In (and Out of) Sync
Do you sometimes have the feeling that your life is somehow out of sync at times? Nothing big mind you, for the car still works and your knees are okay and the neighborhood seems fine and the people are still smiling...but something feels just a tiny bit out of whack, a bit off-kilter. Something is somehow not quite right, something you can't pinpoint exactly but there's this feeling that the alternate universe button has been moved just a tiny notch and now suddenly you're in it. Maybe this is all emerging from the undercurrent of racial and religious divides now being stirred up and bubbling to the surface from newly elected (or possibly about-to-be elected) political figures, divides that many of us thought that we were well underway to overcoming and could now be comfortable just to sit back and relax in our sun chairs...all was finally calming down in the world; this recent spray of cold water appears to have somehow jolted us awake. Where did that come from?
My brother has been visiting (thus the slight delay in getting these out) and even while we've had many trips and chances to chat with my mother and reminisce about our childhood, it somehow appears to be taking longer than normal to just fall back into where we were, as if we had excitedly bumped into an old friend and realized that there was actually little to talk about. That doesn't seem to be the case here, for brotherly history is not so easily erased; but it's smudged a bit as if perhaps too much time has passed or we're both realizing that my mother is declining a bit or that we're all a bit older and that these moments we thought would never end might be approaching the station a bit quicker than we expected. Who knows...something seems just a bit off.
Part of this disoriented feeling might have been the horrible news from my local humane society, a puppy so severely beaten that it died (among the injuries were a fractured jaw, missing teeth, severe eye injuries due to being sprayed with a corrosive cleaner, a liver ruptured in two places, extensive bleeding in the lungs, and bruising between the eyes extending back toward his spine). The abuser was caught (the puppy was only a prelude to the domestic violence inflicted on his girlfriend), taken to court and sentenced to a year in jail. The issue made the news because years earlier, the sentence for such abuse would have been only a small misdemeanor fine of $50 or so; it took nearly a decade of fighting legislatures and courts to get the laws and the views of judges to change, to shift their perspectives and help them recognize the need to correct such behavior. The links between animal abuse and human abuse is gaining ever more ground, as told by the local shelter's newsletter: A joint study conducted by Northeastern University and the Massachusetts Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to animals found that people who abuse animals are five times more likely to commit violent crimes against other humans...According to the warden of the San Quentin Penitentiary in California, the majority of the inmates on that facility's death row practiced their crimes on animals before moving on to actual homicides.
Then came the story in The New Yorker about the brouhaha over the culling of healthy animals in zoos, as "exposed" by the Copenhagen zoo's director (and this after me writing about hygge). It's an interesting piece, one side arguing about the need for continued public funding of zoos in order to both educate the public and to preserve wild species, and the other side bringing to the forefront that for the most part, zoos play a very minor role in all of that and that they cull their male animals rather more than they care to admit. Says the article: David Hancocks, a zoo consultant who formerly ran the Woodland Park Zoo, in Seattle, recently dismissed this idea as part of “the conservation myth, where anything’s justified if you’re ‘saving the species.’ ” In truth, many zoo populations are too small to encourage real hope of long-term survival, no matter how fastidiously they’re managed...most captive populations of endangered animals will never play a conservation role in what remains of the world’s natural habitats...Male giraffes, once they are one or two years old, will fight with each other when they share space with females. Some zoos keep male-only groups, but the typical captive giraffe herd has several females and only one adult male. It’s the same for many other animals, including elephants. As a result, the over-all demand for males is lower than for females.
