THE ELEPHANT IN THE ROOM, AGAIN

This may be something of a watershed as well: Time Magazine, arbiter of conventional wisdom for the better part of a century, asks a rhetorical question in its headline, "Who Belongs in the Zoo?" and takes a step toward the answer in its subhead: IT MAY BE THAT SOME ANIMALS JUST CAN'T BE KEPT HUMANELY IN CAPTIVITY. (Caps in original) Yes it may. Of course, the burden of proof should be on zoos, circuses, racetracks etc. to prove that any animals can be kept humanely in captivity rather than the reverse, but as I said, it's a step.

The focus, of course, is on the most glaring injustice: Elephants. And while the overall thrust of the article is as wishy-washy as you'd expect, it does at least contain some perspectives by an "outspoken zoo consultant" (read: not one of those wild-eyed animal activists) such as this line about the new expanded "environments" for elephants: "From the animals' point of view, they are not better than they were when they were in cages. It's all done for theatrics."

And that was even before this development: "Animal rights activists have called for the resignation of the director of the Los Angeles Zoo, holding him responsible for the death of a 48-year-old Asian elephant named Gita. Gita died Saturday morning. Zoo officials said they believed Gita died when toxins from her muscles entered her bloodstream under the crushing weight of her own frame. The elephant had suffered arthritis for years." Gee, wonder how the pooor elephant ever contracted arthritis, eh?

Meanwhile, though it seems unlikely to happen on this go-round, it is possible that elephants, chimpanzees, tigers and lions in circus performances within New York City. While I have publicly advocated for Philadelphia to be the first metropolis to take this step, I won't shed any crocodile tears if we lose out to New York on this one.

RALPH LAUREN: FUR IS DEAD

I try to stay away from the vicissitudes of the fashion world, but I think this is a pretty big development: "Polo Ralph Lauren Corp. said late Thursday that it is eliminating fur from all of its apparel and home collections, starting with the holiday 2006 season." The AP article notes that "The move by Polo Ralph Lauren represents the first major designer house to abandon fur since designer Calvin Klein did so in the mid-1990s."

BLOCK THAT ELEPHANT!

I have no idea if elephants in Thailand would be happier where they are or in a deluxe, state-of-the-art Australian zoo. But I wanted to point out this story because I'm always raging about losers like SHAC whose strategies are based on terrorizing employees, neighbors of employees, children of employees, fellow college alumni of employees, etc. This, by contrast, is a form of protest I can endorse - peacefully but decisively (for now) blocking the act of exploitation at a point where it can be done.

"Thai animal rights activists on Tuesday blocked eight Asian elephants from being shipped to Australia, arguing the animals would suffer in zoos that spent millions to create special bathing, exercise and sleeping areas for them. Two rights activists stepped in front of trucks as they tried to leave a quarantine station in the western Thai province of Kanchanaburi late Monday, bound for Bangkok's airport. The standoff continued into Tuesday, when about 15 villagers gathered outside the station to protest the move, and officials eventually removed the animals from the trucks and took them back to their quarters."

Again, this could all be reversed by tomorrow, but at the very least it was a worthy effort, and something to which more activists worldwide should pay heed.

ETHICS VS. MOVIE IMMORTALITY

That's a longstanding opposition which is certainly not news, but the man-bites-dog element here is that the fellow in question chose "Ethics." The producers of Cars wanted to name a "hippie" car after this locally-famous "free spirit," Bob Waldmire, assuring him a spot in movie history with a film that's sure to be seen by more than a few people.

But he turned them down. He refused to give Pixar permission to use his name.

"I am an ethical vegetarian," Bob explained. "After they sent me a letter asking for my permission, another local artist friend of mine, Bill Crook, mentioned to me that the movie toys are probably going be sold in Happy Meals at McDonald's. That made up my mind real quick. I couldn't have them selling a bus with my name at a McDonald's if I'm an ethical vegetarian." As it happens, Cars does indeed have a Mickey D's deal. And on this issue, at least, Waldmire has something that's in all-too-short supply these days - integrity.

