How Much is One Life Worth?

One of the differences between animal rights and animal rescue is that animal rights philosophy and activities tend to focus on large numbers of animals, while animal rescue focuses on individual animals. Obviously, for those who care about animal welfare, both focuses are important.

Just focusing on individual rescues does nothing to change the public’s perception about animals or any of the countless ways that humans exploit animals. For long-term change, we must rely on those who work to change the structural conditions that allow for and enable animal exploitation.

At the same time, most people who promote animal welfare or animal rights cannot stand by while individual animals suffer, and many go out of their way to help some of those individuals. The story of animals who have suffered greatly under human control or lack of care often serves to motivate other people to see animals differently, and all of us love stories of animals who survived hardship, and then learned to thrive in a new environment filled with love and care.

But how much time, money, or effort should we spend on individual animals?

I ask this question because I recently played a role in rescuing a small rabbit named Peanut from California. Peanut, a dwarf white rabbit with striking blue eyes and deformed legs, was seen being thrown out of a window near the San Francisco Airport. The person who witnessed this horrific act got out of their car and picked up the bunny, bringing him to Peninsula Humane Society in San Mateo. There, a kind volunteer named Aida, knowing that Peanut would soon be euthanized thanks to the condition of his legs, brought him out of his cage to let him play once in the grass on the shelter grounds. Peanut was slated to be euthanized before his stray period was up.

Aida posted Peanut’s picture on her Facebook page, where it caught the attention of Donna, a long-time fosterer for House Rabbit Society, and a friend of mine. Donna knew that I was looking for a disabled rabbit to be a companion to Junior, a rabbit with a severe neurological condition that makes him fall over. Donna emailed me about Peanut, and I told her if she could get him out before he was euthanized, I would take him.

Once Aida pulled Peanut and transferred him to Donna’s care, we needed to find a way to get Peanut from California to New Mexico where I live. Once again, Facebook played a major role. I posted the story of Peanut on the House Rabbit Society and Harvest Home Animal Facebook pages, and thanks to that coverage, dozens of people volunteered to help get Peanut to me. Ultimately, it only took two very generous souls: Kim, who picked Peanut up from Donna’s in South San Francisco and drove him to Santa Barbara where Diane, who was flying to Santa Fe for a conference, would bring him on the plane with her.

Peanut is now safely living with me, and bonded with Junior even before he was neutered. He’s now been neutered and been given a clean bill of health by my veterinarian, Dr. Levenson, who donated the x-rays of Peanut’s legs and spine.   When he’s not snuggling with Junior, Peanut scoots around my floor in a diaper, which keeps his private parts safe, and interacts with the dogs, the cats, the birds, and the other rabbits in the house. He follows my husband and I around, and spends a lot of time in the kitchen where he quickly learned all snacks come from.

It took a metaphorical village to save Peanut’s life. From the woman who saw him thrown out of the car, to Aida to Donna to Kim to Diane to Dr. Levenson, and to all the people who sent Peanut good wishes and who volunteered to help, his salvation was only thanks to the money, time, and energy of lots of people.

Was it worth it?

Well, clearly, for Peanut it was. He lives a happy life with companionship, good food, freedom to play, and explore, lots of adventures—he took his first camping trip with us last weekend, visiting Bluewater Lake in western New Mexico—and all the love and care that he could ever desire.

It was also worth it for Junior, who had been left alone back in April when his previous companion, Audrey, died suddenly. Junior can rarely stand up, so his life experiences are very narrow. Having a companion who he can lick, snuggle with, and even lean on, has improved his life dramatically.

It’s also been worth it for me. Even though I live with dozens of animals, having someone who is “special needs” is immensely satisfying for me. Caring for someone who needs me brings me a lot of joy. So having Peanut here has made me very happy.

Ultimately, I feel that every life saved is a life worth saving. While every animal rescuer knows that we cannot “save them all,” there’s just no question that saving even a single life is worth it.

Audrey the Star

This morning I said goodbye to Audrey. She didn’t say goodbye to me, though, because she was already dead.

Today, and for a very long time to come, I will mourn her death. People who know me know that I have a house full of animals. At this count, 4 dogs, 2 cats, 1 bird, and 34 rabbits. That means that death strikes this house much more often than I would like. On the other hand, and I am not ashamed to admit this, some animals are a much more important part of my life than others, and yes, some animals I love more than I do others. That means that I grieve some more than others. Audrey was one of those animals.

Audrey was a small white rabbit with pink eyes who came to me a little less than a year ago. She was dropped off at an animal shelter with a broken back, and was rescued by a rescue group called Zooh Corner Rabbit Rescue. Zooh arranged for one of their volunteers to drive Audrey to my home in New Mexico.

