Animal Concerns Across the Globe

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

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.

Good Books

Ursula Heine’s book Sense of Place and Sense of Planet is helping me articulate my environment and Japan project. I also recommend Gregory Golley’s wonderful When Our Eyes No Longer See about Japanese modernism, literature and animals. A lovely read.

See this Film

If you care about DOLPHINS and Movies: Keep a look out for a fantastic new film called “The Cove”

Palin Kills Wolves

In the LA Times on Palin:

Those who watched the video released by the group Defenders of Wildlife, narrated by actress Ashley Judd — which accuses Sarah Palin of “senseless savagery” in her support of Alaska’s aerial wolf-killing program — will hardly be surprised that the Alaska governor has struck back against the animal activists.

In a statement posted on her website, Palin calls the group’s actions “reprehensible and hypocritical” and accuses them of using the controversy as “a fundraising tool to deceive Americans into parting with their hard-earned money.”  The statement reads further:

“The ad campaign by this extreme fringe group, as Alaskans have witnessed over the last several years, distorts the facts about Alaska’s wildlife management programs. Alaskans depend on wildlife for food and cultural practices which can’t be sustained when predators are allowed to decimate moose and caribou populations. Our predator control programs are scientific and successful at protecting vulnerable wildlife. These audacious fundraising attempts misrepresent what goes on in Alaska, and I encourage people to learn the facts about Alaska’s positive record of managing wildlife for abundance.

“Shame on the Defenders of Wildlife for twisting the truth in an effort to raise funds from innocent and hard-pressed Americans struggling with these rough economic times.”

Regarding Palin’s statement, Reuters’ environment blog notes:

What is perhaps most revealing about the statement is that Palin … did not address one of the group’s key allegations: that she plans to introduce legislation shortly that would expand the aerial predator hunting program.

What do you think?  Is Palin relying on a red herring by bringing up the issue of America’s “rough economic times” in her rebuttal, or is she right that Defenders of Wildlife and Judd are out of line in their accusations?  Do you you think the aerial wolf-killing program is an appropriate way to address concerns about moose and caribou in Alaska?

–Lindsay Barnett

NAGASAKI — Mudskippers as PLAINTIFFS Lost their Case

The Nagasaki District Court on Monday rejected claims by Nagasaki Prefecture residents demanding the state and others repay a total of 33.9 billion yen the prefecture had paid for what they call an illegal land reclamation project in Isahaya Bay. In handing down the ruling that concluded the project is ‘‘legitimate,’’ Presiding Judge Hideo Imanaka said that the project is ‘‘effective’’ as it ‘‘fulfills the requirements of economic effects.’’

The judge said it is difficult for the court to determine that the state had ‘‘made a serious mistake’’ in calculating economic effects lost when a tideland in the bay disappears as a result of the reclamation. The lawsuit was filed against the state, Nagasaki Gov Genjiro Kaneko and former Nagasaki Gov Isamu Takada by 22 prefectural residents in October 2000 during construction of the project. The residents also included mudskippers and other tideland creatures affected by the project as plaintiffs in the suit.

DOLPHIN MEAT: REQUEST for WARNING LABEL

Each year, more than 20,000 dolphins and other small whales are killed and slaughtered in Japan. The official reason for the killing of dolphins is to provide the Japanese people with dolphin meat. “Eating dolphins is part of our culture,” the dolphin hunters have told us again and again. But very few people in Japan actually eat the meat.Ignoring the fact that dolphin meat is highly contaminated with mercury, the Japanese government introduced dolphin and whale meat to children’s school lunch programs, in what we see as a rather desperate attempt to support their argument that the Japanese dolphin slaughter in an issue of food culture. The government had to pull the meat from the lunch programs, however, when the scandalous facts about mercury contamination were publicized. The killing of dolphins must stop. The Japanese people have a right to know that the dolphin meat distributed to their super markets is poisonous.

We demand that a label be placed on each and every package of dolphin meat, warning the Japanese consumers of the serious health hazards associated with mercury consumption. If we can make this happen, nobody is going to buy the contaminated product. It’s all about supply and demand!

You can help accomplish this goal.

Please write a respectful, short letter to Ms. Seiko Noda, Japan’s newly appointed Minister of Consumer Affairs, Food Safety and Science and Technology. Her e-mail address is: seiko@noda-seiko.gr.jp