A few bricks short of a load

The past four days have been gobbled up by the technical support service at the University of Vermont, the medium-sized land grant where the USDA program I work for is housed.

The adventure begins in March, when my work desktop, which I didn't use much because I mainly work at home, died after one of those automatic updates corrupted something important. I swiftly decided that even if the six-year-old desktop could be fixed (not a sure thing), this was the right moment to get a dedicated work laptop--I've been struggling because it's very hard to keep my files in sync when I move around from place to place.

I looked through what the campus computer depot had for sale, and went many times around the barn with them about wanting a CD drive. They told me I didn't want one, not really, and I said that I did, really, since I routinely install at lot of graphics and layout software and tend to save out very large files to CDs for transport and output and safekeeping.

"But," I was told, "you can download all the software you need from our archives!" I looked in the archives, which offered all the usual Microsoft stuff, an Adobe Reader, and a web browser with an e-mail utility laid on.

"You're kidding, right?" I said. "Please--I just want a laptop with a CD drive. That's not a strange thing to want."

"But you don't need one!" they said.

I finally persuaded them to order me what I wanted and paid for it. Seven rather long weeks go by.

When the laptop finally arrives, I pick it up and bring it home to load my stuff--my graphics and layout software--only to learn that I don't have the administrative privileges needed to do that. Or anything else for that matter--I couldn't even delete the cutesy beauty shots of campus the computer gods installed and made into a little slide-show-cum-screen-saver. I sent an e-mail asking how to walk around this and was told I could download all the software I would ever need from the archives.

"So," I said, "who is in charge down there? Could you please put that person on the phone?"

"I don't like your tone," she said. "I'm just trying to be helpful."

"It's not good enough to try," I said. "Succeeding is what matters."

After a half a dozen more plaintive calls and e-mails, I was grudgingly told by a person the next rank higher how to walk around this issue by switching users and using the serial number of the machine to act as an administrator--cumbersome but better than nothing. I spent half a day loading my software, getting rid of some of the junk that was pre-loaded, and deleting the silly slide show.

I then brought up Word to work on a document, only to be told, to my amazement, that the pre-installed and pre-configured Microsoft Office that was part of the purchase wasn't activated. It was useless.

Another call: "You need to be logged into the campus network," I was told. "It will authenticate itself as soon as that happens."

"I am," I said. I was.

"Well, it can't be a wireless connection."

"I'm logged in over a DSL line."

"But you're not on campus. You'll have to come to campus and log in from here."

I hadn't quite realized there were magical properties to the campus lines, so off I went to Burlington, 40 miles away. The activation didn't work from my tiny, windowless office, so I took the machine into the computer depot and hitched myself up to one of their magical DSL lines (superficially identical to the DSL line I use at home), and finally got authenticated. But while I was at it, I perversely decided to delete all the university administrator accounts, leaving only myself in charge, and left. I figure if the computer ever needs any intervention from tech support, it will be their turn to call me.

Four solid days.

Redefining cruelty

For more than 50 years, the Heifer Project has worked to feed humans by distributing animals—-chickens, rabbits, cows, guinea pigs, sheep, and other creatures—-to needy individuals and families. In terms of spreading the misery of animal agriculture around the world, the Heifer Project is a champion. ...

First, as with all animal agriculture, the process of creating a pound of edible flesh involves feeding many more pounds of plant food and grain to the animal before he or she is slaughtered. It’s hardly an efficient method of producing food.

Second, the animals are not raised on factory farms, so they often graze in the neighboring area, which results in the loss of habitat for nondomesticated animals and furthers the extinction of other animal species.

from: http://www.all-creatures.org/articles/heifer-veg.html

Well whaddaya know.

Is it categorically bad for humans to eat meat? In some ways, this is a little bit little bit like wondering whether it's bad to have an abortion, and whether one life should be treasured above another. But the similarity is actually superficial--relations among members of the same species is very different from relations among different ones.

A lot of ink, both real and virtual, has been spilled around this and a few adjacent questions, and often the vegetarian argument hinges on the conditions found on farms. People--invariably people who have not spent much time on commercial farms--announce that these conditions are bad: They fret over mud or crowding or cage construction, and because I work in an agency that serves the farm community, I know some of those concerns are not just legitimate but urgent. Self-interest alone should galvanize us to focus on animal health--when we don't, we risk salmonella, e.coli, giardia, and mad cow disease.

