Jonathan Balcombe

Turning 50

2009-03-26T14:28:00.000-07:00

Schuyler, Virginia
27-28 February, 2009

On the eve of my 50th birthday, which arrives in 65 minutes, we have come to The White Pig, a vegan B&B in rural Virginia. It’s our 3rd year running and the 2nd year we’ve brought Emily and her friend Haley Warren (daughter of Frank, whose Post Secret books are best-sellers). Our arrival at dusk was heralded by a cluster of wild turkeys moseying near the border of a field and woodland. Half an hour later, a Big brown bat flapped overhead as Marilyn and I wandered the property in the last wisps of light.

I’ve been reading Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Harriett Beecher Stowe’s famous novel of 1852 which is credited with helping to fuel the end of American slavery. Bringing about measurable social change must be the highest achievement in writing. How desperate I sometimes feel to end the suffering of so many animals caught up every moment in factory farms, fur farms, research laboratories, abattoirs and fishing nets. The magnitude of human abuse of acutely sentient animals makes the hope of their eventual emancipation seem remote and unattainable. But there are so many little victories to be won, and in any case what is to be done during one’s time on Earth but to strive onward? The animals’ cause which consumes my heart and soul makes it oftentimes hard to locate peace within. But I also draw immense pleasure and inspiration from animals’ presence, be it a covey of wild turkeys melting into the undergrowth, a kettle of vultures wheeling high overhead on a thermal air column, or the ladybird beetles buzzing, bouncing and crawling about the lamp at my bedside. Tonight, as I stood on the dried grass lawn in front of the guest-house here, watching the last traces of light disappear behind wind-blown cloud patches, and a crescent moon brightening in the night sky, I felt peace and tranquility. As I get older and the planet grows more crowded, my appreciation and adoration of nature grows richer. Nature reminds me that the best things in life cannot be bought or sold. They are timeless things unfettered by the clamor of our false civilizations. I know just what Whitman meant when he marveled at the pismire (ant) that could stagger sextillions of infidels. Tomorrow the sun shall rise and I shall awake healthy and grateful for another day. Birds will sing again. Earthworms will till the soil. Humble mosses will lie soft and cool on the rocks. I will live.

Midnight fell as I wrote that last sentence. The next half century of my life’s journey begins. The ladybugs, oblivious to my thoughts, continue their own explorations. I will turn out the light that they too may rest.

Memphis Blues

2008-11-03T09:15:00.000-08:00

I’m in Memphis for the National Association of Biology Teachers 70th Anniversary convention (October 17).

I have noticed a dearth of two things here. The first is trees. From my 7th floor downtown hotel window, I can see only a faint scattering of green spots dotting an otherwise gray concrete landscape. I realize that cities are not noted for being like lush jungles, but this one is clearly impoverished compared to most cities I’ve seen. Nevertheless, squadrons of pigeons do aerial circuits and alight on roofs; starlings, house sparrows and mockingbirds are commonplace; and quite remarkably, I watched a Cooper’s hawk land on a church cross as the sun set. Also, there is a loose fairy-ring of large white mushrooms on the lawn in front of the nearby Marriott. And the weeds poking through the cracking seams of run-down lots remind me that nature lies waiting to reclaim her turf when we’re done.

The other dearth is of vegetarian and vegan fare at restaurants. Most menus I’ve perused lack even a single vegetarian option. I went with a colleague for lunch at TGI Fridays. There was no veggie-burger available (unlike their menus in Washington, DC), and the waitress patiently sat down with pen and paper to negotiate our requirements. Five animal ingredients (chicken, bacon, cheddar, blue cheese and egg crumbles) were struck from my cob salad. The waitress recommended fried green beans, which came deep fried in a thick batter that oozed oil. The NABT receptions are no better: meat dishes, no vegetarian options.

