The Gulf

The Gulf stories about birds and fish are horrific.   The photos of suffocated and mangled bird, turtle, crab and fish bodies are painful to view.  But to get some concept of the scope of the damage see the American Birding Association site at:

http://birding.typepad.com/gulf/

An excerpt:

When we first saw all of the Hermit Crabs die on the beach, after first contact with the oil, I became very nervous that the invertebrates were being affected very harshly.  If such a short exposure to this oil could wreak such havoc on them, what could it be doing to the crustaceans, mollusks, and marine worms that migrating and resident shorebirds depend on? I had a phone interview with Dr. Gustav Paulay, Curator of Marine Invertebrates at the University of Florida at Gainesville to see if he could elucidate the situation. Since he was not here, and no testing had been done, he could not speak to specifics regarding the mass die off of Hermit Crabs, but he did explain that this oil likely contains compounds which act on the lipid membranes to break them down.  From looking at the photograph, and hearing that many of the animals exited their shells, he hypothesized that the nature of this thick gooey oil would be clogging the crab’s cilia, inhibiting respiratory function.  Leaving their shells could perhaps have been a last gasp for more gas exchange.

Dolphins in 2009

More far-flung suffering for whales: Faroe Islands, Denmark

In an action that recalls the mass Taiji, Japan, dolphin kills, up to 1000 pilot whales venturing too close to a cove in the Faroe Islandes are driven ashore and slaughtered annually, their meat shared with each of the island’s residents.

Ironically, although in 2008 the Faroe Islands’ Chief Medical Officer warned against the consumption of pilot whale meat due to its high level of toxins, the Faroes apparently dumped 85 tons of the toxic meat into the market this summer (2009). Also note that the hunt is no longer a “sustainable” food drive. It is now for a “sporting male rite of passage,” and they are admitting it openly.

Orcas

Feed Pete Peterson to the Whales

By ALEXANDER COCKBURN

Call him, just for now, Spartacus. He was two years old when the slavers captured him in 1982 and hauled him off to Oak Bay, near the town of Victoria, on Vancouver Island, British Columbia, in the far Canadian west. And there he met his fellow slaves, Nootka and Haida. Day after day, in slave school they learned their tricks. Day after day, they did their act for the paying customers.  And then, on February 20, 1991, in the tank operated by Sealand of the Pacific, the three struck back at their captors.

Okay, not Spartacus, but an orca whale – Tillikum, the one who drowned 40-year-old Dawn Brancheau last Wednesday in the Shamu tank, at SeaWorld, Orlando, after grabbing her by her ponytail. Tillikum was caught off Iceland. Nootka and Haida, both females, were seized in the Pacific. In fact, Nootka was the third orca by that name to be bought by Sealand. The first two died within a year of their capture. At that time, enslaved orcas had a life expectancy in captivity of anywhere from one to four years. These days they do a bit better. In wild waters, orcas live to be anywhere from 30 to 60.

By the time of the 1991 slave revolt, Nootka III already had a couple of priors back in 1989, when she’d attacked trainers twice. Then, on Feb. 20, 1991, Keltie Byrne, a 20-year-old marine biology student, champion swimmer and part-time trainer, slipped while she was riding on the head of one of the orcas. Tillikum, Nootka and Haida took turns in dragging her beyond reach of trainers trying to hook her out with long poles. As Jason Hribal, author of our forthcoming CounterPunch/AK Press book Fear of the Animal Planet: The Hidden Story of Animal Resistance, reconstructed the episode on our CounterPunch site,

“‘The whale got her foot,’ an audience member recalled, ‘and pulled her in.’ We do not know which orca it was that started it, but all three, Nootka, Haida, and Tillikum, took their turns dunking the screaming woman underwater. ‘She went up and down three times,’ another visitor continued. The Sealand employees ‘almost got her once with the hook pole, but they couldn’t because the whales were moving so fast.’ One trainer tossed out a floatation ring, but the whales would not let her grab it. In fact, the closer that such devices got to the young woman, the further out the whales pulled her into the pool. It took park officials two hours to recover her drowned body.”

As is typical with theme parks in the business of exploiting animals, whether whales or elephants or some other captive breed, Sealand tried to pass off the disaster as a one-in-a-thousand mishap – sort of a bad-hair day for orcas. The citizens of Vancouver Island didn’t see it that way. Many said the whales had understandably mutinied against their ghastly imprisonment and exploitation and should be freed. They started picketing Sealand. The company trotted out the usual story that captive orcas actually like being slaves, forced to work 365 days a year, several times a day and, if freed, would swiftly die. What is meant here is that slave orcas are worth a lot of money – up to a cool million each, which explains why Russia has now lifted its ban on orca trafficking.

