earthsip

2011-08-14T11:27:00.029-05:00

So many things have happened this year, we've had a hard time keeping up with it all. After the long, hard winter in the house without chicken friends after June and Rose passed away, Sara now has new companions, Emily and Anne Bronte, named after my beloved Bronte sisters. They came from Heartland Farm Sanctuary, which had just rescued ten hens when a man who'd kept chickens as companions for years was forced to give them up due to illness.
Emily, who looks part condor and sounds like a guinea hen) quickly became Sara's "second in command," but she's much more timid than her sister, Anne, who is very friendly and curious about any type of human activity. Both Emily and Anne have become much less shy of humans since they arrived in late March. All three girls accompany us around the yard while we search the grapes, hazelnuts and willows for Japanese beetles for them, and the rest of the time, enjoy their fruit and veggie treats and the yard's many plants and bugs. (Fallen raspberries and chickweed blossoms, yum!!) They love to explore their yard and dustbathe in the sun. When it's too hot, they hide in the raspberry bushes. All three are full of life and ready to enjoy all the pleasures their world has to offer them.

Looks like we traded Charm and Peridot in on a pair of rare Siamese twin rabbits, doesn't it? Our little moon rabbits are doing well, love each other dearly, and are teaching us patience and the ways of the rabbit. Pinecone bowling is a favorite pasttime. (Gotta get a video of that!)

On a very hot day in late May, there was a block party on our street for the first time since we moved here in 2003, with the youngest attendee, Zoe at age 2 months, and the oldest, Dave at...well, he's retired, anyway! It was great to hang out with all our neighbors and get to meet new ones, too. The first "Bike the Drive" of the year was a great success, again. Some of the biggest streets in Madison were closed to motor traffic, and we joined friends Jenny, Chandi, Terese, Rob, Kenny and Steve's cousin Matt with thousands of others, riding our bikes for several hours on another very hot day on downtown streets that are normally full of cars. Picking flowers from the median of a 45 mph semi-highway---FUN! From there, we headed back to our own neighborhood to "Boombox the Wasteland," a sort of reclaiming event for some industrial and commercial land that was cleared for "development" but has stood idle for years now. WORT 89.9FM broadcast the event live all afternoon, and the hundreds of boomboxes folks brought along sang out while we danced, mingled and shared free food and created spray-paint artwork together. Naturally, we brought our solar-powered boombox!
In late July, Steve installed a beautiful, energy-efficient front door (our old one was leaking air badly) that he got for $70 because it had a "ding" in it And we travelled to Omaha to see Andy and attend a Briggs family reunion up in Walthill, hosted by my sweet, smart cousin Christine and her equally wonderful husband Doug. (The best photo of the reunion, unfortunately, is of the oldest member of the family, this old Model A---or was it T?---circa 1935, that Doug still drives in parades!)

Never seen the Missouri River in flood stage like it is now! Andy and I are standing at what *shouldn't* be the river's edge, looking at what is usually the patio seating at the boathouse bar/restaurant where he hangs out with his friend Jim. (Jim's motorcycle is almost as cool as Andy's, which is gold instead of burgundy.) Andy and Jim rode up to Storm Lake, Iowa, a few hundred mile round trip, just a few weeks before this---and Andy will be 87 in November!

Friends Frances and Alan generously put us up in their beautiful cohousing home while were there, and we even got to join them for a (nearly vegan) dinner they hosted for some of new UU friends, who are now our friends, too.

The protests continue, of course, although the crowds and frequency have dwindled. We attend the Singalongs at the Capitol as often as we can, and Steve has helped with phone calls, while our friends Susan, Bryan and Linda have travelled around the state going door-to-door. It's far from over, and we're in it for the long haul.

And here's our backyard's newest resident, sleeping in a shady, cool spot on top of the rain barrel!

The Ultimate Vegan Reuben Sandwich and Some Personal and Omaha History

2011-05-15T11:50:00.093-05:00

The last time I ever saw my mother alive was in February 2008, about a month before she passed. She was sitting on the living room couch, dressed in her best black pantsuit and a pink scarf I’d given her earlier that day, biting into a dripping vegan Reuben sandwich, murmuring, "Ohhhh, this is sooo good!" and rolling her eyes in appreciative culinary ecstasy. She had just gotten out of the hospital and was so happy to be home with my stepfather Andy, and eating well again. That it was a Reuben sandwich was not really by chance, because we’re from Omaha, Nebraska, and, according to Omaha legend, the Reuben sandwich was created there early in the last century, at the Blackstone Hotel.

There has always been some historical debate about this, though. Some say the Reuben was invented in New York City. (I tend to hold with the Omaha version, not just because I’m an Omahan, but also because the niece of a famous Blackstone chef once rented a room from my mother, and assured us that the old story was true.) You can read more about the controversy and see a very retro menu from the Blackstone at the Nebraska State Historical Society’s "Weird Nebraska" website.

When I was a child in the 1960s and 70s, my mother and I would frequently find ourselves at the Blackstone's Golden Spur Grill after a winter's evening at the symphony, opera, or ballet, most often ordering the original (translated as: poor dead cow) version of the Reuben. In those days, my mother would have gone out of the house in curlers or (horror of horrors) blue jeans before she would have worn warm, sensible clothing for an evening out, so we shivered all evening in our too-thin dressy clothes. In those days, too, we would have thought ourselves deprived if we hadn’t eaten meat (read: some poor dead animal or another) at least twice a day. It wasn’t until the early 1990s, after my mother founded an animal rescue group that became an animal rights group, as well, and we had both had had our "and then it hit me" moments, realizing that not only the lives of puppies and kittens are important, but those of all animals. We both went veggie/vegan, and the old Reuben sandwich became a thing of the past.

We were always trying to come up with the best vegan version we could, and while the vegan Reuben my mother was so happily gobbling up that cold February night was a good one, the recipe below that I’ve just found comes the closest to duplicating that authentic, tangy Reuben taste of any recipe or version of the sandwich that I've tried. (And you don't even need Swiss shreez!) The (somewhat edited) recipe and the photo comes from a wonderful blog called Allison's Gourmet so please visit there for more yummy recipes.) Steve and I made these sandwiches for dinner on Friday, sans avocado, and we both thought they were really and truly right up there among the best sandwiches we've ever had, as Allison says, and they weren't alot of work, either. So, my quest for an authentic-tasting vegan Reuben sandwich is over. I just wish my mother was still here to enjoy one, too.

Onto the recipe...

Here’s what you need to make these delicious grilled vegan tempeh reuben sandwiches...
(Makes 4 sandwiches):

3 tablespoons sunflower or canola oil, divided use
8 ounce block of tempeh, sliced into 8 large, 1/8-inch thick strips
1 large yellow onion, sliced
1 teaspoon garlic, minced
2 bay leaves
1 1/2 teaspoons paprika
3/4 teaspoon caraway seeds
3/4 teaspoon dried dill
1 teaspoon salt
2 tablespoons apple cider vinegar
1 tablespoon tamari
1/4 teaspoon black pepper
3/4 cup water
8 slices bread (any kind of whole-grain bread will work, but it's best on rye)
2 tablespoons non-hydrogenated, non-dairy margarine (Earth Balance recommended)
Vegan Thousand Island Dressing (SEE RECIPE BELOW)
1 cup sauerkraut, drained
2 avocados, mashed or sliced (Optional---sandwiches are excellent even without the avocados)

1) In a large saute pan over medium heat, heat 2 tablespoons sunflower oil and tempeh, browning tempeh on each side. Remove tempeh from the pan and set aside.