I attended a plenary lecture by Dr Steve Running, a climate change expert from the University of Montana, and one of the 450-or-so lead authors on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change which was awarded the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize. As Al Gore did in An Inconvenient Truth (see my blog from Sept 2006, http://www.firstscience.com/home/blog/8.html), Running didn’t sugar-coat the crisis, and he mentioned several steps to address rising greenhouse gas emissions, such as biking/walking to work, supporting wind power, and addressing human overpopulation. But dismayingly, Running overlooked the enormous contribution of animal agriculture — estimated at 18 percent by his own Nobel-winning Panel. That contribution exceeds the entire global transportation sector, which the IPCC has estimated at 13.5 percent. Speaking to about 700 biology teachers, he missed a huge opportunity to edify a large body of influential citizens. I was prepared to rise and ask why Running missed the boat, but there was no time for questions. Instead, I sent him an email:

… I feel it is imperative that we not skirt this issue given its central role in the problem of climate change and its potential to empower people to take immediate and personal life-style steps to address a problem of global scope. If we don’t take personal responsibility for climate change, then I see little hope for our reversing the grim trends you presented.

… As you are a person of high influence on this issue, I urge you to add the meat and dairy connection to your lectures. People must be made aware of it, and the time is now. I’m hoping you’ll also remind them of the other benefits of plant-based diets — including benefits to human health, lower health care costs, and the relief of cruelty and violence toward animals.

I await his reply (stay tuned).

All is not lost in Memphis. I did find a spot (Bigfoot’s) with a decent veggie-burger, and most servers at least know what “vegan” means. Nor will I soon forget the sight of five adolescent mallards engaging in a game of chase round their circular marble pond in the ornate lobby of the famous Peabody Hotel.

A mouse's life

2008-10-18T11:50:00.000-07:00

This morning as I came downstairs for breakfast, I was confronted by an adult house. The poor animal lay prostrate on the kitchen floor, having been badly mauled by my two cats. Though I could make out no obvious external injuries, she appeared unconscious, taking in weak, gulping breaths at two-second intervals — very, very slow for a mouse. As I carried her outside I cursed my cats for their cruel indifference to the suffering of another, and wondered if they had been perusing the daily paper, filled as it is with news of similar cruelty among humans.

Mice are not infrequent visitors to our abode, especially in the autumn as the weather cools. In the previous fortnight I had discovered the grisly remains of another mouse, and rescued a third, half-grown mouse unhurt as our two cats toyed with it in the living room.

I spent several minutes trying to revive this latest victim, but her body remained slack so I euthanized her and placed her in the woods behind my house. Back inside, I quietly reproached my cats again, as I served them their “proper” breakfast, which ironically may be a poor nutritional substitute for what I had just taken outside.

I have to wonder why mice venture into my home when they must know — given their superb sense of smell — that it is prowled by cats. Just earlier that day I had learned of the tenacity with which a mouse will return for a free lunch. The manager of a sanctuary for rescued farmed animals at which I volunteer from time to time, told me of a house mouse they had caught recently in their home. They took the live-trap to the pig barn, gave the mouse some food, then released him. The very next evening, the same mouse was recaptured in their house. They recognized him because his front left foot is snow-white. For the next three mornings “white-foot” reappeared, almost mystically, in the Have-a-Hart trap, having traversed some 100 meters of mostly open pasture from the barn to their home. By this time he was rearing up on his hind-legs in anticipation of his daily snack. They eventually let him go next to a rill, a mile away.

Mice seem as inexorable as sunrises. As long as there are kitchens, and housecats, there will surely be mice. I am fairly certain that, should the day come when the Earth is no longer inhabited by humans, the tiny feet of mice will continue to scamper across the landscape.

June 4, 2008. Cape Town, South Africa

2008-06-05T10:34:00.000-07:00

On a visit to South Africa in April, I went on a Baboon Walk with Jenni Trethowan. A dedicated protector of animals, Trethowan launched Baboon Matters in 1998 to help improve relations between human residents and the wild baboon troops that live on the peninsula that juts south from Cape Town. Predictably, as humans moved in and began to build houses, grow crops and plant gardens, conflicts with the baboons grew. The baboons were labeled as “problem animals” and common “solutions” were to trap, shoot, poison or run over the baboons. Though their numbers declined, the wily baboons adapted to the persecution and their populations persisted. Today, Baboon Matters hires baboon monitors who move about with the troops and intervene to keep them off people’s properties, where the baboons may damage eaves and windows, strip trees of their fruit (can one blame them?), and occasionally break into homes to dine on easy kitchen pickings and leave smelly “gifts” for the home-owners. The monitors’ presence has reduced conflicts by about 85 percent. Most residents are tolerant or even welcoming of the baboons, but there are still those who angrily try to hurt or kill them. One of the females in the troop we followed is missing her right hand from an evil trap set many years ago by a resident, designed to amputate the hand as it was put into the trap for the bait. Four females lost their right hand to this trap. Slowed by their disability, the other three were killed trying to cross roads with a baby in their whole arm; the remaining survivor, Penelope, is currently raising her third child.

