June 11, 2007
A sad end for Dolores
I live in an area where animal control won’t respond to reports of free-roaming dogs. Instead they ask that if you find a free-roaming dog, you should catch the dog yourself and once the dog is secured, they’ll send someone around to pick up the dog. Clearly this presents a problem if you know where the dog lives and you merely want animal control to remind the humans belonging to that dog that they shouldn’t just turn him out of doors on his own. It also presents a problem if the dog you find out roaming is aggressive. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been frightened by aggressive dogs running free when I’m out with my own dogs.
We like to think that companion animals live pampered lives, but the truth is far from it. I’ve called animal control on dogs chained 24 hours a day in horrible weather, only to see the dogs returned to the chain once the AC officer leaves.
A neighbor of ours, a pastor in fact, keeps his dog in a pen in the backyard, continuously. I have never seen the dog walked or any human petting him or interacting with him. There is no other dog for company, just a sad metal pen, a doghouse, and hours of loneliness. During the worst cold of the winter the pastor went out and put a space heater in the doghouse, which was better than nothing, but still just not enough.
About a year ago I met a black lab mix named Dolores, who was out running at large. She was a gentle, but very active dog. I asked around and finally figured out where she lived and set out to return her. I found a house with a fence in the back, but the gate off the hinges, and when a woman finally answered the door she yelled and scruffed Dolores for getting out. And that was the first time of many I returned Dolores to that house.
Dolores adored me and my dogs and so when we’d go on walks she’d come dashing out through her broken gate to join us. I felt terrible for Dolores, but I also didn’t have a leash for her and didn’t think I could handle taking her with us, especially without a leash. So I’d return her to her house again and every single time cringe as she was yelled at and dragged for leaving the yard, even though there was nothing to keep her there.
Sometimes however, I’d see a happier Dolores. She had two little girls who loved her, but didn’t seem to be home all that often. When the little girls were there, they’d play catch and chase. That was the real Dolores, a happy lab mix with a happy family. But that wasn’t how I saw her most of the time.
The last time she met up with us on our walk and followed us all the way home. I put my dogs in the house and opened up my car door for Dolores. She leapt in happily and sat in the front seat as we drove several blocks to her house, leaning over and giving me kisses. But when we got to her house she didn’t want to leave my car, and definitely did not want to go up to her house.
Nobody was home and after some exhaustive searching I found a chain in the back yard and hooked it to Dolores’ collar. She cried as I left, but I didn’t know what else to do. I had 50 billion things to do that evening, I had a house full to bursting with rescues. The people had been warned repeatedly, but still wouldn’t keep her in. If I called animal control, I’d have to be the one to hand Dolores over to them and it might be a death sentence. Also, what about those little girls?
I talked it over with some friends and everyone said that I should just leave the situation alone–I couldn’t do any more, but it was better to leave Dolores where she was than to hand her over to animal control. I was also informed that yelling at and dragging a dog don’t constitute cruelty under the current regulations. They wouldn’t be allowed to beat her, but good luck catching them in the act. Still, dragging and yelling are accepted behaviors.
Then I just didn’t see Dolores, and finally a neighbor told me what happened. On the weekend we went to visit my father in law, Dolores was hit by a car and killed, right in front of her house. I keep thinking about her grinning face running over to me and my dogs. I keep thinking how happy she looked riding in my car until she realized where we were going. The neighbor who told me of Dolores’ death said he wished he’d called lab rescue, but I reminded him there was nothing a rescue group could do unless the “owners” relinquished Dolores to them. Another neighbor pushed himself into the conversation to say he was glad Dolores was gone–she’d torn up his trash and chased his cat. That’s how people saw Dolores, as a major pest, though it was never her fault.
Of course, people shouldn’t drive like maniacs. I’m always finding animals hit by cars in my neighborhood, and always seeing cars practically racing through, taking the speed bumps as some kind of challenge. I also one day found a two year old boy wandering in the street who wasn’t able to tell me where he lived or how he got there–though in that case suddenly a lot of people got involved to try to find his home. But the fact remains, he could easily have been killed by a speeding car.
But cars aside, what kind of life did Dolores have? What kind of life does that dog, penned 24 hours a day in the pastor’s back yard have? What kind of life do all those dogs on chains have? Through breeders and lack of spaying and neutering we’ve created this class of animals that are completely dependent on us. Our happy storybook version is that this is a good thing for everyone involved. The actual story is rampant neglect and mistreatment, and millions put to death in the shelters for the crime of not having a home.
Goodbye Dolores. I wish I could have done more. I can’t help but wonder now if I should have taken you to the shelter and just hoped you might have found a better home.
With the companion animals I rescue and care for, I really think of them as individuals, lives entrusted in my hands. I think about what I owe them, what they need. I see them as refugees of a terrible, unfair system, and I hope to give them some peace, happiness, and love in the time they have left. But we live in a world that regards animals as property, and to most people a companion animal is another thing they own. This animal, this thing, might be a toy for their kids, or a status symbol, or a home alarm system to them. But as owned things, their needs and their lives don’t matter. We are in some kind of strange denial at the moment. We have animal control to go out and tell people that the most blatant cruelty and neglect are not socially acceptable. However, nobody goes out and tells people they need to make their companion animals part of their families. If they want to keep their dog chained, so long as he has food and water, that’s fine. If they neglect something very basic, like the safety of their dog (by letting her run in the street) they might get a warning, but again that dog is their property to be careless with if they so choose. If they want to turn their dog over to the shelter because he’s too much trouble to care for, or they want a smaller dog, or a different breed, that’s their choice. You’re allowed to discard the property you don’t want after all.
