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JULY/AUGUST 2005
Books
Clara’s Grand Tour
by Glynis Ridley
Atlantic Monthly Press
(841 Broadway, New York, NY 10003), 2004.
222 pages, hardcover. $22.00.
General Howe’s Dog
by Caroline Tiger
Penguin
Group (375 Hudson St., New York, NY 10014), 2005.
192 pages, hardcover. $18.95.
Historical scholars Glynis Ridley and Caroline Tiger
each happened across an intriguing mention of an animal while investigating
other events of the mid-18th century. Each reconstructed the story of
the animal, as best she could from surviving documentation. Each produced
a book about her findings, with remarkably different results.
Ridley produced an award-winning account of the travels and influence
of a young female Indian rhinoceros, Clara, whose mother was killed by
hunters in Assam, India, circa 1738-1739. Hauled overland to Calcutta,
Clara was raised to adulthood in the home of Dutch East India Company
director J.A. Sichterman, initially as a household pet. Outgrowing her
quarters, Clara was sold in early 1741 to Dutch sea captain Douwemont
Van der Meer. Van der Meer sailed to Leiden with her.
From July 1741 until Clara died suddenly in London in 1758, Van der Meer
exhibited Clara, visiting virtually all of the leading cities from Versailles
to Vienna, Naples to Berlin.
Clara may have traveled farther in her lifetime than any other rhino ever.
Other rhinos were brought to Europe before and after her, but no others
lived nearly as long, were seen in as many places, or were depicted as
often in art and literature.
Traces of Clara are easily recognized, because before Clara toured Europe,
rhinos for more than 200 years were almost always drawn, sculpted, or
described from Albrecht Durer’s woodcut of a rhino in armor, published
in 1515. Clara became the model for a whole new view of rhinos, continuing
to attract creative attention even after her horn fell off during a visit
to Italy.
Ridley discovered enough of Van der Meer’s sensational promotional
literature about Clara to establish a significant discrepancy between
the allegedly fierce beast described to the public and the rather friendly
animal captured in art.
Van der Meer exhibited Clara at a time when the prevailing modes of animal
exhibition were still royal menageries and small traveling shows. Bear-baiting
and other forms of mortal combat were common, but as Clara was one of
a kind, far too valuable to risk, Van der Meer resisted opportunities
to pit her against supposed natural foes, even while attracting customers
by portraying her as a serial killer of elephants.
Neither the modern circus nor zoos of educational pretensions existed
yet. Although Van der Meer’s exhibitions anticipated modern circuses
in many respects, including in his invention of a heavy-duty circus wagon
for Clara, he also anticipated the zoos of today in purporting to teach
viewers about nature and the world beyond Europe. The earliest drawing
of Clara posed her with a mounted human skeleton, each presented as an
object of scientific curiosity.
Tiger enjoyed much less success in trying to dig up the story of “George
Washington, the Battle of Germantown, and the Dog Who Crossed Enemy Lines.”
Revolutionary troops found a dog belonging to British commander William
Howe; George Washington sent him home. Neither his name nor anything else
about him was ever recorded.
Tiger strives mightly to fill out her story with background information
about Howe, who was friendly with Washington and skeptical of the war,
and Washington, whose famed fondness of his own dogs did not extend to
all dogs.
Washington allowed his dogs to roam indoors long before most dogs enjoyed
house privileges, but was most interested in dogs as hunting companions,
and was an avid breeder in the era when dog pedigrees first became established.
In 1787, trying to stop predation on sheep, Washington ordered that all
stray dogs around his farm should be killed, and forbade his slaves from
keeping dogs.
More might have been done with the animal aspects of General Howe’s
Dog, but––apparently aiming at the school library market––Tiger
avoids any discussion that might be controversial. The result is that
Tiger’s analysis is as thin as the factual basis that inspired the
book. ––M.C.
One Small Step:
America’s
First Primates in Space
by David Cassidy & Patrick Hughes
Penguin Group (375 Hudson Street,
New York, NY 10014), 2005.
135 pages, paperback
plus DVD documentary. $19.95.
One Small Step presents the history of the early
U.S. space program, focusing on the “chimponauts,” who preceded
humans into orbit.