The baboons are wild but habituated to humans. We could stand or sit within two meters of some of them, and more than once I felt the fur of an adult brush against my leg as s/he ambled past. For most of the time they were relaxed, and one could hear individuals making reassuring grunts which appeared to function to let others know that they were nearby when out of view. I watched various foraging techniques, including swiping brush aside to find seeds beneath, pulling out roots to pluck burrowing insects (I think—their hands move so fast), digging in the dirt for some other buried treasures which were deftly plucked up and eaten, and sitting in trees leisurely sampling fruit. One juvenile near me spied a fat spider, calmly plucked her from her web, and bit off the body like a berry, leaving three or four twitching legs in the grass.

One of the females was pregnant, and her flat rump was bright red. Two or three other younger females were in estrous, as indicated by the shiny red swellings wobbling beneath their tails like oversize tomatoes. These damsels were quite solicitous of the two or three large adult males, who seemed mostly to ignore the ruby hindquarters presented to them by a standing female just a meter away. One of these females chased off another and while there was much yelping by the pursued one, there was no violence and little interest from the others. A more intense dispute with intense shrieks brought several troop members to their feet to see what was happening. A large male chased a screaming female who took refuge in a dense thicket while he barked menacingly at her. He looked very intimidating but we saw no incidents of physical violence. The only blood-shed witnessed was from my shin which I scraped during a clumsy descent of a large boulder.

By far the most joyous sight was the rambunctious play of five youngsters on a grassy hillside at the end of a residential street. They would scamper up the 10 meter slope then leap, roll, tussle or summersault their way down again. Flying ambushes, play bites and limb-tuggings were part of a stream of play that went on for at least 10 minutes. One could hear the thuds of their little bodies hitting the ground as they hurtled down the slope twisting and rolling in a grappling heap of as many as four individuals at a time. A leafy branch became the object of a three-way tug of war. The winner was soon left holding the branch while the other two scampered off; the branch lost its prize-status and the youngster dropped it to follow the others. When they ran back across the road a minute later, he once again grabbed the branch and the tug was on again. Animals at play are one of the most beautiful things to behold, for me. I was transfixed, and uplifted.

Racism by any other name

2008-01-02T17:44:00.000-08:00

I recently saw the new film The Great Debaters, starring Denzel Washington, Forest Whitaker, and several young African-American actors (including a young actor confusingly named Denzel Whitaker--no relation to either, I'm told). It was based on the true story of the debating team at Wiley College, an unheralded black school in Texas, which went undefeated and eventually gained the attention of the nation. Set in 1935, racial inequality was a central theme. The film included the aftermath of a horrible lynching.

Whenever I see such depictions I can’t help but draw the powerful parallels between such injustices toward humans and today’s ongoing injustices toward animals. It is so politically incorrect to show the slightest hint of racism today, and I thank goodness for humanity’s capacity for moral progress that we’ve made such huge strides in the past century with the emancipation of women and of “people of color.” Against this backdrop, the quest for animal rights is both exciting and frustrating. Exciting because there is such a movement afoot. Frustrating because so few embrace it, and frustrating that good, decent people have absolutely no clue to its moral legitimacy or urgency.

So profound is this moral blind-spot that it sometimes feels to me that I live in a world of zombies. A woman with a French accent who occasionally rides on my morning bus wore a new coat last week, with a fur collar. Presidential candidate Mike Huckabee appeared in the Washington Post playing in a jazz ensemble, and I thought “good on him.” The next day, he was pictured in camouflage and with shotgun over his shoulder, grinning as he returned from a hunting expedition where he had shot three pheasants. The folks next door stopped in the other day to give us a tin of cookies as a Christmas offering. You couldn’t ask for more amicable, helpful neighbors. They also love animals, feeding the deer and squirrels and drawing flocks of wild birds with their ever-filled feeders. As we hugged and shook hands in greeting, we asked what their plans for Xmas were. Barb said they had been invited to a friend’s place where—and at this point she leaned in with a hushed and confiding tone—they would visit the homes of several prominent niggers and burn crosses on their front lawns.

