Tuesday, September 20, 2011

Animals at Burning Man

Burning Man in some ways can be described as animalistic and primal, but it is virtually absent of nonhuman animal life. Upon my exit of the playa, I welcomed the first dog I ran into like an old friend I hadn’t realized I’d missed so much. Burning Man also does not permit companion animals, for good reason.

Anything goes as far as Burning Man attire, including nothing but the skin on your back. Burners often wear little during the day in light of 90-degree temperatures and a free, liberal atmosphere. But the nights are cold, and wise burners bundle up, many in the faux fur coats that are extremely popular on the playa. The fuzzy, bulky coats are often colorful, fun and handmade, and some even glow in the dark. They contribute to the lighthearted nature of Burning Man.

Then there is the dark side of Burning Man: Despite the playa’s lack of wild animals, every night thousands of rabbit, fox and coyote corpses appeared. After attending the festival in 2008, I was surprised and dismayed at the number of people wearing dead animals this year, in the form of fur coats, shawls, trim and other pieces. It's pretty easy to recognize real fur when you live with a rabbit. Some furs looked new, some were vintage, and some were parts such as tails. All (even roadkill) promote the idea that animal suffering is OK for human vanity and a twisted sense of fashion.


To make one fur coat, you must kill an average of 40 animals, depending on the animal used. With nearly 54,000 people attending this month, there were easily 10,000 dead animals at Burning Man this year in fur alone. Support of the fur trade and the myth of fur as fashion supports:

  • Fur farms, where animals are confined to tiny, filthy cages and killed by anal or genital electrocution or neck breaking
  • Trapping, in which an animal will try to chew her own leg off to escape
  • The brutal theft of the lives of sentient beings whose sole wish and right is to live
While real fur comes with a stigma of cruelty, faux fur, or “playa fur,” is fun and comes free of the animal suffering pricetag. When one guy posted a question about whether or not to bring a real fur coat to Burning Man, one commenter remarked that no one would know the difference. Another replied: “Well, except for the fact that my faux fur coat is white with fuchsia tips, and my faux fur chaps are fluorescent green... Yah, nobody can tell the differencelol.” It’s also cheap, easy to use to create costumes and bike décor, and easy to clean. 



I hope that the playa dust destroyed the real fur worn at this year’s Burning Man and that future years will feature far fewer corpses littering the desert and putting a very unnecessary, ugly mark on all the love and good cheer at Burning Man.


Websites

Update, 2019: Faux fur is hard on the environment. It sheds fibers that will be around long after we're gone! It remains far more ethical than real fur, but ideally, we'll begin skipping fake fur too. <3

Saturday, September 17, 2011

A Fish Tale

Waiting for the school bus alone at the end of our long driveway would've been very boring, had it not been for the fish.

The large-mouthed bass, bluegills and sunfish found food in the seaweed but were accustomed to receiving treats from me and the neighborhood kids. When we walked around the pond, schools of fish followed us, keenly watching for any ripple created by a tossed snack.

Every day before school, I shared bites of my lunch with them. Two fish became particularly excited by my visits to the pond and developed a trust in me that no other fish had shown. A plump bluegill I named Blue and his little sunfish friend, Sunny, would spot me from afar and hurry across the pond side by side, creating twin ripples at the water's surface. They stopped as close to the shore as they could and waited for me. The tips of their small fins sometimes emerged above the surface of the shallow water as I hand-fed them pieces of sandwich. Blue and Sunny accepted each morsel slowly and gently, careful to never nibble a finger.

At the end of every winter I waited eagerly for the ice to thaw to see my friends again. One spring day as I descended the driveway, one telltale ripple appeared in the pond, and I spotted the tiny fins headed my way. Blue arrived alone. Sunny had not survived the winter.

Blue never replaced his companion, nor did he change his routine. Each day, he kept a lookout for the little girl carrying the lunchbox, and his small blue body swayed quickly from side to side as he raced across the pond to meet me.

What’s Behind Your Wool Coat? (2008)

Money is power, and we are empowered with our choices about where to spend our dollars. As a conscious consumer, I'm a label reader. I scrutinize not only the labels on my food and household products but also on the clothing I buy. Demand causes supply, and I don't want to contribute to a demand for products that cause animals to suffer.

Last year, I needed a dressy winter coat, but most of the coats I found online or in stores contained wool.

Sadly, our images of sheep peacefully grazing in the Alps until the Swiss Miss girl comes and gently combs away their wool to keep them cool could not be further from reality in our mass-produced market. So what IS the reality of the wool industry?

