It was a typical winter night at the Eastern Shore Sanctuary, meaning I was sitting on the couch brooding about big problems while dogs chewed carrot sticks on the carpet and catnip-fueled felines chased each other around the chaotic kitchen. Some new piece of wretched information—probably something about polar bears—had punched me in the stomach. “Why aren’t people doing more about global warming?” I muttered angrily. Elder dog Zami regarded me levelly until it hit me: I am people. Why aren’t I doing more about global warming?

Feeling a bit abashed, I decided to ask the question really rather than rhetorically: Why aren’t people doing more about global warming?

Since I am people, I asked myself first. I discovered that climate change didn’t feel real to me, even though I knew it was happening. Only by making myself do so was I able to really feel the fear that ought to be associated with such a scary situation. Balanced against that fear were two unrealistic and opposing assumptions: 1) the environmentalists or scientists or somebody will take care of it; and 2) there’s no use doing anything because we’re doomed. Only by challenging those unconscious assumptions—which did not match my conscious beliefs—was I able to get past my own internal impasse.

Next I looked into the scholarly research on inaction concerning climate change. Many early studies found that people don’t do anything about global warming because they don’t understand it.

You might think that this is no longer a problem. But the college students in my classes still, more often than not, mention the hole in the ozone layer when talking about climate change. Asked what you can do about global warming, they tend to think for a moment and then suggest “maybe…recycle?”

Which brings us to the next reason people don’t take action against climate change: They don’t know what to do. Perhaps they don’t understand the mechanics of climate change or maybe a planetary problem seems self-evidently too big for individual action to make a difference.

Which brings us to what may be the deepest reason for inaction: The feeling of futility. Research shows that many people won’t make changes that cost them in any way—in money, time or lost pleasure—unless they believe that enough people also will be making the same sacrifice for it to be meaningful.

With these ideas in mind, I began to have conversations about climate change. I learned that even people who grasp the mechanics of climate change often have not thought through all of what they might do to reduce their own emissions of methane and carbon dioxide. They are often even less certain about what collective action against climate change might look like. Most importantly, many—perhaps even most—people believe that it simply will not be possible to get enough individuals/corporations/governments to make the changes necessary to save the world.

This is despair. Hopelessness forestalls action. Without action, there really is no hope.

From Cold War to Global Warming
We’ve faced a similar situation before, when very real fears about nuclear war left many people immobile in the face of a grave and mounting danger. When I was researching my book Aftershock I looked into the research about why people did or did not become involved in anti-nuclear activism during the years when the U.S.-USSR arms race made the prospect of nuclear annihilation even more likely than it is today.

One study concerned participation in the November 1, 1961 day of protest during which tens of thousands of women, many of whom had never before engaged in any sort of activism, took to the streets to demand an end to nuclear testing. It turned out that most of the participants in this action, which JFK cited as a determinant of U.S. participation in the Test Ban Treaty of 1963, got involved because a neighbor or friend asked them to do so.

Research related to nuclear activism also sheds light on the persistent problem of despair. In the 1980s, psychologist Joanna Rogers Macy conducted “despair and empowerment” workshops in which participants directly confronted, rather than avoided talking about, their feelings of fear and hopelessness about the prospect of world wreckage due to nuclear technology. She found that talking about such feelings helped to lessen their paralyzing impact and promote action.

That makes sense. When despair remains unvoiced, we cannot argue against it. Meanwhile, the effort used to suppress the terror that springs from and feeds the despair deprives us of vital energy. Because flattening one feeling tends to dampen others, we become benumbed.

Getting Past the Impasse
What, then, can we do to promote action on climate change? Whatever else we do, we have to talk about it with everybody we know. In order to do that effectively, we need to be prepared.

Taking the easiest tasks first, we all need to be good at explaining climate change so that everyone can understand. Practice explaining the mechanics of global warming in a few simple sentences. Be sure to include the fact that greenhouse gasses come not only from vehicles burning fossil fuels but also from power plants, manufacturing and animal agriculture.

Because denial is still a significant factor in inaction, memorize a few key facts proving that the problem is both real and urgent. I like to stress that polar ice is actually cracking, because this is easy to visualize. I also like to quote top climate change scientist Jim Hansen, who has said that we have less than ten years before the world becomes “a different planet,” and to note that climate change turns out to be happening even faster than scientists have predicted.

Next, because most people don’t know what they can do, get good at listing the full spectrum of ways individuals can reduce their own emissions. These include reducing direct energy usage in both fuel and electricity; radically reducing consumption of new consumer goods by recycling, reusing and doing without; buying from local sources; and, of course, eliminating meat, dairy and eggs from the diet.

People also need to know what individual or collective actions might be taken to provoke institutional change by governments and corporations. Options range from lobbying for government controls on emissions to direct action aimed at raising the costs, or reducing the profits, of the industries responsible for carbon dioxide.

When beginning conversations, don’t start with the facts and prescriptions. Remember the despair that must be voiced and dissipated. Start by saying, “I’m really worried about climate change. What about you?” Then, listen. Ask questions. Share your own feelings. Then, remembering that people are most likely to do something when invited to do so by someone they know and remembering that people need to believe that enough other people also will be acting, tell about what you’ve done, are doing, or plan to do.

Learning from the Birds
Where can you find the hope to do this? You already have it in your muscles.

Here is what I learned from the birds: Hope is something you do. “Spent” hens arrive from egg factories in a state of abject shock, half-starved and barely able to walk. Nothing in their lives has taught them to expect anything other than constricted movement and misery. They huddle, shoulders slumped, in a corner of the barn. But then they take a step. And then they take another step. They discover freedom and their own abilities. They learn to use their wings.

Hope is something you do. We create hope by acting. As our actions create change, our hopes are realized. When it comes to climate change, action is our only hope.

How can we start? Follow the birds. Take a step. Then another step. Then…

Let them eat words. That seemed to me to be the theme of the 2002 UN World Food Summit and parallel NGO Forum for Food Sovereignty. At the Summit, national delegations cut back-room deals to boost corporate agribusiness, all the while applauding themselves for recognizing food as a human right. At the Forum, activists spent so much time pontificating about the right to food that plans to take direct action against hunger fell by the wayside.

Sitting in a Roman auditorium as well-fed activists opined that what starving people need most is more rights, I felt more than a little mystified. It was as if these otherwise rational people believed that, in the words of food policy analyst Devinder Sharma, “the ‘right to food’ is a magical stick that makes the Supermen of the political hierarchy deliver food to the hungry.”

In fact, the “right to food” confers no such fantastic powers on its holders. That right is recognized by the constitutions of the majority of countries where people die daily of hunger and malnutrition. In 2001, India’s Supreme Court affirmed the constitutional right to food. Years later, children still starve as surplus food rots in government storehouses.

Meanwhile, here in the U.S., men no longer have the right to beat their wives but battery remains the number one reason women seek emergency medical care. Worldwide, every person now has the legal right not to be enslaved, but more people are held in bondage than ever before.

Clearly, something’s wrong with “rights.”

The Social Roots of “Rights”
In theory, rights may be conceived as either natural or social.

The theory of natural rights holds that entitlements like liberty are inherent. In this view, rights are real things that individuals have simply by virtue of existing. In contrast, rights may be seen as ideas and practices that arise from the agreements that people make with one another. In this view, rights are social constructs that come into being only in the context of relationships.

In practice, rights are always social. Any natural rights we might have are meaningless unless they are recognized and respected by others. Whether inherent or the result of agreements, rights are realized only when people consent or are compelled to honor them.

Power is the unspoken variable lurking in and around rights. Rights both express and regulate power relations among people. Moreover, rights are enforced by physical force.

“Property” comes into being when land or animals are forcibly enclosed or when people or animals are alienated from the products of their labor. These are inherently violent processes, since they involve actual or threatened use of force and cause injury. From electrified fences around lakes to armed guards at grocery stores, the violence implicit in property is hidden in plain view every day.

Because rights are relational and because they are all about power, all of the problems of our inequitable social systems reside within them. Discrepancies of power due to class, sex, and race are built into our structures of rights and perhaps even into the very concept of rights.