LAST VEGCAST FOR MAY

Heh. I keep making that lame joke in recognition of the fact that as promised, I did actually get two podcasts done this month, unlike, say, April. At any rate, it's worth a download, featuring an interview with Will Tuttle, commentary on Barbaro, another Green Beings song, a science fact, and even part of a dining review! Find it over at VegCast, the veggie podcast.

THEY SHOOT COWS, DON'T THEY?

Some readers may be surprised to learn that using 22-caliber guns to kill cows is an ordinary part of slaughter. At any rate, it doesn't merit any remark, seemingly, except when one of the guys handling the gun shoots the other guy, as just happened at a slaughterhouse in Idaho.

'CONFUSED' ABOUT 'HEALTHY' FISH

Missed this last week, but ya gotta love this lede:

"Putting a confusing twist on the health value of fish oil, a new study suggests that eating lots of fish may actually boost the risk of atrial fibrillation, a potentially dangerous heart condition, in certain people." The "HealthDay" reporter isn't the only one who's confused, as documented here via our panoply of studies showing dangerous effects of fish consumption. Those who are familiar with this volume of scientific studies, of course, are not confused at all about the purported "health value" of fish.

But there's more. As with milk and calcium, there's a bizarre double-standard that seems to blind either the reporting or the scientific inquiry behind it: When there's a positive benefit, it's ascribed to the food (fish, milk) rather than the active component (Omega-3s, calcium), and plant-based sources (flax, leafy greens) are ignored as alternative foods. The take-away is simply "eat fish" or "drink milk." But as here, when there's a problem, suddenly this is ascribed to the component itself rather than the food. Was the study actually done on Omega-3s? Not from the sound of it. Why didn't they do a comparison of people consuming fish oil vs. people consuming flax in order to nail down whether Omega-3s themselves actually cause any heart problems? It's almost as if... they don't want to know!

MAD COW THREATENS MORE PEOPLE

Estimates of the fallout from BSE have been revised upwards. "The deadly human form of mad cow disease, vCJD, may have infected far more people than previously thought, suggests a new study. The assumption that most people are genetically shielded from the devastating disease could be wrong, said the research published on Friday."

CLEAR HORMONAL EFFECT FROM MILK

In arguments over bovine growth hormone, one of the canards from Monsanto and the dairy industry has been that this altering of cow hormones has no effect on human cell growth - that hormonal oddities within milk cannot be passed on to the human body through milk consumption.

A new study in the Journal of Reproductive Medicine certainly calls this into question, to say the least. It found that milk drinkers are five times more likely to have twins than women who eat no animal products. The BBC article explains that "It is believed that a protein found in the livers of animals may be the cause. Called Insulin-like Growth Factor or IGF, it is found in cow's milk and other animal products. In women it makes the ovaries more sensitive and increases the number of eggs produced. Higher levels of IGF improve the survival chances of an embryo in the early stages of development. The effect is likely to be greater in countries such as the United States that allow growth hormones to be fed to cattle."

While this study has interesting implications for the BGH debate, it also serves as an immediate red flag to any woman considering pregnancy: "The researcher behind this study says that women thinking of getting pregnant might consider alternatives to meat and dairy products to reduce their chances of having twins, as multiple births are more prone to complications." Just one more way dairy products can be dangerous, once again verified by science.

BARBARIC

"As sad as it is, accidents like this are part of the game." The only thing sadder is that "games" like Saturday's Preakness, which cause life-threatening injuries to horses, are unwarranted and unnecessary - yet they'll continue to thrive for the foreseeable future because, hey, what's a dead horse or two in the cause of fleecing credulous bettors who plunk their life savings down on "sure things" like Barbaro and Smarty Jones?