2) Add remaining oil and onion. Brown for 5 minutes, stirring occasionally. Return tempeh to the pan (leaving the onions in), and stir in garlic, bay leaves, paprika, caraway, dill, salt, vinegar, tamari, and black pepper. Add water and simmer for 30 minutes or until the water has evaporated and tempeh is infused with flavor and coated with a glaze. Remove bay leaves.

While the tempeh is sautéing, you will have plenty of time to prepare the Thousand Island Dressing: In a small bowl combine the following ingredients: 1/3 cup vegan mayonnaise, 2 tablespoons ketchup, and 3 tablespoons dill pickles, chopped. (I used sweet pickle relish, actually, and it tasted great.)

3) Heat a large skillet over medium-high heat. Spread two slices of bread with margarine. Grill for 3 minutes, until browned on one side only. Repeat for the remaining slices of bread.

4) Between the ungrilled sides of two pieces of toast, layer Thousand Island Dressing, sauerkraut, 2 pieces of tempeh, onions, and avocado. Repeat with remaining ingredients.

This is Natasha, watching over her little brother Sergei, on one of their favorite boxes. You would probably not even think of eating either of them, so please, don't eat beautiful, soft-eyed cows, either. Thank you.

Union Busting Protest

2011-02-16T20:48:00.008-06:00

Here's what we've been doing this week: Participating in the recent protests in downtown Madison against our Governor's attempts to strip our public employee unions of their collective bargaining rights. Steve shot this footage, and you can see me a few times in my "wear red to support public ed" sweater.

Charm and Peridot Are Here!

2011-01-24T19:09:00.016-06:00

We adopted Charm (on the left) and Peridot from the Humane Society the day before New Year's Eve. Seemed like it would be better to have more than one rabbit, and we were really lucky to find such a closely bonded pair. No need to see how they get along---they already love each other! Peridot is Charm's son, and he was just born on August 5th, thus his nickname, for the birthstone of August. That's also Steve's birthstone. The Humane Society staff weren't sure how old Charm is, since she was a stray, but she seems young. We had also met Opal and Gem, another son and daughter of Charm's (she had four babies, though, and we don't know what the other one's name was), but before we could make up our minds, Opal and Gem were adopted, which was actually great news! As an adolescent, Peridot is very active, more so than Charm, and more of a chewer than he hopefully will be as he gets older. The upholstered blue chair that was in the study had to be removed since he found it tasty (the upholstery itself, not the wood). They spend any hours that we are at work or asleep their very large cage, and are out the rest of the time. They snuggle quite alot and groom each other. Of course, they are both fixed, so there's no worrying about baby bunnies.

Can't tell yet if they are going to be more friendly as they get to know us better, never having had rabbits before. They are so different from cats! You can't just scoop them up and cuddle them, or expect them to come and lie on your lap, either. We haven't even tried to pick them up yet. They don't mind us petting them, but not for very long, and they seem scared sometimes, when we do pet them, so we don't push the issue. So far, they just want to hang out in their one room, the study, which is now half theirs. In our small house, this is quite a bit of space to give up, especially since Sara is still inside in our living room until spring, but eventually, they will come out into the rest of the house, and then we can use the study for other pursuits again. (I guess the blue chair will have to go, though!)

We have found that they both love apples, hay and pellets, but neither of them is that crazy about vegetables. One night, they will eat whatever I put down, and then the next, they ignore it. Kale is not acceptable, ever. Cilantro and red leaf lettuce, sometimes. Dandelion greens and carrot greens are acceptable half the time. Cannned pumpkin was nixed. Carrots are okay sometimes---so much for that stereotyp! Basil is a favorite, but after I gave them about half of Steve's frozen-fresh basil he grew this summer, he put the kibosh on that, and I haven't yet seen any at the co-op. We'll be able to grow them anything pretty soon, but spring is a long way away. Still, despite the fact that we're feeding them greens in the middle of winter that came from who-knows-where, in some cases, feeding them is still using fewer resources than feeding our cats meat, local or otherwise. Charm and Peridot are pretty good about using their litterbox, or at least just the cage.

Red-eyed rabbits are harder to adopt out, we've been told, because some people are freaked out by those eyes, and at first, we thought we might be, too. But we pretty quickly started to think that they are actually pretty interesting, just different. Both these little ones definitely have as much expression in their eyes as any other creature we've known. Their red eyes aren't exactly the same, either. Charm is so cute; she looks like a koala, with her dark brown nose and moustache. Peridot's father must have been a larger rabbit; his head is larger and even his face is shaped differently than his mother's. He loves his set of hard plastic baby keys, and tosses them around a bit. He's more of a chewer, and Charm is more of a digger, but they both love gnawing on the willow twigs Steve tromped out into the snow to cut for them, and they demolished a basket we gave them in a few days. Their tunnel is a big favorite, too. (I'll post photos of that, too, once I get some good ones.)

Natasha, unfortunately, is terrified of them, even after a month, but Sergei doesn't mind them at all. They haven't really realized Sara is in the next room yet; they can probably see and hear her, but don't seem curious yet, anyway. We're really hoping that Tasha will get over her fear of them, soon, because the study used to be her favorite room. Here's Sergei not minding Sara checking out the living room. He's such a sweet, mellow boy.

Goodbye to our Sleepy-Eyed Rose (March 22, 2007 - January 21, 2011)

2011-01-22T12:59:00.037-06:00

Losing June last November was difficult, but we certainly didn't expect that we'd be going through this again less than three months later. Our other little red hen, Rose passed away Friday morning. She would have been four years old in March. Rose died of the same infection that took her sister June. So-called "laying" hens are prone to uterine prolapse since they are bred for maximum egg production, but the vet told us these Fallopian tube infections are also pretty common among chickens, too. Last spring, Rose was showing symptoms, but antibiotic treatment was successful, so that she was strong and vital all summer and through the winter holidays. This time, though, the medicines that we gave her after bringing her and Sara inside our warm house weren't enough.

Rose was Sleepy-Eyed Rose sometimes because her right eye was often not quite open. Like all of our chickens, she quickly learned to recognize us and our voices and her own name, or names, I should say, because we called June "Moon in June," and Sara is sometimes Sara Sarasen (for no particular reason), but Rose had several names, responding to Rose-is-Rose, Rosalinda, and Rosie, as well as Sleepy-Eyed Rose, by cocking her head, chittering and twirping.

