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!

ABOUT THAT WAR ON E.COLI

"The federal government warned consumers Monday to take precautions cooking meat after disease detectives concluded there is a connection between 14 cases of illness caused by a dangerous strain of E. coli that has been found in seven states across the country in the last six months.

Amanda Eamich, spokeswoman for the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Food Safety and Inspection Service, said scientific tests only recently connected the illnesses to the same pathogen - known by its scientific name E. coli 0157:H7 - but the source of the pathogen has not yet been determined."

Since they haven't nailed down (or at least, finished PR negotiations with) the source, this is not a recall yet, but you can still be on the lookout for listeria-soaked dried beef and ham salad until they do.

MORE MYSTERY MEAT

You can almost set your watch by it: After much hullabaloo, back when the national news media was focused on this, as to how it was going to get right to the bottom of the Alabama Mad Cow and its origins, the USDA has come up with next to nothing, and hardly anyone is reporting this discrepancy. Capital Press Agriculture Weekly, though, notes that as of last week, the cow's origins "remain a mystery."

The article notes that "USDA promised daily Internet updates on the investigation, posted at www.aphis.usda.gov/newsroom/hot_issues/bse.shtml, then didn’t give any new information for the next three days." And after those three days, there's been squat - go check for yourself.

In a continuation of the tradition of USDA follies, the article goes on to note that the agency's initial announcement got the breed of the cow wrong, and that upon digging up the body, had "estimated" the cow's age at 10 years. But there's some contention about that estimate, since it conveniently dates the animal's birth before the 1998 feed ban. South Korea, for one, isn't blithely accepting this "estimate" and says the U.S. has failed to prove its claim that a cow found infected with BSE there last month is 10 years old. The country will continue to ban US beef until the USDA produces more compelling evidence of this claim. I'm sure they'll step up and delivers that evidence immediately - assuming, that is, that the dog didn't eat it.

I'LL JUST SWITCH TO FISHSCAM

More ranting about ads: I opened my New Yorker to find an ad that I at first thought was a parody, it was so ridiculous: Warning readers against eating whales and then suggesting that's the only way you'd need to worry about getting too much mercury, the ad has no brand or affilliation attached to it - it only directs readers to a site that I thought was the joke's tipoff: FISHSCAM.com.

But no, the people behind this (who - surprise! - turn out to be Philip-Morris-funded Rick Berman and deadly-food-industry cohorts once again) think FISHSCAM is a good brand-name for their attempt to bat away the mountain of documentation showing the dangers of mercury in a wide variety of fatty fishes. Yes, that's "fishes," not, ahem, "whales."

The site's name and the fact that their entire campaign is built around a 'straw mammal' argument are funny enough. What's funnier still is their annotated enemies list. Usually Berman is content to simply trump up any flaws he can find in a given organization, but here they have to be tied to the reckless claims the organizations have made about fish-eating. And as you read down the page, eventually, despite Berman's attempts to rebut them, the sheer number and variety of attacks on the healthfulness of fish from divergent sources suggest not some fearmongering conspiracy but a panoply of reasons, some more compelling than others, why fish should not by any rational measure be considered a "health food."

VEGAN FIREFIGHTERS

Interesting little NYTimes story about a firehouse full of vegan firefighters, who are not "that way" because of the bond they've created with any animals whose lives they've saved, but out of a sheer, bald-faced acknowledgement that they need to be as healthy as possible to do their job well.

VEGANISM: LOSE WEIGHT, STAY HEALTHY

A new study in the April issue of Nutrition Reviews shows that "vegetarian populations tend to be slimmer than meat-eaters, and they experience lower rates of heart disease, diabetes, high blood pressure, and other life-threatening conditions linked to overweight and obesity." The article notes that "Rates of obesity in the general population are skyrocketing, while in vegetarians, obesity prevalence ranges from 0 percent to six percent."

WHERE'S THE FTC?

Remember how commercials for kids' toys used to show the toys doing stuff that kids might imagine they could do, but the toys wouldn't actually do by themselves, and advertisers were eventually forced to drop these flights of fancy? There's an analogous situation in a commercial I just saw when I watched a Bravo show that contained a five-second clip of my quail-hunting game.

The commercial, from the dairy industry, depicts a neighbor known to avoid milk attempting to pick up the handles of a wheelbarrow, and his arms falling off. A kid who has been exhorted by his mom to "drink your milk" (again, reminding us that kids actually dislike cow's milk whenever it doesn't have cookies attached and have to be cajoled, threatened and wheedled into drinking it) sees this and is shocked into drinking his milk, spilling it all over himself and the table in his eagerness.

So I get that this is all supposed to be a big hilarious joke, but it's occurring in the context of an ongoing disinformation campaign through which the dairy industry attempts to persuade the public that cow's milk is essential for strong bones. There's no indication within the reality of the ad that the neighbor is "pretending" to have lost his arms, thus a violent tragedy is presented without qualification as the clear result of not drinking milk.

Other than kids' toys, where's the analogy here? Is there any other food, medicine or otherwise, that is allowed to lie to the public through this "entertaining" venue? Would an ad depicting how eating one hamburger causes an immediate heart attack pass muster on the airwaves? For link fun, here's a fun overview of some of the issues involved in deceptive advertising, and this one certainly fits right in there.

VEGGIE OPTIONS IN RED-MEAT BASTIONS


Not only are more kids' camps (of "mystery meat" fame) making veggie options available, at least one camp is serving vegan meals exclusively. And as if that weren't enough, I've heard talk that you'll finally be able to buy vegetarian hot dogs at the Phillies ballpark starting this season.

PIG OUT!

It never ceases to amuse me how far people will go to tamper with nature in order to maintain their "natural" diet, how much they'll abandon tradition in order to keep eating something for the sole reason that they're used to it. The latest in this trend is the supposed heart-healthy pork that has gotten headlines worldwide. We won't bother to list all the health problems unrelated to heart disease that pork consumption is associated with; the joke here is that you could do this with just about any plant food and get a food that has a terrific net gain for health, instead of this one where you hope it turns out to be a wash.

MORE SOURCES OF MAD COW

Mad Cow's not just for beef-eaters anymore: An study published in Science confirms that CWD prions are present in muscle meat of white-tailed deer, and the issue of vCJD in the blood supply is beginning to scare a lot more people. Meanwhile, Japan is considering re-opening its borders to US beef, but the Japanese people seem to have already instituted their own de facto ban.

ARE YOU SITTING DOWN?

I hope so, because here comes some absolutely shocking news: "People who eat meat and carry on doing so put on more weight over a five year period than people who switch over to vegetarianism." A study of 22,000 people by Cancer Research UK carried out at Oxford University found that although we all put on weight as we get older, "vegetarians put on less weight than meat eaters, and vegans put on less weight than vegetarians." Meat eaters on average gained four times as much weight as vegetarians and vegans. And just to add that last coffin nail, the lead researcher specified that "contrary to current popular views that a diet low in carbohydrates and high in protein keeps weight down, we found that the lowest weight gain came in people with high intake of carbohydrate and low intake of protein." Researchers failed, however, to examine the link between high protein intake and a susceptibility to falls while slipping on ice.