That insight helps us see how this troubled concept might be even more problematic when applied to animals. Denial of rights is experienced as denial of humanity. That makes sense, since rights are agreements among people. Humanity is, in a sense, built into rights. People often assert their own rights—including the “right” to own land or animals—specifically in order to claim their place in the human community.

Animals have their own projects and have not expressed the wish to join the human community. Do we, perhaps, do them a disservice when, instead of liberating them from our influence, we seek to incorporate them into a system of rights defined and enforced by humans?

Thunder Without Rain?
In 1857, Frederick Douglass said that “power concedes nothing without a demand” and that “those who profess to favor freedom and yet deprecate agitation are men who want crops without plowing up the ground. They want rain without thunder and lightning.” In the agrarian context in which those words were spoken, people understood that plowing is hard work that is often impeded by resistant roots and the backlash of flying rocks. They knew that thunder is a bombastic by-product of the necessary and nourishing rain.

Recently, thanks to Gary Francione’s book of the same name, the phrase “rain without thunder” has come to be used as a simplistic denunciation of those who work for material improvements in animals’ lives rather than for abstract animal rights. Leaving aside the impropriety of this odd misappropriation of Douglass’ powerful metaphor, we have to ask whether the rights-based approach to animal liberation might not be vulnerable to the complementary charge.

Is agitation for animal “rights” thunder without rain? Rights-oriented animal advocates aim to remove animals from the category of property and vest them with the rights enjoyed by human beings. But animals, like people, can’t eat words. If rights can’t keep children out of bondage in brothels or protect women from rape, how will they keep hens out of factories or protect cows from forced impregnation? If ever obtained, animal rights might turn out to be heat lightning, brightening the skies without breaking the heat or ending the drought.

It seems that the first step toward animal liberation must be to quit asserting authority over animals. Conceding the authority of the legal system subjects animals to authority they did not choose. Rule by law is valid only with the consent of the governed. The animals do not consent.

I’ve always sought liberation rather than rights. Ever since I was a queer teen rebel in the 1970s, I’ve balked at the idea of petitioning the power structure to recognize me. I’ve always experienced the legal system as part of the patriarchy. I do not cede its authority over me.

Does that mean that people who work for “rights” are my enemies? Not at all!

Just as some scholars worry that working for animal welfare may inadvertently bolster an ideological system that needs to be torn down, I worry that pleading for animals to have “rights” within a conceptual framework defined by human power relations may inadvertently strengthen the stranglehold that the ethnocentric and patriarchal legal system has wrapped around the world. But this is just a suspicion so, while I work for “liberation” rather than “rights,” I see people who are working for “rights” as my allies in animal advocacy.

People working for animal welfare are my allies too. While our ultimate aim must be the liberation of animals as a class, we also must do what we can to reduce the suffering of actual animals in the interim. Animals are not abstract entities. They are real creatures who experience real pain and who must live with the results of our choices concerning what we will and won’t do for them.

People acting on their own behalf are entitled to let foolishness or vanity or knee-jerk preferences for this or that tactic impede their own progress toward freedom, but we have no such right in relation to the animals. Unless or until we can prove that working for welfare or rights impedes progress toward liberation, we have to accept the respective benefits of both approaches.

Nobody knows for sure what will be the best route to liberation. If we did know, if the available data led to inescapable conclusions, then all of us who embrace animal liberation as a goal would have no difficulty in agreeing on a course of action. But the data are not clear. No one has done this before.

How, then, can we decide whether and how to work for animal “rights?”

Ask the Animals
During the Elian Gonzales controversy a few years ago, many people were shocked that the boy’s father chose to return himself and his son to Cuba. Here where the right to free speech is highly esteemed but rights to housing and medicine are not recognized, people found it difficult to understand why someone might choose guaranteed shelter, health care and hurricane relief over the right to insult the head of state. Since September of 2001, many of the people who proclaimed themselves mystified by the choices of Elian’s father have proved themselves to be willing to trade civil liberty for a feeling of security.

People differ in the degree to which they recognize or value various alleged rights. How much more wide would be the spectrum of opinion among animals if we asked them about rights?

What do animals want? Food, sex, freedom, comfort, family, shelter, fun…and we don’t know what else. We cannot assume that nonhuman animals want what we want. We have to ask the animals what they want. We can do that by observing their own efforts to liberate themselves and by using informed empathy. We must learn all we can about them and then ask not “what would I want in that situation?” but “what would I want if I were that kind of animal in that situation?”

Birds and wide-ranging mammals need lots of space and the physical freedom to explore it. Pond-dwelling fish and amphibians might not even notice if they were fenced in but have a particularly acute need for water purity and ecosystem integrity.

What do animals want from us? Setting aside for a moment the species with whom we co-evolved—certain mites like us very much—most animals most likely want us to give them back their habitats and leave them alone.

Liberation might look different for some so-called “domesticated” animals. At the Eastern Shore Sanctuary, chickens who demonstrate the ability to do so safely are free to sleep in the trees and forage outside of the fenced yards. Typically, the birds who have been least scarred by past abuse prefer feral freedom while the birds who have been most hurt by factory farming, cockfighting, and in-breeding choose the relative safety of the coops and fenced foraging yards.

Observing the process by which some birds at the sanctuary have chosen to be self-reliant and free, it occurs to me that chickens who have the strength to do so probably would prefer, like their wild jungle fowl relatives who still live in forests in Asia, to live entirely apart from people. Over time, they would recover the genetic integrity that our denial of their reproductive freedom had stolen from their species.

Dogs are a different story. Humans and dogs co-evolved. Canis lupus and Homo erectus were in close relationship with one another, and that has helped determine the details of our evolution. Thus the association of people and dogs is written into our bodies. That being the case, dogs might prefer not to be left to their own devices but, rather, to return to the harmonious inter-species relationship that prevailed before people subjected their former friends to captivity, forced labor, and reproductive control.

Wild birds, chickens, pond-dwellers, dogs—all have different needs and potentially different preferences about “rights.” Which rights should they be granted and how shall those rights be enforced? How can we make that decision without further subjecting the animals to illegitimate authority?

Beyond “Rights”
I don’t pretend to have the answer to these questions. I doubt there is an answer. But one solution might be to start thinking about rights as tactics rather than goals.

Activist tactics vary in their efficacy, depending on a host of contextual factors. The trick is finding the right tactic—or, more often, the right combination of tactics—for the specific situation.

Rights do seem to have their intended effect sometimes. It’s certainly possible that the pursuit of rights in general and the removal of animals from the legal category of property in particular might be among the means of achieving animal aims.

But since unfettered access to unpolluted ecosystems seems to be the primary need of most animals and since the idea of land, lakes, and airspace as property interferes with that aim, how can we work within a legal system that was created to protect property rights? We might establish more wildlife preserves in order to achieve de facto respect for a right to habitat for at least some animals. But this is the same kind of compromise that rights-centered theorists deplore when made by the animal welfare activists who work from a relational ethos of care. How can we get past such impasses?

Animals are outlaws. They stand outside of the law’s protection and they rightly disregard laws enacted by other creatures without their consent. Animals need protection from human abuses of their bodies and their homes but laws may not be able to provide the protection they need.

When Indian elephants and South African baboons protest human encroachments, they do so not by pleading for us to recognize their rights but by trampling plantations, trashing apartments, and tearing apart the fences that people have erected to protect their “property.” That’s the kind of plowing Frederick Douglass was talking about.

Three women walked past the electrified fence and onto the Happy Hens Egg World compound, which confines 220,000 hens in rusty cages 60 miles west of Melbourne, Australia. As the women began documenting the deplorable conditions in the sheds, videotaping the sights and sounds of crowded birds in constant misery, they were set upon by seven male employees of the egg factory, demanding they leave. The women agreed to leave voluntarily but the men attacked them anyway, pushing and shoving them through the dim and dusty shed.