There are actually quite detailed Canadian laws governing the export of wild creatures. Sealand, soon to go out of business, got the permits by saying the whales needed to be sent south to the U.S. for “medical reasons.” Sold to the SeaWorld empire, Tillikum was shipped off under cover of darkness to Orlando, Florida. Nootka followed, and died there in 1994 at the age of 13. Haida and her calf Ky ended up in SeaWorld, San Antonio. Haida died in 2001 but imparted the spirit of rebellion to Ky, who nearly killed his trainer in 2004.

SeaWorld got its start in the mid-1960s, founded by four UCLA grads planning to run an underwater restaurant and marine life exhibit. After various ups and downs, in the late 1980s, the three SeaWorlds passed into the hands of the vast brewing conglomerate Annheuser-Busch, which pumped millions into upgrades, finally selling the theme parks to the Blackstone Group for $2.7 billion in 2009.

So, there’s a lot riding on the slave orcas toiling away (according to a SeaWorld official, as many as 8 times per a day, 365 days a year) as the star attractions in each of the Shamu stadiums. The first Shamu was put to work in the San Diego SeaWorld, now on its fifty-first “Shamu” – one of 20 enslaved orcas presently owned by Blackstone.  Tillikum’s asset value is enhanced by his duties as a sperm donor. He’s a breeding “stud” often kept in solitary, away from the other orcas. One of his long-distance partners was Kasatka, at the San Diego slave facility. Kasatka was also captured off Iceland at the age of two, in 1978, and bought by SeaWorld, and has seen service for the company in Ohio, Texas, Florida and California, making three efforts in San Diego to kill her trainer – in 1993, 1999 and 2006. Her official SeaWorld bio refers chastely to the 1999 episode as “an incident” where she got “a bit aggressive”, whereupon – as a SeaWorld spokesman put it, she was sent  “for some additional training and behavior modification.”

As Hribal writes,

“In order to see the world from Kasatka’s perspective, three facts need to be considered. First, there are no recorded incidences of orcas ‘in the wild’ attacking humans unprovoked. This is an institutional problem. Second, Kasatka and other performers have a long history of attacking trainers. Resistance in zoos and aquariums, in truth, is anything but unusual. Third, the zoological institutions themselves have to negotiate with their entertainers to extract labor and profit. Indeed, animal performers have agency, and zoos have always (privately, at least) acknowledged this. Therefore, the next time you hear about an orca attack, don’t dismiss it from above: ‘Animals will be animals.’ But, instead, look from below: ‘These creatures resist work, and can occasionally land a counterpunch or two of their own.’”

All the SeaWorld shows should be shut down, as should all kindred exhibits. If it’s judged by an independent panel that the artificially bred orcas simply couldn’t hack it in the wild blue yonder, let them laze around in their pools and toss them an occasional corporate executive, perhaps starting with slave-owner Pete Peterson, co-founder of Blackstone, a public pest who richly deserves an orca jaw clamped on his ankle.

For those who think the references to slavery are excessive, remember the words of Frederic Douglass, quoted by Hribal. Douglass often made direct comparisons between the treatment and use of other animals and that of himself. “When purchased, my old master probably thought as little of my advent, as he would have thought of the addition of a single pig to his stock! Like a wild young working animal, I am to be broken to the yoke of a bitter and life-long bondage. Indeed, I now saw, in my situation, several points of similarity with that of the oxen. They were property, so was I; they were to be broken, so was I; Convey was to break me, I was to break them; break and be broken – such is life.”

Maybe, in the wake of Tillikum’s lethal onslaught on  Dawn Brancheau, lover of orcas, in Orlando earlier this week, they taped his whale talk to his seven fellow prisoners. Maybe, one day they’ll decode them. I doubt there was contrition. He was probably pointing out that although the act of rebellion was entirely justified, the aesthetics of orca exploitation by humans were such that he’d actually upped his remaining profit potential – he’s 30 now – for Blackstone. As one entertainment consultant pointed out, attendance will probably go up for “Shamu” shows. Orcas after all are “killer whales,” and the public needs to be reminded of this once in a while.

Jason Hribal’s Fear of the Animal Planet: The Hidden Story of Animal Resistance will be published by CounterPunch Books/AK Press this coming
fall.