It’s a sad, sad world sometimes.
June 10, 2007
Wherein I use a rape analogy and contradict myself
So, yesterday was hectic and as I was running up the stairs with an armload of laundry some stuff knocking around in my brain came together into something resembling a coherent thought.
I’ve said for a long time that even as we bring more attention to issues like rape and domestic violence there are still people out there who don’t know as much as they should, or don’t understand the underlying issues. However, we have made significant progress in that most people do seem to recognize women as independent human beings who don’t deserve to be hurt. There are exceptions of course, but there is increasing understanding.
Then I thought about some old journals and stories that I read while in undergrad and how it had struck me then that as little as a 100 years ago many people didn’t think marital rape was possible. This was because rape wasn’t seen as a crime against a woman (though people might have sympathized with the woman); rape was seen as a crime against another man by dishonoring him or devaluing his property. To rape an unmarried woman was a crime against her father who then might not be able to marry her off, and must also endure the shame the rape brought upon his family. To rape a married woman dishonored her husband and devalued his property, his wife. But for a man to rape his own wife seemed impossible. She was his wife after all, how could he possibly rape her? No other man was being dishonored. He owned her body after all, you can’t steal what you already own.
Slowly attitudes in society changed and many people came to realize that women are human beings with their own will, their own needs, and their own rights. They came to see that some men terrorize their wives or partners through sexual violence and the threat of sexual violence. But none of these changes would have been possible without first recognizing that women belong to themselves. We own our own bodies; nobody else owns us.
Even today, there are some people who don’t understand the concept of marital rape, and it’s more difficult to prosecute than stranger rape, a crime people have a more ready understanding of.
But even as the attitudes about ownership and about rape shifted, a strange secondary prejudice slipped in that allowed many people to ignore just how widespread domestic violence and sexual violence were. People started saying “If it’s so bad why doesn’t she just leave?”
I encountered this attitude at work when two male co-workers discussed in front of me their opinion on a highly publicized domestic violence case, concluding that the woman had gone back to her abuser several times so she must like the abuse. I was so shocked and even hurt by these words that I wasn’t able to interject myself into the conversation to clear up that misunderstanding.
Connected to “why doesn’t she just leave” is an assumption that someone who has been abused will show it in obvious ways, which allows people to believe that their neighbors and co-workers aren’t at risk. I’ve heard people say of domestic violence cases “but she doesn’t look hurt” or “how can she be telling the truth when she seems fine.” We like to think violence is so rare and so horrible that we will be able to immediately tell victims from “normal people” and likewise that we should be able to tell who is an abuser, because they certainly won’t look like us.
These are problems with public perception that many groups are working tirelessly to combat and we do seem to be making some real progress on them.
However, and now for my dreaded hypocrite moment, I wondered if such blind spots also applied to our perception of animals. I really do think the same fallacies in thinking are huge problems in making people aware of how badly we treat animals in our culture. First there’s the problem of property. If you are raising chickens to produce eggs and someone else kills your chickens, that’s a crime against you and that person would be prosecuted, not for hurting the chickens but because hurting the chickens hurt you, a person, the owner. However, if some of your chickens die because you continue forced molting too long or the cages are too crowded, that’s not a crime, because you damaged your own property. Therefore, you’re a bad farmer, but not an abusive monster. See the problem?
(Oh, and see the recent Compassion Over Killing case for further evidence of this)
Many groups are desperately trying to make the public aware of the harm being done to animals and to tell people that animals matter and shouldn’t be made to suffer. So we start to make some slow progress with public attitudes, but we are far from the finish line.
Now the other fallacy comes in: “If it were so bad the animals would all die and the farms would fall apart.” This is what the industry tells us. Even though investigation after investigation shows nightmare conditions, egg-laying hens living on top of the dead bodies of their sisters, pigs that can’t ever turn around, cows with open bleeding sores, and so on… Even with all of that, the industry tells us “It can’t be that bad, if we mistreated the hens they wouldn’t lay eggs, if the cows were suffering they wouldn’t produce milk, the fact that you have a ham on your table proves the pig was treated well.”
Sigh, and yet we all know this isn’t true, and yet people buy into it. How do we fight this misinformation that allows people to feel good about their choices, and lets them keep living in a fog, blocking out the truth?
June 9, 2007
Then something falls into place and suddenly you understand
When I lived in NYC I volunteered with a program where we facilitated reading and writing with severely disabled adults in a public hospital. These were patients who had been in the hospital for a long time, some as long as 19 years. Because of their economic situation they had few other options for the long-term care they required. The patients included people who had been born with severe birth defects (like spina bifida high in the spine and severe) and were now adults requiring monitoring and continuing care. Others had multiple sclerosis or Parkinson’s disease. Some had been paralyzed in car accidents or had had severe strokes.