But a lot of these concerns are sentimental and projective. Cattle, for example, are herd and prey animals, and if you watch them carefully you see that they don't react badly when they get squished together, especially when they're uneasy--the lion is less likely to eat a given individual when there's a large and potentially dangerous group as opposed to a vulnerable individual. This reaction probably has adaptive elements in common with schooling behavior in fish.

But because humans don't like being squished, most humans assume that squishing is unpleasant--the underlying assertion is that all creatures have the same standards of comfort and discomfort that we do. (I can't resist adding that one common result of raising "cage free" eggs is that removing the cages makes room for more chickens per square inch. Since I don't know a whole lot about chickens, it's hard to be confident about the chickens' position on this purported improvement in their living conditions.)

We make the same category error when managing non-farm animals, sometimes with very bad results. Is it cruelty to feed a dog human food? Since dogs have digestive systems very different from ours, I think it is--some dog owners poison their much-loved companion animals because they think chocolate is a key food group and the dog is missing out if it's not on the menu. And to make matters worse, most dogs like sweets for the same reasons we do--they offer access to compressed calories.

But choloate also contains theobromine, which is a neurotoxin in canines, and even a small amount can trigger heart arrhythmia and seizures. The even wider human habit of feeding table scraps to dogs not only encourages begging, but inserts in the dog the processed, sweet, salty, and nutritionally ambiguous foods we humans often eat. Yet this is never labeled for what it is--animal cruelty.

The Heifer Project is one of my favorite charities--it opens doors of self-sufficiency and boosts the human enterprise by giving third-world farmers access to improved strains of domestic livestock, selectively bred--in humans we call this eugenics--to produce a more edible product and more technophilic offspring. And is that cruelty? No, it's not.

PETA piper

Here's a picture of PETA people outside the Westminster Dog Show back in February, all dressed up to make a really good impression.

The message, as I half-understand it, is that dogs shows are bad, but the symbolism here seems ambiguous at best. I wasn't there to pick up one of the flyers--I lived in New York long enough to know I won't be going back--so it's not at all clear who the Klan outfit is directed at.

It's apparently not all that clear to PETA, either--according to their own news release, the Halloween outfits are meant to convey the idea that the AKC sounds the "death knell for many beautiful, healthy, and loving dogs whose lives end at animal shelters. Shelters do their best to help the millions of animals dumped on their doorsteps every year, but life in a cage is no life for a dog, and euthanasia becomes a sad necessity."

But wait--if that's their position, doesn't it follow that the white sheet and hood are on the wrong side of the door? Aren't the people on the inside of the building the oppressors, the sworn enemies of shelter dogs everywhere? Something's gone horribly wrong here, unless--let me see--could this actually be about a photo op, and the siren allure of getting above the fold of tomorrow's paper?

Which worked: The story made USA Today, the LA Times, and NBC, to name a few.

But, to be frank, launching ad hominem attacks on the people who are involved with PETA is just too easy--we can chant in unison that Ingrid Newkirk, president of PETA, is personally responsible for killing 23,000 shelter animals in a single 18-month period, while finding homes for eight.

Or we can point out that PETA has gotten into legal trouble in Virginia for illegally dumping dead shelter animals.

Or we can laugh at the PETA initiative to rename fish "sea kittens" on the theory that people won't eat a creature with a cute name.

But if we want intelligence injected into the debate about right relations with other creatures, PETA has not earned a place at the table. And, if my poking around on both sides of the story is accurate, the supposedly more middle-of-the-road Humane Society of the United States hasn't either.

My point here is that throwing stones at tempting targets (this is code for "people I don't agree with"), is pointless--name-calling only freezes people more firmly into their positions, even if they know those positions are illogical and untenable, sea kittens on dry land. I'd much rather focus on the disagreement itself. Like the snappy little dog described in an earlier entry, that is where the rubber meets the road.

once bitten

Earlier this week I was waiting for something else to happen and watched a woman with a small dog get her wrist bitten. She deserved it--people who get bitten generally do--but what was interesting about the transaction was her complete surprise and her apparent inability to see life from another creature's point of view.