Then-U.S. President Dwight Eisenhower had one question, according to David
Cassidy and Patrick Hughes: “If I put humans in space, are they
going to die? Will their hearts stop beating? Will their blood stop flowing?
Or will they be so sick that they just can’t do anything?”
Video documentarian Cassidy’s investigation, turned into a book
by Hughes, reveals not only how many animals were sacrificed in the cause
of space exploration, but also how carefully their suffering was concealed
from the public. Chimpanzees grimacing in agony were depicted by the Air
Force-compliant media as “smiling with enjoyment.”
The policy of propagandising the space program, glossing over problems,
eventually contributed to the explosions of the space shuttles Challenger
in 1986 and Columbia in 2003, of which California physicist Richard Feynman
wrote: “Truth should never be subordinated to public relations because
although you can fool the people, you can’t fool Nature.”
Rhesus macaques were shot into space to die, killed on impact if the rocket
returned to earth or drowned in the sea if it sank. Others were incinerated
on re-entry or atomised when the rockets exploded.
Wild chimpanzees were “procured” from Africa to better simulate
human astronauts. In 1961 only a handful of then-small and obscure anti-vivisection
societies protested against their capture and use. Chimps were strapped
into metal chairs and trained to spend all day in one position. They were
strapped into centrifuges and other devices to test the effects of rapid
acceleration, deceleration, and decompression.
(John Paul Stapp, the first U.S. space research supervisor, had ethical
qualms about the work, and in 1946-1947 used himself as the subject of
the first such experiments. Recalls the web site <www.ejectionsite.com/stapp.htm>,
“When after many months the results of all Stapp’s work was
presented to the Aero Med Lab brass, they were horrified…Stapp
was told in no uncertain terms that human tests had to end. Chimpanzees,
his superiors advised, would be acceptable substitutes.”)
During actual space flight the chimponaut received shocks if they pulled
the wrong levers.
Those who survived the harsh treatment of the space program were consigned
in 1963 to the infamous Coulston Foundation laboratories for use in other
types of biomedical research.
Primarily Primates at last won the release of 31 former NASA chimps from
the Air Force in 1997, and Center for Captive Chimpanzee Care founder
Carole Noon in late 2002 bought the Coulston Foundation buildings, equipment,
266 chimpanzees, and 61 monkeys for $3.7 million. Some of the chimps had
by then endured solitary confinement in concrete cells for 40 years.
––Chris
Mercer & Beverley Pervan
<www.cannedlion.co.za>
Meat Market:
Animals,
Ethics & Money
by Erik Marcus
Brio Press
(244 Blakeslee, Hill Road, Suite 5, Newfield, NY 14867), 2005.
273 pages, hardcover. $21.95.
Erik Marcus writes crisply in this book about the evils of factory farming.
He disposes of common misconceptions and exaggerated arguments, frequently
employed both by industry apologists and Animal Rights activists. His
logic is clearly expressed and his prose flows tightly. In fact the book
is so easy to read that it would make an excellent text book for humane
education and animal law courses.
Marcus examines the transformation of animal agriculture since 1950 and
analyses the growth of factory farming at the expense of small family-owned
farms.
Aiming squarely at urban activists who have no clear understanding of
farming methods, he introduces us to the life of a layer hen, describing
in harrowing detail her tortured life. Then he does the same for broiler
chickens, pigs, dairy cows, and beef cattle.
Next Marcus suggests ways of reducing unnecessary cruelty, i.e. unnecessary
in the business sense of being not cost effective. Marcus concedes that
factory farming achieves the objective of keeping meat prices low and
yet making profits.
After discussing why animal activists have failed to make real progress
against the cruelty of factory farming, Marcus contemplates how to dismantle
such a large and powerful industry.
Accepting that change will have to take place at a sub-political level,
Marcus suggests that veganism is the solution. Each vegan spares the lives
of the thousands of animals eaten in a lifetime by the average person.
Marcus advocates outreach programs aimed at younger consumers in order
to encourage the growth of vegetarianism or––preferably––veganism.
Marcus becomes less convincing when he advocates launching a new movement
to dismantle the meat industry. It is understandable that Marcus wants
to distance himself from the AR militants whom he believes discredit everyone
involved in trying to stop cruelty to animals. But where would all the
people come from to comprise the Dismantlement Movement? From outreach
programs, yes, but inevitably too from the existing pool of animal activists,
whom agribusiness propagandists could quickly reconnect with the AR movement.