When I started out with the program a volunteer who had been doing it longer than I had told me that sometimes communicating with people on ventilators or with paralysis was difficult. Their voices might be altered, or they might only be able to speak in whispers, or with an odd rhythm that might interfere with understanding. But she reassured me, something amazing happens when you work with someone for a while, suddenly something just happens to you, and then you understand every word. Before you might have wondered if they were always even speaking English or if they might be delirious, and then suddenly you start hearing and you know this amazing, intelligent person.
That’s what happened for me. I was working with a woman with Parkinson’s. She lived on a large open ward, permanently lying down in her bed. She had trouble even turning her head. At first I couldn’t understand anything and then all of sudden I was taking dictation for the memoirs of an amazing woman, who’d been an actress, a mother, a wife, who’d lived through and worked through incredible changes. Everything made sense, except of course this terrible disease.
I had not realized before this work how much we depend on non-verbal cues as we interpret spoken language. Words that sound similar can be distinguished by facial expressions and hand gestures, emphasis is added, and context, in ways we just pick up without even knowing it. When you’re talking to someone who cannot move her hands though, and has only limited facial expressions, you have to learn to look for more, the slightest flicker of an eye lid, or the direction of her gaze become the cues. Like I said, you begin to understand that the spirit and the mind inside this person are still active and involved and perceptive, even though the exterior does not represent those things.
Sometimes though I was disturbed by the reactions others had. Some of the nurses and orderlies wrote off attempts at communication by these individuals as “making noise” or “crying.” I can understand that they didn’t have the time to get extremely close with all the patients, but there seemed an underlying assumption that when the voice went away so did the mind. With my one friend, the one with Parkinson’s, I came in one day as she was being moved from a stretcher back into her bed. Once in the bed she seemed very agitated and was trying to communicate something, but whatever was wrong, even I couldn’t understand her words.
The nurse told me this was crying, as moving back into the bed was uncomfortable. But after the nurse left my friend became more upset, and was still trying to say something unsuccessfully. Her face became red and perspiration appeared. I went and got the nurse again, asking her to please check everything, something was wrong. She checked a couple things, told me again it was crying, and left. Since my friend was still not happy, I went and got an orderly and made the same request of him. He checked the bed, he checked the iv, he checked the nose tube to make sure it was still in place, and then the catheter, everything was ok so far. Then he checked the oxygen tank pushed to the back of the bed. It was shut off at the tank, that was the problem. So clearly my friend had been trying to communicate something vital, but because none of us could understand it, it was easier to simply dismiss it.
Life is full of these moments that force us to reconsider our definitions and prejudices. I was thinking about this also in regard to animals recently, that just because we don’t hear it doesn’t mean communication isn’t going on. Just because we don’t see or understand the intelligence behind another being’s actions, that doesn’t mean there isn’t intelligence present.
Recently the Washington Post ran a story about a study on dog intelligence that found dogs are much, much smarter than we ever gave them credit for (sorry requires registration). Another thing, deductive reasoning, that we used to feel was uniquely human has been found in another species.
Of course this isn’t much of a surprise to those of us who live with dogs. We all know our dogs can play dumb when it suits them, but with motivation they can learn complex tasks. Kyra learned to open the gates on our fence, much to our chagrin. She also learned to open the lever type door handles at the vet’s office. Good luck hiding food as well! For a while I wondered why I kept coming home and not being able to find Q anywhere in the house, then running around the neighborhood convinced she’d gotten outside somehow, only to have her show up later in the bedroom as if nothing had happened. Then I saw her open up the cabinet under the sink and go back into the gap in the wall there that led to a space between the side of the bathtub and the wall, and the cabinet door slammed shut behind her. (some cabinets are now child-proofed). I think that Kyra and Q learned to do these things by observing us and then trying it out themselves. Behind their fuzzy faces there was some thinking going on.
When I talk about the range of emotions my rescued animals express I’ve had people tell me I’m reading too much in. They’ll say, maybe they just learned to act a certain way to get food, you don’t know what they actually feel. That’s true. I don’t know for certain what they feel and they don’t have words to tell me exactly. I do believe though that much the same concept applies.
When you live every day with an animal who doesn’t communicate or express emotions in the same way you do, at first you’re just guessing, then something clicks and you know. It’s not anthropomorphizing, it’s not wishful thinking, it’s not being overly emotional, it’s just that suddenly you get past the differences in facial muscles, the different bones. You get past the fur and the different shape to the eyes, the fact that the flow of words goes only one way, and suddenly something falls into place and there really is communication and understanding.
June 8, 2007
When You Find the Need to Survive
There is a danger in being too emotional sometimes, that we can lose sight of logic, or trust or gut instinct against all reason. So when I get really emotional I try to find some way I can do a sanity check. I used to joke that somebody should invent a mental thermometer, so I can do decisive home sanity check for myself. Like I’d look at it and say “Ok, in the green, I’m fine.” Or “Ooops, it’s in the red, I’d better take a step back, calm down, and rethink this.”
Wouldn’t that be great? Of course we’d all be taking them to work to secretly sanity-check our bosses!