Of course, I made up that last bit. Barb and Paul are not in the least bit racist. What Barb really said was that their friends had invited them over to have roast lamb. For me, that was just as jarring, if less surprising, than if she really had admitted to terrorizing black Americans.

That decent, law-abiding and intelligent people are still buying fur, shooting animals and eating babies says much about humankind’s moral fickleness. The majority still finds it acceptable to treat animals as if they were so many blocks of wood. Or, to be more precise, they don’t find abject animal suffering acceptable, but they are either too ignorant or too complacent to do anything personal about it. To draw from a line in The Great Debaters, our task is to defy the tyranny of majority. That the masses think one thing doesn’t make it right.

Rarities

2007-11-03T17:47:00.000-07:00

Today, as I wandered a field bordering woodland near Berkeley Springs, West Virginia, I encountered a rare creature and a commoner. The rarity was a fox sparrow, by no means an endangered species, but one of those birds that most people who share its geographic range will go through life with no clue to its existence. As a bird watcher for over 30 years, I had encountered fox sparrows on perhaps four prior occasions. Through the naked eye, a fox sparrow wouldn’t merit a second glance. A small brown bird flitting furtively in the brush, they are what some might dismiss colloquially as an LBJ. Through binoculars, “little brown job” resolves into a strikingly handsome creature: eye ringed with white, arrow-head spots corn-rowed down a snow-white breast and converging into a central spot, and a robust, bicolored beak. For me at least, a fox sparrow sighting instantly transforms even the most ordinary nature foray into a memorable event.

The commoner, by contrast, was a cricket. A gravid female in her prime, she measured almost an inch, not counting her ovipositor of nearly the same length. She startled as I stepped across a patch of clover-strewn earth. Insects fascinate me about as much as birds, and I sat down to watch. She behaved as any wise one should in the face of potential danger, remaining stock still for at least three minutes. I stayed equally inert, until a wave of her antennae signaled that she was about to resume her activities. Then, this mundane insect, this shiny black creature whose kind I had seen on countless occasions, transformed before my eyes into a rarity. Inspecting a small patch of bare earth, she crawled forward slightly, pushed her abdomen upward, redirected her egg-tube downward and, with visible effort, tried to pierce the substrate. Unable to penetrate, she gave up and crawled to a new spot to try again.

Over the next ten minutes, I watched her make a dozen or more attempts to force eggs into the earth. She appeared successful on one or two tries. Between efforts, she paused to nibble at some clover.

I once watched a locust thrusting a sickle-shaped ovipositor repeatedly at the soil, but had not witnessed similar behavior in a cricket. It was a glimpse at a private moment, and a rarity every bit as significant as the sparrow. Hours later, as I sit in the glow of a wood-fire, I realize that rarity, like beauty, springs not from the prejudice of mere numbers, but from the heart.

Dear Editors of "Animal Behaviour"

2007-10-31T17:46:00.000-07:00

I’m grateful for your decision to have my book Pleasurable Kingdom: Animals and the Nature of Feeling Good (Macmillan, 2006) reviewed (vol. 73, p 737). However, it was unfortunate that you chose a poultry scientist to review it. Given that I argue ultimately for a more compassionate ethic in our treatment of animals, and that poultry science is invested in the continued exploitation of what is numerically the world’s most abused species, namely the domestic chicken (>300 slaughtered per second in the US alone), Graham Scott’s review wasn’t likely to be positive. Sure enough, he provided a dismissive, insubstantial critique.

Scott dismisses as an assumption my claim that the scientific community is reluctant to acknowledge that animals feel pleasure. How, then, does he account for the complete absence of any books or scholarly journals dedicated to animal pleasure? There are many journals and reams of papers on the equally “private” experience of pain, yet “pleasure” rarely if ever appears in the index of an animal behavior textbook.

Scott sums up my closing chapter as a consideration of “the joie de vivre of animals shown in TV documentaries.” I can only guess that he didn’t read it. Chapter 11 is an attempt to place animal pleasure in a broader moral context, including a discussion of the significance of individuals (species don’t feel things), recent ethological evidence that nature is more virtuous and cooperative than once thought, and the suggestion that ethologists take on the study of animal pleasure (hedonic ethology).

Scott suggests that “the author’s denial that ‘Nature is red in tooth and claw’ relies on the [single paragraph] anecdote that he, a cyclist, enjoys bicycling to and from work in the face of the ‘predator’ cars.” In fact, I spend five pages arguing that our popular portrayals of nature offer a skewed view by focusing on its competitive aspects and its edge-of-seat violent episodes.

