D. Grant Haynes

Our bucolic little world shattered

2009-10-27T21:12:07-07:00

(Published October 22, 2009, in local Eastern Washington newspaper.)

Dear Editor:

As a newcomer to Washington, I have been especially pleased to be close to the abundant wildlife of Lincoln County. We have regularly seen small herds of black-tail deer, large flocks of California Quail, and a myriad of other beautiful and harmless wild creatures near our dwelling place since arriving here in June.

Our hearts have been made happy and given solace through interaction with God’s wild creatures--an experience that is all too rare in 21st Century America.

But a pall descended on our world at dawn October 17 when the 2009 deer hunting season opened here.

Since, we have seen none of our timid animal friends with whom we had sought all summer and fall to establish rapport. There are no deer grazing behind our back fence now. And there are no deer in their usual haunts when we take our walks.

Nor have the flocks of exquisitely beautiful California Quail that had graced our lives each afternoon returned.I assume these creatures are either dead or in hiding because of the ghastly spectacles they witnessed over the weekend as hunters from throughout the state descended on Lincoln County to bag their limits in a barbaric ritual called "sport hunting".

The fall skies weep, as do we, that so many innocent expressions of love, beauty and goodness have been snuffed out by misguided men who find pleasure and sport in killing beings that have done them no harm.

Dixon Haynes

Dedicated to the hunters of North America

2009-10-17T18:01:00-07:00

"A little later in a quieter bend of the shore, I see ahead of me a bleeding, bedraggled blot on the edge of the white surf. As I approach, it starts warily to its feet. We look at each other. It is a wild duck, with a shattered wing. It does not run ahead of me like the longer-limbed gull. Before I can cut off its retreat, it waddles painfully from its brief refuge into the water.

The sea continues to fall heavily. The duck dives awkwardly, but with long knowledge and instinctive skill, under the fall of the first two inshore waves. I see its head working seaward. A long green roller, far taller--taller than my head, rises and crashes forward.

The black head of the water-logged duck disappears. This is the way wild things die, without question, without knowledge of mercy in the universe, knowing only themselves and their own pathway to the end. I wonder, walking further up the beach, if the man who shot that bird will die as well."

Loren Eiseley

The Night Country

As Ye Sow, So Shall Ye Reap

2009-05-01T00:49:00-07:00

Arrogant indifference to animal suffering has a price tag

Human beings have brought swine influenza, avian influenza, and Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy, otherwise known as "mad cow disease", upon themselves by their cruel and callous mistreatment of animals.

Agribusiness' farming factories in which animals spend their lives in crowded cages, pens, enclosures, and pigsties, knowing only their own excrements on their way to slaughter, are a blight on the collective soul of humanity. We all have a frightful karmic debt to pay, at best.

Those specifically involved in or supporting such vile and miscreant abuses of our brothers in the animal kingdom through either occupational choices or eating habits should not complain at the inconvenience and pain diseases spawned in the spiritual darkness of the factory farm and the slaughter house killing line visit upon them.

D. Grant Haynes

You have just dined, and however scrupulously the slaughterhouse is concealed in the graceful distance of miles, there is complicity.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

(From The Huffington Post, May 1, 2009)

Our Hunger for Cheap Meat Has Created Swine Flu

By Johann Hari, Columnist, London Independent

April 30, 2009

A swelling number of scientists believe swine flu has not happened by accident. No: they argue this global pandemic - and all the deaths we are about to see - is the direct result of our demand for cheap meat. So is the way we produce our food really making us sick as a pig?

At first glance, this seems wrong. All through history, viruses have mutated, and sometimes they have taken nasty forms that scythe through the human population. This is an inescapable reality we just have to live with, like earthquakes and tsunamis. But the scientific evidence increasingly suggests that we have unwittingly invented an artificial way to accelerate the evolution of these deadly viruses - and pump them out across the world. They are called factory farms. They manufacture low-cost flesh, with a side dish of viruses to go.

To understand how this happens, you have to compare two farms. My grandparents had a pig farm in the Swiss mountains, with around twenty swine at any one time. What happened there if, in the bowels of one of their pigs, a virus mutated and took on a deadlier form? At every stage, the virus would meet stiff resistance from the pigs' immune systems. They were living in fresh air, on the diet they evolved with, and without stress - so they had a robust ability to fight back. If the virus did take hold, it would travel only as far as the sick hog could walk. So if the virus would then have around twenty other pigs to spread and mutate in - before it would hit the end of its own evolutionary path, and die off.