So, with that disclaimer at the opening, prepare for an over the top emotional blog entry that’s so emo your computer monitor might start sweating huge bloody tears or something.
The thing I wanted to write about is why life is important, not just suffering or protection from suffering. I mentioned this before in my entry on feral cats; the idea was that I can’t be sure I won’t die tomorrow, I can’t be sure that death won’t be horrible and gruesome. But I’d still prefer to take my chances with that than to get a painless lethal injection today.
Taking this a step further, as much as I deplore the conditions on factory farms or in slaughterhouses, and as much as I’d like to see those conditions improved, I still stick to the basic idea that no matter how humanely it’s done, it’s wrong for me to kill an animal because I like how he tastes, or I want to wear her skin, or for sport or entertainment. Just as it would be wrong for someone to kill me because they enjoy the act of killing, or because they want what I have, or they want my body, or any other perceived benefit to eliminating me. Even if my death were sudden, without fear or pain, a single gunshot to the head before I even knew what was happening, even so it would be wrong.
Like many people, I also had a moment where time seemed to slow for me and my very life hung in the balance. With the kind of crystal clarity that sometimes comes in a moment of extreme crisis I suddenly knew that it was a very real possibility I wasn’t going to live through this. My whole being cried out that this was not right. I HAD to live. I wasn’t able to consider the finer points of whether my life was worthwhile. Some people have told me that in moments like that they thought of their loved ones and how missed they would be, or the good they wouldn’t be able to do. I can’t claim anything so noble. Something much more basic kicked in for me, a desperate survival instinct that NEEDED to survive above all else. If I was badly hurt, ok. If I was disabled, ok. But I couldn’t give up, I wanted and needed to live and it wasn’t even a choice it was something felt in every molecule of my body.
Before this I had had some minor experience with those I knew making peace with death and accepting it. I always assumed that when it was the right time for me, I would make my peace. I had a cat named Bernard with advanced cancer when I was only 14 or so. Right before we had him euthanized he wasn’t able to do much but lie on his soft blanket. When I said goodbye to him, he looked back at me with this look of exhaustion, but also love, and also extreme calm. Shortly after that happened, my family had a party and there was a great big gooey cake. My great uncle James was sitting on the couch and asked me to get him a piece and said “be sure it’s an end piece with lots of frosting, a corner is best. If you can get a frosting flower on it, I’d like that.” When I brought him his cake I leaned over him and our eyes met and I was struck by a single thought “that’s the look Bernard gave me right before he died.” Within days my great uncle died, quite unexpectedly, but I just knew. When my grandfather died, it was a shock to all of us, but I was struck by the memory of how he’d looked at me the last time I’d seen him. I’d thought that look of peace and calm had been happy memories as he talked, but I began to see a pattern. And I could only hope that when my life was at an end the calm and love and peace would descend on me too and I’d let go with grace.
But in those moments where I felt my own death coming, there was no peace, just the monumental will to live. Perhaps we could say it simply wasn’t my time, I don’t know.
When I began to rescue animals in earnest I started to notice sometimes when an animal seemed to have given up completely and when they hadn’t. Around this time I took a very ill cat, Q, into my home, only to get a death sentence from the vet a couple days later. She tested positive for FIP and her liver was failing. The vet advised me to say goodbye and then bring her in.
Q was so sick; she was lying on a cat bed, thin in all the wrong places, swollen in the opposite and still wrong places, weak and feverish. And she lifted her head and looked at me, and the look was not peace or acceptance, but overwhelmingly “I want to live.”
Some people think I anthropomorphize too much, but in this one I really don’t doubt myself. I had a very sick cat who wanted more than anything to survive, which should be a no-brainer. Most of us want to live. Some give up after horrible illness; some live a long life and give up in old age… But most living things want to continue to live. We all know this, don’t we?
The end of this story is that Q went through crisis and it was terrible, and then slowly she improved (with a holistic vet, not the original vet). Then later she had a relapse and was very ill again, but managed to pull through again, and has now been with me for 6 ½ happy years. We don’t know eventually what will happen, but it was certainly worth the effort.
I bring up Q’s story because sometimes in all the debating about animals and how smart they are or what they need or notice, we somehow miss this common sense thing: they want to live.
Sometimes when advocates of humane farming talk about killing animals they say things like this: “Since the animal make the ultimate sacrifice for us, we have an obligation to treat them well.” Aside from just the weirdness of the word sacrifice, which makes me think of ancient, obscure religious rituals, this way of speaking glosses over an important fact. The animals aren’t sacrificing themselves, they aren’t lying down their tired heads and going to sleep, they are being violently killed and they want to live. They want to live so badly that sometimes they manage to escape slaughterhouses, which are designed after all, almost more secure than prisons, to prevent escape.
I wonder how intelligent people sometimes manage to twist their brains into knots and think silly things like animals only care about whether or not they are in pain, not if they live or die.