Finally, Scott glibly states that I “do not really present good evidence for any of [my] arguments,” and that I have a “tendency to flit between anecdotal examples and poorly supported arguments that lack scientific evidence.” I intentionally sprinkle the book with anecdotes to make it more appealing to “popular science” readers, but that was not done at the expense of reference to scholarly sources, of which more than 300 are cited in the 30 page bibliography.

As a contributor to, long-standing member of, and manuscript reviewer for Animal Behaviour, I was hopeful that Pleasurable Kingdom would be given a better showing. Of course, none of these factors should influence how a book is reviewed. It is the merits of the book itself that are in question. It is as the first book dedicated to a broad subject with enormous potential for future avenues of ethological research that I thought it would be welcomed by Animal Behaviour. Finally, I have no idea if an ABS editor chose a reviewer with strategic intent to undermine my book’s goals, but I do hope it considers selecting reviewers more carefully in future.

Tuning in to others

2007-10-10T17:42:00.000-07:00

(discard from book ms)

In the autumn of 1985 I lay on my back staring at the sky near the entrance to a cave in Renfrew, Ontario. This spot is busy this time of year with bats preparing to enter the cave to hibernate for the long Canadian winter. It was late dusk, the perfect time to see bats emerging hungry for the evening’s first meal. Directly above me, silhouetted by the darkening sky, was a loudspeaker through which a tape recorder played a two minute playback of prerecorded bat calls, bracketed by a two minute control stimulus of tape recorded silence.

The bats’ response to the bat sounds was astonishing. I saw only a handful of random stragglers during the blank playback, but as soon as the echolocation calls kicked in, the speaker was swarmed. I counted hundreds during the two minute playback.

Why were they drawn to the speaker as if it were a magnet? I speculated that the responding bats were mainly youngsters listening in on other bats to find the best feeding spots. (Another theory is that they are just curious.) Several other playback studies by me and other biologists have documented that bats eavesdrop on the calls of other individuals to identify patches of insects. It’s a bit like choosing a good restaurant by looking to see how many people are eating there.

Fish, it appears, practice a similar art. Juvenile fish tune in to the crackling sounds that emanate from reefs. This cueing allows them to find reef habitats from the open ocean. The snapping of shrimp claws and other sounds distinctive to reefs can be heard up to 20 kilometers away. Scientists discovered this skill by setting up artificial “reefs,” broadcasting sounds recorded from reefs from underwater speakers (Stephen Simpson, Univ of Edinburgh, reported in NewSci, 16 April 2005, vol 186, p 19).

Some bats use the eavesdropping technique to muscle in on someone’s prospective meal. I’ve watched red bats dive-bombing towards a speaker playing the recorded feeding buzzes (rapid pulses made during an assault on a flying insect) of another red bat, just as they will dive after a juicy moth when another bat nearby is buzzing in for the kill (Balcombe & Fenton 1988; Griffin 1958). Such aerial piracy is well known in many bird species, whose daytime activities are more easily observed. It’s a hazardous business—I once watched as a dive bombing red bat miscued and collided with a patch of dirt. Fortunately, it was only a glancing blow and the little spitfire was soon airborne again.

A Sparrow's Life

2007-09-27T17:48:00.000-07:00

Yesterday as I stepped from the train on my way to a Bach concert, I noticed a house sparrow lying prostrate on the platform next to a rain shelter. No doubt she had flown into the shelter’s window. Hoping she was just stunned, I picked her up. Alas, she was quite dead. I stroked the soft feathers on her neck and head, noted the robustness of her pink beak and the perfect symmetry of her tail feathers, before depositing her beneath some ground ivy, where ants, flies and other members of nature’s recycling crew might perform their services undisturbed.

House sparrows are commonplace in the United States, and Washington, D.C. is no exception. They lurk in my neighborhood, chirping from eaves, taking shelter beneath cars, and holding noisy palavers inside cedar trees. Squadrons of these weaver finches arc over my town-home roof and settle in a spray on my generous neighbor’s thistle-feeders, where they nibble daintily at seeds or loiter nearby for the next available spot. They are anonymous, largely ignored by people.

