Why Animals Matter: The Case for Animal Protection

[flvegan]

By Anneli Rufus, AlterNet. Posted February 23, 2008.

We are, of course, but a new book on animal cruelty will make your jaw drop about how vicious humans can be to other animals.

Shamu's mother was harpooned.

She was killed in the wild by the crew that captured the first in a series of young orcas that have since been trained to do tricks at San Diego's Sea World marine park, known sequentially as America's most famous performing sea mammals.

And maybe that's all you need to know to realize just how far humans will go. Maybe that's all you need to know -- were you beside me on those bleachers, years ago, cheering Shamu? -- to see blood, even faded and vestigial, on your hands.

Erin E. Williams and Margo DeMello's Why Animals Matter: The Case for Animal Protection (Prometheus, 2007) is a book so jam-packed with literal crimes against nature that it's hard to read more than a few pages in one go. Williams works for the Humane Society of the United States. DeMello is an administrative director of the House Rabbit Society.

Together they have painstakingly assembled statistics, news reports, anecdotes, and observations exposing the sufferings of so many creatures in so many industries -- food, fashion, entertainment, medicine -- as well as hobbies ranging from hunting to ostensibly positive pet-ownership that you recoil from revelation after revelation about Chinese cat-fur coats, say, or "spent" racehorses that are slaughtered for dogfood. On information overload, you blink: Wait … my species does that?

Indeed it does.

Much, much more:

http://www.alternet.org/rights/77543/

Ladies and gents, THIS book might be the one...

"This is the rest of the tour that Eric Schlosser began in Fast Food Nation -- paced not quite at a bovine plod but still deliberately, somberly slow -- of that bustling, bloody world-within-a-world in which terrible things happen to animals. The evidence is everywhere: in the bedroom closet, the medicine cabinet, the fridge, the restaurant, the cupboard full of cleansers under the sink. It's at the pet shop, circus, zoo, aquarium, boutique. Even if you're a pleather-clad vegan sitting perfectly still in an open field, you are implicated -- used -- as an ostensible statistic, who by virtue of belonging to Homo sapiens can still be considered a potential eventual customer for countless cosmetics, comestibles, clothes, drugs and other future products whose marketing schemes are already under way. The macular degeneration, diabetes or fondness for fur-trimmed jackets that you might or might not someday develop is reason enough for wealthy powerful companies to justify inflicting untold things on untold creatures: "Even with all of our laws," Williams and DeMello muse, "and even with a nation of caring people, we still tolerate -- and many of us unwittingly participate in -- an unprecedented degree of animal cruelty. How can this be so?"

[LeftyMom]

1. Sounds sort of like a print equivalent of Earthlings.

:scared:

[stuntcat]

3. which I can't watch

It's sat here on my desk for weeks and I finally put it away because I can't watch animal torture. The people who really ought to watch/read the stuff just won't. Who can stomach it? Everyone needs to see this stuff.. I mean except me, I'm freaked out so bad lately ;(

[peacebuzzard]

2. yes. my species does that....mirror mirror.....who is the cruelest of them all?

It is so disheartening. So many times I have engaged in personal relationships up to ONLY the point where it sets in that this being in front of me is just one of the masses that cares less about other species. That is when I either say, see ya, or just discontinue altogether. Permanent check out.

Thanks for the link, and to think that in this country we still have one of the stronger fore fronts to the animal rights movement it becomes apparent we are still in the medieval ages......