Recently the creek near where I live overflowed its banks during a bad storm. The next day while walking my dogs I noticed puddles that looked like they were boiling. On closer inspection I found that about 100 fish and crayfish and miscellaneous water creatures (I counted as I saved them so I’m pretty sure of the number) were writhing and suffocating in rapidly drying puddles about 20 feet from the creek. I got to work, grabbing out the fish and rushing them to the creek. Even though they were in agony in the puddles, in desperate straights they resisted all my attempts to grab them. They preferred to stay in a stagnant, warm, drying up, oxygen-deprived puddle to being caught by me, who might eat them. And these were small fish and animals we’re talking about. I was finally forced to run home with the dogs, and return by myself with a Tupperware, spoon, and other implements to scoop out the fish and get them into the creek. Their struggle for survival, in an animal so different from us is instructive. They would rather be in pain than die, they feared and avoided death. There’s no other explanation to me at least.
I felt something like recognition in me. I’ve been where you are, I told them. Not that they could hear or understand me. I just saw myself in that moment.
One more note. I wrote this yesterday, but revised today. So imagine my surprise when I discovered another blogger wrote something similar yesterday. For a more straight-forward and logical examination of the topic check out this entry on Abolitionist Animal Rights.
June 7, 2007
Surreal Life
This post is just kind of something that’s on my mind that I need to write out and get out of my system before I can tackle any more complex topics.
Yesterday I was walking my dogs and a man pulled up alongside me in a beat up white van, leaned out his window and started telling me how beautiful I am and how pretty my dogs are and how he had this feeling we were supposed to meet. And when I said I wasn’t interested he kept talking, and I tried to walk away and he followed. This is of course the point where Kyra decided to put on her scary dog act. It’s funny because Kyra growls and snaps and barks, and Nikita just stands there staring fixedly at the potential threat. But I think Nikita is probably the dog to worry about. She might not give any warning, but if someone was coming toward us she’d probably do something.
Finally the guy in the van gave up because he couldn’t speak over Kyra anyway and she does have big sharp teeth. At that point a guy came out of some underbrush, zipping up his pants and shouted over to me “That’s a good dog, protecting you like that!” Kyra redirected her barking at him. “That’s right!” he exclaimed “Good dog! Keep growling!”
My life. Always weird.
But as much as I’d like to say that this is an isolated incident, it really isn’t. I think I mentioned before that there are times when men will bother me throughout an entire trip to the store, following me aisle to aisle, repeatedly asking me out even after I’ve made it clear I want to be left alone. Sometimes when I’m walking my dogs men honk and yell at me. Sometimes the men honking and yelling things like “Ooooh baby, lookin’ good” are actually cops in siren cars. Yeah, reflect on how safe that makes me feel in my own neighborhood.
For what it’s worth, not that women ever bring harassment on themselves, but I’m not exactly wearing attention-grabbing clothing here. I wear huge t-shirts and sweat pants to walk the dogs.
I’ve had friends suggest that I need to get a large wedding ring and start wearing it. But of course there are reasons why I don’t wear a ring. Besides I should have a right to not be harassed all the time, even if I don’t “belong” to someone else. Funny, there’s this guy at the gym who harasses all the women, but not me, because I always go in with Sean. Being with a guy is a legitimate reason to be left alone, but just preferring to be left alone is not.
Sometimes when faced with this stuff I wonder what these men hope to accomplish. Do they think a woman should not be out walking her dogs and so try to intimidate me into staying inside, or does some part of them honestly expect me to say “Wow, nobody ever called me pretty before” and jump into their shady looking van with them.
There have been times when this unwanted attention has taken on sinister proportions, with men following me in their cars over long distances, or getting out of their cars and coming toward me on foot. And here I’m just talking about the people I’m giving the benefit of the doubt and leaving out the obvious abduction attempt.
It also reminds me how dysfunctional attitudes cut in all directions. The man who judges his manliness on shouting things at women from his car no doubt has trouble relating to women at all in any circumstance. Women feel intimidated and reluctant to do normal things. After all of this, I would not be outside walking if it weren’t that dogs need walking and also discourage people from approaching me. Men who have trouble relating to women as fellow human beings might wonder why none of their relationships work out. They might be lonely and angry or even depressed, but they are likely also unwilling to examine how their own behavior and attitudes might be contributing to those problems.
I think a typical response from people when they’re told they have to change is “Why do I have to change?” For a man who harasses women who are unlucky enough to walk where he’s driving, he’s likely thinking “I’ve always done this. It’s normal.” But the answer to why people have to change is “because it’s hurtful to others.” There’s the added answer of “it clearly isn’t doing you any favors either.”
I started more recently to think of behavior more in terms of reinforcement or withholding reinforcement. So when I think of things that way, I wonder if bothering random women out walking or at the grocery store is self-reinforcing behavior. Do they not care what our response is, because it is the act of harassing women that makes them feel manly and powerful. What gives?
Violence and Trauma Revisited
I think I’ve said it before, but just in recase I need to restate it for the record. I’m not a therapist, I’m not a Ph.D., I’m not a college professor, I’m not an intellectual… Blah, blah, blah, so I’m just speaking from personal experience and I don’t have all the answers.