And, as I learned from having recently read Providence of a Sparrow: Lessons from a Life Gone to the Birds, they are individuals, each with a unique character and personality. The author, Seattle-based electrical technician Chris Chester, discovered a newborn house sparrow while tending his garden. The naked hatchling, resembling “a testicle with a beak,” had fallen from an overhead nest. Chester and his wife successfully reared the chick, who became the pioneer of a small menagerie of rescued birds during the course of his 8 years.

Chester developed an especially close relationship with “B,” who would perch on Chester’s left shoulder and sleep in the crook of his neck. One of his favorite games was Hit the Cap. Chester would place a bottle-lid over the opening in his hand, which enclosed B. B would suddenly lunge through the opening, knocking the cap into the air with his stout bill. Occasionally, B would achieve a double play, hitting the cap a second time as it descended from its first flight. He also loved to play fetch, unless he wasn’t in the mood. Chester showed a full range of emotions, from frisky to irritable. He soon grew tired of fetching the same colored cap and Chester had to seek out unusual bottled products to sustain B’s interest.

Sooner or later we must come to the uplifting—if sobering—realization that all house sparrows are unique individuals. And all warthogs, meadow voles, starlings, iguanas and goldfishes. Each has a biography. Their seeming uniformity is only a function of our unfamiliarity. The more time we spend in their midst, the more their visages resolve into distinct personalities.

Later, as I sat in the concert hall immersed in the dolorous strains of Bach’s Mass in B Minor, my thoughts returned to the little grey/brown bird. How old was she and what sort of personality did she have? Who were her friends? How felt her first flight? What adventures did she have, what flashes of fear and moments of mirth?

I hope she had a good life.

A Dog's Will

2007-08-28T17:48:00.000-07:00

This morning as I went to fetch the paper from the front porch of my town-home in suburban Maryland, a neighbor took her dog across the parking area to a central green-space for a morning bathroom break. I’ve seen this mid-sized, thickly furred canine on his morning ablutions before. Usually it’s the man of the house who is on the other end of the retractable leash, but in either case, there’s a sense of rush-hour haste to the operation. These folks clearly have jobs to get to and the AM dog shift is all business—I only hope the evening walk is less perfunctory. This morning the dog took a wee then, in typical dog fashion, began sniffing about in the grass. The woman paused a few seconds then gave a half-hearted tug on the leash. Fluffy was pulled slightly off balance, but resumed her snuffling about. As she trotted over to investigate another smell served up on the morning’s grassy tableau, another tug altered her direction. But she once again resumed her Hoovering, probably hoping to savor one or two more bouquets before the inevitable return to the relatively bland landscape of indoor carpets and floorboards. Finally, the woman—perhaps growing impatient that the dog’s trivial pursuits were obstructing her own list of important tasks—produced a decisive jerk and the two re-crossed the pavement.

The dog probably knows the routine. She knows the AM shift is short, and that she won’t have long to sniff the world. But she also knows, from experience, that her busy humans, like the leash she’s on, will yield a little. By staying on-task she can buy some time. This, surely, is a dog exercising her will

Isn’t it interesting that the exercise of free will could ever have been viewed as a uniquely human trait? My New Oxford American Dictionary (2nd Edition) defines “will” as the faculty by which a person decides on and initiates action. Apart from the reference to a “person,” there’s nothing about the capacity that doesn’t also apply to any conscious creature who can plan and act. It is now widely documented—if not yet enshrined in popular thinking—that other animals are conscious planners. Furthermore, some philosophers, including the influential Peter Singer, argue that the designation “person” also applies to some animals. I agree, and if it would improve a dog’s lot, or a chicken’s, then I will it to happen. So, I suspect, would Fido.

Backyard nature

2007-08-24T17:49:00.000-07:00

It’s a Sunday morning and I’m sitting on my deck in the outer suburbs of Washington, D.C., which abuts a magnificent woodland plot. In the winter one can just see through the naked trees to a field 500 feet beyond. But in summer this space is transformed into a lush green world. Regardless of the season it throngs with life, but it seems that summer days are the busiest. I have the added good fortune of having neighbors who ply the wildlife with a smorgasbord of bird and mammal feeders, so it sometimes looks like rush-hour at Grand Central Station.

