ANIMAL PEOPLE is the
leading independent newspaper providing original investigative coverage
of animal protection worldwide. Founded in 1992, ANIMAL PEOPLE has
no alignment or affiliation with any other entity.
Editorial: National character
& the quality of compassion
Wildlife Josphat Ngonyo of Nairobi, Kenya, in 1999 founded Youth for Conservation
to clear poachers’ snares from the Kenyan national parks. In 2004
Ngonyo helped to create the Kenya Coalition for Wildlife Conservation,
including YfC, which persuaded Kenya President Mawi Kibaki to veto a bill
heavily backed by Safari Club International and USAid that would have
reopened sport hunting in Kenya, after a 27-year hiatus.
Novalis Yao of Abidjan, Ivory Coast, in 2000 formed Monde Animal En Passion,
in response to conditions at the Abidjan National Zoo, once among the
best in Africa but now a neglected ruin. While Yao cannot yet claim big
victories, he has continued his efforts for quite long enough to confirm
his dedication, under diffficult conditions, and has managed to build
a small but visible animal welfare movement where formerly there was none.
Educated, outgoing, articulate, and multilingual, both Ngonyo and Yao
could have sought personal fortune elsewhere long ago, had this been among
their ambitions.
Instead, their common goal is to improve African treatment of animals.
Ngonyo and Yao emphasize wildlife conservation, because the people of
Kenya and Ivory Coast have unique opportunities to conserve rare species
and enjoy the benefits of ecotourism, but they are also concerned about
dogs, cats, and livestock, and can explain to anyone who will listen how
improving the treatment of animals tends to improve the treatment of woman
and children too. As Yao put it, in conversation at the 2003 All Africa
Humane Education Summit in Cape Town, recognizing the rights of animals
where women are still routinely traded for cattle will automatically raise
the status of women, because women have only the status of animals.
Ngonyo and Yao each won a scholarship to attend the recent Compassion
In World Farming international conference on animal sentience in London.
Unfortunately, at almost the last minute Ngonyo was refused a visa and
Novalis was given an appointment for a visa interview only after the conference
had already started. Stumbling over stereotypes, British visa application
reviewers could not believe—as one of them wrote, in similar words—that
accomplished African gentlemen care enough about animal welfare to fly
to a conference in England and then promptly return home to projects that
pay them little or nothing.
Strong appeals on their behalf from CIWF and other animal groups did not
help.
Who
cares in Vietnam?
At
the CIWF conference, polling data presented jointly by the International
Fund for Animal Welfare and CIWF challenged any pretense by the British
to moral superiority over the Vietnamese, Chinese, and Koreans in basic
attitudes toward animals.
The British infrastructure of pro-animal laws, institutions, and educational
media is much farther developed, reflecting a 200-year head start. Neither
Vietnam, China, nor Korea had the political stability, the freedom of
speech, press, and association, or the economic wherewithal to host an
organized pro-animal movement of any kind until very recently. The oldest
humane organizations they have are respectively less than five, 15, and
25 years old.
Yet in all three nations, latent support for pro-animal activity appears
to have wanted only the opportunity to develop.
A MORI poll commissioned by IFAW with help from One Voice of France and
the Royal SPCA of Great Britain in late 2004 asked 1,000 Vietnamese, 1,000
Chinese, and 1,000 Koreans to indicate how strongly they agreed or disagreed
that humans have a moral duty to minimize animal suffering as much as
possible.
A CIWF-commissioned MORI poll in early 2005 asked the same question of
nearly 1,946 British citizens.
77% of the Vietnamese respondents strongly agreed; 16% generally agreed.
The next highest level of strong agreement, 58%, was in Britain. 43% of
Koreans strongly agreed, as did 30% of the Chinese.
Overall,
92% of Vietnamese respondents, 92% of Koreans, 91% of the British, and
90% of the Chinese accepted a human moral duty to minimize animal suffering.
Asked if the law should require humans to minimize animal suffering, 75%
of the Vietnamese strongly agreed, along with 60% of the British, 31%
of Koreans, and only 19% of the Chinese. But the gaps narrowed with general
agreement added in.
92% of British respondents endorsed the use of laws to reinforce the human
duty toward animals, as did 90% of the Vietnamese, 78% of Koreans, and
77% of the Chinese.
The data can be challenged. The Vietnamese and Korean samples were not
proportionately weighted by age, region, gender, income level, and educational
attainment of the respondents. The Chinese data was collected from Beijing,
Shanghai, Guangzhou, and Chengdu, a representative set of cities, but
was not otherwise balanced. Accordingly, the data is not verifiably representative
of each nation. It is also possible that some respondents told the pollsters
what they thought the pollsters wanted to hear.