Rose's favorite treats, bar none, were bread and tomatoes; she would pick those out of a dozen other treats and race off to gobble them down. No piece of bread was too large for Rose, and two weeks before she died, she made her last little flight from the top of the ladder in the coop to get some bread that she saw in my hand. She also loved raspberries, sunflower seeds and kale. As the omega chicken, i.e., third in line out of three, Rose knew her place, and accepted it humbly. June was always her good buddy. Chickens maintain a social order in which every member of the flock has a place and finds a place. At night, Rose and June roosted together on a shelf up in the coop's heated bedroom, and Sara took the perch. These groupings were somewhat, but by no means, rigidly territorial, and they shared the yard the same way. The day's chosen dustbathing spot was first used by Sara, and then Rose and June would roll ecstatically together, sometimes on their backs, pecking at bugs in the dirt, and raking in particles of earth with their beaks. Having come from to us originally from a rather barren coop without hay, and with only a packed, bare dirt run to explore, it was maybe the first chance they had ever had to search for bugs and eat green plants. They would all bask in the sun, their eyes closed, and stretch out their legs, obviously relishing their freedom. Rose and June enjoyed being together, and they would sometimes preen each other.Rose was usually the first one to notice anything out of the ordinary in the yard, and was the first at the door of the coop to come outside, often jumping up several feet into the air and excitedly flapping her wings. Always shy, perhaps due to rough handling, perhaps just due to her own inherent personality, Rose was bolder with June at her side. I will never forget the sight of Rose and June running towards us through the muddy yard with boots of mud clinging to their feet so that they rocked from side to side and lifted their feet extra high.

Karen Davis of United Poultry Concerns writes, "If there is one trait above all that leaps to my mind in thinking about chickens when they are enjoying their lives and pursuing their own interests, it is cheerfulness. Chickens are cheerful birds, quite vocally so, and when they are dispirited and oppressed, their entire being expresses this state of affairs as well. The fact that chickens become lethargic in continuously barren environments, instead of proving that they are stupid or impassive by nature, shows how sensitive these birds are to their surroundings, deprivations and prospects. Likewise, when chickens are happy, their sense of wellbeing resonates unmistakably."

Rest in peace, Rose, cheerful, shy, sensitive girl. We love you, and will always miss you.

In Memoriam: June Chicken (March 22, 2007 - November 5, 2010)

2010-11-21T12:27:00.007-06:00

When we lost our hen Sophia in March of 2009, we were desperate to find hen friends to keep Sara company, so we were lucky to find a couple who were willing to give us two of their two-year old chickens, June and her sister Rose. It was clear that they had no plans to keep any of their chickens much longer, since they had stopped laying regularly, so we know that we'd rescued June and Rose from the slaughterhouse. We knew we could give them a better life, and happily welcomed June and Rose into our family.

June learned to trust us. Shy and nervous when she arrived, she grew into a friendly and affectionate little red hen, the most outgoing of the three sisters. Accepting her role as second in the pecking order, she always seemed to enjoy her life here. She spent her days with Rose and Sara, either in the coop (when snow made it unappealing to them to go out) or roaming the backyard in their large tractor---we move it several times a day and let them out of it as much as we can without exposing them to hawk attacks. (There are LOTS of hawks around here, and as readers of this blog know, we nearly lost Sara to an attack last year.) June was especially fond of dustbathing, and loved to race around the backyard. She loved grated apples and any kind of berry, and sunflower seeds were a favorite, too. When she scampered across the yard and scratched excitedly in the dirt, June reminded us that chickens want only to live safe, peaceful and unrestricted lives, just as we do. Every chicken deserves to live the life June did.

Bird Brain is a Compliment

2010-08-15T15:28:00.029-05:00

After reading this on goveg.com's "Top 10 Reasons Not to Eat Chickens"...

"Several recent studies have shown that chickens are bright animals, able to solve complex problems, demonstrate self-control, and worry about the future. Chickens are smarter than cats or dogs and even do some things that have not yet been seen in mammals other than primates. Dr. Chris Evans, who studies animal behavior and communication at Macquarie University in Australia, says, “As a trick at conferences, I sometimes list these attributes, without mentioning chickens, and people think I’m talking about monkeys.” Dr. John Webster of Bristol University found that chickens are capable of understanding cause and effect and that when chickens learn something new, they pass on that knowledge (i.e., they have what scientists call “culture”). How does your IQ compare to that of a chicken?"

...I decided to try one of the experiments (from the page in the "How does your IQ compare..." link). After all, every time we ask Rose, June and Sarah who the president of the United States is, they answer correctly, with a prolonged "Barrrrrraaaack!" Actually, it's usually June who answers; she's the most vocal, or perhaps just the most political-minded. But I digress...

At any rate, I discovered that our chickens are indeed able to understand that objects still exist even after they are hidden or removed from view, a level of cognition that is actually beyond the capacity of small human children. Bringing the much-beloved tomatoes-and-brown rice treat out to the backyard, I showed Sarah and Rose the food---June was clucking quietly to herself up in the nest box, and thus unavailable---and let them have a little bit, and then hid it away behind a stump. They looked at me for a moment, and then proceeded to ignore me. Sarah started pecking around in the grass for bugs, and Rose began preening herself. But when I tried it a second time, they knew I still had the food! "Look, empty hands," I told them, and busied myself with other things. Nothing doing---weren't forgetting about those luscious bits of August juicy tomato-soaked rice. Of course, I rewarded them with the food. They definitely knew that food was still around.

(Here's a picture of Sarah looking very skeptical, as she often does.)

Here is something else the girls would no doubt like to eat, but can't, as it's up too high for them to reach: a monarch butterfly caterpillar...and the chrysalis that it (or one of its many siblings) formed, hanging on one of the swamp milkweed plants in the backyard.

Wild Blackberry Frozen Vegan Dessert

2010-08-08T14:25:00.006-05:00

We made this for the first time recently to celebrate our friend Carell's return to town. It's incredibly delicious as well as healthy.

Wild Blackberry Ice Creme
From THE WILD VEGAN COOKBOOK by Steve Brill
His website: http://www.wildmanstevebrill.com/Clippings.folder/ForagingForBrambles.html

2-1⁄2 cups soy milk, nut milk, or oat milk
1/2 cup well-drained silken tofu
1/2 cup raw cashews
1⁄4 cup grape seed oil or canola oil
1/4 cup vegetable glycerin
1/4 cup lecithin granules
2 teaspoons vanilla extract
1 teaspoon blackberry extract (optional)
2 teaspoon liquid stevia
1/2 teaspoon salt
2 cups wild blackberries

1. Place all the ingredients, except for 1 cup of the blackberries, in a blender and process until smooth.

2. Strain through a fine mesh strainer to remove the seeds.

3. Chill the mixture (or begin with chilled ingredients) if required by your ice cream machine, pour the mixture into the ice cream machine, and freeze it according to the manufacturer's instructions.

4. Serve topped with the remaining berries.
Makes 5-1⁄2 cups
Serves 6-8

For more fabulous wild blackberry recipes from Steve Brill, go to his website by clicking on the title of this post.