Child abuse is epidemic in our culture. Reported rates are way too high, and there’s a certain assumption that abuse is under-reported. While some factors are more highly associated with abuse and neglect in particular, like lower household income or a single parent home, no child is safe from abuse based on demographics. Child abuse occurs in every income level, every part of the country, every ethnicity, every religion. Merely being Christian (or any other religion) doesn’t guarantee that there’s not abuse in a home. Having a nice house or no visible marks on the child are also meaningless. It surrounds us, it’s insidious.
Every now and then a really egrigious case of child abuse is reported, often after a child dies, and we all act like it’s the worst thing that ever happened. However, many times abuse continues for years and nothing is ever done. Sometimes adults will stand up and demand to know why nobody intervened on their behalf when they were children and being victimized. Oftentimes others are aware of or suspect abuse but they don’t want to interfere, or they’re afraid they might be wrong, or they care more about the abuser than they do about the child. Of course, just reporting abuse doesn’t totally solve the problem. Foster care isn’t wonderful in many cases, and most of the children are eventually returned to parents who might still lack the life skills to stop abusing.
Trauma and abuse are not “women’s issues,” they are human issues. Men are abused, children are abused, women are abused, the elderly are abused, the disabled are abused, athletes are abused… These are human issues that come down to our failure as a culture to address conflicts and problems without violence. These are human issues that come from living in a world where it’s accepted that some people have the right to control others, to own others.
Because of this, a lot of men in our society have been victims of abuse. Even those that have not been directly abused might absorb terrible messages from a society that condones and even glorifies violence.
In an abusive home, one that follows the pattern we’re all familiar with, a physically violent father who beats the mother, terrified children hiding in corners, everyone there is a victim. The violent father in all likelihood grew up in a violent home. Through his actions he is teaching his son that the only way to relate to other people, women in particular is through violence. He is teaching him the old myth that our anger controls us rather than that we control our anger. And so he raises a son who is terrified and violent, who either learns to despise his mother to cope with the cognitive dissonance or else feels compelled to try to protect his mother which puts him in line for his father’s abuse.
What has that child lost? He has lost the gift of any kind of normal, healthy relationship with either of his parents. He might hate himself for failing to protect his mother (which was never his job) or he might hate himself for anything in him that seems weak or feminine in his view, because he begins to believe that “feminine” traits invite abuse. Without some kind of help along the way and hopefully counseling, he might lose the ability to ever have a decent, loving relationship himself. The very thing that might sustain him through life’s ups and downs is lost to him before he even knew it was possible. He may not be able to develop normal friendships either, because he has no example of how to treat others with kindness. He also can’t let people get too close lest they see the deep family secrets played out. He might internalize extremely bad views of how to deal with frustrations or how to work through difficulties, and the lack of those life skills might hold him back in all areas of his life from damaging his professional reputation to holding him back from volunteering. This leaves a shell of a person, someone who really can’t find or hold onto happiness, someone who can’t find fulfillment in work or human relationships.
Of course the daughter in that physically violent home also suffers, that goes without saying. She is more likely herself to have an abusive partner later in life. The same cognitive dissonance and self-hatred might play out in her. The mother suffers the direct effect of the physical violence, and is more likely to have also been abused herself as a child or have grown up in an abusive home. In this scenario, everyone is broken. Nobody wins.
Then we must also keep in mind that sometimes mothers are the physical abusers in the household. And the same dynamics and damage play out.
If we change this scenario to a verbally and emotionally abusive parent though, what changes? The verbally and emotionally abusive parent can also be either male or female. Though the children in this home might not be in fear for their lives, they also learn poor ways of relating to others which may hold them back in the workplace, in friendships, in intimate relationships, and limit their lives in many ways. The verbally and emotionally abused child will often internalize the abuse, believing that they are in fact stupid, ugly, or bad. They also will grow into adult who are more likely to communicate in abusive ways—they simply don’t learn adult communication skills in a verbally abusive home. Verbal and emotional abuse can also result in post traumatic stress disorder and long-term depression in the children exposed to it.
We need to find ways to break the cycle of abuse and violence. We need to teach people how to handle the trauma they’ve endured and not pass it on. We need to stop sending generation after generation of broken people into the world.
June 5, 2007
A Vegan Deed for the Day
I passed around vegan birthday cake at work, a little late but better than never, though sadly to only four co-workers. They came back later demanding the truth, they just knew it couldn’t be vegan. You can’t make a good, moisty carrot cake with cream cheese frosting and not use cheese, and eggs, and butter! No, indeed, it is in fact vegan. 100%. Thank my good pal Tofutti non-hydrogenated “Cream Cheese” (really soy based) and using apple sauce instead of eggs, and grating in fresh carrots and loading it up with walnuts, and ginger and cinnamon.
Happiness abounds.
BTW, I have added an email me button to my profile. I might have to remove it if it results in out of control spam, but… When I started this blog I figured that people would leave comments, and that a lot of people reading had my email address anyway. Then I discovered I’d been getting emails on an old address I don’t really use anymore. Soooo, it seemed prudent to make a way for people to contact me. But fear of spam was the reason I didn’t do it in the first place, so we’ll see.
But for what it’s worth, seriously, you can leave a comment disagreeing with me if you like!!
Building Community Locally
This has been on my mind a little while obviously.