Yet there are also external indicators that suggest the data could be
correct.
For example, 55% of Vietnamese and 47% of Koreans are Buddhist. Buddhism
recognizes a moral duty to prevent animal suffering, albeit much circumvented.
Commented IFAW and CIWF in a joint press release, “The surprisingly
strong pro-animal stance of the Chinese, Vietnamese and South Korean public
is in stark contrast to their governments’ actions on animal welfare.
There is only minimal welfare legislation in South Korea, frequently flouted.
In Vietnam there is none. Although China has wildlife protection laws,
Beijing decided in 2004 to delay introducing legislation protecting all
animals.”
The lack of legislation, however, hardly means nothing is happening.
On March 10, for example, the Vietnamese Ministry of Agriculture and Rural
Development and World Society for the Protection of Animals jointly announced
that they had agreed in February to “establish a national task force
for phasing out bear bile farms.” The agreement “outlines government
plans for registering and microchipping all bears in captivity and phasing
out bear-breeding on farms, and for strengthening the ban on taking bears
from the wild,” the announcement said.
WSPA
is also to develop a bear rescue center in Cat Tien National Park.
Representatives of 22 Chinese wildlife parks and zoos on March 12 agreed
at a conference in Kunming, Yunnan province, to discontinue feeding live
horses and cattle to captive lions, tigers, and other big cats. Three
more institutions, among a total of 30-plus, reportedly signed on within
the next week. Thus the agreement will apparently start with promised
compliance by two-thirds or more of the Chinese wildlife park and zoo
sector.
Once common in the U.S. and Europe, live feeding as entertainment at accredited
zoos ended by 1960, and was last documented in the U.S. at the non-accredited
Steel City Petting Zoo in Florida, closed by the USDA in 1996.
As in the U.S. and Europe, live feeding is on the way out in China because
surveys discovered an adverse response from the public. Zoo operators
promoted live feeding initially because attendance around the big cat
cages peaked at feeding time, when the cats were most active. Many zoos
found a secondary revenue source in selling poultry to visitors, to be
thrown to the big cats, or in charging an extra admission fee for visitors
to watch big cats killing large prey.
But such practices tend to attract warped thrill-seekers, who have little
actual interest in animals, and typically drive away people who care about
animals. In particular, live feeding scares away children—and their
parents. As overall attendance declined, zoo management eventually learned
to poll and pay attention to the feelings of non-visitors and one-time-only
visitors, albeit with limitations.
Also as occurred in the U.S. and Europe, Chinese zoos and wildlife parks
appear to be seeking a compromise that will let them keep their sadistic
clientele while winning back families and animal lovers.
“The agreement refers only to large livestock, specifically horses
and cattle,” e-mailed Royal SPCA East Asia senior program manager
Paul Littlefair. “It does not mention other species,” Littlefair
said, “so we should infer that pigs and goats, as well as poultry,
rabbits, and mice, will continue to be used.”
“As positive as it sounds, there are parts of this story which are
not as black and white as they seem,” agreed Animals Asia Foundation
founder Jill Robinson. “We spoke with a China Wildlife Conservation
Association official who clarified that, ‘The agreement among the
wild animal parks is an industry self-discipline protocol, not a law.’
Reports stating that reserves or zoos that break the pledge will lose
their operating licenses are not accurate.
“As there is no law or official regulation to protect animal welfare
in China, industry self-discipline is currently the only way to regulate
wild animal parks,” Robinson continued. “We are advised that
a zoo management regulation might be enacted later this year, which may
include content about animal welfare and possibly protection of birds
and small animals.”
By then the Chinese zoos and wildlife parks may learn, as their western
counterparts did, that there is no compromise between promoting and prohibiting
cruelty that will satisfy people who have decided for themselves that
cruelty is offensive.
Facing
cruelty
Live
feeding at zoos, also recently reported in Egypt, is only one issue exemplifying
a cross-cultural and almost universal ethical dilemma. Asian, western,
and Islamic cultures have in common that they are challenged, stressed,
and even destabilized by spreading recognition that cruelty to either
animals or humans is not wrong only when done for amusement, or as part
of producing food and clothing, but inherently wrong, in any context.
Throughout history, and perhaps throughout our evolution, leadership has
derived from the capacity of dominant individuals to inflict suffering
upon unsubmissive subordinates and outsiders. Legal justice emerged to
help limit and direct cruelty, not to ban it entirely.