A Beautiful Garden

2010-06-17T10:19:00.050-05:00

I just got back from Minneapolis from the Their Lives, Our Voices conference put on by Compassionate Action for Animals a few days ago. It was so inspiring to spend the weekend with a large group of people who have been awakened to the reality of the lives of farmed animals. I made some wonderful new friends, and we ate great vegan food together, some of it at the conference, and some at area restaurants. Particularly good was The Hard Times Cafe, where I went for my usual morning soymilk cocoa as well as a few meals, one of which included a veganized Banh Mi sandwich. In between the excellent talks, I bought a book, "An Offering of Leaves," by Ruth Lauer-Manenti, a yoga teacher, that is continuing to inspire me, too. It's a collection of dharma talks in the form of stories from her life about her yogic commitment to ahimsa (non-violence), compassion, and service. One of the things mentioned in the book is the importance of sharing insights into the nature of reality with others. This is something that is often difficult for me, as I tend to be so very certain of things. Since I was trained to be a teacher, I'm talkative and like to share my insights, but I don't always listen well to others.

The conference was mostly about animals who are farmed for their flesh, milk and eggs, how they are treated and killed, about how to do vegan outreach, working with the media to get the message out, etc. It's a healing and exciting place to be, and it's easy to see myself taking action when I'm in a supportive place like that, but I always dread a little the going back out into the world to talk about it to other people. I got a chance to do that right away, though, before I even left town.

I was having breakfast at The Hard Times cafe with one of my new friends, when a taxi pulled up outside just as I was thinking it was time I called one. The driver was just stopping to get coffee, but was happy to have a fare. On the way to the bus station in the rain, he asked me what I'd been doing in Minneapolis. It wasn't easy to say that I'd been at an animal rights conference, because I knew the conversation from that point might be very difficult, but I said it, anyway, feeling a little like I was jumping into deep water. He asked me about what he'd seen recently on tv, some undercover slaughterhouse footage, and said he hoped it was unusual. "Don't they usually kill them humanely?" he asked, putting his finger, like a gun barrel, up to his temple.

We talked some more about the (impossible) idea of "humane slaughter," sitting in the cab outside the bus station, watching the rain fall around us. He had very long white hair and sad eyes in a soft, round face. I liked his gentle voice and the fact that he became so interested in what we were talking about that he had nearly had an accident. He said that he would stop anyone who tried to kill his dog for food, and agreed that if a hurt, bleeding calf appeared on the street at that moment, he would want to help however he could. He said he actually doesn't eat much meat because he can't afford it. "But I tried a veggie burger, and it tasted like, well...you know..." That was funny to both of us. He agreed to give Tofurky brats a try, adding that come to think of it, his favorite food is Chinese food "that's mostly vegetables, anyway."

Then he told me that when he was a child his family had a big garden, and his mother grew "just about everything: rhubarb, brussel sprouts, tomatoes, sweet corn. And we had an apple tree and a peach tree, too, next to the garage, and I used to sit up there on the garage roof, waiting for my dad to come home, just eating peach after peach. He'd get so mad, not because he minded me eating the peaches, you know, but because I kept throwing the pits down on the ground, and he didn't want all those peach trees growing up all over the place."

The image of him as a little boy in a beautiful vegetable garden, eating peaches and planting new peach trees, was such a contrast with what we had been talking about, the killing of animals for food, the awful vision of the slaughterhouse, of death and cruelty. Talking with others about what they can do to stop participating in violence against animals can be so difficult, but it can also be transformative. Deciding to step outside of the safe feeling I had carried with me from the conference so soon was hard; there was a conflict in me. It's not something I can do every time the opportunity arises, but I am very grateful that I had the chance to be honest, to listen to this man, and also that he took the chance to listen to me. It's good that I have my opinions, my knowledge. But that knowledge should lead me to communicate with others.

It's Mother's Day

2010-05-09T15:07:00.007-05:00

PETA just launched a TV public service announcement about the filth and cruelty that they exposed in their undercover investigation of a farm that supplies Land O'Lakes. Apparently, some Philadelphia-area viewers were so sickened by the ad that they complained to the TV station that aired it. (If only they'd complained to the Land 0' Lakes perpetrators of the abuse, instead!) As a result, the station pulled the spot after it had aired just twice. Ironic...if it was a worker defiling their milk or butter, they'd watch,and then call Land O'Lakes to complain, and probably even demand a criminal investigation.

Yes, it's graphic, but this is the reality of the dairy industry: Cows are electro-shocked and jabbed with knives, they live in stalls covered in urine and feces, and sick cows collapse and die. There's nothing pretty about the way that animals who are used to produce milk are treated, but those who still eat products made animals' milk (aka dairy products) sometimes prefer to live in blissful ignorance.

You can make this ad go viral! Help by sharing the pulled ad through blogs, e-mails, and any other way you can think of. And if you are still eating the products made with animals' milk, make a commitment to stop. Think about the other mothers on this Mother's Day.

Reality Check

2010-05-02T19:32:00.015-05:00

Here's Natasha surveying The Back Forty (Feet), sitting near the 360 degree swivel table Steve made to put the solar oven on...

Some things have not gone well on our little homestead recently. First, all of our poor bees died over the winter. We don't know if it was because they had mites, or if there wasn't enough sun behind that bee enclosure, or because there weren't enough consecutive warm days this winter for them to get outside to eliminate, or because the hive got too moist inside. Most likely, it was a combination of all of these things. It's not CCD, that's for sure. Lots of people here lost their bees over the hard winter, including our next door neighbor. And it wasn't that they didn't have enough honey. We had not touched their honey, as they wouldn't have had enough if we did. Now we have about a dozen huge jars of it; Steve spent a very sticky Monday in late March with a rented extractor, and then probably another four hours scraping off and cleaning the foundation sheets, (where they build up the comb for their brood), for the new bees, who are doing well. The new spot for the hive is sunnier, behind a beautiful woven willow gate and chicken wire fence that Steve made to keep the cats from getting too close. The willow branches are from our small willow tree that was so heavily damaged by the December blizzard that it had to be taken down; it had to go anyway, so we could put something that will fruit in, but we were still sad to lose it.

Then we discovered that the peach tree has curly blight. Its first year of blossoming, and so beautiful, but it's not well. The treatment, apparently, is to remove lots of blossoms (more than one would usually) so it doesn't use up all its energy fruiting, make sure to give it seaweed extract as fertilizer and water it if there isn't much rain, then treat it organically with copper next spring.

The back yard, frankly, is a mess---on any trip across the yard, you stumble on clods of bare dirt, scraps of wood, fabric, or metal lying about, or holes that the chickens have scratched up for dust-bathing, or half-rotted sheets of cardboard lain down to help curb the invasive ornamentals. It's easy to catch an ankle in a twist of baling twine or a length of cut raspberry cane or multiflora rose that hasn't yet made it to the compost or stick pile yet. I want it to all look nice and tidy, but am realizing that it's hard to do that and still take care of the earth properly. Practicing permaculture is a SLOW process, so we have to wait and make mistakes.

