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ESSENTIAL DESTINATIONS

MONTH: March 2006

B O O K S

Why The Tail-Docking Of Dogs Should Be Prohibited
and Cephalopods & Decapod Crustaceans: Their Capacity To Experience Pain & Suffering Advocates for Animals (10 Queensferry Street, Edinburgh, EH2 4PG, Scotland, U.K.), 2005.

Rule #1 for headline writers is that brevity is the soul of wit.


Rule #2 is, “Never use a word that your readers will not instantly recognize.”


Bad titling unfairly handicaps Why The Tail-Docking Of Dogs Should Be Prohibited, which would be both more succinct and grammatically correct without either “the” or “of.”


Bad titling outright sabotages Cephalopods & Decapod Crustaceans: Their Capacity To Experience Pain & Suffering.
If you know what a cephalopod is, raise a tentacle. If you know what “decapod crustaceans” are, raise a claw.


At 16 and 20 letter-sized pages, respectively, these new Advocates for Animals handbooks are exactly what activists need when urging lawmakers to ban tail-docking, or are speaking up for octopi, squid, crabs, lobsters, and crayfish.


Each handbook collects the relevant facts, cites key studies with footnotes, and helps activists counter the standard arguments for excusing cruelty.


Why The Tail-Docking Of Dogs Should Be Prohibited was assembled to promote a bill now before the Scottish Executive which would prohibit cosmetic tail-docking.


Tail-docking dogs has already been banned in Britain, Sweden, and a few other places for long enough to produce a substantial body of evidence, presented by Advocates for Animals, that banning the practice has no ill effect on dogs.


Pigs, sheep, horses, and even cattle are still routinely tail-docked in much of the world, however, mostly to mask the symptoms of other bad practices. For example, pigs are tail-docked because otherwise pigs who are too closely confined will bite each other’s tails. Dairy cattle kept in confinement are sometimes tail-docked so that they won’t flip manure while swishing their tails in the barn or milking parlor––but if they were given adequate outdoor time, and were not afflicted by flies, this would be much less a problem.


Although dogs rather than livestock are the focus of Why The Tail-Docking Of Dogs Should Be Prohibited, pain studies involving livestock are mentioned, making this handbook useful to anyone addressing any aspect of the tail-docking issue.


It may be downloaded from <www.advocatesforanimals.org.uk/>.


Cephalopods & Decapod Crustaceans: Their Capacity To Experience Pain & Suffering is apparently not available at the Advocates for Animals web site, as I was unable to find it. Summaries of pain studies comprise almost the entire publication.


Addressing suffering in species so far removed from humans might seem tactically premature, since much of the public still has difficulty understanding that tail-docking causes dogs to suffer, but relevant discussion occupied much of the lead feature in the January 22, 2006 edition of The New York Times Magazine. Examining the evolution of personality, author Charles Siebert extensively discussed studies of octopus personality done at the Seattle Aquarium since 1991 by staff scientist Roland Anderson and University of Lethbridge psychologist Jennifer Mather.


“Anderson and Mather’s 1993 paper in the Journal of Comparative Psychology, entitled ‘Personalities of Octopuses,’ was not only the first-ever documentation of personality in invertebrates,” Siebert wrote. “It was the first time in anyone’s memory that the term ‘personality’ had been applied to a nonhuman in a major psychology journal.


“In the years since Anderson and Mather’s original paper,” Siebert continued, “a whole new field of research has emerged known simply as ‘animal personality.’ Through close and repeated observations of different species in a variety of group settings and circumstances, scientists are finding that our own behavioral traits exist in varying degrees and dimensions among creatures across all the branches of life’s tree.”


Personality is a much more complex issue than simply possessing the ability to recognize and respond to pain. In basic form, personality appears to involve the ability to weigh the chance of suffering of pain against anticipation of more satisfactory outcomes.


Since the existence of personality in octopi now appears to be established beyond debate, any scientific question as to whether cephalopods and decapod crustaceans feel pain appears to have been settled by default. Unsettled is only the cultural question of whether or not humans will choose to respond to the pain of animals unlike ourselves.
Discovering that these animals have personality, and learning to recognize their individual differences, is a huge step toward reducing the emotional distance between species. Thereby, it is a huge step toward recognizing a moral obligation to mitigate or prevent their suffering. ––Merritt Clifton

Making health decisions on behalf
of our animal companions
by Shannon Fujimoto Nakaya, DVM
New World Library (14 Pamaron Way, Novato, CA 94949), 2005.
155 pages, paperback. $13.95.