This morning I’ve been out here for an hour and as usual there are plenty of little stories unraveling. A blue jay begged noisily from a branch as another hammered at a nut between his claws, bolting back hunks with a forward jerk of his head. He gave the last piece to the obsequious loiterer, who gargled out a cry of thanks—or was it relief, or perhaps simply pleasure? A large solitary wasp alit on the rim of my birdbath, wings flitting restlessly as she descended to the water edge and daintily slaked her thirst. Her abdomen shone metallic blue-black. Little did the green looper nearby know how imperiled it was in the presence of this insect predator as it began a circuit around the rim of the birdbath. But another hazard threatened the tiny green grub. I’ve read reports of caterpillars which blindly do circuits on round rims until they exhaust themselves and die. But not this one; I’m not sure if she completed a full circuit before crawling back down the side. While checking on her progress I rescued a beetle floating on the water. It was so small that I couldn’t tell whether it was a living thing until I viewed it through my binoculars (which make a serviceable magnifying lens when used in reverse) as it crawled away over the copy of The Washington Post resting next to me. Its oval body barely filled the space inside the lowercase letter “o” printed on the page, yet it breathes, flies, and cleans its antennae.

I see that the looper has returned to the rim of my birdbath, so perhaps the “robotic march til death” theory may yet hold. The plot suddenly thickens comically as a pair of ants patrolling the birdbath bump headfirst into one another. They each take off at a sprint in opposite directions round the rim (why do ants panic like this when they’re so willing to sacrifice themselves in the interests of colony efficiency?). The looper doesn’t know what hits him as he bails from his perch, meeting the grass below before deploying his bungee-cord silk lifeline.

As I write, a robber fly collides clumsily with my laptop screen before landing on the cover of the Post’s BookWorld section, where it now perches on Gunter Grass’s cheek. Just as I think the insects have completely stolen the show, a half-pint gray squirrel plays solitaire at the wood’s edge, repeatedly practicing leaps onto a sapling’s trunk.

Piebald Ethics

2007-08-10T17:50:00.000-07:00

This morning, still recovering from jetlag, I went for a bike ride as the sun rose on the suburbs north of Washington, DC. As I cycled through one of the lovely state parks that grace my neighborhood, I spooked a small herd of deer enjoying some browse at the border of a woodland and field. At first I thought they were accompanied by a domestic dog, until I realized I had seen a piebald white-tailed deer. His upper half was normal gray-brown, but the rest was mostly pure white, as if he’d been sloshing about belly-deep in a pool of paint. Coincidentally, two hours later as I perused a magazine during my train commute into the city, I turned the page onto a painting of Mary Sabina, a piebald African slave girl born in 1736 on a plantation in Columbia. Painted at age four with just a sash around her waist, her body looks like a jigsaw puzzle assembled from pieces of ebony and white marble. While there is no surviving record of Mary Sabina’s life, she was something of a celebrity in her time.

Mary’s striking appearance results from a rare genetic disorder that disrupts the development of skin pigment cells (melanocytes) so that large patches of skin contain no color and appear absolutely white. In Mary’s case, this was not only a curiosity; it was also a source of consternation, for it raised questions about the exclusivity of whiteness and suggested that black Africans had the potential to be white too.

Today we look back on 18th century racial ideas as a product of crude social, political and economic agendas of the time. But what about the deer I saw? His piebald coat has no relevance to matters of race, but his social status has deep parallels to Mary’s. He’s a conscious, sentient, pain-avoiding, pleasure-seeking being with appetites, beliefs, and friends. No doubt he has his favorites among the shrubs and berries he nibbles with his prehensile tongue. Yet, like Mary in her time, he is a victim of piebald ethics. As a non-human, he could end up pierced by a legal bullet or arrow during this autumn or next. Because of an arbitrary set of rules forged from arrogance and sustained by convenience, he has no more rights of his own than does the bicycle I was riding when I saw him.

Someday perhaps, a few centuries from now, people may look back on deer hunting—and factory farms, vivisection labs, and fur-wearing—as most of us now do on slaving.