Waiting for this all to be forgotten, then business as usual for Sea World

February 24, 2010

A Message from Jim Atchison
President and Chief Executive Officer, SeaWorld Parks & Entertainment

It is with great sadness that I report that one of our most experienced animal
trainers drowned in an incident with one of our killer whales this afternoon, February 24, 2010 at our SeaWorld Orlando park.

We have initiated an investigation to determine, to the extent possible, what
occurred. There are no other details to share at this point, but we will make
our findings known in due course.

I must emphasize that this is an extraordinarily difficult time for the SeaWorld
parks, and our team members.

Nothing is more important than the safety of our employees, guests and the
animals entrusted to our care. All of our standard operating procedures
will come under review as part of the investigation.

We extend our deepest sympathies to the family and friends of the trainer
and will do everything possible to assist them in this difficult time.
We appreciate everyone’s understanding and will share more information as it becomes known and available.

SeaWorld Orlando and SeaWorld San Diego are open today as scheduled (SeaWorld San Antonio is not yet open for the season) but Believe shows and Dine with Shamu experiences at all SeaWorld locations have been suspended for the time being.  We will update you on this as soon as we have more information.

Free Orcas

Apologies to readers and especially the animals for being away for a few months.

Recently in Orlando Florida an orca was involved in the death of a trainer, Dawn. Our regrets go to Dawn’s family. Dawn was the unfortunate victim of hubris and ignorance of the human public that still considers sea zoos an appropriate place for dolphins and whales.  No entertainment is worth their captivity in tiny pools and certainly there is no need for human loss in order that humans be entertained and massive corporations paid. Leave the whales to the sea.  Leave the dolphins to their pods.  The show need not go on.

The Cove

The Japan Times recently wrote about a fantastic documentary on the slaughtering of dolphins in Japan called The Cove. The article gives no sense of the film. The film is  about more than animal rights and more than “westerners” telling Japan what do to. There is
much to discuss in terms of the documentary style and for me much of the stylistic interest in the film lies in the way in which the hidden and the exposed get articulated filmically. The core of the film illustrates the attempts of the fishermen to hide their slaughter of dolphins, the filmmakers’ attempts to hide as they film the slaughter (leading to the use of military technology and so on to plant cameras at night), and the reasons why killing, suffocating and eating mercury-laced dolphin meat is bad. One scene, taken by hidden cameras in the shadowy dawn, captures the offhanded remarks of fishermen waiting for the morning sunrise to begin the day’s task of slaughtering of the dolphins captured in the bay.  The primary visual interest in the film for me was this repeated shift from lightness to darkness, from the visible to the invisible: the injured baby dolphin’s nose as it disappears under the water after repeated attempts to surface or of the fisherman scuba diver’s flippers as he scans the bay bottom for dead dolphin bodies in the bloody red waters.

The article does not cover the attention in the film to marine zoos. It is clear that the fishermen make much of their profit from selling Taiji dolphins to global sea worlds. This is not new information. The illegal trafficking of dolphins is highly profitable. So lucrative is the sale of dolphins to sea zoos that Taiji is creating its own training ground for the dolphins they catch. The crux of the film is that the toxic food market and the highly profitable global sea market are highly implicated. The film does spend quite a bit of time addressing the problem of overfishing, too, with the tuna at the core through a particularly memorable sequence of days at Tsukiji compressed into about a minute of film, contrary to the JT article.

Perhaps this film is ultimately about time–the amount of time it takes to suffocate a creature, to train an actor, to fish seas to emptiness, to poison the child without his knowledge. It is an emotional film not because it is an “animal rights” film that “is more about compassion than mercury” but because it is about life, illness, and death and the ways in which the health of human and nonhuman animals get compromised under the cover of blue tarps and through government-funded programs (school lunches). Minamata is certainly relevant here and I can see why it came up repeatedly in the Q and A.

So-called “swine flu” from the Guardian

From The Guardian, May 2, 2009 by Felicity LawrenceIn modern disaster management theory, when any large system experiences a major shock or failure, you assess the risk, activate an ordered emergency response, and manage the after-effects. In the world of real people hit directly by the real shock, you look for someone to blame.

For ordinary Mexicans this week, who faced the shutdown of their country by swine flu and an unknown number of deaths, it was a culprit that was needed.

The Fred Goodwin of the epidemic was easy to identify in their eyes. Just five miles from the town of La Gloria, which appears to be the epicentre of the flu outbreak, is a giant industrial pig complex jointly owned by the world’s largest pig processor, Smithfield Foods.