Since arriving here last year, tiny Audrey has played a huge role in the life of this house. She was a brave, big-hearted, and fierce girl. Afraid of nothing, she explored the house with her custom-made cart, and, when the cart was unusable because she chewed through its harness, she simply crawled everywhere in her little athletic sock which protected her trailing feet and back end.
She loved to tease Igor, one of the living room rabbits, because she knew that he had a crush on her and that it pissed his girlfriend Charlotte off when he spent time with her. She also teased the guest room bunnies, Max and Maggie, because Maggie used to go wild with anger whenever Audrey slipped into her room in her cart. She also loved to go out into the courtyard, where the big group of rabbits plays, and watch them from her side of the rabbit gate.

But what she really loved was to go camping. I’ve written here in the past about bringing Audrey with us on camping trips, where, thanks to the protection of her sock (and a 70 square foot play area created by a set of collapsible ex-pens that we bring) she gets to explore each new campsite. In the past year, Audrey’s been to the desert, the snow, the beach, and even the Rocky Mountains, and relishes each new set of smells, sights, and experiences. Her joy on these trips adds immeasurably to my and my husband’s joy, as we watch her sniffing, eating, meditating, and even binkying in each new place.

I still can’t believe she’s gone. As a writer, my first impulse when someone close to me dies is to write about it. I don’t know how healthy it is, or whether I do so to stave off the intense pain of the grief which I know is coming, but I feel like I need to immediately put into words some of the life of the one who just left. I want everyone to know that she was here, and that her life mattered.

In the case of Audrey, she was so full of life that it seemed at times like that 2 and a half pound body just could not hold it all in. Rabbits don’t normally vocalize, but Audrey did, all the time. She wanted us to know who she was, how she was feeling, and what she wanted.
But now she’s quiet.

I have always told people that Audrey was a star. She had loads of friends on Bunspace, the social networking site for rabbits, and recently we had just signed with a new literary agency; my new agent is pitching a book about Audrey to publishers. I pictured us traveling to the Today Show and having Audrey grunt at Al Roker.

Audrey really was a star, though, even though she’ll never get to be on tv now. She was a shooting star—bright, full of light, and now gone.

47,000 Dead: Does Anyone Care?

Just this week, 47,000 creatures lost their lives and almost no one noticed.

A&L Poultry, the owner of an egg farm in Turlock, California, decided to close down its egg operations and simply left to starve all of the chickens at their plant. 47,000 of the chickens, left with no food and no water for over 2 weeks, died of starvation and dehydration. This kind of a death is slow and agonizing; according to doctors who have witnessed starvation and dehydration among children in Africa, it results in dizziness, weakness, cramping, nausea, and dry heaves. It is a horrible way to die.

And yet 47,000 chickens died this way this week. A&L Poultry said: “An attempt to arrange for delivery of the chickens to a third party in order to avoid the usual business practice of euthanizing the chickens resulted in an unacceptable situation A&L Poultry did not intend, and profoundly regrets.”

The “usual business practice,” then, when an egg-laying farm is to shut down, is to kill all of the birds. In this case, the unacceptable situation was that the birds starved slowly to death, while not a single employee of A&L Poultry noticed, or cared. A video taken inside the abandoned facility showed tens of thousands of dead and dying birds; because egg-laying chickens are stuffed tightly into cages with other hens, the survivors were sharing quarters with their dead sisters. Watching this silent, eerie video is enough to make a grown man—or woman—weep. I know I did.

This horrifying story, which has received just the tiniest bit of press, has a happy ending for some of the birds, however. Harvest Home Animal Sanctuary and Animal Place, animal sanctuaries in Stockton and Vacaville, stepped in, negotiated with the owners (who initially told the rescuers to leave the property) and rescued about 4,600 of the survivors. Farm Sanctuary will be taking some of the birds as well.

Many of these survivors are unbelievably weak; some can barely stand, but all are getting stronger and healthier thanks to the love and care of the volunteers at Harvest Home and at Animal Place. The sickest of the birds, now at Harvest Home, were left to suffocate under the manure pits at A&L. These birds will get to live the rest of their lives walking around on the grass, pecking for grubs and roots, and enjoying the California sunshine.

Is that too much to ask for the rest of this country’s chickens? If eggs are going to be enjoyed by millions of Americans, is it too much to ask that the chickens who provide them get to live a life of contentment, of peace, and of happiness? Or are we so greedy and selfish that even animals who provide so much to so many should get denied even the simplest pleasures, and must live short hellish lives of misery? And then die in agony?

