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ESSENTIAL DESTINATIONS
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MONTH: July-August 2007
Books
A Naturalist & Other Beasts: Tales From A Life
In The Field
by George B. Schaller
Sierra Club Books (85 2nd St., San Francisco, CA 94105), 2007.
272 pages, hardcover. $24.95.
The Emotional Lives of Animals
by Marc Bekoff
New World Library (14 Pamaron Way, Novato, CA 94949), 2007.
214 pages, hardcover. $23.95.
"I was fortunate to have been part of the golden
age of wildlife studies, from the 1950s to the end of the 20th century,
when many large mammals--even such familiar and spectacular ones as the
elephant and jaguar--for the first time became the focus of intensive
research," writes George Schaller.
Schaller also had the good fortune to be hired in 1956
as a field biologist for the New York Zoological Society, and to work
his way up as it grew into the Wildlife Conservation Society, for which
he is now vice president and director of field operations.
Born in 1933, when Konrad Lorenz had barely begun to
differentiate ethology from other approaches to studying animals, Schaller
began his work at a time when behaviorism dominated scientific thinking
about how animals think and feel. Anthropomorph-ism, or projecting human
attributes into animal behavior, was a scientific cardinal sin.
Ethology was coming into vogue. Wildlife photography, film making, and
the advent of television early in Schaller's career developed new public
interest in studying animals in their natural habitat. That meant more
funding for field research, and a much larger audience for discoveries.
By the middle of Schaller's career, the audience for
wildlife documentaries had matured into the greater part of the donor
base and voting constituency for wildlife conservation, previously a poor
relative of managing wildlife to be hunted and fished.
The 19 essays forming A Naturalist & Other Beasts
are individually a combination of wildlife observation and travelogue.
Cumul-atively, they are a series of snapshots in the evolution of the
ethics of research, parallel to growing recognition that animal behavior
exists, just as Charles Darwin postulated, in a continuum with our own.
Schaller seems to have mostly avoided the debate over
what discoveries about animal intelligence mean--or should mean--to how
humans treat animals. He left challenging the taboo against anthropomorphism
to Jane Goodall and Dian Fossey, and left raising the major ethical questions
to Donald Griffin, a much older scientist with formidable credentials
in traditional laboratory observation.
Schaller insightfully discusses conflicts of values involved
in conservation, but his chief discussion of ethical duties toward individual
animals is in an author's note appended to his chapter about observing
Himalayan snow leopards. On the third of Schaller's treks to the Himal-ayas,
he was accompanied by the author Peter Matthiessen, who based The Snow
Leopard (1973) on their journey.
"I was, and still am, ambivalent about providing
a snow leopard with live bait," Schaller writes. "I checked
the goats twice a day to make certain that they remained fed and watered
and were not distressed; they lacked only companionship. I could have
offered dead baits, as it still done by hunters for lions and leopards,
but that would have caused the death of goats needlessly. Most of the
live goats were not discovered by a snow leopard in the few days they
were tied out, and their was little chance that a cat would find a goat
carcass before it was stripped by vultures. Furthermore, my heart is with
the rare markhor, not the locust-like domestic goat. Each meal of a domestic
goat eaten by a snow leopard saved the life of a markhor."
Between staking out goats to attract leopards, Schaller
and Matthiessen bunked at Tibetan Buddhist monasteries, but whatever they
learned about reverence for all life does not seem to have trumped ideas
about species conservation that assign greater moral value to scarcity,
rather than the capacity to suffer.
Marc Bekoff, 12 years younger than Schaller, nine years
younger than Goodall, initially did similar field studies, but eventually
moved from documenting what animals do to analyzing how and why. Often
partnering with Goodall in recent projects, Bekoff tends to be identified
with a much younger generation of scientists, ethicists, and activists.
"Basically, I am an animal rights advocate/activist
with deep concerns about all animals, plants, bodies of water, the air
we breathe, outer space, and inanimate landscapes," Bekoff wrote
in a recent autobiographical statement. "I am a vitalist and see
and feel life in everything, animate and inanimate...I am a vegetarian.
