National image & the quality of compassion

[Guest guest]

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, May 2008:

 

 

Editorial feature

 

National image & the quality of compassion

 

Having never won a fight in his life, despite picking many

in his youth, the longtime ANIMAL PEOPLE office cat Alfred the Great

died in 2006 after convincing generations of younger cats that his

scars from many early thrashings were evidence that he was not a cat

to trifle with. Alfred occupied a royal pillow for years after

learning a lesson about image and character from an old female cat

named Gidget, nicknamed " Devil of the Boss Cats. "

A rather small tabby, Gidget one evening turned on a coyote

believed to have eaten nine other cats, and sent the coyote racing

up a mountainside for dear life with her practiced shrieks and Aikido

rolls. The coyote never came back.

Alfred followed Gidget, practicing her growl and swagger.

But Alfred also studied the social nuances exhibited by the

Buddha-like Voltaire, his predecessor as as the ANIMAL PEOPLE top

cat, who tended to let younger tomcats beat each other up without

involving himself in pointless confrontation. Cultivating political

wisdom, Alfred reigned into frail old age, then peacefully

abdicated when he knew he could no longer present a convincing bluff.

Image and character, as almost every animal instinctively

knows, are often not the same thing--but image reflects character

often enough that rivals and predators tend to avoid risking

mistakes. The essence of successful display, whether to attract a

mate or to repel a threat, is convincing others that the brightness

of feathers, size of mane, length of horns, or jauntiness of a

strut is authentically indicative of whatever is underneath.

Image tends to be created by the combination of whatever is

deliberately offered to view with what cannot be hidden. Thus much

of image is a matter of presenting a potential defect or

vulnerability as an attribute and asset. Alfred could not hide his

scars, but he could tell hugely exaggerated war stories about them

with his cocky demeanor. Gidget could not hide being small, but her

growl hinted at the ferocity of a puma. Voltaire moved in a regal

manner ensuring that he was seen as the king of cats, not just a fat

cat.

Displays of national image and character, though the

products of cumulative human behavior, differ little in essence from

the individual displays of cats.

National character might be described as the sum of attitudes

underlying the prevailing beliefs and practices within a nation.

National image tends to be created by the choices of national

leadership about what they think the nation should put on official

display.

Sometimes national character and national image are

strikingly at odds. Spanish citizens, for example, have turned

away from bullfighting in such numbers that bullfights are no longer

held in some major cities and are no longer prominently televised.

Yet a bullfight was the first event shown on Spanish national

television, 60 years ago, and Spain has for so long promoted and

subsidized bullfighting as the national sport that advertisements for

tourism to Spain and products of Spanish origin still often depict

bulls and toreadors. As bullfighting wanes, the time may come when

Spaniards actively resist equations of Spain with bullfighting as a

form of ethnic stereotyping and a slur--as Spanish animal advocates

already do.

Foxhunting, now banned in Britain, may likewise fade and be

rejected as a symbol of Britain, despite a resurgence of

participation in superficially sanitized fox hunts since the ban took

effect in 2005.

The French, though still world leaders in eating frogs'

legs, have long objected to being called " frogs. " In fairness,

protest against frog-eating and associated cruelties also originated

in France, encouraged by the 19th century socialist revolutionary

Louise Michel.

Native Americans of several tribes in the northern Rocky

Mountains once ate dogs, but in contemporary reservation culture the

term " dog-eater " is perhaps the worst of insults.

In truth, most people in most societies overwhelmingly

reject cruelty to animals when asked for their opinions, and when

they recognize cruel behavior for what it is.

Of particular note are MORI polls commissioned by the

International Fund for Animal Welfare, the Royal SPCA of Great

Britain, Compassion In World Farming, and One Voice, of France,

which in 2004-2005 discovered that 92% of Vietnamese citizens, 92%

of South Korean citizens, 91% of British citizens, and 90% of

Chinese citizens accept a human moral duty to minimize animal

suffering.

Britain has enforced humane laws for nearly 200 years, but

South Korea has only a weak and recent tradition of humane law

enforcement. China and Vietnam have none.