The openness of the Danish zoo to let the public see what happens behind the scenes was met with much controversy, although members of the European Association of Zoos and Aquaria (EAZA) annually euthanize 3-5,000 animals yearly (it is more in the U.S., although figures are more difficult to come by). Adds the author, Ian Parker, Denmark’s largest pig slaughterhouse is open to the public, and a hundred and fifty visitors tour it each day. (in the U.S., both the press and public are banned from entering or photographing the majority of slaughterhouses) And in an interview with the press, Bengt Holst (the Copenhagen Zoo’s scientific director and chair of Denmark’s Animal Ethics Council) was asked why --if he was so casual about letting children see a giraffe being autopsied-- just let them see it being killed? "There’s no education in seeing the killing.” He said of the autopsy, “Schoolchildren can actually learn a lot from seeing this.” He went on, “To see the big neck...and see the big heart. Why does it have a big heart? Well, it has to pump the blood two metres up in the air to reach the brain.” He noted that children “asked a lot of questions, and the vet answered a lot of questions.” Asked about feeding the giraffe’s carcass to the lions, Holst said, “We try to show the public what an animal is, what animal wonders are, in all its aspects...And the real-life lions eat meat, and meat comes, among others, from giraffes.”
Which made me think about our place in all of this. We raise and kill to survive, but we really don't want to do or see either one. But more than that, are we the ones sending things such as climate, crops, and even species a bit off-kilter...just by being "us"? Wrote Verlyn Klinkenborg in his review of The Moth Snowstorm (and which subsequently appeared in The New York Review of Books): We clamor endlessly about our own identities and happily attribute individuality to mammals of a certain size—a fox roaming the pasture or a black bear crossing the road at dusk. But the identity of wild birds as individuals is concealed within their identity as members of a species. I wonder if the concept of “species” doesn’t sometimes get in the way of understanding the effect humans are having on the natural world. After all, a species endures even as the individuals that make it up come and go. But sometimes the word implies that the collective whole—the generality of goldfinches, say—matters more than the individual. Only when a species dwindles to its final numbers do the individuals seem to become, well, individual. Perhaps the only passenger pigeon ever to bear a name was Martha, the very last one.
My brother has been visiting (thus the slight delay in getting these out) and even while we've had many trips and chances to chat with my mother and reminisce about our childhood, it somehow appears to be taking longer than normal to just fall back into where we were, as if we had excitedly bumped into an old friend and realized that there was actually little to talk about. That doesn't seem to be the case here, for brotherly history is not so easily erased; but it's smudged a bit as if perhaps too much time has passed or we're both realizing that my mother is declining a bit or that we're all a bit older and that these moments we thought would never end might be approaching the station a bit quicker than we expected. Who knows...something seems just a bit off.
Part of this disoriented feeling might have been the horrible news from my local humane society, a puppy so severely beaten that it died (among the injuries were a fractured jaw, missing teeth, severe eye injuries due to being sprayed with a corrosive cleaner, a liver ruptured in two places, extensive bleeding in the lungs, and bruising between the eyes extending back toward his spine). The abuser was caught (the puppy was only a prelude to the domestic violence inflicted on his girlfriend), taken to court and sentenced to a year in jail. The issue made the news because years earlier, the sentence for such abuse would have been only a small misdemeanor fine of $50 or so; it took nearly a decade of fighting legislatures and courts to get the laws and the views of judges to change, to shift their perspectives and help them recognize the need to correct such behavior. The links between animal abuse and human abuse is gaining ever more ground, as told by the local shelter's newsletter: A joint study conducted by Northeastern University and the Massachusetts Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to animals found that people who abuse animals are five times more likely to commit violent crimes against other humans...According to the warden of the San Quentin Penitentiary in California, the majority of the inmates on that facility's death row practiced their crimes on animals before moving on to actual homicides.
Then came the story in The New Yorker about the brouhaha over the culling of healthy animals in zoos, as "exposed" by the Copenhagen zoo's director (and this after me writing about hygge). It's an interesting piece, one side arguing about the need for continued public funding of zoos in order to both educate the public and to preserve wild species, and the other side bringing to the forefront that for the most part, zoos play a very minor role in all of that and that they cull their male animals rather more than they care to admit. Says the article: David Hancocks, a zoo consultant who formerly ran the Woodland Park Zoo, in Seattle, recently dismissed this idea as part of “the conservation myth, where anything’s justified if you’re ‘saving the species.’ ” In truth, many zoo populations are too small to encourage real hope of long-term survival, no matter how fastidiously they’re managed...most captive populations of endangered animals will never play a conservation role in what remains of the world’s natural habitats...Male giraffes, once they are one or two years old, will fight with each other when they share space with females. Some zoos keep male-only groups, but the typical captive giraffe herd has several females and only one adult male. It’s the same for many other animals, including elephants. As a result, the over-all demand for males is lower than for females.