Rescued deer given a new chance at life

This week I read a story about four Sitka deer who ended up in the frigid waters of Stephens Passage in Alaska last October. They were swimming through the waters, trying to find land, and were quickly becoming incapacitated by the cold and the effort of swimming against the waves.

They approached a charter fishing boat captained by Tom Satre, and began circling the boat, obviously looking for help. Satre and his family helped pull each of the deer onto the boat, where they collapsed, shivering, in exhaustion. Satre piloted the boat towards the peer, and once docked, the first deer jumped out of the boat and ran into the forest. Two more came next, but the fourth was so weak he could not walk, so Satre began to haul him a wheelbarrow, but it had a flat and would not go very far. Satre and his family then waited for the deer to regain his energy, helping him to stand up until he could move on his own, and then he too walked into the forest.

The story is both heartbreaking and inspiring--without this human family, and their efforts, the deer family would not have survived. One of his family said that the rescue was "one of those "defining moments in life," and Satre said that "it made an emotional mark on each of us."

I read through the story to find out more, and was surprised to read that Satre went further and said, "I'm a hunter and have taken a lot of flack, but (taking them) just didn't seem very sportsman like."

After reading that line, I was taken aback. The story took, in my mind, a quick turn from heartwarming to horrifying, as I began to imagine a hunter taking the opportunity to shoot to death four struggling deer begging for human help. Unsportsmanlike would be, in my mind, an understatement. True, he not only did not take the opportunity to kill them, and in fact, spent the afternoon bringing them to safety. But the fact that other hunters gave him "flack" for not killing the deer ruined my otherwise good mood.

Now I wonder, a year later, how Satre has been effected by this life-changing (and life-giving) moment. I wonder, mostly, whether he still hunts, but a search online has not answered my question. My hope is that this experience has nudged him into leaving hunting behind; it's difficult to imagine that one can go from spending hours with wild animals who put their trust into a human, only to begin killing them again.

Humanizing Sex Workers

From my guest blog at Sociological Images:

Katrin B. sent in a link to a series of ads created by an organization called Stepping Stone Nova Scotia. Their mission is to advocate on behalf of, and offer resources and services to, prostitutes in the Maritime Provinces of Canada.

The ads depict quotes by friends or family members of prostitutes (“I’m proud of my tramp, raising two kids on her own”) which are intended to humanize sex workers; the bottom of each ad reads “Sex workers are brothers/daughters/mothers too.” They’re also intended to shock the reader into really thinking about prostitutes. The juxtaposition of words like “tramp” and “hooker” with the white middle-class faces of the speakers makes the viewer question our culture’s ease with using those terms, and forces us to see the person behind the prostitute.

Stepping Stone’s executive director, Rene Ross, points out that every time a prostitute is killed—sex workers have a mortality rate 40 times higher than the Canadian national average—media accounts emphasize that the victim was a prostitute, but not that she (or he) was also a mother, daughter, friend or, for example, animal lover. By thinking of sex workers only in terms of their stigmatized occupation, we don’t have to care about them as people.

In New Mexico, where I live, the remains of eleven women (and the unborn fetus of one) were found buried on a mesa outside of Albuquerque in 2009. The women had disappeared between 2003 and 2005, and most, according to police, were involved with drugs and/or prostitution. Why did it take the police so long to find the bodies of these women, and why do their murders still remain unsolved? Some observers have suggested that because the women were—or were alleged to be—prostitutes, there was less pressure to find them after they went missing, or to solve their murders once their bodies were found. As long as the victims were sex workers, then the non-sex worker public can feel safe in the knowledge that they are not at risk. We know that prostitution is dangerous, so it’s expected that some of them will die grisly deaths, and be buried like trash on a mesa outside of town.

I love the motivation behind the ads, and they do make me smile. I hope they have the effect that Stepping Stone intends—making people think of prostitutes as people, not trash. But they’re also funny, and I wonder if they won’t also have an unintended effect, of making prostitutes seem like a joke.

This week I watched the Comedy Central Roast of Charlie Sheen. During the roast, most of the jokes dealt with his well-known history with drug use and prostitution, and “prostitute,” “hooker” and “whore” were used as punch lines in the majority of the jokes, and each “whore” reference incited additional laughter. Sure, many of the women that Sheen paid to have sex were doubtless “high class” call girls, paid well, and not living on the street. But we also know that at least some of these women, as well as the non-prostitute females in his life, were subject to violence and threats of violence. He is alleged to have beaten, shot, shoved, and thrown to the floor a number of women over the years, but because many of these women were prostitutes (or porn stars, which is the next best thing), the women were “asking for it.”

Let’s hope that Stepping Stone’s campaign does some good, making us think about sex workers as people, rather than punch lines and faceless victims.