The April 2005 ANIMAL PEOPLE editorial feature, " National

character & the quality of compassion, " extensively explored why

cruelty to animals--and humans--tends to be much more visible in some

nations than others, even when the citizens of each nation express

almost equally strong distaste for cruel behavior.

The defining differences, in terms of legislation, tend to

reflect political freedom. Participatory democracies tend to have

relatively strong humane laws. Totalitarian states tend to treat

animals much as they do their citizens.

But laws are scarcely the whole issue. The humane laws of

western democracies still benefit relatively few of the billions of

animals who suffer and die each year at human hands--and would

benefit relatively few, even if the laws now on the books were much

more strenuously enforced than they ever have been.

The U.S. Animal Welfare Act, for example, exempts rats,

mice, and birds used in laboratories, thereby exempting about 95%

of all laboratory animals from any protection. The U.S. Humane

Slaughter Act exempts poultry--about 95% of all the animals who go to

slaughter. More than 30 states explicitly exempt cruelty from

prosecution if cruelty is part of a standard practice in agriculture,

and every state exempts cruelties commonly involved in hunting,

trapping, and fishing.

Nearly every cruelty commonly observed and cited by some

animal advocates in appeals for a boycott of the forthcoming 2008

Olympic Games in Beijing has a parallel in the U.S., albeit taking a

superficially different form. Even when U.S. laws nominally prohibit

the cruelty, enforcement is often so sporadic that the laws serve

more to shield animal use industries from criticism than to bring

offenders to justice.

Compare the live skinning of dogs by some Chinese fur

sellers, exposed in 2005 by the state-run Beijing News, to the

live skinning of cattle at the Iowa Beef Packers slaughterhouse in

Wallula, Washington, exposed in 2000 by the Humane Farming

Association.

While the Chinese live skinning was deliberate, the Wallula

incidents were accidental consequences of slaughter lines running too

fast to enable workers to re-stun cattle who were improperly stunned

with the first shot of a captive bolt gun. Yet the numbers of

animals involved may have been comparable. HFA obtained affidavits

from 17 Wallula slaughterhouse workers who testified that up to 30%

of the cattle they killed were inadequately stunned. No one was

successfully prosecuted at Wallula, despite years of HFA efforts to

bring a case.

Lack of effective enforcement of the Humane Slaughter Act was

most recently illustrated by the abuse of downed cattle in October

2007 at the now closed Westland/Hallmark slaughterhouse in Chino,

California. The abuse videotaped by an undercover inspector for the

Humane Society of the U.S. strikingly resembled practices videotaped

in the notorious live markets of Guangdong by the Animals Asia

Foundation. The victims in Chino were cattle, while the victims in

Guangdong included dogs, cats, civets, and pangolins, among other

animals, but suffering is not limited by species.

 

Matters of degree

 

In truth, what humane laws are now mostly about--in the

U.S., Europe, India, and wherever else they exist--is establishing

recognition of kindness toward animals as a culturally appreciated

value. This may be mostly clearly illustrated by comparing and

contrasting public entertainments involving animals in the U.S. and

China.

The American Zoo Association and predecessor societies have

discouraged feeding live animals to captive carnivores since 1898,

but live feeding was still practiced by at least one non-AZA U.S. zoo

as recently as 1996, when it was closed for repeatedly flunking

Animal Welfare Act safety inspections.

This was the same year that live feeding at Chinese zoos

first came to international humane attention, coinciding with an

explosion of zoo development in China, which still has fewer zoos

serving 1.3 billion residents than the state of California has to

serve about 35 million. Live feeding was banned by most Chinese

zoos, by collective agreement, in March 2005, but continues at

several which disingenuously pretend to be preparing tigers for

potential return to the wild.

However, European-style bullfighting has never caught on in

China, despite several well-funded attempts to introduce it. An

attempt to introduce U.S.-style rodeo to Beijing in 2004 was an

abysmal flop. Cockfighting is discouraged. U.S.-style dogfighting

was illegally introduced to Guangdong in the late 1990s, but remains

a clandestine pursuit, if still done.