Smithfield is adamant that the swine flu is not of its making and has no connection to its factory farms in Mexico or in any of the countries where it has established its powerful presence. By the end of the week, the company had, like a besieged banker, gone into shutdown mode and declined to give interviews, but it issued a statement: “We have found no evidence of the presence of influenza virus in any of our pig herds or any of our employees at any of our worldwide operations. All our herds are tested regularly for disease including influenza. We routinely administer flu vaccines to protect them and conduct monthly tests to examine the presence and identity of different flu strains.”

When a young boy from La Gloria who had been ill in March became the earliest confirmed case of the current swine flu outbreak, following new tests by the US Centre for Disease Control (CDC) on previously cleared samples from Mexico, Smithfield said it too was re-examining its herds. It was confident that it could reassure people who have been “bombarded by unfounded opinions, non-scientific statements and unrestrained internet rumour and speculation” that it was not the source. It declined to answer the Guardian’s detailed questions on its tests. The results were not due till this weekend. Like the rest of the world watching a pandemic unfold as though in a slow-motion car crash, Smithfield could do little but wait to see how hard or soft the landing would be.

Smithfield’s predicament has not been helped by the fact that, like Sir Fred, it has made itself somewhat conspicuous with its habits. It operates on a grand scale. The volume of its pig waste is extravagant. But just as RBS did not alone cause the financial crisis but merely conformed to the latest banking type, so it is the very nature of today’s globalised meat industry that is at the heart of this emerging swine flu pandemic. The factory unit near La Gloria fattens nearly a million pigs a year. Globally Smithfield slaughtered 26 million pigs in 2006, generating sales of $11.4bn (£7.6bn) and profits of $421m. It already controls over a quarter of the total US processed pork market and it has expanded by acquisition in Europe. Like the banking sector, the global food system has seen the emergence of unprecedentedly large players that are dominant at every stage of production from pig breeding to bacon slicing.

The modern food system has a sophistication and global interdependence to match the financial system, too. It looks too big to fail. But like that sector, it is also extraordinarily fragile and vulnerable to shock. Many of the shocks are likely to be of its own making.

Smithfield’s intensive factories of densely packed hogs, like those of the rest of the large-scale industry, produce vast lagoons of foul-smelling discharges. In many of the areas where it has sited its factory farms or slaughtering and processing complexes, activists and locals have campaigned against it, accusing it of environmental pollution, labour rights abuses and in some places operating without proper permits. The people of La Gloria have had long run-ins with the company’s nearby subsidiary Granjas Carroll. When 60% of the town’s population became ill in March with flu-like symptoms, they quickly blamed the pigs.

Swine flu is currently being passed from human to human, and it is possible that this particular strain of swine flu was created without ever seeing a pig directly, as UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation’s (FAO) experts on animal health point out. The FAO has, however, dispatched a surveillance mission to help the Mexicans check their pig herds.

But the focus on Smithfield is not surprising given its history. It won notoriety a decade ago when two of its US subsidiaries were given the largest ever environmental fines by the government’s Environmental Protection Agency, having to pay $12.6m for illegally discharging pollutants from its operations in to the Pagan river in Virginia. It had committed more than 5,000 violations of permit levels for discharging faecal coli forms, phosphorus, ammonia, cyanide and oil from its pig factories over more than five years, destroying fish stocks and polluting water tables. Even more troublingly, it was also found guilty of falsifying documents and destroying records.

And as expert labs continued their forensic work through the week, the ancestry of this latest strain of flu and its connection with modern intensive pig farming in general if not with any farm in particular was established.

By Wednesday night the reason why scientists had pressed the full flu alert button even though only a few hundred cases outside Mexico, almost all mild at that point, had appeared, also became clearer. At CDC the head of virology had completed the genetic fingerprinting of the swine flu and was able to say that it has arisen from a strain first identified on industrial pig units in North Carolina in the late 1990s. It is no coincidence that this threat to global human health should have emerged from that particular state, as Michael Greger, director of public health at the US Humane Society and leading author on the history of bird and animal flu explains: “North Carolina has the densest pig population in North America and boasts more than twice as many corporate swine mega-factories as any other state. With massive concentrations of farm animals within which to mutate, these new swine flu viruses in North America seem to be on an evolutionary fast track, jumping and reassorting between species at an unprecedented rate.”