The link is just one of a slew of stories/columns trying to find an angle on this tragedy other than the obvious one. We need safer tracks, viewership will decline, etc. with all the attendant hand-wringing one would expect. But so far none of them put forward the obvious remedy: Stop running "games" where the main athletes don't choose to be there - where they are forced to compete in situations that can literally end up killing them. Such institutions are nothing short of barbaric, and though it will be a while before they're abolished, once they are the populace will look back on the callousness of saying "it's part of the game" and shake their heads in wonder.

STUDIES: OTHER ANIMALS PLAN AHEAD

As always, there's the caveat that scientists have to present their study findings with the "sexiest" possible angle, so it's not surprising to have constant "breakthroughs" in our understanding of animal intelligence. But still.

"Apes and birds may use mental abilities previously attributed only to humans when they gather and store food," reports Bloomberg news, citing two studies from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology and the University of Cambridge, respectively. "Researchers found that orangutans and bonobos were able to choose the correct tool to retrieve grapes or juice and hang on to it for as long as 14 hours. A separate study by British scientists found that Western scrub-jays seemed to recall which birds were watching them when storing food, and sometimes chose a new spot if they saw a familiar face."

So what does all this imply? Well, Josep Call, an author on the ape study, helpfully points out that "the ability to plan for the future was supposed to distinguish us from the rest of the animal kingdom," and the reporter re-quotes him on it immediately in paraphrase: "Scientists had believed the ability to plan ahead was a major difference distinguishing humans from apes, which shared a common ancestor millions of years ago, said Call."

There's a potentially more interesting quote from one of the scientists behind the bird study: "Whilst the ability of non-human animals to reason about another's mind continues to elude definitive study, our study provides evidence to suggest that a non-human animal might discriminate between individuals with different knowledge states." In English, this seems to be saying that the birds have some rudimentary awareness of the consciousness of other birds, that other animals may have their own, different, motivations, hopes, and views of the world. What's remarkable, and ironic, is that this very awareness of other animals as conscious subjects still seems to be largely missing in most humans.

"NOBODY SHOULD BE IN THIS BUSINESS"

I was unaware that the foie gras fight had ventured all the way here to Philadelphia, but this Inquirer story set me straight with a wealth of interesting tidbits. You could say it's overstuffed with choice morsels.

"Councilman Jack Kelly has a new suggestion for how to serve the goose-liver delicacy: not at all. Kelly plans a bill that would ban the sale of foie gras, which he says involves unspeakable cruelty to geese and ducks."

But we must hear the rationalizations well-reasoned arguments of the foie-gras industry titans, mustn't we? "People come in here and they want foie," said Christopher Lee, the executive chef. "We know what to do with it. If they're going to save up for six months to come here for their anniversary, they should be able to get what they want."

And if they want bald eagle for their anniversary, so be it. Or dolphin. Or human babies. Because after all, they saved up for six months for it, and that's the only criterion that matters.

"Kelly's idea is modeled after a bill passed last month in Chicago. He said yesterday that he hadn't known about foie gras until being asked about it by someone who knew about his push to improve city animal shelters." Uh oh, sounds like we're due for the usual "city slickers don't understand farm life" tripe - yep, here it comes, right on schedule: "Joel Assouline, who supplies roughly 400 local restaurants with caviar and foie gras, said the squeamishness was a result of not knowing where food comes from." (Exactly true except for the "not." People eat foie gras all the time not knowing where it comes from. It's when they do know that they get, ahem, "squeamish.")

"Has [Kelly] ever been to a farm?" Assouline continues. "The whole issue, if you look at it really closely, is that farming of animals is not a really nice business. If you see chickens piled up in a little cage or veal being raised, the images are not very pretty. The way I look at it is, it's part of the natural cycle." That's a convenient way to look at it, Joel, since you're too lazy and stubborn to adjust to reality, but force-feeding geese and ducks, piling up chickens in a little cage or confining baby calves to crates has nothing whatsoever to do with "the natural cycle." What it does have a lot to do with is greed and heartlessness.