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The openness of the Danish zoo to let the public see what happens behind the scenes was met with much controversy, although members of the European Association of Zoos and Aquaria (EAZA) annually euthanize 3-5,000 animals yearly (it is more in the U.S., although figures are more difficult to come by). Adds the author, Ian Parker, Denmark’s largest pig slaughterhouse is open to the public, and a hundred and fifty visitors tour it each day. (in the U.S., both the press and public are banned from entering or photographing the majority of slaughterhouses) And in an interview with the press, Bengt Holst (the Copenhagen Zoo’s scientific director and chair of Denmark’s Animal Ethics Council) was asked why --if he was so casual about letting children see a giraffe being autopsied-- just let them see it being killed? "There’s no education in seeing the killing.” He said of the autopsy, “Schoolchildren can actually learn a lot from seeing this.” He went on, “To see the big neck...and see the big heart. Why does it have a big heart? Well, it has to pump the blood two metres up in the air to reach the brain.” He noted that children “asked a lot of questions, and the vet answered a lot of questions.” Asked about feeding the giraffe’s carcass to the lions, Holst said, “We try to show the public what an animal is, what animal wonders are, in all its aspects...And the real-life lions eat meat, and meat comes, among others, from giraffes.”
Which made me think about our place in all of this. We raise and kill to survive, but we really don't want to do or see either one. But more than that, are we the ones sending things such as climate, crops, and even species a bit off-kilter...just by being "us"? Wrote Verlyn Klinkenborg in his review of The Moth Snowstorm (and which subsequently appeared in The New York Review of Books): We clamor endlessly about our own identities and happily attribute individuality to mammals of a certain size—a fox roaming the pasture or a black bear crossing the road at dusk. But the identity of wild birds as individuals is concealed within their identity as members of a species. I wonder if the concept of “species” doesn’t sometimes get in the way of understanding the effect humans are having on the natural world. After all, a species endures even as the individuals that make it up come and go. But sometimes the word implies that the collective whole—the generality of goldfinches, say—matters more than the individual. Only when a species dwindles to its final numbers do the individuals seem to become, well, individual. Perhaps the only passenger pigeon ever to bear a name was Martha, the very last one.
Perhaps all of this is causing me to pause and think about where we, as a collective whole, might be heading. Times have seen change throughout history, but now abusing animals on one side and being open about our killing of animals for food and pleasure on another...is there much difference? And if the studies are slowly showing more and more of a correlation, are we moving onto our own species with impunity, the divides becoming so pronounced and so vocal that death via war would seem justifiable. Let us hope not...rather like McCarthy's book, despite all of the negative and depressing reporting and horrible (if factual) news making the rounds is another view of the good in the world. Said the reviewer: Seeded throughout The Moth Snowstorm
is the other half of the book—a study of joy, not loss. McCarthy has set
out to write what is, in essence, an environmental theodicy—to account
for the existence and purpose of the joy and beauty we feel in the midst
of so much loss and despair. “It is clear,” he notes,“that the earth
did not have to be beautiful for humans to evolve.” But it is beautiful,
and our species has lived in the midst of the planet’s natural beauty
for almost the whole of its evolution:
We have been operators of computers for a single generation and workers in neon-lit offices for three or four, but we were farmers for five hundred generations, and before that hunter-gatherers for perhaps fifty thousand or more, living with the natural world as part of it as we evolved, and the legacy cannot be done away with.McCarthy suggests, as Wordsworth did, that there is an organic correspondence—a radical fittedness—between the human mind and nature itself. “Something dwells already in our minds; and I believe it is the bond, the bond of fifty thousand generations with the natural world, which can make aspects of nature affect us so powerfully.” Love of nature isn’t universal in our species, he admits, but the propensity to love nature is. On this propensity—which flickers in and out of our awareness—rests the whole of McCarthy’s ode to joy. In sync, out of sync...perhaps it is all just a part of nature overall.
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