Violence or Art

Today, the Huffington Post reports on a controversy brewing at Paris Fashion Week, where two dresses made out of over three thousand cow and yak nipples are going to be shown by British fashion designer Rachel Freire. Animal rights activists are outraged that Freire is using body parts from slaughtered animals as art. Freire defends her use of the nipples by saying that they are “from European cows slaughtered for meat in veterinarian-approved and checked slaughter houses.” She also says that she would “happily donate my own body to be used as art by a responsible individual,” to which a commenter on Huffpo wrote, “So can I take you up on your offer then? Would you prefer to be killed with a captive bolt pistol or slaughtered kosher or halal style?"

Using the dead body parts of slaughtered animals for art is nothing new. British artist Damien Hirst’s first major piece was called A Thousand Years (1990) and consisted of a cow’s head rotting inside of a glass case, complete with flies and maggots. Other artists have used, and sometimes killed, animals in order to provoke reactions from the public. In 2003, Chilean artist Marco Evarisitti created a piece, for example, that involved live goldfish swimming in blenders full of water. Patrons were given the opportunity to press the buttons on any of the blenders, killing the goldfish within, which the artist said was an invitation for the public to “do battle with their conscience.” More controversial was Swedish photographer Nathalia Edenmont, whose work involved actually killing rabbits, mice, chickens and cats, and then photographing their chopped up bodies alongside flowers, fruit and other objects. Like Evarisitti, Edenmont has said that her work was intended to challenge the public, and claimed that those who opposed it were hypocrites for not opposing the killing of animals for makeup or for food.

Just a couple of weeks ago, the San Francisco Arts Commission gave New York City artist Tom Otterness a $750,000 grant to create public art for San Francisco’s subway system. After the city put out a press release about the grant, local animal activists recognized the artist’s name; in 1977, Otterness adopted a dog from a humane society, shot him, and filmed his death for a film he called “Shot Dog Film.” Activists led by In Defense of Animals were outraged; IDA employee Anita Carswell said “You do not let an animal shooter put up 59 sculptures in your subway system. It’s going to be offensive to everybody that rides the subway, a reminder: ‘People who shoot dogs for stupid reasons get rewarded.’”

He may not get his reward after all. San Francisco Mayor Ed Lee has asked that the project be put on hold; as of this writing, it is unclear whether the project will be completed, or whether Otterness will be the artist to complete it. At least in San Francisco, the city of St. Francis, most people do not see such cruelty as art.

Redemption?

You may have heard by now that Michael Vick, the quarterback for the Philadelphia Eagles, just won a one hundred million dollar, six year contract, just two years after being released from the Leavenworth penitentiary after being caught running a dog fighting business.

Sports analysts are already saying that Vick's deal is not really for a hundred million dollars; he's only truly guaranteed $35 million over the next three years, and can lose all the rest depending on his performance, lack of injury, and the like. Still. $35 million is an awful lot of money for a convicted dog killer.

For many in the sports world, Vick's story is a storyof redemption. Not only did Vick lose his football career, his lucrative product endorsements, and his freedom, but in 2008 he filed for bankruptcy, thanks to the loss of his income and poor financial management of his assets while he was free. Yet less than two years later, Vick not only got a chance to play professional football again, being named Comeback Player of the Year in 2010, but he is now the third highest paid player in the NFL, and the first to ever sign two one hundred million dollar deals in his career. He's also gotten back his endorsements; even Nike, notoriously shy of signing controversial athletes, has given Vick a new contract.

At a press conference announcing his new contract, Vick appeared humble, and talked about the "sacrifices" he had to make to reach this point in his life, and all that he gave up--he does still owe millions to his creditors as part of his bankruptcy settlement. Sports commentators seem united in their sense that Vick is now a changed man, and that he has moved forward from his "mistakes." That may well be, and in the press conference, he seemed sincere.

But I'm still not convinced. Running a dog fighting ring that involved multiple states, gambling and racketeering, lying to police and prosecutors, and hundreds of dogs being trained, fought, and, in many cases, brutally killed (some by Vick himself) is not a "mistake." It's a sign of extreme cruelty and, some would say, pathology.

America is the land of second chances. We famously forgive our fallen celebrities for their financial, sexual, and even criminal transgressions. And if we won't allow for those who have sinned to redeem themselves, what does it say about us?

But for me, I am going to wait and see. I suspect that Vick won't--or at least won't soon, because right now he can't afford it--restart his extravagent lifestyle, and will try to keep a clean image. I certainly doubt that he will ever engage in dog fighting again. He would be insane to do so. But I wonder how a person who once tortured animals for pleasure and profit can ever truly change, especially if he continues to refer to that behavior as "mistakes."