Novel human disease is the toxic debt of today’s industrial livestock farming. The influenza virus has eight genetic segments. If two different types of flu infect the same cell at the same time, the genes from both viruses mix, swapping segments to form totally new hybrids. In Mexico as in many poorer countries, industrial pig and poultry farms are increasingly sited close to crowded urban populations, making simultaneous infection by different flu strains more likely.

The 1918 flu pandemic was an H1N1 strain and was a kind of bird flu new to humans so they had no immunity to it. It killed at least 50 million people as it raged around the world in less than a year. The 1918 H1N1 strain passed from humans to pigs, and became the dominant form of flu among pigs, albeit one that evolved into a fairly mild strain.

But then in 1998 there was an explosive new outbreak of swine flu in a factory farm in North Carolina that made thousands of pigs ill. The virus had evolved into a triple hybrid that had never been seen before, containing gene segments from bird, human and swine flu. It had found the ideal breeding ground. Pigs, whose immune systems were suppressed by the stress of crowding and fast feeding, and kept confined indoors, were perfect disease incubators for flu whose preferred method of transmission is virus-infected aerosol droplets, expelled by the million in the hog’s famous barking cough. Thanks to the modern practice of transporting live animals, the new virus spread rapidly through pig herds around the country.

Six of the eight genetic segments of today’s swine flu outbreak isolated by CDC experts can be traced back to the triple hybrid from North Carolina.

Factory animal farming has developed as a giant ecological credit bubble. It has delivered enormous growth in global meat production over the last three decades. Consumers have happily bought its cheap products just as they gobbled up the freely-offered loans of the financial boom without asking too closely how such consumption could be sustained or what the eventual consequences might be. Swine flu should make us question that complacency.

Jan Slingenbergh, a senior animal health officer at the FAO believes the precise final evolution of the current virus may never be found. “We don’t know, but what is most likely is that a human was infected by a common flu virus and at the same time with a second virus which had elements probably from pigs and they mixed to form a new virus. The last bit of human mixing probably took place around mid-March in Mexico.” Slingenbergh is sceptical that a link will be found to the Granjas Carroll factory.

The current virus may now progress as a mild strain and die down or it may mutate and evolve further to become more virulent. The reason experts have invested so much effort in preparing for a flu pandemic and are taking this one so seriously, is that these rapidly evolving strains that mix bird, pig and human forms could throw up a particularly deadly variety. Health experts have warned for years about the danger of intensive livestock farming creating new and rampant human disease.

If these new viruses are the toxic debt of the food system, the genetically improved pig is its highly engineered and artificial derivative. Pumped up like a bodybuilder, dependent on antibiotics and vaccines to keep it going, it has disproportionately large back legs to meet a market that likes hams more than shoulder of pork; it has tiny ears and no tail to limit the scars from the aggressive behaviour distressed conditions produce; and it is bred without hair for ease of slaughter. When herds of 5,000 of these genetically identical modern animals catch flu, it rips through them.

Large-scale producers pride themselves on their economic efficiency, but if the true costs of such polluting and disease-harbouring methods were internalised rather than externalised as environmental debts, they would be anything but good value. The cost of the flu pandemic will be unquantifiably large, but it is not the industry that will pay. Instead, the damage will affect the poorest disproportionately. It is ordinary Mexicans who are most affected now, just as the sub-prime mortgage crisis has made those at the bottom of the ladder homeless.

Where the next shocks to the food system will come from is unpredictable. As well as outbreaks of disease, climate change may produce a sudden dislocation in supplies. A coincidence of drought in two or more grain producing countries could, for example, lead to price spikes and shortages. An energy crisis could expose how dependent our food system has become on an uninterrupted flow of oil and transport – earlier this year, after just two days of snow, there were worries that London might not be able to maintain its food supplies, according to Rosie Boycott, chairman of the mayor’s London Food board.

Official government figures show that there has been a steady erosion of any slack in the system. In the UK, stocks of all food are typically down to 11 days of supply. The UK now carries just eight days’ worth of stocks of frozen foods, and 10 days of perishable goods. Globally, grain stocks are down to 50 days.

Tim Lang, professor of food policy at City University and a member of the government’s Sustainable Development Commission, warns that the whole British food network has become taut. “In that last 30-40 years there has been enormous investment in what is called efficiency,” he says. “That means there is no spare. The food system is like a fully stretched rubber band. If it breaks, there would be a sharp rebound. I don’t think a systemic failure is imminent but it is very vulnerable to shocks. They could be technical shocks, ecological shocks or human disease shocks. We don’t have a sustainable UK agriculture base at the moment and we need one.”