Have you ever wondered how a veterinarian feels when a someone rushes in with an animal and screams for help, then expects an instant and accurate diagnosis without giving any relevant patient history?


Veterinarian Shannon Fujimoto Nakaya emphasizes that, “Making health decisions on behalf of our animal companion begins with noticing when things are different…” She lists questions that should be asked of a vet when seeking a diagnosis. She notes that it is not unreasonable to ask your vet to explain things in terms that you understand, and also not unreasonable to get a second opinion.


Many people have difficulty making decisions when their animal is terminally ill. Complications can include the ability of the caretaker to pay for treatment, whether the animal is responding to treatment, and how much pain the animal may be suffering, perhaps without showing unambiguous symptoms. Nakaya leads readers through a step-by-step decision-making process.


Nakaya shares her perspective on how to make the vet’s job easier, the human/ animal bond, healthy living for both humans and animals, graceful aging, coping with death, and the spiritual nature of animals.


Many scientists seem to lose their compassion on their way through university and managing a career. It is refreshing to encounter a vet whose 20 years on the job has not diminished her kindness and spirituality.


––Bev Pervan
<www.cannedlion.co.za>

 

 

Ivory Markets of Europe: A survey in France, Germany, Italy, Spain & the U.K.
by Esmond Martin & Daniel Stiles
Save the Elephants (P.O. Box 54667, 00200 Nairobi, Kenya), 2005. 104 pages, paperback. No price listed.

Ivory Markets of Europe is the fourth and perhaps most startling in a series of regional reports on the elephant tusk ivory trade produced by geographer Esmond Martin and anthropologist Daniel Stiles since 2000.


Martin and Stiles began by looking at Africa, where most ivory originates. They found that ivory artifacts are still readily available at leading tourist destinations, despite the 1989 ivory trade moratorium imposed by the United Nations Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species. The source of most of the ivory still available in Africa appears to be elephant poaching.


Next Martin and Stiles investigated the ivory markets of southern and eastern Asia, where the use and exchange of ivory artifacts is reputedly most entrenched. Again they found much ivory for sale, but they also found evidence that demand is declining, with the numbers of ivory artisans and quality of their work falling off parallel to the ivory supply. Despite ongoing ivory poaching, Martin and Stiles found, the ivory trade moratorium appears to be effective.


The ecologically sensitized elephant conservation donors of western Europe might believe that their home nations have relatively small roles in contemporary ivory trafficking.


This is generally true, but Martin and Stiles have established that “Germany greatly exceeds China, Japan, Cameroon, and Nigeria––all viewed as important ivory markets––in market scale and in number of ivory retail outlets. The U.K. also exeeds all but China of these countries in market scale, and it greatly surpasses China in number of retail outlets that sell ivory.”


“The primary difference between them,” Martin and Stiles continue, “is that the greatest proportion of the European ivory is pre-1989 in manufacture, and the ivory in China, Cameroon, and Nigeria is of recent date, most of it from poached elephants.”


Historically, Europe was the primary destination for African elephant ivory. Relatively little new ivory is entering Europe, but the residue of centuries of past acquisition now gluts European antique and curio shops.


Differences in taste in ivory artifacts, the difficulty of reworking finished items to suit the Asian market, and the relatively high value of the euro compared to most Asian currencies probably explain why the European surplus is not moving east, in economic competition with poached ivory.

 

Simply put, filling the remaining Asian demand with poached ivory is cheaper than developing a reworked ivory trade.


As Martin and Stiles indicate that ivory demand is falling almost everywhere, the longterm prospects for redeveloping an international ivory industry might seem poor. Yet South Africa, Botswana, Namibia, and Zimbabwe continue to stockpile ivory in hopes of reaping windfall profits when and if they can break the moratorium. Anticipation of money to be made selling ivory at some point in the near future appears to be involved in the South African National Park Service scheme to kill half of the elephants in Kruger National Park, as described in the December 2005 edition of ANIMAL PEOPLE.


Though windfall profits might never develop, there is the possibility that oversupply could drive the price of ivory down enough to create new demand among nouveau riché residents of some nations where until now, only the rich could afford it. Mass consumption of ivory might in turn re-stimulate poaching. ––Merritt Clifton