Even in ethically advanced societies, which have halted public executions
and torture, dispensing justice remains inextricably linked to meting
out punishment. Punishment is still linked to dominance displays that
chimpanzees could understand. The use of rehabilitative treatment in place
of societal revenge is just a few generations old, and so imperfectly
developed that recidivism—the tendency of criminals to repeat crimes—still
sabotages most attempts to use it. Prolonged incarceration under harsh
conditions and the death penalty remain politically popular because they
at least protect society from recidivism.
Ethical and compassionate people tend to favor the most restrained applications
of punishment that promise to prevent crime, yet are unable—so far—to
devise methods of justice that succeed without making anyone suffer.
This dilemma is not newly recognized. The Hindu/Buddhist/Jain and Judeo/
Christian and Islamic morality systems each have addressed it through
the centuries by distinguishing in different ways between transgressions
against specific individuals or institutions, which tend to have tangible
effect, and transgressions against the stability and well-being of collective
society, which may have only potential cumulative effect, for example
gambling, intoxication, fornication, blasphemy, and idleness.
Transgressions against individuals and institutions are usually prosecuted
here-and-now, if the offenders can be apprehended. Trial and punishment
for transgressions against the social order may be reserved for the judgement
of a deity. The punishment may be as severe as eternity in hell or reincarnation
into a much lower life form, but the actual infliction of suffering is
deferred, in recognition of the limited human ability to see what harm
actually results from misdeeds which have no obvious or immediate victims.
In general, with many exceptions specific to time and place, the Hindu/Buddhist/
Jain morality systems allocate to criminal law what has material definition,
and to karma, or the fate of the individual soul, whatever is not materially
defined. Sins without specific material consequence tend to be punished
by public approbation. This may circumscribe social and economic standing
for generations. Nonetheless, Hindu, Buddhist, and Jain societies rarely
seek to prevent sins other than material crime through the use of criminal
penalties.
By contrast, the Judeo/Christian and Islamic religions are actually based
on extensions of the use of criminal law to try to prohibit activities
which may harm the soul. Especially in Judeo/Christian societies, the
social strictures upholding morality may be weak or inconsistent, but
laws exist to govern a broad range of conduct rarely formally regulated
under Buddhism and Hinduism.
The Hindu, Buddhist, and Jain religions have recognized a moral obligation
to prevent animal suffering for more than 2,500 years, and have encouraged
charity toward animals.
Yet, even though the early Buddhist rulers Asoka of India and Arahat Mahindra
of Sri Lanka enacted national animal protection laws before 250 B.C.,
animals in southern Asia have chiefly been protected by custom and public
opinion.
Where time, outside cultural influence, and the pressures of poverty have
eroded the meaning and moral force of the ancient pro-animal teachings,
there have usually been no enforceable laws to restrain the ruthless.
Live markets, eating dogs and cats, wildlife poaching and trafficking,
cockfighting, and other abusive practices have persisted for centuries
as the vices of conquerors and affluent oligarchs, whose ability to command
public cruelty has defined their privileged position.
Mosaic law, codified even earlier than Hindu, Buddist, and Jain teachings,
prohibited a variety of practices harmful to animals, and prescribed kosher
slaughter to try to minimize the suffering of animals who were to be eaten.
Though Mohammed incorporated most of the same teachings into Islam, only
hallal slaughter has received comparable emphasis, much separated from
the original context. Mainstream Christian theology all but excised any
concern for animals within a generation of separating from Judaism.
Paradoxically, because the laws of Judeo/Christian and Islamic cultures
have always addressed personal morality as well as actual crime, the distance
in Judeo/Christian and Islamic nations from culturally recognizing a virtue
in kindness to animals to proactively prohibiting cruelty toward animals
has usually been remarkably brief. In some nations, including modern Israel,
which started without a secular humane law, the transition has occurred
in less than one human lifetime.
Our own time, in the west, is seeing the gradual redefinition of cruelty
from a subject of only lightly reinforced personal morality, to a subject
of criminal law. This proceeds largely from growing recognition that cruelty
toward animals erodes social values.
Also important and gaining momentum is increasing recognition of animals
as sentient beings, who like humans possess what Bill of Rights framer
Thomas Jefferson termed “certain natural inalienable rights.”
While most humans stop short of conceding to animals the rights to life,
liberty, and pursuit of happiness, a right to not be tortured is perhaps
more broadly accepted for animals than for battlefield enemies and convicted
criminals.