Here's what happened: The setting was an urban (well, sort of urban) campus, and it was a warm day between classes--the sidewalks were very full. Even from about 500 feet away, I could see the little dog was signaling a lot of unambiguous anxiety about the crowding, the feet, the bicycles, and the periodic outbreaks of humans running with Frisbees. Whenever some new alarm was raised, the dog would flatten its ears and half-lower its rump, pulling backward on the leash, and the human on the other end would pull the dog forward. They progressed at a snail's pace down the block, slowed by anxiety on one end of the string, exasperation on the other.

When the pair came to the crosswalk, the woman reached down to pick the dog up and presumably carry it safely across the busy street, and this is when the bite occurred--just as she moved to get one hand under the dog's ribcage while the other hand was flapping around, busy with winding the slack of the leash around her palm. Suddenly a balky, worried little dog became a biting dog, a frantic bundle of defensive rage. The dog latched on to the woman's wrist, just for a second, but with the momentum of sheer panic. I'm sure it hurt, even if the dog was diminutive, and this hurt escalated when the dog got thwacked fairly hard for misbehaving--an event that probably reinforced the original message that humans do unpredictable, hurtful things with their strange appendages.

Why does our species find it so easy to disregard clear signals from other creatures? Episodes like this are a form of cruelty that seem to be off the radar of people active in the animal-rights movement, perhaps because so many people in the movement don't seem to know very much about canine or other species behavior. Yes, PETA, puppy mills are bad, and you can take a picture of how very bad they are, but I argue that this is worse.

If a dog has rights, then one of them is to be understood, especially when the dog is yelling at us, as loud as possible, at the top of a pair of tiny lungs.

a slave in the fields of the lord

"This is interesting that you say farmed animals 'enjoy' a relationship with man... As if they are willing subjects to the enslavement and eventual permanent end/use of their bodies. And while the goal might be to 'protect them from predators' we forget that man is the most 'successful' predator of them all."

--comment posted here, April 11

Domesticated animals are not slaves--slavery is a purely human construct. They are animals of various species who have chosen the path of technophilia--otherwise, they would be impossible to domesticate.

Not all technophiles are domesticated--rats, mice, certain wasps, raccoons, bats, white-tailed deer, and that endless parade of carpenter ants in my back shed all feel the pull of the man-made environment, but they aren't domesticated. Instead, we classify them as pests. Are they to be classified as slaves as well? Seems like some very loaded and disapproving language to use for creatures who have a liking for human waste, human food, and human infrastructure.

As predators go, man is barely adequate--we don't stack up well against lions or sharks, that's for sure. But predation is morally neutral, and in many species an absolute requirement: Most predators have digestive systems that requite they eat meat and nothing else. What's difficult, and not neutral, is the real root of our species' success. We are omnivores, with scavenging and predation in the mix, and this has helped nurture our apparently endless flexibility. It is this flexibility that has gotten us into no end trouble--it's our chief adaptation and our default behavior, and lies at the heart of a lot of very hard problems.

"For me, the crux of it is that killing/eating animals is not necessary for human health. Indeed the more we learn the more it's understood we can thrive on a plant based diet. So the question becomes... If we don't 'need' to place 10 billion animals inside of warehouses and slaughterhouses... Why do it at all?"

--same comment, same date

Does it really matter whether people can get adequate nutrition without eating meat? I don't eat meat, and I don't think it matters. It's not a moral position for me, although others sometimes use vegetarianism as a propellent for their self-regard. And it's not a question of doing or not doing something--it's a question of understanding that having right relations with other creatures requires thought, humility, and an understanding of evolutionary constraints and evolutionary behavior.

What does matter is that almost everyone I have engaged with in the animal-rights movement seems to be amazingly short on hands-on, in-depth knowledge of how different species behave, react, and are profoundly different from each other. This includes an ignorance of how the human species really operates, since we, too, are animals.

To speak broadly of "animals" as a class that includes any being that isn't us is morally unacceptable. We're in this together--bears, dogs, bees, elephants, menhaden, rats, grasshoppers, penguins, and humans--and we need to be able to tell each other apart.

more than one kind of difference

"What place should non-human animals have in an acceptable moral system? ... [P]ublic outrage is strong when knowledge of 'puppy mills' is made available; the thought here is that dogs deserve much more consideration than the operators of such places give them. However, when it is pointed out that the conditions in a factory farm are as bad as, if not much worse than, the conditions in a puppy mill, the usual response is that those affected are 'just animals' after all, and do not merit our concern."