Patty Mark and Debra Tranter just after the assault

Hearing her comrade cry out in distress, one of the activists grabbed the wall of the shed and said that she would not leave without her friend. The youngest worker grabbed both her breasts and squeezed them hard, putting his mouth next to her ear and snarling, “that made you move, didn’t it?” She screamed and fell on the floor. The men grabbed her by the ankles and dragged her body along the length of the grimy walkway.

“During moments like this funny thoughts pop into your head,” she said later. “Every time I enter a battery hen shed, the noise of hens screaming is almost deafening. I silently stare into their cages documenting via video their suffering. As I was being dragged along the floor by my feet, I remember looking up at five tiers of cages and all the hens were completely silent, their necks were stretching out of their cages and their eyes were looking down on me. I was the one screaming and they were witnessing my suffering.”

By the end of the ordeal, animal rescue team member Debra Tranter was covered in filth and bruises. Pictures of her and Animal Liberation Victoria (ALV) founder Patty Mark leaving the scene show strong women shaken by a traumatic experience. Nonetheless, their first press statement after the incident stressed their ongoing determination to protect and rescue hens. Some days later, they went back to the same shed and did so, dodging guard dogs and barbed wire, to rescue as many hens as they could carry away into the night.

Unhappy Hens

Most of the eggs eaten by people come from hens caged in egg factories, who spend their days standing on sloped mesh in cages so small that the birds crowded into them cannot open their wings or even lie down comfortably. They are fed just enough to keep them laying eggs and not one iota more. Dim lighting and the constant cries of birds in distress create a sense of chaos. Ammonia from the manure pits below the tiers of cages hangs heavily in the air.

Animals deprived of everything that is natural to them behave unnaturally. Deprived of freedom, normal social relations, and cognitive stimulation, birds may vent their frustrations on themselves or each other. To prevent economic losses from this, the people who run egg factories burn off the tips of the birds’ beaks in a painful and disfiguring operation known as “debeaking.”

In the U.S. right now, 270 million birds are caged in egg factories—sprawling complexes in which as many as 250,000 birds may be confined in each building, and a total of more than a million birds at the mercy of men like those who assaulted Patty Mark and Debra Tranter.

Numbers can be numbing. 270 million is too many to contemplate. Imagine a single hen crowded with seven others in the middle of a battery of cages containing thousands of others. Imagine you are that hen.

Have you ever been bored? Frustrated? Uncomfortable? Cranky? Imagine yourself crowded into a cage, often thirsty and always a little hungry, with nothing to do other than jostle your cage-mates. They’re not your friends—they’re your competitors. There’s never enough space and never enough food for everybody to feel satisfied. You can’t ever get comfortable. There’s no place to go to get away from each other. And there’s never anything to do!

One of your cage-mates keeps screaming. She won’t shut up! Another is slumped in a stupor. She won’t move out of the way! Somebody else is dying. No—she’s dead. Your eyes burn. Your feet throb. Your wings ache to open. You can’t turn around or lie down. You wait.

Ten minutes. Five hours. Three weeks. Eight months. Two years. Two years you may wait for relief from the tedium and pain. Then the cage opens but you are not released. Instead you are trucked to a painful and terrifying death at a slaughter factory or, if no buyer has been found for your bedraggled body, simply buried alive in a landfill.

Animal Liberators to the Rescue

The July 2005 ALV raid on Happy Hens Egg World was what’s known as an “open rescue.” Open rescue teams do not mask themselves or their intentions. They record every phase of the process of saving animals who are in dire need of food, water, or veterinary care. They replace any locks that they break and sometimes call to ask the police for help in taking abused animals to safety. If they end up in court, they use the “necessity defense,” arguing that any crime they committed (such as trespass) was justified by the need to prevent a greater crime and using the trial as an opportunity to get evidence of extreme yet routine cruelty to animals into the public record.

First used by an ALV team in Australia in 1992, the tactic of open rescue has since spread to several European countries and U.S. states. The German organization Befreite Tiere (Liberated Animals) has undertaken 36 open rescues in the past two years, rescuing 1,031 hens, ducks, geese and pigs along the way. In Sweden, a group calling itself Raddningstjansten (The Liberation Service) has coordinated a series of raids on egg factories. In one, four activists calling themselves “Action Group Pippi” (after the character Pippi Longstocking) took 60 hens from cages, leaving behind a letter for the farmer. In the U.S., local organizations such as Mercy for Animals of Ohio and the Animal Protection and Rescue League of California have used the open rescue method to document abuses at egg factories.

Still photos and video footage gathered during open rescues alert activists and the public to the atrocities that go on behind closed doors in factory farms, puppy mills and vivisection labs. The brave animal advocates who break into these houses of horror risk their own safety and sanity, confronting unthinkable cruelty and unspeakable suffering, to bring abused animals and their stories into the sunshine.

On the night of the incidents at Happy Hens Egg World, Patty Mark was still awake and shaky at two a.m. In the weeks following her assault, Debra Tranter wrestled with depression and struggled with questions about the futility of her activism. Both say that the expressions of empathy and solidarity that poured in from animal advocates around the world kept them afloat during the difficult days following their misadventure.

Solidarity Against Sexual Abuse

Debra Tranter was not the first woman sexually assaulted at an egg factory (nor the first woman sexually assaulted while trying to protect or rescue animals). In 2002, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission determined that supervisors employed by DeCoster Farms, which had egg factories in Iowa and Maine, sexually assaulted several female employees. Because the women were undocumented workers, their supervisors were able to use threats to keep them silent and compliant in the face of sexual exploitation.

That kind of behavior should come as no surprise. Debra Tranter is perhaps in the best position to explain why. In the moment of the sexual assault, she says, “as well as feeling shocked and violated I also felt in complete solidarity with the caged hens surrounding me. These men knew how to abuse, manipulate, and terrorize to get what they want. They wanted me to leave the shed the quickest way possible, so they abused and terrorized me to get me out. They want the hens’ eggs, so they cage and torment them in order to get what they want the easiest and quickest way possible.”

Why grab Debra Tranter’s breasts rather than more quickly muscling her out the door? The hens and the dairy cows can tell us. To break an animal’s spirit, you must first steal from her the sense that she controls her own body. These animals and the more than a million children held in sex slavery are the living legacy of the days when all female animals—human and nonhuman alike—were chattel.

Fat cow. Silly hen. We use animals to insult women and project our ideas about passive femininity onto them. The result is to reduce the female animal to a body whose reproductive powers can be controlled and appropriated by men.

Thanks to thousands of years of using every trick in the book to control the reproduction of other animals, we people have got sex and power all mixed up. Young men confuse rape for consensual sex. Young women see their own bodies as objects to barter and then put themselves down for doing so.

That’s one part of the process that leads so many women to believe the lies about themselves and other animals. Women buy the groceries in most households. They’re the ones buying the eggs and milk of other females to feed their children, many of whom may themselves be sexually abused.

But some women stand in solidarity with the hens and the cows. They refuse to allow themselves or other animals to be reduced to meat. Like Patty Mark and Debra Tranter, they feel afraid but act anyway. In so doing, they liberate themselves—and us—along with the animals. And they deserve nothing less than our fullest support.

Glancing out the window, I see two elderly roosters drinking from a water bowl in the front yard. Fauna has lived with us since 2001, when he arrived in the midst of a colorful crew of roosters who had been evicted from a Pennsylvania farm. Soon after, he struck a love match with Flora, a former egg factory inmate who was one of a group of hens we called “the Anarchists” in honor of their knack for jumping over fences and redistributing wealth.

Flora and Fauna were a devoted couple until she died prematurely, her body weakened by her experiences at the factory farm. Like many aging widowers, Fauna grew socially isolated, spending more and more time indoors and less and less time doing the things he used to love to do.

Chili arrived a couple of weeks ago from DC, where he had been living in a city park for the past few years. He seemed tentatively relieved by the safety of our sanctuary but we wondered if he missed the homeless man who had done his best to care for him back in the city.

Who can explain friendship? Is it an intuition of compatibility or some kind of chemistry that draws two beings to each other when they have only just met? Whatever the reason, Chili and Fauna began to spend time together and the resulting change in Fauna’s behavior has been remarkable. He’s back out in the front yard, sunbathing, dust bathing, and making the most out of every day.