If it was a really lucky, plucky virus, it might make it to market - where it would come up against more healthy pigs living in small herds. It has little opportunity to fan out across a large population of pigs or evolve a strain that could be transmitted to humans.

Now compare this to what happens when a virus evolves in a modern factory farm. In most swine farms today, six thousand pigs are crammed snout-to-snout in tiny cages where they can barely move, and are fed for life on an artificial pulp, while living on top of cesspools of their own stale faeces.

Instead of having just twenty pigs to experiment and evolve in, the virus now has a pool of thousands, constantly infecting and reinfecting each other. The virus can combine and recombine again and again. The ammonium from the waste they live above burns the pigs' respiratory tracts, making it easier yet for viruses to enter them. Better still, the pigs' immune systems are in free-fall. They are stressed, depressed, and permanently in panic, making them far easier to infect. There is no fresh air or sunlight to bolster their natural powers of resistance. They live in air thick with viral loads, and they are exposed every time they breathe in.

As Dr. Michael Greger, director of Public Health and Animal Agriculture at the Humane Society of the United States, explains: "Put all this together, and you have a perfect storm environment for these super-strains. If you wanted to create global pandemics, you'd build as many of these factory farms as possible. That's why the development of swine flu isn't a surprise to those of us in public health community. Back in 2003, the American Public Health Association - the oldest and largest in world - called for a moratorium of factory farming because they saw something like this would happen. It may take something as serious as a pandemic to make us realize the real cost of factory farming."

Many of the detailed studies of factory farms that have been emerging in the past few years reinforce this argument. Dr Ellen Silbergeld is Professor of Environmental Health Sciences at Johns Hopkins University. She tells me her detailed on-the-ground studies led her to conclude there is "very much" a link from factory farms to the new, more powerful forms of flu we are experiencing. "Instead of a virus only having one spin of the roulette wheel, it has thousands and thousands of spins, for no extra cost. It drives the evolution of new diseases."

Until yesterday, we could only speculate about the origins of the current H1N1 virus killing human beings - but now we know more. The Center for Computational Biology at Columbia University has studied the virus and found that it is not a new emergence of a triple human-swine-bird flu virus. It is a slight variant on a virus we have seen before. We can see its family tree - and its daddy was a virus that evolved in the artificial breeding ground of a vast factory farm in North Carolina.

Did this strain evolve, too, in the same circumstances? Already, the evidence is suggestive, although far from conclusive. We know that the city where this swine flu first emerged - Perote, Mexico - contains a massive industrial pig farm, and houses 950,000 pigs. Dr Silbergeld adds: "Factory farms are not biosecure at all. People are going in and out all the time. If you stand a few miles down-wind from a factory farm, you can pick up the pathogens easily. And, like in the US, the manure from these farms isn't disposed of according to any regulations, even though we know viruses can remain alive in it for more than a month. They can just sit in cesspools. The viruses can be transmitted from there by flies."

It's no coincidence that we have seen a sudden surge of new viruses in the past decade at precisely the moment when factory farming has intensified so dramatically. For example, between 1994 and 2001, the number of American pigs that live and die in vast industrial farms in the US spiked from 10 percent to 72 percent. Swine flu had been stable since 1918 - and then suddenly, in this period, went super-charged.

How much harm will we do to ourselves in the name of cheap meat? We know that bird flu developed in the world's vast poultry farms. And we know that pumping animal feed full of antibiotics in factory farms has given us a new strain of MRSA. It's a simple, horrible process. The only way to keep animals alive in such dirty conditions is to pump their feed full of antibiotics. But this has triggered an arms race with bacteria, which start evolving to beat the antibiotics - and emerge as in the end as pumped-up, super-charged viruses invulnerable to our medical weapons. This system gave birth to a new kind of MRSA that now makes up 20 percent of all human infections with the virus. Sir Liam Donaldson, the British government's Chief Scientist, warns: "Every inappropriate use in animals or agriculture [of antibiotics] is potentially a death warrant for a future patient."