I’m going to try to pick my words very carefully here. That doesn’t mean I won’t totally mess up and say the wrong thing though.
I’ve heard a lot of complaining lately that there is not much sense of community among vegans and animal rights activists in the Washington, DC area. Some object that there is too much arguing within the vegan community. Others feel slighted and left out, and so disengage from involvement.
When I’ve been involved in AR in physical locations where there was a strong sense of community among the activists, there were several common factors. The first was that the group of activists tended to be on the small side. The second was that in those locations there were either no or very few people employed full time in Animal Rights–that is the national groups tended not to be headquartered there. I think this is worth noting because I think it did create a feeling of all activists sort of being in this together and all more or less on an equal playing field, so to speak. Activists felt free to debate, disagree, reach consensus, etc, because everyone’s viewpoint was valued. Another factor was having a clear, visible target that all the activists worked together on–whether that was the chicken farms down the street or the local vivisection lab.
I’m not saying that there is not going to be a similar sense of community here because things are different. I’m not even convinced that cohesive communities like that, in such a small setting, were particularly effective. But perhaps we should keep in mind that our unique situation here: the presence of so many large, national groups here, and such a large, wide-spread population, and thus many wide-spread activists is going to create a different atmosphere.
It may be that given this our natural tendency would be to subdivide ourselves into smaller more cohesive sub-communities. Maybe that’s acceptable and maybe not.
I feel it’s easy to demonize individual people, and perhaps doing so contributes to a feeling of community among those doing the demonizing. It’s a much more difficult thing to try to understand where the other person is coming from and why. It’s hard to ask someone what they believe and the basis for that belief and then to actually listen to the answer. And then to ask clarifying questions and listen to those answers. It’s much easier to assume that we’re all mind readers and already know what everyone else thinks.
Of course sometimes you ask and the answer is just incomprehensible, but then, hey, at least you tried. More often I feel like I ask questions and they are met with deafening silence from those who feel they are too important or too right to have to answer questions. And as I keep repeating, the presence of some actual, quantifiable data would be so, so helpful in guiding everyone’s views.
The thing about having an external bad guy to blame when stuff goes wrong though, is that it excuses us from having to examine our own methods and our own communication. It means we don’t have to wonder if we ever said anything wrong, or failed to communicate fully, because it’s all that guy’s fault, over there, not us.
It also goes without saying that there cannot be community without some level of respect, but that’s a harder nut to crack. How do we work around that? How do we define respect? How do we live with it when we realize that some people in the community are incapable of treating us as individuals with respect?
One thing that really troubles me each time the topic is brought up though is this starting position that we lack community in this area. It is not the same as some other places, true. It’s not so cohesive and we argue, but so what? So many times I’ve asked for help, I’ve gotten help above and beyond the call of duty. I’ve had people here offer sympathy, advice, and support on so many issues. There is community here in that sense. There are a lot of really kind, generous, caring people here and we shouldn’t forget that just in doing what they already do, they are building community every single day.
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Some possibly boring theory stuff from M. Scott Peck
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M. Scott Peck wrote extensively on the exercise of community building, though his topic was directed toward building a sense of community within churches and religious groups. Still perhaps some of his thoughts are relevant to us.
He wrote that in any community building situation there is an initial phase where everyone is very polite and tries to get along but there is no actual sharing or communication going on. He refers to this as pseudo-community–it looks like a community, but at a more basic level it really isn’t.
The next stage in community building is chaos. People stop being polite and start to actually say what they think. They consider issues at a deeper level and therefore agreeing for the sake of agreeing is not so appealing anymore. Fights can become very heated. Many people think this means the end of community and feel it is a complete disaster. But according to M. Scott Peck this is a necessary step without which true community can never be formed.
The next step would be emptiness, even more painful than chaos, as community members attempt to understand each other and let go of the ego factors that previously blocked true communication.
After going through these difficult growing phases the final stage of True Community becomes possible. Though true community never means the end to disagreements, it should mean that there is more empathy between those who disagree. There is more actual listening and more acceptance of community members as individuals with unique perspectives who may see things in very different ways.
Of course many prefer to stay forever in the first stage because they feel positive about it so long as nobody ever voices any dissent. As M. Scott Peck pointed out, generally those who are leaders in the first stage of community building try to hold everyone in that stage and prevent moving onward. To some extent this would be because of a loss of power concentrated in individual leaders that this theory anticipates should the creation of true community actually take place.
June 4, 2007
I suppose I should update
I did in fact eat tons of watercress on my birthday. It was excellent. Yay watercress!
The comments that so many wonderful people have left on this blog are stirring me to further thought, and will probably come up in future entries. I’m really honored that people have chosen to share their own thoughts and stories and add to the discussion. I have a lot to say, but some of it might be a tad delayed.
One of my main thoughts is that the people who don’t want us to fight for our own rights or the rights of animals, the people who don’t feel we’re entitled to our own safety, or the sanctity of our own bodies… Those people like the idea that using violence against us will derail us. They want us to feel shut out from making a difference. They want us to suffer trauma and depression. Anything to shut us up. So, facing that, it is an incredibly powerful thing when we find ways to recover, when we find ways to use our voices. If nothing else, just being vegan and demonstrating that it is possible and healthy and fulfilling, that is a powerful example. So we need to remember the ways in which we are already doing good and honor that. And we need to take care of ourselves so that we can keep on doing those things.
