December 16th, 2003 |
A peculiar circumstance attracted his attention: there seemed to be some kind of festivity going on, there were crowds of gaily dressed townspeople, peasant women, their husbands, and riff-raff of all sorts, all singing and all more or less drunk. Near the entrance of the tavern stood a cart, but a strange cart. It was one of those big carts usually drawn by heavy cart-horses and laden with casks of wine or other heavy goods. He always liked looking at those great cart-horses, with their long manes, thick legs, and slow even pace, drawing along a perfect mountain with no appearance of effort, as though it were easier going with a load than without it. But now, strange to say, in the shafts of such a cart he saw a thin little sorrel beast, one of those peasant’s nags which he had often seen straining their utmost under a heavy load of wood or hay, especially when the wheels were stuck in the mud or in a rut. And the peasants would beat them so cruelly, sometimes even about the nose and eyes, and he felt so sorry, so sorry for them that he almost cried, and his mother always used to take him away from the window. All of a sudden there was a great uproar of shouting, singing and the balalaika, and from the
tavern a number of big and very drunken peasants came out, wearing red and blue shirts and
coats thrown over their shoulders.
"Get in, get in!" shouted one of them, a young thick-necked peasant with a fleshy face red as a
carrot. “I’ll take you all, get in!’
But at once there was an outbreak of laughter and exclamations in the crowd. “Get in! Come along!” The crowd laughed. “D’you hear, she’ll gallop! They all clambered into Mikolka’s cart, laughing and making jokes. Six men got in and there
was still room for more. They hauled in a fat, rosy-cheeked woman. She dressed in red cotton,
in a pointed, beaded headdress and thick leather shoes; she was cracking nuts and laughing. The
crowd round them was laughing too and indeed, how could they help laughing? That wretched
nag was to drag all the cart-load of them at a gallop! Two young fellows in the cart were just
getting whips ready to help Mikolka. With the cry of “now,” the mare tugged with all her might,
but far from galloping, could scarcely move forward; she struggled with her legs, gasping and
shrinking from the blows of three whips which were showered upon her like hail.
The laughter in the cart and in the crowd was redoubled, but
Mikolka flew into a rage and furiously thrashed the mare, as though he supposed she really could
gallop. “Father, father”, he cried, “father, what are they doing? Father, they are beating the poor horse!” Two lads in the crowd snatched up whips and ran to the mare to beat her about the ribs. One ran
each side. “I’ll teach you to kick,” Mikolka shouted ferociously. He threw down the whip, bent forward and picked up from the bottom of the cart a long thick shaft, he took hold of one end with both hands and with an effort brandished it over the mare. “He’ll crush her,” was shouted round him, “He’ll kill her!” Adapted from: Dostoyevsky, Fyodor. Crime and Punishment. Trans. Ray Freiman & Company. New York: Capricorn Press, 1984. (pages 56-60) |
May 24th, 2001 | ||||||
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October 24th, 2000 |
Of course, for veterinarians a review of Animal Welfare Position Statements of The Canadian Veterinary Medical Association is instructive. Some 17 categories of restriction of former practises are listed and explained in the membership directory for year 2000. And the Association of Veterinarians For Animal Rights, P.O. Box 208 Davis, CA 95617-0208, list 40 categories of welfare subjects (from cosmetic testings to blood transfusion) and take ethical positions on each. I would be happy to recommend to any inquisitor that he/she simply phone their local practising vet for any humane or ethical question respecting animals and rest in confidence that the concern is adequately covered. Were it so easy I would not be promoting the subject here or begging that veterinarians get vigilant to embrace modern notions of animal treatment and use by the human race. Many of us as veterinarians have been trained to the tune of a past standard in animal use and need to realize that things have changed since the 1960's and 1970's. We must answer differently now the inquiries of concerned citizens than we would have done a decade or two ago. Therefore, we need cohesive and logical answers as a group that likes to be seen as professional in the highest meaning of the term. A consensus of our standards is advised. Since I do not have the confidence touched on above I urge any veterinarian with reason to state such confidence to proselytise me with mail to this web site or link to e-mail. I am very open to suggestion. |
July 15th, 2000 |
The assurance of favourable habitat and survival conditions in which an animal can find shelter, food, water, and rest and also reproduce. Beyond that only the question of abundance of these qualities of life can be addressed by humans. We cannot, for instance, assess other qualities of life of animals including happiness or satisfaction and we probably shouldn't try since we cannot assure those. Measuring happiness is seldom possible among humans. Think of the controversy that would accompany any attempt to rank levels of happiness for animals. No. We must confine our discourse to the bare bones such as the definition of welfare above. So, might we consider that welfare or well being is best judged as the norm of existence in a population (as found) when we first discover that population? Then our part in their welfare is largely to "do no harm" in our attempts to observe them or make other contacts. Some high applications of this concept is found in programs to study endangered species where the mere proximity of humans might thwart nesting or migration behaviours. In many management of wild fauna schemes the human "touch" is still very invasive. Tags, bands, marks and radio collars are crude shortcuts to observation, their degree of "harm" not known. On the lower end of this scale lies most of our history of contact with animals...disregard for habitat, enslavement, slaughter. We can talk about these events later. 