Are you surprised by this story? Do you believe that roosters are inherently aggressive or cannot get along with each other? If so, you’re not alone. The most common fallacy about roosters is that they cannot live together in groups without fighting. This misperception is rooted in propaganda put forward by proponents of cockfighting, a “sport” that is itself rooted in thousands of years of projecting human ideas about sex and gender onto chickens.

Cockfighting began in Asia Minor more than 2,500 years ago. It was brought to Spain by the Moors and carried to the New World by the European invaders of the Americas. Those who portray cockfighting as a proud Latino tradition tend to conveniently forget to mention that it is a legacy of the same Spanish Conquistadors who slaughtered and enslaved the indigenous peoples of South and Central America.

Studies of modern-day “cockers” (as they call themselves) show that these men and boys do see the birds as expressions of their own masculinity. They feel shame if one of “their” roosters behaves normally, fleeing from an aggressor or declining to attack a retreating bird. In contrast, unnaturally aggressive birds are accorded an almost totemic respect.

Here at the Eastern Shore Sanctuary, former fighting cocks coexist peacefully with each other and with hens rescued from egg factories. Both groups of birds are physically and psychologically scarred by the specifically gendered forms of exploitation they have endured. The tops of the roosters’ combs and the tips of the hens’ beaks have been cut off. Both suffer feather loss: hens pluck out their own feathers due to hunger or frustration during months in over-crowded cages; fighting cocks lose feathers (and eyes) when forced to fight and are sometimes shaved to make them look fierce.

In each case, the natural sex role of the animal has been perverted and exaggerated for purposes of human pleasure and profit. Eggs are, of course, a component of the reproductive process of the female bird. White Leghorn hens have been bred to bear far more eggs annually than their wild jungle fowl ancestors. Factory farming practices such as forced molting increase the pressure on their bodies, leading the hens to suffer abnormal rates of reproductive system ailments.

Similarly, combat is natural for roosters, but not in the way that cockfighting enthusiasts say. With few exceptions, roosters fight for defensive rather than offensive purposes. In the wild, male jungle fowl squabble over pecking order and territory but do not inflict serious injury. The same is true of feral roosters and the roosters here at the sanctuary.

Roosters will fight to the death to protect the flock from a predator. Cockfighting perverts this natural and honorable behavior into a parody of human masculinity. The roosters who have been “trained” as fighting cocks cooperate because they have been so traumatized that they are terrified, seeing every other bird as a potentially deadly predator.

Fighting cocks are typically caged or tethered to stakes for most or all of each day. This isolation prevents them from learning to recognize and react appropriately to the social signals that chickens use to maintain the peace within and between flocks. Isolation also prevents the establishment of normal peer and sexual relationships, thereby warping their social development and emotional stability.

Our sanctuary began by accident, when my partner and I found a chicken in a ditch within weeks of moving into an epicenter of industrial poultry production. I’d always admired birds from afar but assumed that it would be impossible to cross the mammal-avian divide in order to form a meaningful relationship. I surprised myself by feeling a strong kinship with our new family member and she surprised me by becoming attached to us, waiting on the back porch for us to come outside and following me around as I went about my outdoor chores. I called her Mosselle, after my beloved departed grandmother, because they shared a certain stubborn charm.

One morning, Mosselle suddenly made a loud gargling noise. “Maybe she laid an egg,” we thought, and ran around after her, looking for where she might have hidden it. Another time, we heard what sounded like choking from the makeshift coop early in the morning and worried that she might be sick. Luckily for us, somebody with some sense showed up and said, “That bird’s a rooster!”

I struggled with the realization that our beloved friend (who we renamed Viktor Frankl) was a rooster rather than a hen. Even though he hadn’t changed at all, it was hard not to feel differently about him. This was my first inkling of the ways that gendered preconceptions can alter one’s perceptions of chickens and other animals.

Contrary to popular opinion, both male and female chickens are raised for meat. Because we take in any local bird who manages to evade the chicken catchers or jump off the truck headed for the slaughterhouse, we cannot control the sex ratio of the birds coming into the sanctuary. We were forced by necessity to learn how to manage multiple roosters.

After Viktor came Chickweed (male) and Violet (female). When Viktor first met these young additions to our makeshift family, he didn’t know what to do. Should he treat the juvenile rooster as a relative or a rival? Should he court or protect the young hen? In a matter of minutes, he veered wildly from one instinctive behavior to the next, clucking like a mother hen one moment and dancing like a suitor the next. Finally, he settled on the role of single parent, assuming responsibility for the instruction and protection of the young birds who had so suddenly come into his life. At sunset, he would usher them into the coop, where he would sleep between them and the door. If they got out of line, he would administer a sharp peck on the head.

As we brought in more and more birds, both male and female, Viktor assumed the role of top rooster, which is a very demanding job. He spent his days scanning the skies and the horizon and made it his business to inspect any changes to the coop or yards. Once we saw him placing his body between two young roosters and a potential predator, almost daring the intruder to attack.

The next year, Fauna and his crew of 24 rowdy roosters moved in. Every other sanctuary had rejected them, expecting them to bring nothing but trouble. Instead they brought great joy to many of the hens, who had never seen such spectacular feathers, and still more learning opportunities for us. Many of them preferred to sleep in the trees and a number of them preferred each other’s company now that they had the opportunity to mingle with hens. None of them ever bothered the slower and less physically fit roosters from the meat industry.

Then came our first frantic call about confiscated fighting cocks who would be euthanized if we didn’t accept them. Rather than condemn them to death without even trying, we decided to use what we had learned about roosters to create a rehabilitation program. Upon arrival, the new roosters did try to attack any bird they saw but their high heart rates and dilated pupils told us that they were terrified, not angry. They seemed relieved to be soothed by us and then put into a safe place where they could see and meet, but not attack or be attacked by, the other birds. They responded so well to our behavioral program of gradual introduction to the flock punctuated by time-outs for aggressive behavior that they were able to be on their own among the other birds within three weeks rather than the three months we had predicted.

So far, the program has worked with every former fighter who has come to the sanctuary. We’re working on a “how-to” manual for other sanctuaries to use. Because we have little land and even less money, we are sharply limited in the number of birds we can accommodate. By publicizing our methods, we hope to convince existing sanctuaries to take in more roosters and to inspire more people to offer sanctuary to chickens. We’ve learned a lot from observing and being with the birds and we owe it to them to share their stories with the world.

Please note that all statistics are from that time.

In the late 1970s, while the epidemic known as “disco fever” swept through the U.S., an epidemic known as “junkie pneumonia” raged among injection drug users in New York City. Unlike disco fever, junkie pneumonia was not the subject of intense media scrutiny or public outcry. No movies were made. Few people were aware that large numbers of injection drug users were inexplicably dying of pneumonia. Those few who did notice these deaths did not feel compelled to investigate the public health puzzle they posed. Junkies die all the time. Nor did anyone bring this less danceable epidemic to the attention of the fevered populace. Bringing the epidemic to the attention of the public would not have made much difference. Undoubtedly, some people would have voiced the opinion that people who shoot drugs deserve to die while most would have shrugged and kept dancing. Investigating the epidemic as the potential public health menace it was, however, could have had a profound impact on hundreds of thousands of lives. Had anyone bothered to investigate the deaths of these drug users, they would have found that they had an immune system disorder that we now call AIDS.

Here’s how I imagine things would have been different if such an investigation had occurred back in the 1970s: (1) researchers would have discovered the HIV virus and its routes of transmission many years before they did, and (2) this earlier discovery would have saved many lives now lost; (3) no one would have wasted energy on inane and homophobic concepts such as GRID (Gay-Related Immuno-Deficiency - the first name given to the syndrome now called AIDS); (4) otherwise rational researchers would not have investigated “the gay lifestyle” as a potential causal factor; (5) the media would not have been able to label AIDS as “the gay disease;” and (6) increased anti-gay violence would not have resulted.

Here’s how I imagine all of this would have helped people who shoot drugs: not at all.