At least the chickens are all happy and healthy, and the bush cherry is blooming beautifully and looks good. We should have cherries this year. I forgot to get a photo of it, as it's in the front, unlike most of our projects. Steve innoculated more shiitake mushroom logs yesterday. The first set, which might not fruit again, were innoculated in the spring of 2007, and we never got around to posting to show how it was done. He bought spores through the mail, and then drilled holes in oak logs that he got from a big old oak that came down on our friend Glenn's land. (Oak is best because the shiitakes prefer it and it holds its bark longer, so it stays moist longer.) The spores get pushed into the holes with the innoculator tool, and then he seals the hole with melted paraffin. Turns out you can use beeswax, too, and we have lots of that, so he'll use it next time. You'll notice he set up shop in the shade; that's so the open holes don't dry out too much while he's working.

Be a Chicken Advocate: The Backyard Chicken Movement

2010-05-01T14:28:00.005-05:00

So many people are excited when they hear that we have chickens, and say, "I want to get chickens, too!" After I tell them about what it's really like to have chickens, they aren't always as enthusiastic. The plain fact is chickens poop alot, and they can be a bit noisy. They also require alot of care---it's not like you can just go away and leave them for a weekend, and they need interesting things to do, especially in the wintertime. They need to get out of their coop and scratch around in real dirt, and that means they will eat most anything that they can get to that you've got growing in the ground. Most vets don't know much about chickens, also, so yours might not live very long. So it's not something I recommend to anyone who doesn't really care deeply about chickens. Of course, if someone wants to get them just for eggs or to kill them to eat them, I don't recommend it.

As interest in "urban farming" spreads across the U.S. many cities are considering letting residents keep backyard flocks of chickens. This can present opportunities for people to learn about chickens and other domestic fowl, but also presents challenges regarding the quality of their care and will likely lead to a huge increase in abandoned birds at local shelters. Many urban centers tolerates wanton breeding, swapping, and backyard slaughter, all of which are being actively promoted by many urban farming enthusiasts. Chicken Run Rescue (CRR) encourages animal advocates to take an active role in advocating for chickens and other domestic fowl as this trend continues. Here's what you can do:

* If you live in Minnesota, sign up as a foster or volunteer with CRR to help care for chickens, consider adopting birds who need homes, and apply for chicken permits. (If you're not a Minnesota resident, contact CRR for more information on groups in your state.)

* Become involved in local policy development and standards of care. Lobby for education requirements for permit applicants. Work to ensure that backyard slaughter is prohibited in your city.

* Advocate for roosters - 50% of hatched chicks are roosters and they are killed outright, abandoned, or sold to slaughter. Oppose limits and bans on roosters.

Every year, domestic fowl, mostly chickens, are impounded by urban Animal Control. These birds are victims of neglect, abuse and abandonment, sometimes used as a source of eggs or intended for slaughter, fighting or ritual sacrifice. Some are the discarded outcome of "nature lessons" for children or after a hobby that no longer holds interest. Don't breed or buy- Adopt! There are never enough homes for displaced animals.

I've always been a big fan of "This American Life" and its producer, Ira Glass, so it was great to find this video, where Ira Glass talks with TV host David Letterman about Chickens and why he (Ira) doesn't eat them anymore!
Ira Glass and David Letterman Talk About Chickens

Help a book about peace and justice surpass Karl Rove on Amazon! It’s here! The March 12 Compassion and Health Campaign

2010-03-12T11:10:00.009-06:00

This is very exciting! I just got an email from Dr. Will Tuttle, the author of "The World Peace Diet." He says, "Today, March 12, we see "The World Peace Diet" climbing quickly on the Amazon best-seller list, up to #1 in Healthy Living, #2 in Ethics, and #26 overall at 8:30 am PST, and I think there's a good chance we can go all the way to the top! How terrific to go past Karl Rove (currently #3) and plant this message of peace and compassion for all life in the larger public consciousness. This is something we can all participate in and make happen!!"

So, if only because you don't want Karl Rove to win, please read on...

This book, "The World Peace Diet," written by Dr. Will Tuttle, helps you understand the power of food, and the cultural mentality reinforced by our practice of food, for many levels of healing-–physical, psychological, cultural, ecological, and spiritual. Many people have called it a revelation, and one of the most important books of the 21st century. Today, Friday, March 12, Dr. Tuttle is coordinating a special offer for this critically-acclaimed book called “The March 12 World Peace Diet Compassion and Health Campaign.” Many generous and caring sponsors have donated excellent bonus gifts and prizes to anyone who buys The World Peace Diet (TODAY ONLY), and anyone who buys the book on March 12 (only) is eligible to receive them. Here’s the link to this special campaign: http://worldpeacediet.org - everything is explained there.

You can help strengthen the forces of health, truth, transparency, sustainability, and peace by buying a copy of The World Peace Diet today (for yourself or to give to a library or friend). It’s a great way to help animals, the Earth, hungry people, and all of us, and spread the message we believe in. Also, "The World Peace Diet" is printed on 100% post-consumer recycled paper and soy-based inks, so the eco-footprint of buying this book is tiny and the eco-benefits enormous. As Julia Butterfly Hill says: “Use 'The World Peace Diet' as a guide to empower yourselves and others in making dietary choices that are powerful beyond what you can possibly imagine.”

"My" Valentine's Day Monkey

2010-02-12T12:57:00.039-06:00

Shopping our way out of the problem of the exploitation of animals (or any other social ill) isn't really as effective as ads would have you believe, but I really do love my new "necklace," a Primate Freedom Tag. It's the same idea as the POW/MIA bracelets from the Vietnam War (and it comes in keychain length, too). Each tag is unique, imprinted with the serial number, gender, date of birth, species, and location of a monkey or nonhuman ape being held for experimentation in one of the United States' Primate Research Laboratories. The tag I chose at random a couple of days ago turned out to be for a male Rhesus Macaque whose birthday is actually tomorrow, February 13. "R98006," who is being held at the Wisconsin National Primate Research Center, was born in 1998, so his 12th birthday will be tomorrow, the day before Valentine's Day.

I wonder---seriously, I really do wonder---if anyone who is "working" with him will notice this fact, and if they do, will they acknowledge it in a way that he can benefit from? Does R98006 get a birthday or Valentine's Day present of love in any form? Maybe a day of freedom from cages? A day off from being tortured? Perhaps (but not likely) someone will feed him one of the 92 types of plant foods (fresh fruits, leaves, seeds, tubers, and bark) that wild rhesus monkeys normally consume. If he's being kept in a cage alone, does he get to spend his birthday with other macaques? In the wild, living in areas that range from near desert to snowy mountain heights, macaque troops number around 200, on average. Of course, macaques used in research have difficulty socializing normally after living years in isolation---they develop neurotic problems like hair-plucking or self-mutilation---so R98006 might not be able to enjoy the company of another macaque any more.

So the next thing I need to do is contact the Wisconsin National Primate Research Center, where R98006 is being held. He may not even be alive any longer, but if he is, maybe they will tell me how he spent his 12th birthday. I'll ask them to tell me how he's being used, if he's caged alone or with other macaques, what the lab's future plans are for him. I hate thinking about all of this, but doing nothing and feeling hopeless about the situation doesn't do me or R98006 any good. He could live another three to eight years, and the time he may or may not have left will likely be just as nasty and brutish as the first 12 years have been.