Writes Marcus on page 83:
“Just as slavery was once America’s most pressing human rights
violation, there can be no doubt that the effort to eliminate cruelty
to animals should focus on agriculture. Animal agriculture accounts for
more than 97% of animals killed by humans in the USA.
“Farmed animals therefore deserve priority and arguments made on
their behalf should not be weakened by lumping in rhetoric pertaining
to hunting, medical research or companion animals.”
This logic trivializes the important work done in other animal advocacy
causes, including opposition to hunting, medical research, and companion
animal welfare practices that interface with opposition to meat consumption.
Marcus is correct that the numbers involved in animal agriculture support
his proposition. But numbers alone are not the whole measure of the value
of an enterprise. People campaign for lions, tigers, harp seals, moon
bears, and gorillas because they care passionately about them.
Far from weakening the campaign against factory farming we believe that
exposing cruelty to animals of any species helps to build a general societal
consensus that no animals should be mistreated.
Besides, canned lion hunting–– my own focal issue––is
itself a form of factory farming, abusing wildlife as “alternative
livestock.”
The notion of creating a Dis-mantlement Movement might be justified, however
awkwardly, if it rested on a new or unique moral foundation. But Marcus
relies upon the same moral and ethical values long used by vegetarians,
animal rights advocates, and animal welfarists, differing merely in his
tactical preferences.
In political lexicon, a group of groups is called a “front,”
and we venture to suggest that this is really what Marcus wants and needs:
groups who share his tactical ideas getting together to form a front to
campaign jointly for the abolition of factory farming.
Possibly in the interest of conciseness, Marcus has not dealt with any
longterm macro-economic effects of factory farming, such as the global
petroleum shortage that many resource economists believe is imminent.
One wonders whether factory farming will not die a natural death in the
post-petroleum world, now just 20 years away by some estimates.
An over-populous society which crowds into cities where it is pathetically
reliant upon a fast depleting commodity like oil to put food on the plate
cannot last indefinitely. A meat industry which has flourished during
the oil glut by burning oil to grow food for animals, to transport those
feeds to massive captive breeding facilities, and then to transport the
dead product to city markets, must inevitably unravel.
If the meat cannot be brought to market, but the markets still insist
on consuming it, then the markets must go to the meat. Urban societies
may disperse back to the countryside, as the Internet facilitates decentralized
commerce, and a new era might begin for the small family farm––much
as the back-to-the-earthers prematurely predicted during their exodus
to the countryside after the petroleum crisis of the early 1970s.
––Chris Mercer
<www.cannedlion.co.za>
Animals:
Why They Must Not
Be Brutalized
by J.B. Suconik
Nuark Publishing
(30 Amberwood Parkway, Ashland, OH 44805), 2002.
160 pages, hard cover. $28.00
Suconik’s book is basically a moral
treatise against the arguments commonly used to support vivisection. Give
us the whole balance sheet, he implores vivisection apologists, not just
an item from the profit and loss account. Then we can accurately determine
the legitimacy of the whole enterprise.
Don’t just argue, for example, that without biomedical research
on animals we can forget about a cure for AIDS. Tell us how much it will
cost, how many animals will be used, how cruel are the procedures and
what are the alternatives.
Sure, if you spend millions tormenting animals for years you are bound
to learn something, sooner or later. But if better ways exist, then the
millions spent on vivisection will have been wastefully employed.
Suconik describes biomedical research as “the biological science
version of medieval torture to extract information.”
The second half of Suconik’s book offers harrowing examples of egregious
cruelty endured by animals around the world.
Suconik provides some deep thinking and some trenchant criticisms.
Unfortunately, Suconik compounds the often turgid nature of moral argument
with sentences such as, “the reader will discover heretofore unnoticed,
but relevant facts and rebuttal (truth) to disprove fallacious and misleading
rhetoric, and a myriad of need to be known examples of the unceasing human
tyranny of animals.”
––Chris Mercer
Wild Dogs:
Past
& Present
by Kelly Milner Halls
Darby Creek Publishing
(7858 Industrial Parkway, Plain City, OH 43064), 2005.
64 pages, hardcover, illustrated. $18.95.