On the whole, despite the persistence of live feeding at the

renegade zoos, the Chinese people could scarcely be accused of

broadly enjoying or accepting violent abuse of animals as

entertainment, even to the degree that Americans do, all the while

pretending that rodeo bucking events are not typically stimulated by

" bucking straps " and electroshock, and that the cattle and horses

who crash to the ground in roping events are rarely seriously injured.

Probably the least flattering comparision of U.S. and Chinese

attitudes toward animals involves consumption of wildlife. Wildlife

consumption, especially in the southern part of China, is justly

notorious, not only for the cruelty associated with the animal

traffic, but also as a major contributor to the loss of wildlife

throughout Southeast Asia. Turtle populations are depleted as far

away as South Carolina because of Chinese demand.

But IFAW public opinion research done in 1998 and surveys of

Chinese university students done by Peter Li, Zu Shuxian, and Su

Pei-feng in 2002-2003, with support from the World Society for the

Protection of Animals, put the matter into a different perspective.

The 1998 survey found that 38% of Chinese adults had eaten wildlife;

24% of the students had.

The implied lower rate of wildlife consumption among educated

young people parallels U.S. studies--and the rates found by both

studies closely compare to U.S. research showing that three to four

times as many people eat animals shot by hunters as the 10% who

actually hunted a generation ago, the 6% who hunted circa 2000, and

the 4% who hunt as of the most recent U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service

survey.

The major differences in Chinese and U.S. wildlife

consumption are that Chinese wildlife consumption more often involves

reptiles than mammals, U.S. consumption seldom involves declining

species, and Chinese wildlife consumption is mostly a minor branch

of the upper-priced portion of the restaurant trade, while U.S.

wildlife consumption is the end product of a major recreational

industry.

Both hunting in the U.S. and Chinese wildlife consumption are

declining, but most U.S. states and the federal government are

actively trying to rekindle public interest in hunting, while the

Chinese government has discouraged wildlife consumption since the

Sudden Acute Respiratory Syndrome outbreak of 2003-2004. Edicts

introduced to keep wild mammals out of live markets have recently

been extended to reptiles and birds. Beijing has also acted to

ensure that wildlife commerce does not merely move from live markets

to the Internet.

The U.S. has no form of wildlife commerce directly comparable

to bear bile farming, practiced in China, both North and South

Korea, and Vietnam, but the confinement of the bears closely

resembles the confinement of sows in gestation stalls.

IFAW found in 1998 that only 30% of Beijing and Shanghai

residents had ever heard of bear bile farming--much as most Americans

at that time had never heard of gestation stalls. Of those who did

know about bear bile farming, 87% considered it unacceptably cruel.

Peter Li, Zu Shuxian, and Su Pei-feng discovered five years

later that 40% of Chinese university students were aware of bear bile

farming, largely through the work of the Animals Asia Foundation's

China Bear Rescue Project. Ninety percent considered it unacceptably

cruel.

U.S. voters recently banned gestation stalls in Florida and

Arizona, and will get a chance to do so this fall in California.

Chinese voters may never get a chance to ban bear bile farming, but

the polls suggest they would if they could.

Most of the meat consumed in China, as in the U.S., comes

from vast factory farms. Despite the recent rapid rise of Chinese

meat consumption, Americans still eat about twice as much meat per

capita.

Chinese meat consumption includes about 10 million dogs and

one million cats per year. About 80% of the dogs and virtually all

of the cats are eaten in the southern half of China. Many are hauled

like factory-farmed poultry, and are killed by means which

approximate what happens to the millions of pigs per year who are

inadequately stunned in U.S. slaughterhouses. The cats are often

boiled alive; however, improperly stunned pigs may go alive into a

scalding tank that facilitates removing their hair from their hides.