That animals may have moral standing comparable or equal to that of humans
has been accepted in Asian philosophy to some extent for thousands of
years. Yet hardly anyone, human or animal, has enjoyed legal rights to
the extent that westerners recognize them.
The change underway in Asa is the transformation of theocracies, including
Communist goverments opeerating as quasi-state religions, into secular
states which recognize individual rights. The challenge for animal advocates
is to ensure that individual rights are extended to nonhumans, as well
as people, so that newly conferred human rights do not license and perpetuate
cruelties that most Asians disapprove of, do not participate in, and might
otherwise prohibit as recognition spreads that cruelty can be banned by
use of democratic law.
Claimed
rights in conflict
The
conflict between the extension of secular human rights and the effort
to establish basic animal rights is especially intense right now in South
Korea.
The underlying public issue is the demand for dog meat by older men, the
most privileged class in an oligarchic and patriarchal society. If the
dogs suffer in death, the consumers believe [contrary to science], their
meat will become suffused with adrenalin, and have aphrodisiacal value.
Less discussed, also causing horrific suffering, is the use of a tonic
for older women made by boiling cats alive.
These practices have long had the social status, or lack thereof, of vice.
The providers of dog and cat meat are an underclass, shunned by most people
yet protected from expulsion from society by their role in catering to
the rich and influential. Only about 6% of South Koreans either eat dogs
and cats or work in the dog and cat meat industry, but the consumers include
President Roh Moo-hyun, many other prominent politicians, and the owners
of big businesses, including some of the largest news media. This is approximately
the same status that sport hunting has in the U.S. and Britain.
While British hunters seek ways around the recently adopted national ban
on most forms of pack hunting, and are organizing in opposition to an
anticipated drive to ban captive bird shoots, U.S. hunters rush to enshrine
a “right to hunt” in state constitutions—usually succeeding,
despite their diminished numbers, just as British hunters forestalled
efforts to ban foxhunting for decades after opinion polls first showed
majority support for a ban.
In South Korea, where dog and cat meat sales have nominally been banned
under an unenforced law since 1991, the current guise for trying to legally
preserve the industry is a “consumer protection” bill approved
on March 9 after five months of review by the cabinet-level Ministry of
Office for Government Policy Coordination.
“The Korean government is presenting their attempt to legitimize
the dog and cat meat trade as a combination of protecting dogs and cats
with protecting public health and the environment,” explained International
Aid for Korean Animals founder Kyenan Kum. “You cannot protect dogs
and cats while developing a policy to hygienically control dog and cat
meat production. The Korean government has long argued that to reduce
cruelty to dogs and cats in the process of slaughter, they have to legalize
the dog and cat meat industries––but if they genuinely wanted
to reduce the cruelty to dogs and cats, all they had to do was to strengthen
and enforce the existing Animal Protection Law.”
While the dog-and-cat-eating debate raged, the Buddhist nun Jiyul Sunim
completed her fourth hunger strike since February 2003 in defense of the
endangered Mount Cheonseong clawed salamander and 29 other protected animal
species, whose habitat she believes will be jeopardized by the construction
of a railway tunnel. Her first strike lasted 38 days, her second for 45
days, her third for 58 days, and her fourth for 100 days. Each strike
followed a broken promise by government officials, resembling some of
the long series of broken promises about protecting dogs and cats.
Toward the end of Jiyul Sunim’s most recent hunger strike, her caretakers
turned away a visit from President Roh Moo-hyun.
Jiyul Sunim may be no closer to saving the clawed salamander et al, despite
her exposure of political mendacity, than dog-and-cat meat industry opponents
are to removing it from government protection. The South Korean government
has already heavily invested in building the tunnel. Far more than the
6% of Koreans who eat dogs and cats are likely to use it, as it involves
the most traveled intercity route in the nation.
What Jiyul Sunim has achieved is a dramatic reminder to Korean officialdom
that the 47% of Koreans who practice Buddhism are supposed to protect
all animal life, no matter how humble, and that many of the 49% who are
Christ-ian share an essentially compassionate if confused outlook.
Jiyul Sunim’s hunger strikes might not have been undertaken and might
not have won so much public sympathy if the species at risk had not been
endangered, and if the threat had been cruelty rather than extinction.
“Civilized
eating habits”
Around
the world, meat-eaters especially would like to maintain a “comfort
zone” distinction between the global acceptance, in principle, of
a species’ right to survive and the rights of individual animals
to not suffer. Throughout Southeast Asia, major branches of Buddhism have
struggled for millennia to rationalize not observing the strict vegetarianism
taught and practiced by the Buddha.