More than a decade into the AIDS crisis, the U.S. population first devastated by that crisis remains critically under-served by AIDS prevention programs. The reasons for this are precisely the reasons that junkie pneumonia was ignored in the first place: racism, disregard for the lives of people who shoot drugs, and an ill-disguised war on the poor masquerading as a war on drugs.

Injection drug users are the second largest group of people with AIDS. The majority of women with AIDS and nearly half of all people of color with AIDS are injection drug users or their sexual partners. The majority of children with AIDS (over 90% of whom are children of color) are born to injection drug users or their partners. While rates of HIV transmission are declining among gay men, those rates are rising among people who shoot drugs. It is estimated that 50% of the 10-12 new AIDS cases expected weekly in Michigan will be related to injection drug use. This is a public health emergency which, like most such emergencies, primarily affects women and people of color.

Among people who shoot drugs, HIV is transmitted primarily through the sharing of injection equipment. Research has shown that needle exchange programs (which provide sterile needles in exchange for used needles) are the most effective way to reduce needle sharing. The common belief that such programs “condone” drug use and lead to its increase is not supported by any evidence. In fact, some needle exchange programs have reported a decrease in frequency of injection among their clients. Additionally, as noted by the National Commission on AIDS, “outreach programs which operate needle exchanges and distribute bleach not only help to control the spread of HIV, but also refer many individuals to treatment programs.”

Nationally, Bush’s “war on drugs” mentality has kept the federal government from adopting the recommendations of its own National Commission on AIDS, which supports the removal of legal barriers to the purchase of sterile injection equipment. Locally, this mentality, combined with typical institutional disregard for the lives of people who shoot drugs, has led the Washtenaw County Health Department to drag its feet on bleach distribution and refuse to even consider needle exchange. Additionally, the state drug paraphernalia ordinance can be construed to prohibit distribution of sterile injection equipment to people who shoot drugs.

As is the case in many cities across the U.S., AIDS activists in Ann Arbor have stepped in to provide this critical public health service. Since December, AIDS Coalition To Unleash Power (ACT UP) has run a limited street-based AIDS prevention program which includes needle exchange. This spring, ACT UP plans to expand its Ann Arbor program and to establish a similar program in Ypsilanti.

But, needles are not enough. Injection drug users need AIDS prevention education materials (including both safer sex and safer drug use information) which address the reality of their lives. Medical workers and others who provide AIDS-related services must increase their attention to the particular needs of injection drug users with AIDS. Researchers must include injection drug users in their studies of experimental AIDS treatments. Since addiction to injection drugs is not a healthy way to live, drug rehabilitation and other health care must be made available on demand. Community-based, non-judgmental drug use prevention programs must be instituted everywhere. Most importantly, we must all work to address the poverty, racism, and sexism that lead people to use drugs in self-destructive ways.

This is an emergency. Our lives are your lives. Their lives are our lives. ACT UP.

Written on Christmas Day in 2002, this essay has been widely published and reprinted.

As the Christians gather to celebrate the birth of the founder of their religion, I find myself asking a question that I wish Christians would ask themselves: Who would Jesus kill?

Lately many Christians have been using the simple question, “What would Jesus do?” to help them make ethical judgments that are consistent with their religious beliefs. This holiday season, as Americans discuss the prospect of war over dinner tables groaning with factory farmed meat, the most apt variant of “What would Jesus do?” is: Who would Jesus kill?

Most Christians envision Jesus as the “Prince of Peace” and remember his injunctions to turn the other cheek and refrain from casting the first stone. Even those who imagine Jesus as an avenging warrior do not conceive of him smiting the innocent or torturing the helpless.

Yet, this holiday season, Christians across the USA are sitting down to dinners centered upon the carcasses of tortured and innocent animals. The top topic of conversation: Whether and when to attack Iraq.

Before I go further, let me make it clear that I don’t think the United States ought to make policy decisions on the basis of the Christian faith. I believe in the separation of church and state and I devoutly wish that we had that here in the USA. The fact remains that I have the leisure to write this essay today specifically because a Christian holy day is recognized as a national holiday. George W. Bush and his cabinet regularly invoke religious imagery, speaking of a “crusade” against “evil,” while the the members of the Senate and the House get together to sing “God Bless America,” rather than the secular national anthem.

Therefore it is reasonable to ask ourselves and them: Who would Jesus kill?

Would Jesus kill Iraqi children so that the friends of Dick Cheney can gain control of Iraqi oil reserves? Would Jesus kill Iraqi mothers so that armament companies can profit from perpetual warfare? Would Jesus kill Iraqi wildlife in order to replace one undemocratic regime (Saddam Hussein) with another (military occupation)? Would Jesus kill any Iraqis at all, since there is no evidence that Iraq is a threat to us or anyone else?

Jesus is sometimes imagined as a judge. I wonder whether judge Jesus would approve of the USA casting the first stone against alleged Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, when the USA has more weapons of mass destruction than any other country, the USA has pulled out of international treaties limiting weapons of mass destruction, and the USA has announced an official policy of preemptive first use of weapons of mass destruction?

I wonder how Jesus would judge the honesty of the Bush regime’s efforts to trick the public into supporting an attack on Iraq? Jesus would know that Israel and Turkey (not Iraq) are the most flagrant violators of UN directives. Jesus would know that an attack on Iraq would make terrorist attacks on the United States more (not less) likely. Jesus would know about all of the hospitals and homes and houses of worship leveled by US ‘precision’ bombing over the years and know that such attacks are part of a deliberate (not accidental) military strategy intended to demoralize the population.

Jesus would know that anything the government of Iraq has done — invading other countries, oppressing its own people, deploying weapons of mass destruction — the government of the USA has done more often and to worse effect. Jesus would know that the only just resolution of the conflict between George W. Bush and Saddam Hussein would be a peaceful compact rather than a violent conquest. Jesus would know that violence only begets more violence.

People of every faith see themselves and their religions as embracing peace and love. Most Americans think of themselves as peaceful people. How is it that people who imagine themselves to be peaceful are so easily persuaded to embrace war?

Every Sunday afternoon, I participate in a small peace vigil in a nearby town. Right across the street from where we stand are three fast food restaurants serving a distressing array of unhealthy and unethical foods. Staring across at those restaurants last week I began to wonder if the American diet might help to explain the ease with which Americans are persuaded to embrace violent solutions to problems.

Meat eating is an unnecessarily violent solution to a problem. As every healthy vegetarian demonstrates, it’s just not necessary to eat meat. Meat eating is killing for pleasure rather than killing for self defense. When we encourage our children to eat meat, giving them the wings of dead birds as after-school snacks, we teach them to place their own pleasure over the right to life of another being. When we allow egg factories and dairies to brutalize animals while polluting the environment, we teach our children to have reckless disregard for the environment and for the feelings of others. They grow up to be the kind of people who would rather spill blood for oil than give up their SUVs.

Would Jesus kill the little chickens? Six weeks old they are when the people come to take them to the slaughterhouse. They’ve never seen the sun, never breathed fresh air, never met their mothers or jumped in a mud puddle. Would Jesus kill the little children? Over 800 million people, most under the age of five, live with hunger and malnutrition. Yet precious food is wasted as animal feed, at a rate of about ten pounds of grain or soy for every pound of meat produced. Every two seconds, another child dies of a hunger-related illness. The average meat-eating American consumes enough plant, water, and energy resources to feed 20 people a healthy vegetarian diet.

Who would Jesus kill? The answer, of course, is: No one. This holiday season, I hope that his followers will choose peace in their daily lives and in the policies of their governments.

Thanksgiving, 2003 — Bush the executioner grins and pardons a turkey before flying to Iraq. He’s earned that self-satisfied smirk. All over his United States, citizens celebrate conquest over platters of flesh. Too full of turkey to think and too full of themselves to question, they let out their belts and watch TV. Tomorrow they go shopping!

***

“Body parts are everywhere!” That’s what one US soldier had to say about the saddest city in Iraq, according to an AFP report. It’s also an apt description of the state of US dinner tables during the festival of gloating and gluttony known as Thanksgiving.