Here's the money quote: Kelly "voiced little sympathy for businessmen like Assouline. 'They should diversify,' he said. 'Let them grow corn or something. Nobody should be in this business.'" Right on. As I've said before, we don't cry about putting drug dealers "out of business," so why is the fact that someone's been doing something for a long time any kind of rational concern, if what they're doing is reprehensible? Nobody, indeed, should be in the business of animal cruelty. It's just that simple.

SIGN-PAINTING COWS FAIL:
CHICKEN DEMAND PLUMMETS

You know the cows I mean - the ones constantly in the process of painting new billboards pushing people to eat chicken, in that zero-sum fantasy of slaughter-food marketers that if people don't eat one, they'll have to eat the other. Well it turns out that a little-reported fact is that both beef and chicken consumption are down significantly, to the point that thousands of animals are now being killed not for food, but simply to prop up the pretense of a viable industry.

"Fears about avian flu have dramatically cut chicken exports, creating bonanza for the food depositories that serve the nation's poor and hungry," reports the Chicago Tribune. "The nation's chicken and meat processors are dealing with a glut caused by the fears about avian flu and, to a lesser extent, mad cow disease. Rather than dumping the chicken and meat onto the market and further sinking retail prices, the food companies are donating the products to the food depositories and taking a tax write-off on the charitable contribution."

The article reports that "prices and sales started plunging last August when avian flu concerns began spreading rapidly through Asia, which imports more than 50 percent of the 7.2 billion in chicken the U.S. exports. Prospects dimmed further two weeks ago when Russia unexpectedly closed its borders to U.S. poultry."

So to recap: As the proverbial chickens come home to roost on our intensive animal agriculture and consumers start noticing, demand is plummeting. But rather than respond to that by decreasing the actual supply (i.e. not killing so many chickens and cows) the slaughter-food industry keeps the kill-line moving apace, dumps the dead animals at food depositories and rips off the American taxpayer, who sees a shortfall in revenue due to the tax write-off these companies get for their "largesse." That's the system, folks, and you're welcome to it.

CHOLESTEROL: THE CLOSER TO VEGAN, THE BETTER

A new study from the University of Toronto shows that in terms of lowering cholesterol - something meat-eaters spend millions of dollars on drugs to do - the closer your diet is to vegan, the better off you are. The "portfolio" diet is described as "a near-vegan regimen, meaning no meat, eggs, poultry, fish or dairy." (Sounds like "a vegan regimen" to me, but I couldn't find a source that explained what made it only "near." Maybe they mean it's not quite vegan because the dieters don't actually care about ahimsa.)

"Can a modified portfolio approach help? To answer that, Jenkins and his team enrolled 66 adults with elevated blood cholesterol in a one-year study of the diet," explains this Washington Post article. "The study found a direct link between how closely participants followed the portfolio plan and how much their blood levels of low-density lipoprotein (LDL) improved. LDL is directly linked to heart-disease risk. Nearly a third of participants who stuck closest to the plan's goals lowered their LDL levels by 20 percent or more, an improvement that rivals the use of low-dose statins."

DOLPHINS SAY THEIR NAMES

"Bottlenose dolphins appear to whistle their "names" to each other," according to a new study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Here's the best part: "Researchers say that this type of referential communication is extremely rare in nature, and until now had not been clearly shown in a non-human animal." LOL - how do we know this type of communication is "extremely rare" in nature when it was previously non-existent in dolphins? Wouldn't it be a wee tad more honest and accurate to say "scientists successfully decoding this type of animal-to-animal communication is extremely rare"?

STUDY: VEGANISM BEST FOR PLANET EARTH

Two professors in geophysical science at the University of Chicago have done a study to determine what diet is the most energy-efficient in terms of the planet's resources. Surprise! It's veganism!