But instead of addressing these wider issues, the response to the flu pandemic in terms of food production is “carry on as normal”. Urged to spend our way out of ecological recession, we are exhorted to keep eating pork products. Keen to protect the economic interests of its meat industry, the US government took to calling this swine flu “H1N1 flu” a couple of days ago, in order not to put people off their chops. The World Health Organisation, which depends on the US for a large part of its budget and has been bullied by it before, has now followed suit, rebranding the flu influenza A (H1N1). But simply saying “as you were” is no more an adequate response to the cause of this current crisis than it is to the banking collapse. If we carry on as before, the pigs may yet have their revenge. And if not the pigs, the chickens.

Shipwrecked Dog

This story of a canine overboard (“Austrialian Canine Castaway Found”) is not only “heart-warming” but it gives a sense of the different personalities a dog will exhibit vis-a-vis those outside the family and those inside. Likely the dog better represents aspects of psychoanalyst Takeo Doi’s in-group / out-group theory than humans. The video of the dog’s owner describes how the dog was “wild and vicious” to others and then easily returned to a carefree domestic life with its owners.http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/7986816.stm

Fish and Monks

DharmareleaseFish.jpg

A Strange Tale from Prof. John Lock:
The practice of releasing captive animals as a mean to obtain greater karma (or whatever word your version of Buddhism uses) has been a matter of concern from conservationists for some time as it necessitates that the animals be captured first with implications for the welfare of those animals. It also introduces invasive alien species into the environment to compete with the indigenous fauna. Birds, fish and turtles are particularly favoured for this ritual which tends ot take place on Buddha Day/ Vesak Day.   In Eastern Asia there is a thriving trade in captive animals for this purpose.  THere are many references to this on the internet but one that recently caught my eye because it illustrates the sort of unexpected conflict of interests that can arise when individual acts of kindness are exposed to the western taste for commodification and economies of scale  is at http://www.zhaxizhuoma.net/NEWS/2004-releaseFish.html

An excerpt:

“Reporters will often observe and report on Dharma Assemblies in which captive animals are released. This is especially true with respect to Dharma Assemblies at the ocean shore. This is because the battle that takes place between man and beast is more exciting than watching a Western movie. Buddhist Dharma Teachers and laypersons in this particular group go to the ocean shore at least two or three times a year to release into the ocean many fish that they buy from fishmongers. In the course of time, this release of captive fish has become a custom here in Los Angeles.
“Many fish-eating pelicans, seagulls, and sea lions converge at this shore, waiting for their delicious meal. They do not have to expend energy chasing after one or two small fish, as they usually do. All they have to do is wait beside the fish boat from which fish are released into the ocean. As soon as the fish are released into the water, the pelicans and seagulls rush toward the fish with the speed of an arrow and devour them with all their might. The sea lions are even more voracious. With their large mouths open, they swim toward the numerous fish. The large sack-like mouths of the sea lions devour one group of fish after another, and the fish roll into their stomachs. Birds and sea lions eat about thirty percent of the fish that are released.

“This situation has caused those Buddhists who release the fish to feel anguished. Thus, they have taken many preventive measures. Every time they release fish, there are at least three people who hold high-pressure hoses that they aim at the approaching fish-eating birds and sea lions. They thereby try to drive those birds and sea lions away, but it is of no use. You can still see birds rushing into the spray to kill their prey. Avoiding direct contact with the water from the hoses, they dart toward the group of fish. The sea lions dive under water and approach the fish. Water spouting from the hoses is of no use against them.

“There are also the fierce pelicans. As if to purposefully show their strength, they catch fish by directly rushing toward the ponds of fish on the fish-releasing boat. At this time, you can see people on the boat battling with the birds in order to save the fish. There are intense battles between man and bird. Those people battle with the birds up and down the boat. Those kind Buddhists do not want to harm the birds, but they also want to save the fish. This sight truly makes one sigh with emotion.”

Mechademia

I recently had an article accepted at the Japanese popular culture journal Mechademia on the idea of “becoming-fanimal” which I suggest might be a different way of conceptualizing the kind of deep interest individuals (“fans”) have for animals which is not a “domesticating animal love.” Please look for it. The upcoming volume of Mechademia has something I wrote on the abjected Japanese male turned “yapoo” (beast) in a galactic space of a white matriarchy. The abject human as animal is one window into ways in which we ultimately think about animals in our world–the abject sufferers of technological and human-colonialist modernity. While this takes into account speciesism of western modernity it maintains a speciesist posture through its focus on abjection as an inevitable “use” of the animal.