This year, the United States celebrates Thanksgiving in the wake of the taking of Falluja. Waving “drumsticks” and fighting for “wishbones,” complacent Christians will gorge themselves without fear, safe from the threats of gay marriage and Iraqi self-determination. Stuffing themselves beyond satiation, they and their children will partake of the proud Puritanical tradition of ruthless, reckless expansion.

Colonization is nothing to crow about. When Columbus blundered into a hemisphere populated by 70-100 million people and countless unique species of flora and fauna, he set into motion a chain reaction of repression and rebellion that continues to this day. The ongoing European occupation of the Americas was accomplished by both intentional and collateral genocide and ecocide. Neither the human communities nor the ecosystems that were here before the Europeans have ever fully recovered.

The Pilgrims honored on Thanksgiving day continued the conquest begun by Columbus, imposing both technologies and ideologies on the people, plants, and animals who were here first. Like the geographic displacements that cleared the way for European occupation, cultural dislocations were induced through both coercion and deception. The resulting changes warped every aspect of Native American life, including public gender roles and private sexual relations.

According to Gay American Indians (GAI) cofounder Randy Burns, “for centuries before and after the arrival of the Europeans, gay and lesbian American Indians were recognized and valued members of tribal communities” (1). However, over time, cultural disruption combined with the imposition of European notions about sex and gender led many communities that had previously integrated homosexual and cross-gendered individuals into the fabric of community life to begin, like Europeans, to disparage and shun their gay, lesbian, and transgendered family members.
***

“Today was a day like TB
you cough & cough trying to get it out
all that comes up is blood & spit”
- Chrystos (2)

Over 25,000 people in the United States, most of them gay men, were allowed to perish before the federal government took concerted action against AIDS. Today, more than half of all new AIDS diagnoses are among people of color while government action remains relatively minimal and often misplaced. Worldwide, more than 46 million people are struggling against HIV while drug companies use trade agreements and friends in high places to keep drug prices profitably high.

Many vendors of patented pharmaceuticals also make and market the pesticides, fertilizers, and biotech seeds that pollute and pervert the ecosystems within which we must sustain ourselves. These corporations manipulate the world food system, continuing the process of agricultural imperialism wherein unique and self-sustaining farming communities were converted into interchangeable cogs in a profit machine.

Today, most farmers are so entangled in the world economy that they are vulnerable to every market manipulation by the agribusiness corporations. Farm families in Asia and Africa have to worry about going hungry because of price fluctuations caused by US farm aid. Several countries export corn, wheat, and soy to the USA even as their children starve. The agribusiness companies that buy up the majority of those crops as feed for animals use their market power and influence with governments to keep prices below the cost of production. Thus, for the cash crop farmer, a good harvest is no guarantee of a full belly.

In colonial days, firearms and tax collectors were the agents of agricultural change, forcing subsistence farmers to switch to cash-crop agriculture to supply Europeans with cheap raw materials. In these allegedly post-colonial days, the World Bank and the USA use economic threats and incentives to control agricultural policies in developing countries, ensuring that US and European consumers will always have absurdly cheap meat. While Americans make their own children sick with 99 cent cheeseburgers, the children of the farmers who grew the corn that fed the cows go hungry.

The cows themselves, of course, are dead. Both animals and people have been and continue to be hurt by the historic and ongoing European fetish for flesh as food. Farmed animals were the unlucky agents of ecological and cultural change in the course of the conquest of the Americas. Historian Alfred Crosby wryly notes that “one who watched the Caribbean islands from outer space during the years 1492 to 1550 or so might have surmised that the object of the game going on there was to replace the people with pigs, dogs, and cattle” (3).

The importation of animals to be exploited as food or tools probably caused more ecological and social disruption than any other single aspect of the European occupation of the Americas. There were no cattle or horses or pigs in the Americas prior to the invasion. Imported animals ravaged grasslands, displaced indigenous animals, and trampled the carefully tended vegetable plots of Native American agriculturalists. For people subsisting on a predominantly plant-based diet, the destruction of crops was tantamount to theft of scarce food. Different communities reacted in different ways. Some fought back in defense of their fields; others gave up agriculture for hunting and pastoralism. All were themselves changed by the changes in local flora and fauna due to the arrival of the Europeans and their captive animals.
***

The turkey typifies the destructive impact of the historical process of colonization celebrated on Thanksgiving. Like so many animals native to the Americas, wild turkey populations were decimated by the combination of relentless hunting and reckless habitat destruction wrought by the European colonizers. Turkeys were also subjected to a process of ‘domestication’ that led directly to the factory farmed turkeys of today — distressed and disabled birds who go to painful and terrifying deaths having never seen the sun or breathed fresh air. Wild turkeys nest in trees and raise their chicks to be free. Domesticated turkeys cannot reproduce on their own; human “farm hands” masturbate male turkeys and then inject the collected semen into turkey hens who have been “broken” by being shoved to the ground with their legs in the air (4).

Just as domestication has perverted the bodies of turkeys, colonization of the Americas corrupted the eating habits of both European and Native Americans. That process of diet change led directly to the typical US diet of today, which is marked by heavy consumption of meat and other animal products. The average US carnivore gobbles up enough resources to feed 20 people a balanced vegetarian diet. As a result, 826 million people in the world are living with hunger and malnutrition while the US struggles with heath care costs and productivity losses due to the heart disease, diabetes, obesity and cancers associated with meat consumption (5).
***
“What was the familiar name
Of that young girl who danced so gracefully
That everyone in the village sang with her -
Before Cortez’ sword hacked off her arms…?”
-Jimmie Durham (6)

“Please circulate the name of Ali… Two houses were hit by a Bush missile and the fires burned alive 12 members of his family… He is fully conscious. He has no more arms, and a black burned belly…”
-Marinella Correggia reporting from Baghdad (7)

David R.
“from Alaska, loved flowers and wanted to open a flower shop but he managed a bank instead (you know how life can be) well he was positive (?HIV?) and full of love, then his health slipped and he met a blond …”
- panel from the AIDS quilt (6)

“Chickweed never recovered his sunny personality after his sister Violet died. Over time, he became less angry but he was never quite the same. When Chickweed died and we buried him, we felt compelled to add a few trinkets to his grave. We imagined future archeologists digging up our property. We wanted them to know: This chicken wasn’t anybody’s dinner. This chicken was somebody’s brother. This chicken was somebody’s friend.” (9)

Numbers can be numbing: The last of five billion passenger pigeons died in captivity in 1914. On the peninsula where I live, 12 million more chickens are dead by the end of every week. 24,000 people, most of them under the age of five, die every day due to hunger and malnutrition. The Taino people were reduced from three million to 200 within 50 years of the arrival of Columbus. Three million people will die of AIDS-related illness this year. And the USA just bought enough bullets to shoot each remaining Iraqi citizen 58 times.

These sad statistics, these litanies of loss, are all related. There are causal connections, like the link between meat consumption in the USA and hunger in Argentina, where 20 percent of the children are malnourished even as the country exports corn and soy to be used as animal feed. There are financial and motivational entanglements like those among drug profiteers, meat producers, and the Bush administration. There are ideological connections, like the identical stereotypes applied to both subjugated animals and subjugated peoples. And then there is the simple fact that every number represents a unique individual, once alive with joy and pain, now dead with all hope extinguished and only mourners left behind.
***

“Same as it ever was… same as it ever was… same as it ever was…”
- Talking Heads, Once in a Lifetime
The causal role of religion in all of this may be uncomfortable to face but cannot be ignored. Since their inception, the Abrahamic faiths have justified enslavement, oppression, and exploitation of women, animals, and people of other faiths. Just as Judaism mandated the conquest of Canaan and Islam excused the enslavement of African pagans, Christianity has been a guiding force in European and American expansionism.

The change in Native American attitudes towards homosexuality was but one outcome of the Christian crusade against Native American religious practices and but one battle in the ongoing religious war against gay men and lesbians. If George W. Bush really did win the election, it’s because Christians of all classes and colors came out to smite their gay neighbors. And, quiet as it’s kept, some of the Christian support for Bush is because, rather than in spite of, the inquisition at Abu Ghairb.