We don't *need* to kill sheep for wool, right? But we do. And we do it very cruelly.

Australia leads the world's wool producers, producing half the merino wool and 30 percent of all wool used worldwide. The country exploits more than 100 million sheep, and it's considered standard in the Australian wool industry for as many as 6 million to die each season as a result of neglect, starvation, disease and exposure. Flocks usually consist of thousands of sheep, making it impossible to give attention to individual needs.

Within weeks of birth, lambs' ears are hole-punched, their tails are chopped off, and the males are castrated without anesthesia by one of the most painful methods of castration possible.

Shearers are usually paid by volume, not by the hour, which encourages fast work without regard for the sheep's welfare. According to industry publications, shearers clip more than 350 sheep in one day. Says one eyewitness: "[T]he shearing shed must be one of the worst places in the world for cruelty to animals … I have seen shearers punch sheep with their shears or their fists until the sheep's nose bled. I have seen sheep with half their faces shorn off…."

MULESING

But that's not all.

In Australia and New Zealand, the most commonly raised sheep are merinos, who are specifically bred to have wrinkled skin, which means more wool per animal. This unnatural overload of wool causes some animals to die of heat exhaustion during hot months, and the wrinkles collect urine and moisture. Attracted to the moisture, flies lay eggs in the folds of skin, and the hatched maggots can eat the sheep alive.

In order to mitigate this condition, called "flystrike," Australian ranchers perform a barbaric procedure called mulesing, which involves carving huge strips of skin and flesh off the backs of lambs' legs and around their tails—with no painkillers. This is done to cause smooth, scarred skin that won't harbor fly eggs, yet the bloody wounds often get flystrike anyway before they heal.

One farmer—who successfully protects his sheep from flystrike by using a combination of fly traps, chemical sprays, breed selection, and grazing management—attributed the industry's resistance to giving up mulesing to "a bit of old-boys'-club arrogance in a once-grand industry that is now struggling a bit."

LIVE EXPORT

The terror sheep endure today does not end with mulesing. When sheep age and their wool production declines, they are sold for slaughter. This results in the cruel live export of 6.5 million sheep every year from Australia to the Middle East and North Africa. Sheep are crammed aboard enormous multitiered open-deck ships, and severe overcrowding causes many to be trampled to death or to starve when they cannot reach food and water. Treated as mere cargo, sick or injured sheep may be thrown overboard to drown or be eaten by sharks, or tossed alive into shipboard grinders.

Investigators found that animals were dragged off the ships by their ears and legs, bound and thrown into the trunks of cars, and slaughtered in prolonged and cruel ways that are illegal in the United States, Europe and Australia.

WHAT YOU CAN DO

Upon learning these facts, many people ask where they can find humane wool. It's difficult to find considering that the raising and shearing of sheep even outside Australia is often inhumane, and it's extremely hard to tell where a wool product originated.

An Internet search for humane wool turned up an organization that boasted to be the first sheep farm in the United States to be "certified humane" by major "humane" organizations. However, it also offers "flavorful lamb cuts." I suspect that like "humane meat," "humane wool" is an oxymoron, unless perhaps it comes from private individuals on a subsistence scale rather than companies exploiting animals for profit.

The only way to be certain that you're avoiding wool from sheep raised in Australia and New Zealand is to avoid wool altogether, and boycotting merino wool is a great step in the right direction. You can also buy clothing from retailers that have pledged not to sell Australian merino wool products until mulesing and live exports have ended, such as American Eagle Outfitters, Abercrombie & Fitch, Timberland, Aéropostale and Limited Brands.

Alternatives to wool include cotton, cotton flannel, polyester fleece, synthetic shearling and other cruelty-free fibers. Tencel—which is breathable, durable, and biodegradable—is one of the newest cruelty-free wool substitutes. Polartec Wind Pro, which is made primarily from recycled plastic soda bottles, is a high-density fleece with four times the wind resistance of wool, and it also wicks away moisture.

As for me, I'll keep reading labels. Last winter I found a soft, warm coat that met my needs and was completely synthetic. My first opportunity to wear it was at Farm Sanctuary in New York last Christmas, where I met Thelma, a beautiful sheep who followed me around to be pet. I was really happy with my choice as a consumer. I could hug this sheep knowing that my coat had not been manufactured from the blood and suffering of others like her.




The Wasp Who Came for Breakfast (2001)


In 2001, I wrote this short story for a book called The Grace of Small Things: Stories Celebrating the Insect-Human Connection, but I don't know if the book was ever published.
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If you visit my mother’s home in the country, you’ll see on the living room wall a montage of those she fondly calls her “critters.” These photographs feature the animals who frequent her yard seeking sunflower seeds and other delights - birds, deer, squirrels, raccoons, skunks, woodchucks, wild turkeys, even a black bear.