There is no defending such cruelty. Neither is there any

defense for the periodic dog purges that many Chinese cities still

use in response to rabies outbreaks, instead of forming animal

control agencies with properly trained staff, promoting low-cost

vaccination and sterilization, and operating animal shelters that

emphasize good care and rehoming.

Yet fairness requires noting that as recently as 1985 the

U.S. killed more dogs and cats in shelters than the sum killed in

China for meat plus those killed in purges. Only in 1985 did the

last U.S. cities to kill dogs and cats by decompression switch to

using less painful methods.

In gist, the U.S. is far ahead of China in paying legal lip

service to eradicating cruelty, especially to dogs and cats, but

the gap in animal advocates' perceptions of the U.S. and China is

unfortunately more a matter of image than of reality.

In preparation for the 2008 Olympics, Beijing has emphasized

an improved image as regards animal welfare. Like past hosts of the

Olympics and similar international events, Beijing is striving to

rid the streets of stray dogs and cats, but has made efforts to

avoid obvious cruelty, and has introduced the beginnings of an

animal sheltering system. Chinese animal advocates, encouraged by

hints from state media, remain hopeful that a long anticipated

national anti-cruelty law will be introduced before the Olympics.

International attention to animal welfare in China has been

overshadowed by the Chinese response to demonstrations and sporadic

anti-Chinese violence by Tibetans seeking political independence. Of

note is that in this situation too, Beijing has made

efforts--including allegedly sending out disguised soldiers to pose

as rioting Buddhist monks--to avoid an appearance of responding with

inappropriate force.

Historically, Beijing has answered any hint of insurrection

anywhere claimed as Chinese territory with what U.S. military

spokespersons in Iraq and Afghanistan call a " rapid escalation of

force " --and has put the force on display as a warning to other

potential rebels. The present Tibet response may be as forceful as

any other, and western media and other potential witnesses have been

kept away, but Chinese use of force has been downplayed by state

media.

The image Beijing appears to want to offer to the world in

2008 includes disassociation from cruelty, whether to animals or

humans.

On March 8, meanwhile, U.S. President George W. Bush

dismayed much of the world by vetoing a bill passed by the U.S.

Congress which would have prohibited the Central Intelligence Agency

from practicing overt tortures including a technique called

" waterboarding. " New York Times columnist William Safire, a former

speechwriter for U.S. President Richard Nixon, traced the origin of

" waterboarding " back to ancient China. Safire noted that then-U.S.

President Theodore Roosevelt in 1902 explicitly ordered U.S. troops

to stop using " waterboarding " against Philippine insurgents, after

it was exposed by Mark Twain and a Congressional hearing.

" Torture is not a thing that we can tolerate, " Roosevelt wrote.

Though Roosevelt was a hunter, who avidly shot birds and

learned taxidermy in his teens, he refused to kill and dissect

animals needlessly as a Harvard undergraduate.

Roosevelt helped to introduce the system of funding wildlife

conservation through the sale of hunting licenses, in effect turning

over control of wildlife management to hunters. Yet he also helped

to award the New York City animal control contract to the American

SPCA, taking it away from private contractors who formerly drowned

impounded dogs in crowded cages that were dunked into the Hudson

River.

Most famously, " Teddy bears " were named in Roosevelt's

honor after he refused to shoot a tethered bear cub at a " hunt "

arranged for his amusement.

Books have been written about Roosevelt's shortcomings, some

of which Roosevelt himself acknowledged, but he appears to have

understood at all times the value of maintaining an image of

kindness, especially toward animals, and even while waging war.

 

 

 

 

--

Merritt Clifton

Editor, ANIMAL PEOPLE

P.O. Box 960

Clinton, WA 98236

 

Telephone: 360-579-2505

Fax: 360-579-2575

E-mail: anmlpepl

Web: www.animalpeoplenews.org

 

[ANIMAL PEOPLE is the leading independent newspaper providing

original investigative coverage of animal protection worldwide,

founded in 1992. Our readership of 30,000-plus includes the

decision-makers at more than 10,000 animal protection organizations.

We have no alignment or affiliation with any other entity. $24/year;

for free sample, send address.]