Now that men who believe themselves to be the agents of the Christian God are even more firmly in control of the United States government, we can expect the processes of conquest and cultural change to become more extreme and explicit. The Pentagon backed General William G. Boykin when he declared the United States to be a Christian nation and asserted that “our God” is “a real God” who is “bigger than” Allah (10). George W. Bush took time out from fighting evil to tell the Cattle Industry Annual Convention and Trade Show that “we want people in China eating US beef,” (11) even though the groundbreaking China-Cornell-Oxford Project has decisively demonstrated that increased meat consumption has already harmed Chinese health (12).

US soldiers use depleted uranium bombs in Iraq even as the US government forces unwanted uranium mines into Navajo lands (13). Thus the conquest continues. But resistance has been as persistent as poke weed, surviving underground when apparently uprooted, coming back every spring to torment those who would fence it, and feeding the wild birds in the wintertime.

The Lakota people on the Rosebud Reservation in South Dakota have struggled to rid themselves of a massive pork production facility at which both abuses of animals and abuses of Native American workers have been alleged. Environmental activist Rosalie Little Thunder has condemned the facility because pigs are not native to the region, because the animals are kept in inhumane conditions, because the plant spews pollution, and because the original agreement between the corporate owners of the facility and the tribal council was not approved by the people. Native American workers at the facility have come forward with allegations of racial discrimination and tales of animal abuse above and beyond the mistreatment built into the confinement system (14).

The Rosebud resistance is a struggle where the connections between the oppression of land, animals, and people are perfectly clear. If we want to support every sort of resistance against illegitimate power, then we must teach ourselves to recognize those kinds of connections even when they are not so easy to see.
***
It wasn’t so long ago that leftists laughed at gay liberationists, considering their struggles at best silly and at worst distractions from real problems like racism. Now, most feminists understand heterosexism as an element of sexism as well as a significant problem in its own right. We understand how racism and homophobia have combined to jeopardize the lives of all people with AIDS. We know that both the roots and the branches of the different kinds of oppression among humans are so entangled that we can’t hope to end one without ending them all.

Today, it’s the animal liberationists who are the targets of sneers and jeers from the left even as we struggle mightily against the same foes. Feminists are still in the process of articulating all of the connections between speciesism and sexism while concepts like dietary racism have only just begun to be explored. We’re on the cusp of change and, if history is any guide, we can look forward to hours of anguished argument as the animal and social justice movements struggle to integrate each other’s analyses.

The Spaniards hacked the arms off of any ‘Indian’ who did not supply them with the requisite tribute of gold. Cluster bombs blow the limbs off of boys and girls in Afghanistan and Iraq. We teach the boys and girls here in the USA to eat the wings of baby birds as snacks. All of these dismemberments are symptoms of the same disease: violent alienation from ourselves, each other, other animals, and the rest of the natural world.

While all of our problems are connected, estrangement, or separation, is both cause and consequence of those problems. We are cut off from the earth, other animals, each other, and ourselves. Those disconnections allow us to do terrible things to the earth, other animals, each other, and ourselves. Doing those terrible things increases the estrangement. And the cycle of violation and separation continues…

George Bush’s Americans seek solace at the shopping mall, too disconnected from their own desires to imagine an alternative. Dissidents seek comfort in numbers, arranging countless identical demonstrations that have no impact on the military-industrial complex but at least allow them to feel less alone. They, too, seem unable to even imagine a world in which effective collective direct action might actually make a difference. Thus they remain content with symbolic shows of dissent.

Remembering, in the truest sense of the word, is the cure for this malaise. We must connect the dots from the slaughterhouse to the dinner plate, from rape at the fraternity house to rape on the dairy farm, from torture in the vivisection lab to torture in iraq, and from meat consumption in the United States to hunger in Argentina. We must recognize and cultivate our relationships with each other, with other animals, and with the ecosystems in which we are enmeshed. And we must make sure that our own hearts, minds, and hands are always connected. We must work to ensure our own basic integrity, so that what we think and feel and do are always consistent with one another.

If we remember hard enough, we can envision the freedom, integrity, and attachments that have been stolen from us all. If we work hard enough, we can bring them back.
“because the moon remembers
because so does the sun
because the stars
remember
and the persistent stubborn grass
of the earth”
- Paula Gunn Allen (15)
Notes
(1) See Living the Spirit: A Gay American Indian Anthology, edited by Will Roscoe (1988) St. Martin’s Press
(2) From her book Not Vanishing (1988) Press Gang.
(3) See “The Biological Consequences of 1492” by Alfred W. Crosby, Jr.; in Report on the Americas, 25.2 (1991) 6-13
(4) See “My Job at the Turkey Breeding Factory” by Jim Mason, presented in Norfolk, VA in September of 2004 and available on videotape via United Poultry Concerns and in text via Compassion Over Killing
(5) See Global Hunger Alliance for more information about the connections between meat consumption and world hunger
(6) From Living the Spirit
(7) Personal communication, 04 April 2003
(8) Information about the AIDS Memorial Quilt may be found at AIDSQuilt.org
(9) See Meet the Chickens on the Eastern Shore Sanctuary website.
(10) “REBUILDING IRAQ — CONTROVERSIAL REMARKS. Pentagon defends general”
By Matt Kelley, Associated Press, 10/17/2003
(11) Transcript: President Bush on Terrorism, Farm Bill, Trade Bill (February 8, 2002) at http://hongkong.usconsulate.gov/uscn/wh/2002/020801.htm
(12) Visit the China-Cornell-Oxford Project for more information about diet change and health in China
(13) See the Depleted Uranium Education Projectand Energy bill is omnicide by Brenda Norrell in Indian Country Today (12/03/2003)
(14) See Hog Farm at the Dakota-Lakota-Nakota Coalition website
(15) From Living the Spirit

First published 28 November 2006 by FreezerBox Magazine.

Throwing the homosexuals to the hounds sounds like a metaphor for the Republican Party’s electoral strategy of recent years, but it actually happened back in 1513 in what is now Panama. Then, governor Vasco Nunez de Balboa condemned 50 homosexual Indians to be torn apart by dogs.Seen by both Catholic Conquistadors and Protestant Pilgrims as a sign of godless animality, same-sex pleasure was ruthlessly suppressed throughout the process of the subjugation of the Americas. Today, the conquest of the senses continues, as billions of people and animals are forced to forgo all kinds of natural happiness so that a privileged few can enjoy the empty gluttony that has brought us to the brink of planetary catastrophe.

When Columbus blundered into the Caribbean, sexual freedom — including full acceptance of homosexuality — was the norm in the region. Did the invaders understand that such physical freedom would be a wellspring of resistance? Did they dimly suspect that people who don’t need a reason to enjoy each other might be hard to control?

Whatever they knew, they threw themselves into the task of policing sexuality with a fervor that would satisfy any latter-day acolyte of Focus on the Family, mercilessly murdering those who transgressed the new world order of patriarchal heterosexuality. When the Tairona Indians on the Caribbean coast of what is now Colombia rebelled against the suppression of their sexual customs, which included divorce and homosexuality, the resulting repression nearly erased 80 communities. As Eduardo Galeano has remarked, it is one of the ironies of history that the Caribbean, where indigenous people physically fought for their right to same-sex pleasure, is now among the most homophobic regions of the world.

The Tairona were not alone. Same-sex coupling was recognized as natural by hundreds of indigenous South, Central, and North American peoples. In many cultures, homosexual men and women were not merely tolerated but fully integrated into the life of the people, often with designated routine or ritual roles that recognized their unique positions and perspectives.

Then came the Europeans with their guns and bibles. Disease, displacement, and missionaries dedicated to cultural genocide conspired to estrange many native peoples from their own traditions. New practices, such as Christianity and cattle ranching, became the new “traditions.” These days, some gay and lesbian Native Americans who embrace the old ways are locked in struggles with conservative Christian elders over the same subject that brings Bush voters out in droves: gay marriage.

The glee with which our fellow Americans regularly run to the polls to deprive us of our civil rights is no surprise to LGBTQ people who know our own history. The Puritans whose survival is celebrated every Thanksgiving, like the Conquistadors of the Caribbean, often imposed the death penalty for homosexuality.