Western travelogue

2007-05-17T17:40:00.000-07:00

I’ve just passed through the security system at Phoenix International Airport. Today I happen to be wearing a black t-shirt with “MERCY FOR ANIMALS” in bold white letters and a stylized blue logo featuring a chicken, a rabbit and a fish. My blazer also features a small black “Praise Seitan” button that I purchased at a vegetarian festival I spoke at the other day in Portland, Oregon. As I began placing my wallet, cell phone, watch, shoes, and laptop into the plastic containers for the conveyor belt to the security scanner, I wondered if my animal rights accoutrements might stir suspicion among the security personnel. As the term “Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act” goose-stepped in my brain, I had visions of a stern-faced uniformed guard quietly asking me to step aside for questioning. I was prepared to counter any interrogations with gentle explanations of animal rights being a movement of compassion and nonviolence, and if necessary, to explain that the button refers to veganism, not demonism. As it turned out, my passage through security was smooth and the personnel affable.

Six days of public speaking and signing books in Oregon and Arizona have brought some rewarding encounters with nature. In a backyard festooned with over 50 varieties of wildflowers, I watched as a feral Norway rat made forays from the undergrowth to get seeds beneath a bird-feeder. She looked much like the tame rat I had petted at the festival the day before. A pair of Steller’s jays and a Towhee poked about right next to the rat, and none seemed to take much notice of the other. I admire the natural tolerance wild creatures often show each other; it reminds me of the civility we show strangers.

A lawn abutting my Tucson hotel swimming pool provided more intense fare for the nature-watcher. The close-cropped green carpet served as a courting ground for sex-pumped great-tailed grackles. A small cluster of the large, glossy males stalked about with bills pointed straight up, like royalty out for a stroll. Suddenly a male would stoop with gaping bill, puff up his feathers creating the illusion that he had just doubled in size, then scurry over to a female crouching with fluttering wings on the periphery. The air around the pool was constantly cleaved with a cacophony of grackle calls, including a loud warbling call that sounded as if the bird was making a derisive comment about my swimsuit.

At a rest-stop en route to Phoenix, I watched a pair of cactus wrens cavorting and preening in a small tree. Nearby, a mother thrasher demonstrated foraging techniques to her fully fledged chicks. She would trot a couple of feet and they would follow as if tethered to her by invisible string. She plucked and swallowed a tiny morsel from the sandy gravel, then hurried off again. The young pair stayed behind, making desultory probes at the substrate before trotting off to join her again. As I returned to my rental car I saw a sign warning visitors of the presence of rattlesnakes. Considering how many snakes get bumped off by humans, I figure it’s a good thing snakes can’t read, else they’d be scandalized, if not terrified, by such a sign.

Blog Entries (FirstScience blog)

2007-03-04T17:45:00.000-08:00

This morning I went grocery shopping at my local Whole Foods market. Whole Foods is the largest natural foods supermarket chain in the world. I consider people who shop here to be relatively enlightened.

I saw at least six people wearing coats with real fur trim collars.

Fur fact: the fur industry has staged something of a come-back since it reached its low point in the mid-nineties [link].

Each time I see someone wearing fur, a little bit of my faith in humanity dies. I think: here’s someone whose morals are mired in the Stone Age. Fur production involves immense suffering—be it ranch-raised (where deranged animals circle for months in wire boxes before being electrocuted, strangled or clubbed then skinned, sometimes still alive) or wild-caught (where animals struggle for hours or days while a leg or foot goes gangrene in a steel-jaw trap, and babies starving when their mother fails to return). That it’s all completely unnecessary makes it all the more offensive.

On my daily commute to work I display a large “Fur Shame!” button on my briefcase, next to another that says “Practice Nonviolence.” It’s my little way of expressing publicly how I feel about making innocent animals suffer for someone’s vanity, ignorance, or both.

Last week on my commute home I chatted with a neighbor who told me she recently had her beagle euthanized due to advanced Lyme Disease symptoms that left him unable (or unwilling) to walk. She is an educated, articulate compassionate person, and she was still agonizing over her decision to end the dog’s pain. I asked if she was planning to replace her dog but she said she was reluctant as she is single and her long work hours mean that a dog is alone for long periods.

I also noticed she was wearing a real-fur collar, probably coyote. I asked: “Is that real fur?” “I hope not!” she replied. “I didn’t pay enough for it to even consider that it might be fur.” I told her I was quite certain that it was fur and that the label would probably confirm this.

Fur fact: several coat manufacturers have been caught mislabeling real fur as faux.

Which goes to show that I’m wrong to assume that fur wearers just don’t give a damn. Many, if my neighbor is representative, are well-meaning but either careless or mis-informed. Perhaps there’s still hope for the demise of an industry that should have gone out with the invention of knitting.