I eat a few animal products minimally, and strive to eliminate all animal
products as time goes on. My reasons for vegetarianism are ethical and
not health related," although Bekoff--even in his sixties--is a formidable
bicyclist and runner.
The Emotional Lives of Animals, already perhaps Bekoff's
most influential book, is less entertaining than Schaller's anecdotes,
more argumentative, copiously footnoted, and addresses much that Schaller
might have seen, and in some cases even documented, without actually perceiving.
"The plural of anecdote," Bekoff often argues,
"is data." His dispute with the scientific establishment is
with a self-protective scientific tendency to selectively and sometimes
unconsciously exclude from analysis any observations that may call into
question key presumptions about why and how the studies are being done
in the first place.
For example, Bekoff would point out that Schaller's ambivalence
about staking out the goats is a behavioral observation. Why was Schaller
uneasy? Why does he feel compelled to rationalize the ethics of his action?
Why does he retreat behind an argument based on scarcity, which if extended
one step farther would suggest that since humans are more numerous than
goats, Schaller himself might have made the most appropriate leopard bait?
Schaller's feelings were an emotional response. Scientists
trained to exclude their emotional responses from their observations tend
to miss much information. In Schaller's case, his feelings about staking
out the goats might have furnished far more material for study than his
few glimpses of snow leopards--if he had allowed himself to pursue that
line of thought.
The Emotional Lives of Animals explains, basically, that we know animals have feelings similar to ours for many reasons, not least that we often respond to the feelings that animals project, and are rewarded by responses similar to what ours would be if the roles were reversed. --Merritt Clifton
Animal Welfare In Islam
by Al-Hafiz Basheer Ahmad Masri
The Islamic Foundation & Compassion In World Farming, 2007.
(The Islamic Foundation: Markfield Conf. Centre,
Ratby Lane, Markfield, Leiscestershire, LE67 9SY, U.K.; <www.islamic-foundation.org.uk>;
CIWF: 5-A Charles St., Petersfield, Hampshire
GU32 3EH, U.K.; <www.ciwf.org.uk/>.)
164 pages, paperback £9.95, hardback £15.95.
Animal Welfare In Islam is an updated and corrected edition
of Islamic Concern for Animals, originally issued in 1987 by the Athene
Trust, the original name of Compassion In World Farming.
Considered the definitive work so far on the obligations
that religious Muslims should observe toward animals, the first edition
included both English and Arabic texts. The new edition is only in English.
Key excerpts have been accessible at <www.islamicconcern.com/islamicteachings.pdf>,
but the whole text had been out of print and hard to find for more than
a decade.
Similar commentaries are now emerging from various scholars
around the world, but the contributions of B.A. Masri (1914-1993) are
especially of note. His honorific, "Al-Hafiz," signifies that
he had memorized the entire Quran. After a long teaching career, Masri
edited the monthly Islamic Review, 1961-1967, visited and spoke in more
than 40 chiefly Muslim nations, and was a well-known lecturer and broadcast
commentator on Islamic affairs.
"The Islamic instruction and guidance on animal
rights and man's obligations concerning them are so comprehensive that
he need not go elsewhere for any guidance," al Masri prefaced.
"As believers in the consummate and conclusive revelation
of God," Masri continued, "we are expected to learn from the
misconceptions of the past and cast behind us the parochial approach to
religion. Fourteen centuries is a long enough period to grasp mentally
the fact that the way to spiritual development (Dîn) does not lie
in ritualistic observance and the hair-splitting of the Law (Sharâh).
Surely it is a long enough period to liberate ourselves from the pre-Islamic
traits of our respective cultures.
"
Not to be cruel or even to be condescendingly kind to
the so-called inferior animals is a negative proposition," al Masri
asserted. "Islam wants us to think and act in the positive terms
of accepting all species as communities like us in their own right, and
not to sit in judgment on them according to our human norms and values."