The smallest critter was photographed inside, on her perch on the kitchen windowsill, where she feasted on honey. She was my mother’s resident wasp.

The regulars were all given names, and the wasp was no exception. My mother, Mary Lou, contemplated a WASP name and christened her Babs. Initially, Babs appeared in the kitchen sink frequently, when Mary Lou was washing dishes, so she guessed the wasp was thirsty.

When Babs settled onto the windowsill above the sink, Mary Lou gave her a drop of water, which she drank. On subsequent visits, she gave Babs honey, which she also consumed. In an effort to introduce variety to Babs’ diet, Mary Lou offered her fruit, but Babs preferred the honey.

Every day Babs would fly to her spot at the sill to meet my mother. She arrived when the sun was out, in the early morning or sometimes the afternoon. The wasp waited and watched Mary Lou in anticipation of the water and honey, and Babs never moved when she put them on the sill before her. Mary Lou had always been afraid of being stung by a wasp, but said that, oddly enough, she never felt afraid of Babs. 

While the snow swirled on the other side of the window, Babs stayed warm and dry, dining on fresh water and honey.

In the spring, when Mary Lou started seeing wasps outside, she put Babs on a piece of paper and carried her out the door to the porch. After a moment, Babs flew away, to the tune of my mother’s voice singing “Born Free.”

Reflections of a Quieter Time (2008)


The apartment I was renting in downtown Boulder a few years ago sat above a garage, and every time the neighbors opened and closed the garage door, my living room shook and groaned, and pictures rattled on the walls. When the upstairs neighbors came and went, it sounded like elephants stomping up and down the stairs. I heard way too much information.

I tried moving to a renovated, inexpensive unit in North Boulder but was again driven out—this time by the roaches who strolled fearlessly across my kitchen floor, the incessant beat of Mexican polka, and the stench of cigarettes and fried meat in the hallways.

So, after 12 years of renting too many apartments to count—from upstate NY to Manhattan, Boston, DC and Boulder—I knew it was high time to leave the noisy neighbors behind and seek solace in the woods. With that, I ascended into the mountains above Boulder.

My biggest requirement: no humans within sight, earshot or smelling distance. I rented a sunny, south-facing one-bedroom cabin with a loft, wood-burning stove, hardwood floors, lots of windows and a sprawling deck with a killer view. 

The house (now ashes as a result of the Fourmile Canyon fire) sat at the bottom of a long driveway on five wooded acres on a dirt road off Sunshine Canyon, six miles above Boulder and four miles below Gold Hill. My newfound gift of silence at first pounded in my ears, only to be replaced by birdsongs and the wind rustling through the pines.

Each morning, while Tinkerbelle, Sugaree and Bigwig cuddled close by, I put on my fleece hat and partook in the ritual of building a fire in the woodstove with the pinecones and twigs I'd gathered for kindling. During a few big snows I stayed tucked away up Sunshine for a week at a time. I loved my solitude … but was far from being alone. In fact, in my reality, I was merely a squatter on the property, which was inhabited by untold numbers of deer, foxes, rabbits and enormous wolf spiders … and received regular visits from many sweet dog friends and occasional forays from curious bears looking for food. Sunshine Canyon is a wildlife sanctuary, free from harassment by hunters.

My first encounter with deer on the property took me by surprise because I quickly realized that the deer were tame. One watched me cut up an apple, and when I outstretched my hand to jokingly offer her a slice, the doe walked up, gently took the apple, and ate it while standing at my side. She then licked the apple juice from my hand.

I loved watching the deer and once happened to see a young buck trying to sniff a cat who was hanging out in the yard. The cat wasn't comfortable with the deer's lack of respect for her space and she turned tail, but when she turned back around, she found the deer right behind her once again. She picked up the pace, and so did he. He followed her up the driveway, where she hid beneath the truck while he circled it, looking beneath it for this strange, hissing creature he had discovered.

Then there were the foxes. One morning, while I was outside picking grass for the house-rabbits, I felt someone watching. I looked behind me to see a skinny red fox standing just 10 feet away. I asked her why she was so tame and she crept closer and peered up at me with her enchanting reddish-orange eyes. She poked her nose in my bowl of grass and then meandered off into the trees. Later I realized that she was my neighbor: She lived in the dilapidated building at the top of my driveway, and she showed as much interest in me as I did in her.