For me, wearing a Primate Freedom Tag and writing to ask about "my" monkey, is a reminder not only of the hard realities of life for captive primates in research labs, but also of the hope that experimenting on them could become illegal in our lifetime. To learn more, please visit the Primate Freedom Project website.

(Posted by Marina)

VegInspiration. Feeding the Shadow

2010-01-19T20:00:00.003-06:00

Will Tuttle's website has a daily inspiration for going vegan. The words and photos are always beautiful and positive. Thought I'd share today's "VegInspiration":

VegInspiration. Feeding the Shadow

Posted using ShareThis

(Posted by Marina)

“VEGANIC” GROWERS TAKE THE ANIMAL PRODUCTS OUT OF ORGANICS

2010-01-11T16:27:00.008-06:00

Written by Lee Hall, and reprinted from "Action Line," the Friends of Animals' magazine, 777 Post Road, Darien, Ct 06820.

Climate meltdown is the animal farm’s real nemesis. How do agribusiness CEOs react? Some promise to reduce emissions by using new kinds of animal feeds. Others boast of plans to convert methane into electricity. If it’s a small company, perhaps the owners are describing the animals the buy, breed and kill as part of a natural ecology.

Animal activists have joined in, trying to improve husbandry practices or promote supposedly sustainable animal farms. “Incremental steps!” they say. But likely in the wrong direction.

In 1944, when just over two billion people occupied the planet and before the era of mass-scale industrial farming, Donald Watson and a few like-minded “non-dairy vegetarians” developed the vegan platform: Truly idyllic and sustainable animal farms didn’t exist in the early 1900s, and never will. Watson was a vegan-organic gardener -- steering clear of animal manure, bone meal, feathers or blood, instead using compost for fertility. We haven’t all reached this level of dedication in our own lives, and yet this would seem the best example of a model to set forth, so people know what to strive for. And today, there is an international network of vegan-organic farms. So why aren’t more animal and environmental advocates following -- or at least lending their support to -- their refreshing example?

In the 1970s, Peter Singer’s "Animal Liberation" (followed by "Animal Factories," authored with Jim Mason in 1980, and most recently followed by Singer’s and Mason’s "The Way We Eat") described large animal processing plants as horrifying places; but Singer has steadfastly maintained that breeding and killing can co-exist with the idea of treating animals fairly. In other words, Singer appears to believe that the animal factory, not animal farming per se, constitutes the ethical problem.

For humane reasons and also due to the “environmental costs of intensive animal production” Singer says “we need to cut down drastically on the animal products we consume.”[1]

But does that mean a vegan world? That’s one solution, but not necessarily the only one. If it is the infliction of suffering that we are concerned about, rather than killing, then I can imagine a world in which people mostly eat plant foods, but occasionally treat themselves to the luxury of free-range eggs, or possibly even meat from animals who live good lives under conditions natural for their species, and then are humanely killed on the farm.[2]

Farmers, restaurants and grocery chains have seized the opportunity. Whole Foods Market claims “to assist and inspire ranchers and meat producers around the world to achieve a higher standard of animal welfare excellence while maintaining economic viability.” Singer, together with an alarming number of animal-protection groups, endorsed Whole Foods’ Animal Compassion Foundation, which turned out to be quite lucrative for this internationally expanding corporation.

Celebrity restaurateur Wolfgang Puck was bathed in accolades by two wealthy animal-protection societies for buying only “sustainable seafood,” for indicating “interest” in processing plants that use a gas slaughter method, and for only serving chicken and turkey flesh from farms that comply with “progressive animal welfare standards.”[3] Red flag! Advocacy should never be about making exploitation appear to work decently.

It gets weirder still. In early 2009, Worldwatch Institute, a Washington, DC think tank known for its reports connecting animal agribusiness with climate change, announced a partnership with the Stonyfield Dairy company. The group’s communications director[4] told me, “ Stonyfield buys dairy from conscientious farmers and is constantly pushing those farmers to improve.” The advertising draw? This dairy producer has animal welfare in mind. The reality? Stonyfield uses animals for profit. The planet gets used up in the process. Dairy cows, who live longer than beef cattle and are overfed to stay as productive as possible, are associated with high methane emissions and feed demand.

Greenwashing is an international phenomenon. A few months ago, a British television station the documentary Pig Business, made by Tracy Worcester, who has worked on behalf of Friends of the Earth. Brimming with disturbing images (some of which were excised for the television audience), the film decries pig crates, rough handling, and cheap meat. Worcester points out that foreign pigflesh -- from the US-based multinational Smithfield, for example -- would fail British expectations of handling and housing standards. The film’s promoters laud small farms and local butchers.

“ I think we all fundamentally like pigs, don't we?" Worcester asks. B ut Worcester will eat bacon, the Telegraph newspaper assures its readers -- as long as it’s from “really, really happy pigs.”[5]

Those pigs aren’t happy, dear readers; they’re dead. Meanwhile, the owners of the supposedly happy animals are pressing free-living beings out of former wildlands. Moreover, animal agribusiness is notorious for its heavy use of fuel to transport crops and animals.

To get around that, we’re told we can be “locavores” -- buying dairy, eggs, and animal flesh as well as vegetables from area farmers or hobby farms, or dining at restaurants with local sources. But even Forbes has run an opinion piece questioning these ideas, citing a study by Rich Pirog of the Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture that connects transport to just 11% of food's carbon footprint.[6] “No matter how you slice it,” the comment observes, “it takes more energy to bring meat, as opposed to plants, to the table. It takes 6 pounds of grain to make a pound of chicken and 10 to 16 pounds to make a pound of beef.”

The conclusion? “ If you want to make a statement, ride your bike to the farmer's market. If you want to reduce greenhouse gases, become a vegetarian.”

Vegan-organic (also known as “veganic”) growers believe we can live without animal farms -- even without the by-products of animal agribusiness. ( The fruits and vegetables we know as organic are usually grown on farms that raise animals or use animal manures and slaughter by-products to fertilize their soil.) Some think a world without animal agribusiness isn’t possible, and call veganic growers idealists. Who’s right?

To answer the question, we could start by asking if continued reliance on animal farms is really sustainable. Domesticated animals must eat, and feed crops are invasive -- planted where great prairies and dense rainforests once flourished. Animal husbandry also puts tremendous pressure on the world’s water. Veganic growers are genuine liberators, freeing the land from grazing and fodder production, taking no more water than necessary, avoiding pollution, and returning part of the harvest to other beings and to the land. They’re cultivating respect, shielding and celebrating the freedom that’s still possible for animals who live in local ecologies.

Of course, vegan-organic growers are idealists; they hope to show society how to live without relying on a system that treats animals as products. But they will in turn point out that organic growing can’t spread much further as it is now, because the manure it uses needs to come from somewhere, and grazing land is already pushing out the rainforests. Trying to change animal agribusiness in increments -- say, by switching to “cage-free” eggs or supporting free-range concepts -- means forgetting that Earth’s space is finite, and the spread of pasture-based farming uproots free-living beings.