--Merritt Clifton
Animal Laws of India
edited by Maneka Gandhi, Ozair Husain, &
Raj Panjwani
Third Edition
Universal Law Publishing Co. (c/o <sales@unilawbooks.com> or
<www.unilawbooks.com>), 2006.
1,236 pages, hardcover. 995 rupees (about $22.00) plus
shipping. Indian animal advocates often claim that India has the laws
most favorable to animals of any nation, and the most favorable courts
at the upper appellate levels.
Thus Indian animal advocacy tends to emphasize improving
enforcement and trying to move as expeditiously as possible through often
incompetent and corrupt local courts to reach the upper levels. This distinctly
contrasts with the emphasis of activism in the U.S., where seeking passage
of new laws generates many times as many appeals and e-mails as seeking
enforcement--although activity on behalf of stronger humane law enforcement
has increased exponentially since the advent of Alison Gianotto's enforcement-oriented
web site <www.Pet-Abuse.com>.
Animal Laws of India (Third Edition) includes all the
major animal protection laws of India and individual Indian states under
one cover, with summaries of the most important court precedents and instructions
on how to pursue cases using each law.
The intent of editors Maneka Gandhi, Ozair Husain, and
Raj Panjwani is to help local humane societies to bring prosecutions against
animal abusers. Including the laws of each state is worthwhile because
many common offenses involve transporting livestock or wildlife from one
state to another. At times there can be significant advantages to prosecuting
a case in one of several different possible venues. Animal Laws of India
can help law enforcers decide where, for instance, to intercept a trainload
of cattle en route to illegal slaughter.
Animal Laws of India also enables people trying to draft
or pass legislation in other nations to see what has succeeded in India--or,
in some cases, has won passage without being enforceable. Some of the
legislative topics are specific to Indian culture and customs, but many
others occur throughout the world. While western nations, for instance,
have not had to deal with donkey-trains and bullock carts in more than
a century, the relevant Indian legislation could be helpful in Africa
and Latin America.
The heft of Animal Laws of India is worth a mention. If one is going to "throw the book" at an offender, this one could have a substantial impact. --Merritt Clifton
Chosen By A Horse:
How a broken horse fixed a broken heart
by Susan Richards
Harvest Books
(c/o Harcourt Inc., 15 E. 26th St., New York, NY 10010), 2007.
248 pages, paperback. $13.00.
Never before interested in adopting sick or injured animals,
Susan surprised herself by responding to an appeal for help from her local
SPCA.
Having lost her mother at a very early age, moving from
one unhappy relative to yet another one during her childhood, and having
then endured an abusive marriage, Susan was too concerned with her own
problems to take care of sick or abused animals.
The SPCA had confiscated 40 horses, all starving and
in poor health. Among them was Lay Me Down, an ex-racing mare who, after
a few defeats, had been used for breeding. Susan chose to adopt her, along
with her frisky foal, for no better reason than that she was the only
horse willing to walk up the ramp and go into the trailer for Susan, with
her foal at her side.
Desperately thin, and drooping from pneumonia, Lay Me
Down was a shadow of her past beauty. But right away she began teaching
Susan some lessons in life.
"Unlike me, Lay Me Down seemed to feel no rancor.
In spite of everything, she was open and trusting of people, qualities
I decidedly lacked. It was her capacity to engage that drew me to her,
that made me aware of what was possible for me if I had her capacity to--to
what? Forgive? Forget? Live in the moment? What exactly was it that enabled
an abused animal, for lack of a better word, to love again?"
Lay Me Down settles down well on Susan's farm, and from
the start, showed more affection toward Susan than any of her other three
horses, whom she had kept for many years. All went well for a while.
Then one day, Allie, "my best friend and horsewoman
extraordinaire," visited Susan and inspected Lay Me Down closely,
before advising Susan to get a veterinarian to check the horse's eye.
The vet discovered an inoperable tumor. In enduring the
heartbreaking ordeal of treatment and death, Susan also dealt with her
own dark memories. --Beverley Pervan