As spring arrived and the first wildflowers bloomed, a house wren made her nest of hundreds of twigs in the wall of the mud room, a tiny entry area into the house, without a door to the outside. She built the nest just beneath the bare light bulb that illuminated the entryway, and whenever I turned on the light at night, the ethereal little bird would come out of the nest and blink at me accusingly. I finally resorted to wearing my headlamp when I came home at night to avoid disturbing the wren family.

One friend likened me to Snow White, communing with the wild animals in my mountain retreat. But, the sanctuary did not come cheap, and rent was rising. I was forced to move back down into town, where I bought a first-floor condo, and stomping from above now rudely awakens me each morning as the windows rattle and I curse the builder. I can't return to the mountains soon enough.





Thursday, September 15, 2011

A Day in My Life at the Ranch (07/02/08)


Sundays are special at the Kindness Ranch. Special because I don't do as much office work as usual, don't get as many business-related calls, and I've already had Saturday to begin my unwinding process from the hectic workweek. Sundays mean more time with the animals.

One of the ways I enjoyed today was by thoroughly grooming the horses. So mentally therapeutic, and good exercise for the arms too! The colts—a year old and Second Chance already larger than one of the adults—galloped over when I called and soaked up the attention, bobbing their heads up and down as I brushed their necks. How far they've come since the first time I attempted to groom them a few weeks ago! As I brushed Second Chance, he rested his head on my shoulder and breathed down my back while Milagro tousled my hair and tried to nibble my arms. I loosened pieces of tumbleweed from Milagro's mane as he tried to playfully shrug me off, and I stroked the soft hair of Second Chance, noticing how his black spots were much hotter than his white spots in the sun.

It was lightly sprinkling, and I gazed up over a horse's back to see a rainbow over the hills. I regretted not bringing my camera to capture it and the horses with their silky manes and blissed-out, glazed expressions. But I told myself I'd remember this gorgeous place and the animals who make it so breathtaking.

The mares, Stormy and Shima, were next, and I unfastened a tick from Stormy's ankle and unknotted some of Shima's dreadlocks before she decided she'd had enough human attention for the day. Meanwhile, Stormy followed me around, the gentle and sad horse I hug daily and promise her that she'll be reunited with her sweet colt in another month, after weaning.

A chunk of my afternoon was spent cajoling a wayward potbellied pig to return to the barn. Bernadette had been showing off her relatively newfound freedom and fighting with her former roommate and nemesis Antoinette through the fence, and today enormous Antoinette escaped and attacked Bernadette, who ran away howling. I repaired the fence and put Antoinette back in her pen, but Bernadette had taken off. She was quite a distance away as I headed after her  through the thick grass to persuade her back home with a nectarine. The whole time I kept vigilant for snakes—rattlesnakes, to be exact, who should be emerging about now and basking in the sun. I regretted my choice to wear shorts today but was glad I had thrown on the blue cowboy boots.

When I reached the deaf pig—the other pigs will come when you call them—she turned around and followed the nectarine, painfully slowly, back to the barn. She only had one small new nick that I could see, likely a pig bite. But once we at last reached her pigpen, she saw her new roommate—sweet, harmless and tremendously fat Simone—and again fled. I began to wonder if her eyes as well as her hearing were failing, because it was Bernadette who is sometimes bossy and aggressive with Simone, not the other way around. I ended up leaving Bernadette loose in the barn to make a mess until dinnertime, when I was able to coax her into her pen with Simone.

As I headed home a little while ago to pay bills, return phone calls and answer e-mails—and oh, to change five cat litterboxes next door too—a chore I do while holding my breath—I caught a glimpse of a shiny, spiky black furball. I stopped and peaked around the side of the road, and sure enough, it was a baby porcupine! A fuzzy little angel black face and a tail like a black-tailed prairie dog, but fatter, like a tiny beaver's tail. The likely product of the two large brown porcupines who've been hanging around, busily killing the pine trees. When he saw me he waddled away in the slow, bumbling sort of style I've come to learn porcupines have, and joined his mother in their secret home, nudging her to let him in while he looked for me over his shoulder.

I've been here exactly a month and have only for the first time today made time to blog about some of my experiences here. It was the little porcupine who topped off my inspiration.

The Purple Love and Bike to Work Day (7/26/08)


On Bike to Work Day I rode the Purple Love down the mile-long gravel road on the ranch to feed the animals. The rescued horses, who had probably never seen a bike before, appeared shocked. Shima began to run around, but not run away. Curiosity overtook both mares, and they had to have a better look. They sniffed toward the direction of the bike and snorted at it. I rang the bell, which was also very surprising and interesting to them. 

