairy-based formula is better for their babies than mother’s milk; dairy-based formula, of course, necessarily involves the exploitation of female cows.

Anyhow, this year’s topic is “What is your top pro-choice hope for President Obama and/or the new Congress?” Easy, peasy as (vegan) pie!

I have so many hopes, that it’s hard to choose just one. If forced, I’d have to get vague: Be progressive in words and actions.

But that doesn’t make for a very interesting post, so instead I’ll name my most immediate pro-choice hope for Obama: Repeal the Global Gag Rule. While this is only one of many pro-choice hopes I have for the Obama administration, I would love for it to be the first he enacts - because in so doing, he’ll send a strong, clear, pro-choice message, not just to the nation, but to the world.

Also known as The Mexico City Policy, the Global Gag Rule is a policy which

requires non-governmental organizations to “agree as a condition of their receipt of [U.S.] federal funds” that they will “neither perform nor actively promote abortion as a method of family planning in other nations”. The policy has exceptions for abortions done in response to rape, incest, or life-threatening conditions.

Referrals to abortion providers - indeed, even broaching the subject of abortion - qualifies as “actively promot[ing] abortion.”

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Via the Lantern Books blog, I learned that author/activist Hillary Rettig - whose book, The Lifelong Activist, I had the pleasure of reviewing a few years back - donated a kidney, unbidden, to a complete stranger.

She details her story over at The GirlieGirl Army, in a humorous post titled “Kidney Karmarama, or… How My Kidney Found Mr. Right”:

What’s the awesomest gift you can give someone? Their life back, right?

That’s what I had been thinking for a while. And so, I had been looking into donating a kidney. From my research I knew that the surgery was really safe (only 2/10,000 fatality rate, lower than for appendectomies), and that you can survive perfectly well with just one kidney. Really what you’re looking at is a bit of inconvenience in exchange for…saving someone’s life.

Sign me up!

My research eventually led me to a popular site called matchingdonors.com, and even though I knew what I was going to find there, I was NOT prepared. It’s like a dating site, except the personal ads are all from people begging you to save their lives by giving them a kidney. So it’s full of messages like:

“I’m 40 years old and want to live to see my kids grow up.”

“I’m 60 years old and hoping to live to attend my grandson’s graduation.”

“I’m 25 years old and just want the chance to live a normal life.”

Heartbreaking doesn’t begin to describe it. Most of these people were on dialysis, where, three times a week, you sit for hours hooked up to a machine that does the kidney-work of filtering out waste from your blood. Dialysis is, at best, a mixed blessing: it keeps you alive, but totally screws up your life and doesn’t even work all that well. Most dialysis patients are weak and sick all the time, and die within a few short years.

Once I saw the matching donors ads, I knew I would have to donate - how can you turn someone away when you’ve seen their face and heard their desperate story? In fact, I wished I had a thousand extra kidneys to donate. But I only had one, so how to choose?

Lots of the people self-identified as animal lovers, with some including photos of themselves with their companion animals in their ads. As a vegan and animal/veg activist I knew I would definitely want to donate to one of them. And then I came across an ad without a picture that included this text:

“I am a retired Veterinarian from Colorado. My wife and I started a no-kill animal shelter 20 years ago to give animals a second chance at life. I would like a second chance too. We have invested everything to help save the animals.”

My kidney starting singing sweet songs of love, having found its dream recipient. His name is Bill Suro, and the shelter he and his wife Nanci started in Denver is called MaxFund. They save sweeties like Millie, a dog who was found in New Mexico with anemia, a fused spine, grossly infected back feet, and (rage alert) BB shots embedded throughout her body. Many shelters would have euthanized her, but at Maxfund she got all the medical help she needed and is now whizzing around in a rollie cart! (See her story here; joyful weeping alert.)

So I called Bill and offered to donate.

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