2. In a more perfect world human evolvement would have stayed on a progression from that of the Greek Philosophers where animals often figured highly, Buddhism where tolerance is extended to animals, and probably some mystery schools where they at minimum were sacrifice materia (offerings to deities). We think the North America natives c. 1500, had an animal centred mysticism that went beyond a thanks for the food and clothing they represented. Less so for the South American natives, but do we know enough yet to pass judgement on that? What the world did instead was enter the darker ages for whatever reason, and humanity under stress seems to invariably unload onto the next lower order. The ills of society, I dare say, were visited upon the animal kingdom, captive or wild, and habits formed in these periods became the common ground on which hierarchy of the universe was expressed and written. The long centuries that we imagine were required to domesticate our present day farm animals probably occurred when those animals were held in high esteem by the closed family of those times when one animal may have been all a nuclear family had. A camel. a horse or donkey, an ox could have been more than wealth , it could have been sign for events, subject for worship. Augury with animals is not confined in literature to the event of the Flood where Noah sent out a dove and a raven. To the present it is possible to find folk lore where the behaviour or birth of animals is tied to something like a riddle or the paranormal. Let it be suffice to say that close and caring contact of ancient peoples with their animals has brought us today the docility we all recognize as the thing distinguishing domestic from wild animals. I pose the question; Have we really emerged from those dark ages in our use and regard for domestic animals? I'll try a third page to see if I can answer it. 3. I am always drawn to the clues in The Bible of the status of domestic animals in those times, and here of course "times" are pretty widely spread. The serpent, the meat offerings, the best male, the ass for beast of burden, the Ark story, Abraham's sides of beef, sheep as followers, goats as wanderers, and horses as symbols of power. Help me here, but I cannot remember camels in biblical references prior to Christ's birth and the Magi. Maybe they were not common in the Holy Land! For Jesus Christ, sheep were a reflection of humans. I feel it was no fetch of analogy that translates into current English," I am the good shepherd and my sheep know my voice." Quite likely the human animal bond there was something an idiot could easily see, make no mistake. The use of the illustration was both for emphasis and for its axiom. Shepherd and sheep = God and man. A pretty close tie! And to this great teacher an ox was worthy of rescue from a well even if the activity meant breaking a code of the Sabbath. Yet obviously the kindest shepherd must have also practised slaughter. Along with greater numbers of captive animals comes the equating of them to money, at least to wealth. And I believe this is the departure in history where animals fell from high mystical regard by their masters to that of a mere commodity, transferrable to gold, something to hoard, to trade, something in the total possession of one's self and not to be the concern of by passers by. Could this have not been the status of European agriculture at the time of finding America and the advent of the industrial revolution? The hardening of life in cities following European wars was probably a stimulant to servitude, a deterioration in many quarters. Class distinction had been well established in the old monarchies, serf and lord relationships were predatory and no doubt treatment of animals reached a new low. When the keeper is harried and hard pressed the animal he drives is the recipient of his anguish and more. These attitudes and conditions were brought to the Americas by the English, Spanish and French in ships (I will let the Portuguese off the hook for now) and much put to use on the humans and animals of the new land. Exploitation and enslavement ensued. How many stories of deprivation and waste awaits in the blank pages of this era of history may never be known. The naming of the Horse Latitudes leads one to reflect on the privations of The Ancient Mariner. (Though I've considered it a myth that becalmed sailors would toss horses over the side to relieve load! More likely they would be kept to final starvation, of the horse, to stave off starvation of the sailor). Consider the many place names that suggest hardship, murder, wreck and castaway associated with the coasts and conquests of North and South America! The western hemisphere has yet to recover from, and to reform from, the legacy of these awful events. For in spite of the claim that it was the off-scourings of the human race of Europe that first found its way to the western hemisphere and practised piracy of every sort, we cannot deny that the leadership at highest levels in Europe ordered it and continued it as nation state policy. We inherit this history like polluted water and it runs in our collective veins to this day. Our Canadian ideas of law and possession stem from these darker ages despite a slow enlightenment. Europe has now surpassed us. Hence our trends in animal care as well as human welfare are far behind those of even Europe from whence we came. Creatures that can't order their environment and have to exist in the one they are born into find a less than friendly life in our society today. Habitat change has brought many to the edge of extinction under human control. Farm practices have removed all but a thread of human contact with food animals to the point that a machine, a motor, or a light is more likely to signal a change in their hour to hour existence than the sight or the voice of a human, and they respond to these stimulations instead. A fan starting or a feed auger rattling can set a chicken barn or hog palace to pandemonium as the occupants stir to an expected feeding. The owner or keeper may be miles away and unaware. He need not know his animals nor they him! In fact, contact with, or sight and smell of their keeper is usually associated with fearsome stress, bludgeoning pain, and long lasting recovery periods. The domestics are modified animals and are being further modified as time passes. The long association with, and control by, the human element has skewed the genetics of domestic animals through selection and controlled breeding. They have been translocated to regions of the earth with climate far different than the nascent environment in which they thrived. All of this makes us as humans especially responsible for the welfare of domestic animals since we have forced a certain dependence on us into their existence. So, what level of comfort can be ruled acceptable for domestic animals? We currently have the high order of care lavished upon commensal animals as pets and the low order of those we kill for food or exploit for some other product. Is it of public interest to have public sensitivities put into law to control treatment of food animals to level out the disparity we see between these groups? The opportunity to do this arises today with the advent of large corporate farms. Licensing these entities gives governments power to inspect and recommend on matters of environment, safety, workman's comp. etc. It would be easy to also set out minimal standards of treatment for the animals at the same time. On the other hand, we could rely on public awareness to simply influence the management of farms to do the very best job on threat of losing the market if they don't. This last can be a faint hope in a commercial world where image advertising is practised by corporate marketers to create a public belief out of thin air. There is no assurance that public resistance to a particular product in the marketplace will influence production methods of food animals. But here the Euro Countries play some part, influencing us through market pressures. To review: The keys to assessing animal welfare in broad terms are habitat, access to sustenance, balanced reproduction with stable population. The changes for domestic animals are widely varied, the low end being food animals. Can changes to law help? |