Still, a nation whose conscience can be awakened by the plight of a salamander
and the protests of a previously obscure rural nun may not be far from
recognizing an urgent moral duty to end the dog and cat meat industry.
Certainly the IFAW/CIWF poll data suggests so.
Across the Yellow Sea from the Korean peninsula, in southern China and
Vietnam, no laws exist against dog-eating, even on paper. Vietnamese consumption
of dogs, especially in the north, rivals Korean consumption. Vietnam forbids
eating cats and snakes, appreciating their role in controlling rodents,
but China eats more dogs than the rest of the world combined. Guangdong,
the only Chinese province where cats are often eaten, probably eats more
cats than the rest of the world—and these are only two of the species
suffering in the Guangdong live markets.
Yet there are hints that the Chinese and Vietnamese federal governments
are fed up with the commerce. The live markets of Guangdong and northern
Vietnam have in recent years spread Sudden Acute Respiratory Syndrome
and repeated outbreaks of the deadly avian flu H5N1. They are depleting
wildlife throughout Asia and even in parts of the U.S., where trappers
are close to extirpating turtles to meet export demand.
Though the live markets of Guangdong have documentedly sold dogs, cats,
and wildlife since the mid-14th century, their growth to present scale
and prominence is relatively recent, reflecting the societal economic
growth of the late 20th and early 21st centuries. The live markets are
visibly cruel, attract foreign criticism, and are a frequent embarrassment
to Beijing officials, who find the markets difficult to defend.
On November 2, 2004, the Chinese federal health ministry banned the slaughter
and cooking of civets for human consumption, to promote “civilized
eating habits,” reported the state-run Beijing Daily. The ban could
have been packaged as a disease control measure. As Associated Press observed,
“The announcement came a week after the government said 70% of civets
tested in Guangdong were carrying the SARS virus.” Yet the announcement
strongly indicated that civets are not believed to be the still unknown
original host of SARS.
With Guangdong civet consumption abruptly curtailed. Cuc Phuong National
Park near Hanoi, Vietnam, made a show of the export of three breeding
pairs of Owston’s civet to the Newquay Zoo, Thrigby Hall Wildlife
Gardens, and Paradise Wildlife Park in England.
This was a conservation measure, on behalf of an endangered regional civet
subspecies. But, like the Chinese ban on civet-eating, it was also a gesture
of recognition that some decision-makers saw the horrified global response
to the massacre of tens of thousands of civets in the 2003 SARS control
effort, and had perhaps had the same feelings about it.
Dog
meat farms spread rabies
Other
animals raised for the Guangdong live markets are still massacred in the
name of disease control. China has tried since early 2004 to limit the
culling of chickens and ducks by promoting vaccination, and has enjoyed
relative success, compared with other nations which have had widespread
cases.
But even though China is familiar with vaccination, officials are responding
quite differently to canine rabies, in a manner mixing traditional Communist
heavy-handedness toward dogs with hints that the goal might be to put
some dog meat producers out of business—if only to protect others,
who may be in greater political favor.
On March 15 the state-run Xinhua News Agency reported that there were
244 reported human rabies cases in western Guangdong in 2004, up 41% since
2003; that all dogs were being killed within a 2.5-kilometre radius of
any village where rabies occurred; and that 60,000 dogs were killed in
2004 to contain rabies outbreaks.
The initial public statements blamed rabies, and the killing, on careless
petkeepers. ANIMAL PEOPLE pointed out through ProMed, the moderated online
forum of the International Society for Infectious Diseases, that dogs
are not often kept as pets in Guangdong, but that Guangdong is the hub
of the Chinese dog meat industry, and that dogs raised for meat are exempt
from the anti-rabies vaccination requirement that is stringently enforced
against individual petkeepers.
These are points that ANIMAL PEOPLE has made repeatedly in recent years.
Reaching deep into China, ProMed was among the many online information
sources that cracked official secrecy about SARS and avian flu several
years ago. Perhaps the ANIMAL PEOPLE response had something to do with
the revised version of the Xinhua News Agency release that was distributed
just a few hours later.
This time an unnamed official with the Guangdong Provincial Bureau of
Health “said that poor oversight of dog-raising, increases in the
number of unregistered dogs, and fewer dogs being vaccinated all have
contributed to the spread of the epidemic.”
It was the first known admission by the Chinese government that producing
dogs for the live markets has a role in perpetuating the recurring Guangdong
rabies outbreaks.