The article notes that "The strict vegetarian diet turned out to be the most energy-efficient, followed by poultry and the average American diet. Fish and red meat virtually tied as the least efficient." That's right, good ol' "I'll just switch to fish" not only is loaded with contaminants for you, it's also bad for the planet. The researchers did tie in the fact that there's no health advantage to ruining the health of the Earth: "The adverse effects of dietary animal fat intake on cardiovascular diseases is by now well established. Similar effects are also seen when meat, rather than fat, intake is considered," Martin and Eshel wrote. "To our knowledge, there is currently no credible evidence that plant-based diets actually undermine health; the balance of available evidence suggests that plant-based diets are at the very least just as safe as mixed ones, and most likely safer."

I guess it's really true that what goes around comes around - at least in the case of the Earth.

MILK GLASS IS HALF EMPTY

This quick overview of the dairy controversy is representative of a number of articles that are showing up pretty regularly, which we would not have seen in the mainstream press just a decade ago.

Still, as usual, it's pretty deficient, pitting "all those dairy ads" and the USDA's dietary guidelines against two prominent scientific experts who, as the article notes, are "from dairy-farming families, but their views have entirely turned around because of their research." Classic "he-said, he-said" stuff - on the one hand, on the other hand, etc. - as long as you don't mention that "all those dairy ads" are simply bald-faced commercial industry promotion and that our Department of Agriculture is proven again and again to be a branch office of the cattle industry. Let's compare this to the articles we'll be seeing five years from now. I doubt the smokescreen can hold out too much longer.

MICHAEL POLLAN'S DILEMMA

Michael Pollan is an engaging and obviously thoughtful writer on issues of food and ethics. His Omnivore's Dilemma, of which I've only read excerpts, looks to continue and extend his quest to find the perfect tightrope to walk between giving in to cultural pressure to be unconscious about food and the imperative to consistently eat consciously. But his titular quandary is a classic false dilemma: The choice isn't between gustatory pleasure and ethics - veganism offers both. The "dilemma" really is, will you or won't you live according to the ideals you actually believe in? Will you allow your comfort in the familiar to trump your reluctance to participate in needless cruelty and environmental destruction?

Pollan is good enough at philosophy and logic to work out the fact that there's no real justification for continuing to breed and eat animals. Yet blinded by his desire to excuse his own comfort level, even he falls back on utterly ridiculous arguments such as "domestic animals owe us one because we're responsible for their existence," which Peter Singer pretty handily demolishes in this Mother Jones interview, and maybe-if-I-eat-organic-chicken-that's-good-enough wishful thinking.

That said, Pollan does a good job of bringing a lot of facts to light about the excessses of the Western lifestyle, and with every piece he seems to be inching closer to making that crucial connection between honesty and action. So we eagerly await his next opus on this topic!

YET ANOTHER FRIDAY RECALL

Pssssst! Speaking of the venerable tradition of Friday recalls, did you hear that 78 tons of ground beef had been recalled for E.Coli contamination? (That's right, seventy-eight freaking tons of beef - well over the amount the average American consumes in a full year!)

What's that? You say you didn't hear? You didn't get this detailed list of products you're supposed to check for in case you have deadly E.Coli lurking in your fridge? You didn't know to go and carefully examine this PDF-only release from the USDA? OK, then, their system is working perfectly! Carry on.

FRIDAY BOOKEND

How fitting that the meat-recall scandal that pegged so many of its developments on Friday coverage, and so succeeded in keeping this story - to this day - from the consciousness of most Americans, was wrapped up (at least for not) on a Friday. What a coinkidink, as Micky Dolenz would say.

You may recall (ha!) that "eight people died and more than 50 were sickened in the outbreak, which led to one of the largest meat recalls in U.S. history" - or you may not, since the companies involved, in collusion with the USDA, managed to keep a layer of smoke and mirrors between their obvious involvement and the public, largely via the Friday strategy. Pilgrim's Pride long maintained they had absolutely nothing to do with the people's deaths, that the strain of listeria had not really been tied to their plant, and the USDA did not publicly call them on this until well after any significant media coverage had stopped. Now they've quietly - and that is the operative word - settled. OK, rack 'em up again and let's feed some chicken feces to the next unknowing crowd!