Then I pedaled over to the pigs. Simone jumped up, startled, but then trotted over to inspect this captivating object lying in her midst. Was it a toy? Was it tasty? She circled the bike, turning the wheels and pedals, and put her mouth on a handlebar, then grunted once or twice and returned to her food.

After feeding time and the sun began to set, I pedaled uphill to my yurt passing the little growing porcupine waddling around on the side of the driveway. The baby's spikes would've camouflaged him so well in the grass, were he not black. He turned his head slowly to glance back at me to see if I'd spotted him. His little face and shiny, tiny black eyes reminded me of a guinea pig, but a punk guinea pig, with his spiked-up do. Ever so slowly, he waddled away into the tall grass and disappeared.

Now I can't help but contrast this Bike to Work Day with last year's, in which I met my friend Deb in downtown Boulder for breakfast outside Dushanbe and we both rode and bussed and rode to Interlocken, where we worked at a marketing agency. All along the way we were given food and gift certificates. Back then she rode the Purple Love, and I rode an old green bike, but now Deb lives in Hawaii and has left the Purple Love to me while she's gone. I, in turn, left one of my green bikes with my friend Ashley, who's now riding it to work in Boulder.

I hadn't even realized that it was Bike to Work Day -- organized in Boulder by my friend Sue -- until I talked with my friend Mike last night and he mentioned that it was Bike to Work Day in Denver. Maybe I sensed it, but nonetheless, I appreciated the bird's eye view that I can't get from the vantage point of the huge Ford ranch truck, and think I'll bike to work more often.

Reunion (7/16/08)

The horses had been waiting for this day for two months. Both mares had been used for the production of Premarin (pregnant mares' urine) in their life of slavery before the Kindness Ranch. They were each branded twice and kept pregnant in tiny stalls where they were outfitted with tight devices to collect their urine throughout their pregnancies. Their babies—mere "byproducts" of the Premarin industry—were taken away after birth and often slaughtered, especially if they were male. The grief they must've experienced, time and time again.

So when Stormy and Shima were rescued and arrived here at the sanctuary, they were pregnant and each gave birth to a foal who was born free. 
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Their babies, Milagro and Second Chance, were not branded or mistreated, and they never will be. For the first time, the abused mothers were allowed to keep their babies, and they cherished them …. and didn't wean them, even when the colts were over a year old and still nursing.

The vet advised me to separate the horses for two months because it wasn't healthy for any of them to continue nursing. Reluctantly, we separated them on May 15, and it was traumatic. The colts became needier for human attention, and the mares simply drooped.

I'd been assuring the sad-eyed mares all this time that they'd be seeing their sons soon, always letting them know how much longer. Yesterday I told them it was their big day. But I'm no horse-handling expert, so I planned to wait until my rancher-neighbors came over to help me to ensure nothing got chaotic (since being kicked two weeks ago, I'm more cautious!).

But the mares had waited long enough, and as I walked toward my bike to ride down and get the mail early on the afternoon of July 15, I spotted Stormy and Shima loose on the ranch, outside their corral. They were standing calmly outside the corral where their sons were. I thought I was seeing things, kept looking back to their empty corral across the yard ... and spotted the wide open gate, which was uncanny.

I let the mares in the gate to the big pasture where their unaware sons were grazing out of sight. None of them was wearing a halter. I grabbed my camera and walked past Stormy and Shima and around the corner to greet an unsuspecting Milagro and Chance. The colts came slowly to my call, nibbling grasses as I led them toward the mares, until we reached the crest of a hill and they spotted their mothers.

Milagro stopped still and then ran forward to the mares. Then Chance saw his mother, and both stared across at one another for a couple seconds before Chance let out a needy, happy neigh and ran toward Stormy as she galloped toward him.
Stormy sees her son
All four ran around together in small circles and kicked their back legs for joy, then stopped to stand close and sniff one another. 
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Next they ran in a line all the way down to the road and then north, covering more ground than I ever saw the colts use in that corral. I was elated for them.
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The mother-child bond is particularly strong between Chance and Stormy, who used to call to one another while they were separated.

I checked the mares' inexplicably open gate. It's the kind that closes with a metal peg twisting into a hole in the fence post. It wasn't damaged. I hadn't used it and don't know anyone who would've, particularly recently, and I don't know of anyone else who was here yesterday.
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Maybe the mares understood me or just instinctively knew it was their day, so they managed to somehow open the gate, left and went to rejoin their children, the only ones they ever got to keep.
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