Another holiday, another throw away animal

Another holiday, another excuse for throw-away animals.

For rabbit lovers, it was bad enough that Easter is the time of the year when uninformed families purchase pet rabbits to give to their children. Because of Easter’s long association with rabbits (which itself derives from the rabbit’s connection to the moon and association with rebirth and regeneration), the rabbit is the go-to animal to not only symbolize the holiday, but to purchase, in live form, as a gift for it.

Baby bunnies, as well as chicks and ducklings, are purchased at pet stores and feed stores every year as gifts, and every year, many of those same rabbits find themselves abandoned at animal shelters, or worse, in the wild. Those that aren’t often don’t survive because the purchasers were not planning to commit to these animals for their lifetimes.

February 3 marks the beginning of the Year of the Rabbit, which occurs once every twelve years in the Chinese Lunar Calendar, and is celebrated throughout Asia and among Asian communities everywhere. Communities around the world will hold festive celebrations, ushering out the Tiger and in the Rabbit.

The bad news is that because rabbits are considered especially auspicious during its special year, many people want to get rabbits to keep in the house during the year. Unfortunately, this will result (as it did in the last Year of the Rabbit, 1999) in countless rabbits being abandoned after the year is over.

Why are animals such intractable symbols for holidays such as this? I suppose on one level, rabbits should consider themselves lucky that they’re not turkeys. Turkeys famously represent Thanksgiving to Americans, commemorating a harvest feast held by American colonists in 1621. This symbolic association results in some forty-five million turkeys being raised and slaughtered every November.

But even without that wholesale slaughter, rabbits still do not fare well at Easter, and nor, evidently, do they fare well during the Year of the Rabbit. House Rabbit Society Singapore points out that during the last Year of the Rabbit, in 1999, over twice as many rabbits were abandoned at that nation’s shelters than in 1998. This year looks to be no different.

In addition, many Chinese restaurants are now offering rabbit-meat dishes to commemorate the New Year, leading to yet more suffering. In the United States, rabbits are not covered under the Humane Methods of Slaughter Act, so killing them is not regulated at all, and they are not stunned prior to death.

Going back to the ancient belief that a severed rabbit’s foot is “lucky,” rabbits who are considered to bring luck to people end up suffering in a myriad of ways.

It would be wonderful if one day we could create holidays with animals at their center where the animal was truly celebrated, rather than intensively bred, abandoned, or slaughtered.

Animal Sacrifice

In the United States, October is known for Halloween. Millions of kids and adults will dress up as their favorite monster or celebrity and go to parties and trick or treat.

But in India, Bangladesh and Nepal, October is known for festivals involving animal sacrifices on a massive scale. In Bangladesh and some parts of India, the festival of Dussehra involves the ritual slaughter of thousands of animals at temples in honor of the Hindu goddess Sati. During the festival of Durga Puja, in order to honor the goddess Durga, animals are also slaughtered at temples throughout India and Bangladesh. In most of India, animal sacrifice is illegal and authorities and animal welfare organizations have been working to convince locals to replace the animal sacrifice, known as bali, with other offerings like pumpkins, cucumbers and other foods.

But no festival in South Asia demands more animal lives be lost than Nepal’s festival of Dashain, which began on October 15 and runs for fifteen days. Each year, hundreds of thousands of animals are sacrificed for the goddess Durga. In temples around the country, thousands of water buffaloes, pigs, goats, chickens and ducks are killed in order to please the goddess and protect against evil. So many animals are needed that they need to be trucked in from India and Tibet; one news report said that 20 truckloads of buffaloes are arriving daily. In 2009, over a million animals lost their lives in this two week period. Another Nepalese event is the month-long Gadhimai festival, which occurs every five years in November and likewise involves the sacrifice of hundreds of thousands of animals to the goddess Gadhimai, in order to end evil and bring prosperity. Gadhimai draws millions of attendees from both Nepal and India, who come because animal sacrifice is legal here.

In recent years, Nepalese animal rights organizations like Animal Welfare Network Nepal (AWNN) have been attempting to stop the sacrifices and substitute new activities for the celebrations, but have thus far been unable to sway public opinion. AWNN argues that animal sacrifice is not consistent with Hindu values, and that goddesses like Durga, who is a symbol of both power and motherly love, would not want animals to be slaughtered in their name.

Proponents of animal sacrifice in South Asia note that not only are these practices cultural traditions that date back thousands of years, but that the animals live better lives than the billions of animals who are raised and killed for food every year in Western factory farms. We could also add that Westerners’ distaste at practices like this stem in part from the very public, and very bloody, way in which the animals are killed. In the United States, animals are killed in slaughterhouses which very few of us will ever see, in conditions which are, for all intents and purposes, invisible. Their suffering is thus invisible, allowing us to conveniently ignore it. The killing of animals in India, Bangladesh and Nepal is, for sure, brutal (many of the animals are hacked to death and beheaded), but comparatively speaking, even a few hundred thousand animals who lose their lives this way (in countries where meat consumption is quite low) is relatively minor compared to the billions of animals who lose their lives every year in the US.

On the other hand, if local activists are ultimately successful in ending, or even minimizing, the slaughter in Nepal, as they appear to be in India, hundreds of thousands of animals per year will be saved. Then the spotlight will be even brighter on Americans, who so often take the moral high ground when it comes to the practices of other cultures, but whose own behaviors are hardly morally pure.

Animal rights activist world's 24th most dangerous man

Today, the FBI added the name of Daniel Andreas San Diego to the agency's list of 25 most wanted terrorists in the world.

Osama Bin Laden, mastermind of 9/11 as well as of other deadly attacks like the 1998 bombings of embassies in Tanzania and Kenya, is #1 on the list.

San Diego, who allegedly set off three pipe bombs, early in the morning, at two empty corporate offices in 2003, is #24.

Really, an animal rights activist is the 24th most dangerous man in the world, and is the only American on a list populated entirely by Muslim fundamentalists who have killed Americans?

I am astounded by Andreas' inclusion on this list, and not just because I once knew him. (We worked together at In Defense of Animals a few years back; I remember him as a sweet, idealistic, young kid.)

I am astounded because including Andreas on the same list as Osama bin Laden implies that both men's crimes are, if not equivalent, at least comparable.

But how is that possible? If Andreas is guilty of the crimes of which he is accused, he indeed broke the law. Property destruction is indeed a crime, and it is a crime for which many animal rights activists have gone to jail. But comparing destruction of property to the killing of thousands of people? It bears repeating (although no news article that I saw on this story today even mentioned it) that even radical direct action like Andreas is accused of has never, not once, resulted in harm to any human being.

Many people are wondering about the timing of today's announcement. Was it made to counter right-wing outrage aimed at the Obama administration after last week's release of a memo by Homeland Security warning of a rise in right-wing extremism?

Perhaps.

But even then, the activities of "left wing extremists" like Andreas, who break into buildings, destroy property, and often rescue animals, and right wing extremists who preach white supremacy, death to doctors who perform abortions, and armed anti-government activity, are hardly comparable.

If Andreas is caught (he is thought to be in Costa Rica), at least he can be thankful that the Bush Administration is no longer in power; otherwise he would most likely be sent to Guantanamo Bay and be subject to "enhanced interrogation techniques."