One of the most frustrating aspects of all of this is realizing, after all this time, that putting myself on the line to be brutalized was one of the least effective uses of my time and my energies and my talents. I did it because I was told that it was the way to make a difference. I was told that was my role; I wasn’t given a list of choices, but simply this one choice: this is what you’re expected to do. Looking back I can’t say it was worth much. Did it reach people? Did it keep bringing the focus back to the animals, or did it put the focus on me?
Those are vital questions to me. They are questions I should have been asking then, and the very questions I must continue to ask.
In other news…
So, because my birthday cannot pass without mishap, I ended up, in dim light, stepping on the claw end of a hammer in my bare feet. The claw went up into the heel of my foot. It’s not that bad, but I can’t stand or walk on it for very long, because for one it hurts, and secondly the swelling creates a weird unbalanced sensation where it’s kind of like I’m trying to walk with a marble stuck to my heel.
But it turns out that it’s been about a decade since my last tetanus shot, which was also necessitated by injury, that time involving a rusty nail. I called the doctor and they were pretty insistent that I needed the shot, not because the risk is so great, but because tetanus is so very bad. Apparently, once you develop symptoms, even with treatment it can be fatal, so they really want me to get the shot. I thought I was probably not at risk since my foot did bleed, but they said even so, since it is a puncture (deeper than it is wide) I need a shot.
Let that be a lesson to you all, don’t postpone your vaccinations. I would probably just risk it anyway and not get the vaccination, but since this is me and it’s fairly certain I’m going to step on another hammer or back into a rusty nail protruding from a door frame, or possibly tumble down an imbankment and impale myself on some kind of landscaping implement, yeah, I probably need to keep up to date on my tetanus vaccinations. Once when I was a kid I fell out of a tree onto a barbed wire fence, an old one, and ended up stuck on it in so many places that neither I nor my brother could get me loose, so I had to hang there, upside down, while he ran home and got my dad to come lift me up off the barbs. My entire life is a three stooges movie! But I really don’t climb trees anymore, so I’m probably safe on that count.
June 3, 2007
Fred the pig
There was a story on the news recently about a young boy named Jamison Stone who shot and killed a half ton hog. What we learned later was that this was a canned hunt, and Fred the hog (yes, he had a name) had been raised like a pet. He loved and trusted people and didn’t understand that they could turn on him. He was later sold to a “game reserve” where people pay to hunt tame animals so they can get easy trophies.
The boy who shot Fred shot him several times over the course of three hours, while chasing the wounded hog through underbrush in the fenced enclosure from which Fred could not escape. Fred died a slow, agonizing death, becoming weaker, bleeding, trying desperately to stay alive as he was shot over and over.
To most people this should be heartbreaking.
My father is a hunter and has hunted my entire life. He also dislikes hunts that strike him as unfair. He’s about “sportsmanship.” While I was growing up he confronted other hunters that broke laws to make hunting easier, such as putting out salt licks to attract deer and then shooting them when they come to get the salt. He also argued against “spotlighting” where men would drive trucks at night to places where the deer congregated, sources of water usually. Then they would turn their headlights on suddenly. The deer would be stunned by the bright light and freeze in place, so they could be shot before they even tried to run.
In truth, all hunting is unfair of course, because humans use guns. If you want to be fair, try to chase down a cow and then bite her to death with your own teeth, or claw her with your fingernails. Because that’s natural, right? But that’s a whole different issue.
I haven’t had a chance to talk to my Dad about Fred, but I’m pretty sure he wouldn’t like it. He would say it’s wrong to teach an animal to trust and love humans, only to chase him on a harrowing hunt, as he slowly bleeds to death. That kind of thing is just wrong.
But anyone who feels uncomfortable at the thought of Fred’s death should know this. Even with a slow painful, three-hour death, he had it better than nearly every other pig out there. The ham on a sandwich came not from a canned hunt, it came from a pig who was born into confinement and misery and lived in misery his entire life, start to finish. Then he rode on a truck, crammed to the point of injury with other pigs to a terrifying slaughter house, where his slaughter was not gentle or humane, but likely painful and bloody. Pigs have incredibly sensitive noses, noses that let them seek out delicate truffles growing underground, a scent the human nose cannot detect. So I imagine they can smell the overwhelming stench of death as the truck pulls up to the slaughterhouse, and they’re forced with electric prods to walk to their own deaths.
Can killing another for our own purposes ever be fair? Can it ever be humane? Whether that purpose is the “thrill of the hunt” or because we like some bacon in the morning?
Fred’s death is the perfect opportunity to go back to the core of the issue. So long as we own living creatures and treat them as objects for our own purposes, we are not any different from the boy who shot Fred, or his father who brought him to the canned hunt, or his relatives who watched Fred’s agony and did nothing. As long as animals are simply means to our own ends, then any cruelty we heap on them will be tolerated. Because we cannot both objectify and protect. We cannot both use and respect. We cannot both kill and be kind at the same time.
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