Anti-gay referenda are just one of many legacies of the European invaders. Historian Alfred Crosby has written that “one who watched the Caribbean islands from outer space during the years 1492 to 1550 or so might have surmised that the object of the game going on there was to replace the people with pigs, dogs, and cattle.” Today, factory farms in which hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands, and even hundreds of thousands of animals are confined litter the landscapes of the Americas. Their effluents poison our water while the carbon dioxide and methane released by their operations are among the chief causes of climate change.

Some of the diseases that decimated indigenous people were deliberately introduced, as when Sir Jeffery Amherst distributed smallpox-infected blankets to Native Americans in 1763. Today, we live with the very real prospect of a pandemic of avian influenza that Dr. Michael Greger, in his new book Bird Flu, calls “a virus of our own hatching.”

The conquest of the senses continues too. Gluttony of all kinds has replaced the natural pleasures that have been suppressed. Estranged from their own bodies, Americans have an insatiable appetite for the bodies of others, conveniently converted into objects for consumption by butchery or pornography.

Homo Sapiens is just one of the hundreds of species of animals who enjoy homosexual activity either for transitory sensual pleasure or to form stable same-sex pair bonds. Nothing could be more natural. But, to the Europeans who invaded the Americas, our animal bodies were, like all of nature, profane objects to be exploited and controlled.

We’ve now reached the logical conclusion of behavior based in that mindset. At the brink of environmental catastrophe, we are profoundly disoriented animals living within a dangerously deranged biosphere. We are so out of touch with our senses and feelings that we cannot perceive the changing climate or feel the fear that motivates action in an emergency.

Among the Maya of Guatemala, the word for sex is “play.” Play might seem beside the point in these dangerous days. But truly mutual animal happiness brings us into communion with each other and ourselves without hurting anybody else. Unlike the consumption of cancer-causing pork chops, paper sex objects, and plastic electronics, true play energizes people for the hard work ahead. So, if you’re wondering what to do instead of going shopping, I invite you to come out and play.

pattrice jones

“No, the waters and the mountains do not belong to the mens. But how do we tell that to Bush and Blair?”

I’m at the Fórum Social Mundial and have no answer for the Brazilian musician who earnestly poses that question after admiring the Alice Walker quotation on my t-shirt. How indeed, I wonder, when even the people who are talking back to Bush and Blair do not understand that basic fact.

These days, most progressive environmentalists endorse what might be called the ‘trickle-down’ theory of environmental justice. Just as Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush have asserted that the self-interested choices of rich people ultimately help all of the other economic classes, today’s global justice advocates assert that the self-interested choices of “the people” will ultimately help all of the other species on earth. Both theories amount to little more than wishful thinking. Trickle-down economics was and remains a fantasy that justifies individual selfishness without regard for economic realities. Similarly, the ‘power-to-the-people’ theory of environmental justice is an illusion that justifies species selfishness without regard for ecological realities.

I guess most of the activists attending FSM would be disconcerted to hear themselves characterized as self-centered or out of synch with the ecosystem. But from the perspective of concern for all beings, their relentless preoccupation with people, people, people seems extremely egocentric. Water pollution? Only a concern because it hurts people. Desertification? Only a problem because people are thirsty. GMOs? Problematic only because either they or their impacts on ecosystems might hurt people. Violence? Only a problem when directed against people. The solution to each and every one of those environmental problems? Put the power in the hands of “the people.”

An advertisement for a FSM workshop exemplifies this attitude. There is a cartoon of a family in swimming suits, looking sad because their holiday plans have gone awry. The father complains that “our favorite waterfall doesn’t belong to the people anymore.” Barbed wire installed by a corporation prevents them or anyone else from approaching the river and waterfall. The thwarted swimming party — rather than, for example, the thirst of the animals who will no longer be able to reach their usual source of water — is the primary focus of concern. The solution to the terrible problem of the obstructed outing is spelled out in the headline of the poster: “WATER IN PEOPLES HANDS!”

This poster hangs on the outside wall of a campus cafe in which activists are relaxing and refreshing themselves. A scrawny, mangy dog — one of the many living ghosts who haunt the venues of the World Social Forum — lies outside, panting in the midday sun, too weak to even get up and move into the shade. Environmental justice activists, many carrying water bottles in their hands, walk by without noticing or stopping to offer a drink to this obviously thirsty animal.

WATER IN PEOPLES HANDS!? Who, other than people, has created dead zones in the oceans and polluted rivers and streams? What species uses more than half of all freshwater, leaving all of the remaining species to survive (or not) on the dregs? Who, other than people, is responsible for the climate change that has already irrevocably altered the natural history of the world’s waters? If not people, then who is responsible for the destruction of more than half of all wetlands on the planet? Who, other than people, has driven countless birds, fish, amphibians and plants into extinction by changing or taking the water on which their lives depended?

WATER IN PEOPLES HANDS!? People are the problem! Corporations and communities are just different types of collections of people. “WATER IN PEOPLES HANDS” means shifting the power from one group of people to another. The fundamental fallacies — the notion that water somehow ‘belongs’ to people and the conviction that homo sapiens, as just one of the billions of plant and animal species dependent on water for life, has the sole right to control this vital resource — remain unchallenged. With those dangerous ideas still operative, it’s unlikely that the new bosses of the water would be any more responsible than the old. They might ensure that people (or at least their favored subset of people) would get enough, but their ‘people own the world’ attitude virtually guarantees that they would not take into account the needs of other species, unless those species happened to be deemed useful to humans. Thus, collective ‘ownership’ of water would be only slightly less likely to result in ecosystemic disaster than private or corporate ownership.

Private and corporate control of water are just the latest logical extensions of age-old human attitudes and practices. All of the Abrahamic faiths (Judaism, Christianity and Islam) are founded on the very convenient conviction that “man” has the right and the duty to exercise dominion over the land and the other animals. While some indigenous religions do not accord such unique privileges to humans, other indigenous faiths of the past and present do share the opportune opinion that people occupy a superior position and/or exercise special rights.

The fiction of the FSM is that people, unfettered by states and corporations, will always make smart and just decisions and thus can be trusted to chart the course for all life on this planet. There’s no evidence for this fantasy and plenty of evidence against it. Looking at the thirsty dogs at the World Social Forum, I wonder: If even the most self-consciously progressive among us cannot be trusted to share water with our species’ most long-standing and loyal companions, how can we trust that “the people” in all their diversity will elect to apportion water with wisdom and compassion?

We say “Our world is not for sale,” and by this we mean that natural resources ought not be owned by private entities. “Ownership” is essentially the effective expression of exclusive control and is generally established by some act of actual or threatened private or state violence. Barb wire tears skin. Security guards carry guns and clubs.

Having challenged the idea of “ownership,” are we willing to go further and question the assumption that “the people” as a collective have the right to possess or control natural resources? If we truly believe that mountains and rivers belong to everyone, aren’t we obliged to question the bizarre system of accounting wherein “everyone” includes only humans? If we truly believe that it’s not possible to “own” a tree, then aren’t we obliged to question the idea that it’s possible to own a tree frog? Or a dog?

In short, aren’t we honor bound to find a way to liberate the water from the control of its corporate captors without selfishly claiming the control for ourselves? How could we do that? We can’t consult consult the other animals or the plants. Or, can we? Could we, perhaps, enter into such empathic relationships with them that we could be trusted to take their interests into account when planning our actions? Could we observe them with such care and precision that we could accurately conclude what they might like us to do? Could we invite people who recognize and relate to animals as fellow beings (rather than property) to represent their interests when we gather to make decisions at events like the World Social Forum?

We could and should do those things. It’s too late to undo the damage that generations of people have done, but it may not be too late to learn enough to stop the ongoing destruction. Then we — the people and the plants and the animals — can begin to build another world — together.

The Alice Walker quotation that provoked this meditation? “The animals of the world exist for their own purposes. They were not made for humans any more than black people were made for whites or women for men.” The same holds true for the water and the flowers and the land.