Brian Graff of the North American Vegetarian Society says supporting veganics is “not about reaching some notion of perfection.” Graff explains: “Either buying or growing your own vegan organics is just another avenue open to us to minimize our exploitation of the earth and its creatures.”

So if you’re fortunate enough to have veganic farmers in your area, you’ll be doing something important by supporting them. If you already cultivate a garden, seriously consider avoiding the use of manure and other animal derived products. For more about both of these ideas, check out the work of the Veganic Agriculture Network at http://www.goveganic.net.

FOOTNOTES

1] Quoted in Rosamund Raha’s “Animal Liberation: An Interview with Professor Peter Singer” in "The Vegan" (quarterly magazine of the Vegan Society; Autumn 2006), at page 19.

2] Ibid.

3] Farm Sanctuary joined the Humane Society of the United States in urging advocates to thank Wolfgang Puck for issuing these claims.

4] E-mail from Darcey Rakestraw dated 6 Jan. 2009.

5] Louise Gray and Charlie Brooks, “Marchioness of Worcester: The Aristocrat Standing Up for Pigs” (27 Jun. 2009).

6] James E. McWilliams , in “ The Locavore Myth” in "Forbes" (issue dated 3 Aug. 2009), states: “A fourth of the energy required to produce food is expended in the consumer's kitchen. Still more energy is consumed per meal in a restaurant, since restaurants throw away most of their leftovers.”

To read this article online at the Friends of Animals website, go to http://www.friendsofanimals.org/actionline/winter-2009_10/movement-watch.php

Year of snow, year of plenty

2009-12-30T11:42:00.010-06:00

We got quite a bit of snow here a couple of weeks ago, a true blizzard. Nearly all the snow you see here fell in one day and night. The chicken tractor is pretty much buried---not that they're using it right now, anyway. You can barely see the "bee corner," but there is a hive there! We make sure the snow is cleared away from the entrance of the hive so that the bees have ventilation and can take a "cleansing flight" if they want to. Like cats, they are very tidy and won't deposit waste inside their hive.

Sara, Rose and June were snug in Sophia House during the storm. They have two water sources, one down in the coop that freezes and needs to be changed often, and another up in their bedroom. That one doesn't freeze because of a little heater that also helps keep them warm at night. just before the weather turned, Steve moved the coop closer to the house and into the best spot to catch solar warmth; he also fully insulated and shingled it, too.

It seems this little willow tree in our backyard lost a few of its largest limbs, carrying the weight of all that snow that fell so quickly...

As the storm was winding down, we went snowshoeing by the creek...

and even did a little yoga along the way:

We saw this evidence of the beavers that live somewhere near by. Several years ago, on a midnight canoe on the creek, we heard one tailslap the water, and barely caught a glimpse.

This mourning dove was perching much closer to the ground than she normally would, with so much snow coating everything; she's only about 6 feet off the ground here.

Cold and icy though it is, it's a beautiful time of year, too, with the wheel of the year having just turned on the Solstice, and the light returning now. And when it seems there's too much snow, we remind each other of the saying, "A year of snow, a year of plenty," meaning that since there is less chance of the fruit trees blossoming too soon and facing a killing frost, fruit will be more plentiful. We'll be outside less, but we have some down time now to organize and order seeds. Marina is taking a permaculture webinar course online. And soon it will be time to start seedlings! Happy New Year!

Let's Not Go to the Police Dog Demonstrations Tonight

2009-12-29T09:45:00.016-06:00

Government or Life?

A holiday letter to send Heifer International

2009-12-19T18:19:00.004-06:00

Their programs might look good at first glance (to a non-vegan, anyway), but there's nothing animal friendly or even sustainable about Heifer International, or any of the other "animal gift" schemes popularly given as holiday presents. You might like to send this letter, too. Feel free to use this one, or edit it to suit your own writing style.

****

Heifer International
P.O. Box 8058
Little Rock, AK 72203-8058

Dear Heifer International,

I am writing to ask that you please remove my name from your mailing list, and that any gift donations given in my name be refused.

For over 50 years, vegetarian organizations and animal advocates have criticized farming animals as inefficient, expensive and environmentally destructive, and livestock donations as especially inhumane and ineffective in fighting poverty as well as being environmentally unsound. Animal gift schemes seek to persuade people of the poor world that their best nutritional interests are served by buying into modern farmed animal production processes, but with that comes an addiction to high capital input systems, additional stress on precious water supplies, environmental destruction, a loss of control over the means of production, bad health, cruelty to animals, and more human poverty and malnourishment.

The "donation" of animals to other countries amounts to nothing more than a thinly veiled attempt to spread dairy and meat consumption to new parts of the world, with detrimental consequences for the health of those nations and disastrous consequences for the animals. Many recipients of gift animals are unable to feed them to maturity, let alone feed and raise any offspring, and all farmed animals require large quantities of water, shelter from extremes, and veterinary care, resources typically in short supply in impoverished areas.

I hope that Heifer International will consider restructuring itself to join in reforestation efforts instead of bringing a cruel, unhealthy, environmentally destructive diet to cultures that are primarily vegetarian and creating a nightmare animal welfare scenario.

Please remove my name from your mailing list, and do not process any gift donations given in my name. Thank you.

Sincerely,

That's Soooo Madison!

2009-11-26T08:03:00.021-06:00

We had a lovely surprise yesterday: Steve's beautiful purple photo, "Walking the Rails," won an Honorable Mention in the "That's Soooo Madison!" photo contest, and publication in the "Isthmus" newspaper this week! It's online, too, of course. Click on the title to go to the link---it's the 10th photo in the slideshow. (That's me falling off the rails into the sunset in late winter of 2005) This is the second time Steve has had a photo published in Isthmus; the last time was in their 2008-09 "Annual Manual," a guide to Madison. (That photo was one he took of himself skiing in some very nice fluffy snow, by the Monona Terrace Convention Center at night in February, 2008.) If it's online, we don't know where it is...

To see another of Steve's prize-winning photos published on the Internet, (and find out how I got the nickname Goatgirl!), scroll down the sidebar here to the right, and click on Lance Armstrong at around 6:31pm. That photo was taken in 2001, and won second prize in humanclock.com's photo contest in 2002.(The first prize winner was of a little girl and a very attractive jellicle (aka black and white) cat, and we had to concede that it was more worthy of first prize.) The prize was a very nice postcard of the Adelaide Railway Station that Dave, the talented, funny and nice creator of humanclock.com, sent us from from Broome, in western Australia, as he was biking 4,000 miles crosscountry.

Happy Tofurky Day to everyone, especially the turkeys! If you're in Madison, come to the free vegan Thanksgiving dinner sponsored and prepared by Alliance for Animals .