--From the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy

Boy. For a fairly snooty academic web site, it's hard to believe you can run across something as airheaded as this.

The status of puppy mills versus factory farming has nothing compelling to with the conditions as conditions, but has much more to do with the fact that dogs and people have signed a mutual aid contract that is durable, complex, and weirdly symbiotic. So yes, a puppy mill, by definition, is far more alarming to people than a factory farm. Farm animals enjoy a very different kind of arrangement--they are normally raised, and protected from predators and illness, just long enough to be milked, have their eggs stolen, and then be killed and eaten.

There's something implicitly wrong with the a phrase like "non-human animals," as if the only thing that's knowable or important about the many species sharing our planet is that they aren't like us, thus rendering all animals basically the same. It's an appealing construct because it lets us be lazy--now other creatures can be talked about generically, as if a raccoon and a blue jay were interchangeable.

But it doesn't take much real-world, hands-on experience to know how bogus this position is. Because not only are different species animals different from us, they are also wildly different from each other, and, what's more, the difference between a raccoon and a blue jay is a different kind of difference than the difference between that same blue jay and and a Great Dane.

The more I read what the ethics community writes about our right relations with other creatures, the more I think that having an advanced degree in philosophy is a serious impediment to coherent thought. I'm not anti-academia, not at all--I'm ABD in literature and treasure the many important things I now know about how language works. What I don't treasure, and feel a need to fight, is the complete absence of clarity in the animal-rights train of ideas.

The earworm of the Easter Rising

I woke up this morning vaguely aware that Easter is tomorrow, but the truth is that Easter has very little traction for me--I like biting the heads off peeps with Nick, but after that Easter's over. But that song, that terrible, beautiful song about the Easter Rising of 1916 in Dublin has haunted me all day.

One of the most damaging, thrilling, and upsetting renditions of "Foggy Dew" is by Sinead O'Connor--the tune is borrowed from "Foggy Foggy Dew" (yes, there is a difference of exactly one "foggy") and the lyrics were written by some fellow named Charles O'Neil, at least according to the stuff laying around in the music room.

I don't know from Charles O'Neill, but he wrote wonderfully well about what happened in Dublin during that Easter week, and in particular what the conflict sounded like. He says:

As down the glen one Easter morn to a city fair rode I
There armed lines of marching men in squadrons passed me by
No pipe did hum, no battle drum did sound its loud tattoo
But the Angelus Bell o'er the Liffey's swell rang out through the foggy dew.

I like that--the muffled secrecy of the advance, the treachery and secrecy, followed by the tongue of the bell, the call to decency, faith, and prayer. Later on he says:

Oh the night fell black, and the rifles' crack made perfidious Albion reel
In the leaden rain, seven tongues of flame did shine o'er the lines of steel
By each shining blade a prayer was said, that to Ireland her sons be true
But when morning broke, still the war flag shook out its folds in the foggy dew

Sinead left this stanza out of her version, so I didn't know it even existed until today, but reading the lyrics confirmed that this lament is all about what was heard as much as what happened. Think I'm making this up? How about:

Oh the bravest fell, and the Requiem bell rang mournfully and clear
For those who died that Eastertide in the spring time of the year.

There's that bell again, but not the Angelus this time.

So "Foggy Dew" is today's earworm, that song that will not leave you alone, and it's time to just accept that it's going to play in the background for the rest of the afternoon, perhaps into the evening.

Here's an odd, contradictory detail: I know that the Angelus is the thrice-daily prayer that faithful Catholics say to remember the incarnation, and I'll add quickly that, for a Quaker, I seem to know more than I should about Catholicism, but we'll leave that problem for some other day. And here's the contradiction--I have another idea that the Anglus isn't actually part of the prayer cycle during Holy Week. (Where do we learn these things? From novels? Probably The Nine Tailors, but sheesh.)

The song ends with a rewind, with the narrator going home once the carnage is over--

Back through the glen I rode again and my heart with grief was sore
For I parted then with valiant men whom I never shall see more
But to and fro in my dreams I go and I kneel and pray for you,
For slavery fled, O glorious dead, when you fell in the foggy dew.

Happy Easter.