Of course, agribusinesses is desperate to deny all this is happening: their bottom line depends on keeping this model on its shaky trotters. But once you factor in the cost of all these diseases and pandemics, cheap meat suddenly looks like an illusion.

We always knew that factory farms were a scar on humanity's conscience - but now we know they are a scar on our health. If we carry on like this, bird flu and swine flu will be just the beginning of a century of viral outbreaks. As we witness a global pandemic washing across the world, we need to shut down these virus factories - before they shut down even more human lives.

Travis died for your sins

2009-03-18T16:11:00-07:00

Chimp Shot Dead After Attacking Woman

HARTFORD, Conn., Feb. 17, 2009 (AP)

Travis the chimpanzee, a veteran of TV commercials, was the constant companion of a lonely Connecticut widow who fed him steak, lobster and ice cream. He could eat at the table, drink wine from a stemmed glass, use the toilet, and dress and bathe himself.

He brushed his teeth with a Water Pik, logged on to a computer to look at photos and channel-surfed television with the remote control.

But on Monday, the wild animal in him came out with a vengeance.

The 200-pound animal viciously mauled a friend of his owner before being shot to death by police... .
____________________________

Chimpanzees have gotten too much bad press recently.

I'm here to defend these sad, misunderstood, maligned, and endangered creatures of the African bush.

We all read in horror the news story referenced above in which a 55-year-old Connecticut woman was severely mauled by a 15-year-old common chimpanzee (Pan troglodytes) named Travis.

The unfortunate woman was visiting the animal's 70-year-old owner when the inexplicable attack occurred.

Travis was shot to death by a police officer that had been called to aid the victim of the savage attack.

And as if the Travis story didn't represent enough negative publicity for chimpanzees in a single month, several weeks after Travis was destroyed, animal behavior researchers in Sweden achieved great notoriety with a news story about Santino, a 30-year-old chimpanzee in a zoo there who had been seen gathering a cache of stones each day to hurl at zoo visitors.

Santino's behavior was said to offer the first proof that chimpanzees are capable of thinking ahead--of planning actions in advance and pursuing such plans when the time is right.

Uncaring and unthinking news editors dealt with Santino's story, like Travis', in a largely unsympathetic manner.

There were these dark, hairy, and funny looking "others" who were attacking innocent humans.

One of them--Santino in Sweden--actually had the temerity to devise a scheme for throwing stones at his tormentors when they visited the Furuvik Zoo where he is held.

How dare he!

In truth, Travis should not have been living as a quasi-human in the home of a human where he had to be kept in a secure steel cage the majority of the time. Travis was not a human. He was a wild animal native to equatorial Africa--one in whom instinctual behavior eventually overrode his unnatural and learned lifestyle as an almost-human creature in a Connecticut home.

Likewise, Santino, also a common chimpanzee, is a wild animal that should live on a warm African plain rather than in cold and damp Sweden. Santino should not be imprisoned in a zoo where humans may point and giggle about his appearance and antics for the rest of his likely 50-plus-year life.

Nor should young chimpanzees that are forced by the advertising and entertainment industries to pose for "comical" but demeaning photos be so misused and abused. Greeting cards, children's books, films, and ads featuring chimpanzees are in poor taste--an abomination to sensitive and compassionate persons everywhere.

Chimpanzees are highly intelligent creatures--man's closest relatives, genetically speaking. Is it any wonder that they occasionally feel enough pain, chagrin, humiliation, and confusion while in captivity at the hands of humans to strike back?

Who could blame them? One can only marvel that such instances of chimpanzee rage are not more common.

Man's fellow earth creatures are not here merely for man's pleasure, man's use, or man's abuse. They are separate tribes entirely with an inherent right to live their lives in dignity--as free from pain, fear, humiliation, and angst as possible.

I disapprove of all wild animal captivity. It is wrong and it is immoral.

More information on chimpanzees can be found at: http://www.savethechimps.org/chimps_facts.asp

D. Grant Haynes

PETA's new hard-hitting ad causes stir

2009-02-17T15:56:47-07:00

This clip should be required viewing for every meat eater in the United States of America.

D. Grant Haynes

http://www.peta.org/content/standalone/VeggieLove/Default.aspx