Listening to The Voices

2009-11-21T10:14:00.027-06:00

Yesterday morning, I was busy getting ready to leave the house for my annual mammogram. This week was the five year anniversary of my cancer diagnosis, so I was a bit preoccupied. An apple crisp was baking in the oven, and I had to keep on eye on it as well as on the cats and the chickens, at the same time making sure I had all the lists and bags and such that I needed for the several errands I planned to run afterwards. Then I looked out the front window and saw Tina, one of our neighbors, kneeling on the bike path in the park across the street, holding her hand out to a slender, medium-sized black dog. I remembered Steve's telling me yesterday that he thought there might be a stray dog in the park. The dog had fled as soon as he came out on the porch, and he'd been afraid to pursue her; he didn’t want to frighten her towards the busy street to the north, half a block away.

Watching Tina coax the dog with little luck, I thought about what I should do, one eye on the clock. Here came another neighbor, Leila, with her beagle mix, Bonnie, safely on her leash, as always. The black dog wagged her tail, sniffing Bonnie, but raced far away as soon as either human made a move towards her. I thought to myself, "Well, she's in good hands, I don’t need to do anything. They’ll take care of it." But I kept coming back to the window. The black dog was soon alone in the park again. I called the police dispatch number, and was told someone would call me back. Nearly 45 minutes passed. I went outside with an open can of cat food, but the black dog wouldn't come within 100 feet of me. She skittered about the park, shy, aimless and disoriented, and ever closer to the busy street. I felt disoriented, too; I don't have much experience with dogs, and didn't really know what to do. She was just close enough for me to see her dark collar and tag, but it was obvious I wouldn’t be able to get ahold of her. When bicyclists came down the path, she hid in the bushes. I left the cat food at the foot of a tree in the park, and went back home.

Washing up, brushing my teeth, gathering my knapsack, and so on, I kept thinking: I should call the 24-hour emergency clinic for animals. Why wasn’t exactly clear. They're a vet clinic, after all, not a clearinghouse for lost pets. I made a few more phone calls, hoping to find someone else, (read: a Dog Person), who could come over and catch her. No luck. But finally I listened to that little hovering, pesky cloud of a thought telling me to call the emergency animal clinic. "I don't really know why I'm calling you," I told Lori, the woman who answered. Her voice sounded puzzled and curious, and she said, "Where do you live?" I was already puzzled, and then I got curious, too---I told her where I was, and Lori said, "Is it a black dog?" A man who lived just a few blocks away from us had told them he'd lost his young black female dog. I called this man, Rick, and somehow, he was at home, hadn’t yet left for work. He exclaimed excitedly, “Try calling her! Her name is Baby Girl!" While we were still on the phone, I went out and called. “She stopped running,” I told him. Within a few minutes, Rick was pulling up in his black car, and running into the park towards the black dog, calling her name, and she was leaping into his arms and licking his face. I'm so glad I listened to that little voice!

Baby Girl looks pretty much like this dog, whose name is Rogue, who is one of the dogs up for adoption at the Dane County Humane Society.

(Posted by Marina)

Pollinator's Eye View of Our Back Forty (Feet)

2009-10-06T18:49:00.033-05:00

Before it gets too cold and snowy for photos of the lush green garden to start feeling like a distant memory, here's a bird's or pollinator's eye view of our backyard, aka the Back Forty Feet, a photo taken in late July, in full summer bloom. You'll see the chicken tractor over on the left, along with a wheelbarrow full of various invasive plants. Our year-old peach tree (which has doubled in size and produced only teensy little inedible fruits this year but should bear good fruit next year) is blocking the view of the chicken coop, which was in a good "summer" location at that point---not in too much sun and so as to catch the breeze. Keeping chickens cool is important. It now has wheels and can be moved more easily around the yard. Mulch under the peach tree is hay from the chicken coop.

There aren't as many flowers in our yard as we'd like, but there just isn't that much sun; we hope to add more eventually, though. There are stands of day lilies that threaten to take over, underneath the clothesline, mostly; Steve's cousin Matt worked very hard to dig alot of them out this summer. Here you can see Joe Pye weed in flower towering over the red raspberry bushes, just to the left of the chicken coop; the black and purple raspberries are to its right, and also over by the fence on the left side of the yard, just west of the fern garden. Back in the far corner on the left is the compost heap, with the shiitake mushroom logs nearby. (This winter, we'll try to devote a whole posting to the great 2007 innoculation of the mushroom logs.) Wild grape and a trumpet vine cover the back fence; domestic grape vines have been planted on the fence near the clothes line, but won't be producing for a while yet. You can also see lots of wild grape vines twining around the phone line that comes from the house (bottom right corner), but the oyster mushroom logs next to the garage (bottom left corner) are out of sight. The invasive wild rose bush at the far end of the clothesline posts will be replaced next year with a native rosebush that doesn't spread wildly and has good quality rosehips that are a good source of Vitamin C. We made a nice rosehip syrup a few years ago, and it was delicious. Somewhere back by the chicken coop and over by the oyster mushroom logs are two hazelnuts, just leafy twigs right now, but within a year or two, they should be producing well. Steve keeps a little herb garden in the area by the back steps, which you can't see (bottom left corner). We wondered for quite a while what all the vines covering the silver maple snag were, and finally identified them: While there is the lovely red and green Virginia Creeper, there's also (ack!) poison nightshade and some other pretty but invasive vine in our bioregion, so we've been removing those. Tricky without pulling other things out... On the bottom right border along the fence there is a forsythia bush, also solomon's seal, bloodroot, may apples, wild ginger (which we have yet to try), bluebells, jack in the pulpit, and at the foot of the snag are crocus and trilliums.

And what's in the garden, which is the whole bottom right quarter of the photo? Zucchini, sweet potatoes, squash, Swiss chard, broccoli, and probably some other things. Our other gardens plot is a community plot a couple of blocks away, and that's where Steve grows potatoes, tomatoes, peas, sweet corn, peppers, onions, and other veggies. The garden deserves its own post...in the winter, when we've got more time...

In the other (far right) corner of the yard is the honeybee hive, our newest addition! When our friend Eric, who knows about these things, moved away at the end of June, he sold us one of his honeybee hives, and our neighbors have one of the others, just on the other side of the fence. Steve built this little fenced-in corner to protect curious felines, and the screened portion is so the bees' flightpath isn't blocked by the fence. They've made honey, but there's only enough for them for now; we hope that we can safely share some of it next year. From Eric, we've learned that honey bees aren't as important as pollinators as native bees, like mason and leafcutter bees. These wild bees help increase crop yields. If you look very carefully, you'll see just to the right of the silver maple snag, high up on the fencepost, a wooden block that is nearly hidden in the leaves. This is one of our two homes for leafcutter bees in our backyard. For more information about how you can help native bee populations and become active in pollinator conservation, go to The Xerces Society for Invertebrate Conservation's webpage on pollinator conservation:
http://www.xerces.org/pollinator-conservation/
Yes, I am lame and lazy for not making this a link, but you can also click on the post title to go directly to that page.

Sara Chicken's Favorite Biryani with Seitan

2009-08-02T11:02:00.013-05:00

The solar-oven-baked pizza from Friday was particularly delicious, but I was too hungry to wait and get a photo of it! So here's what we had for dinner last night, recipe upon request of our honored guest, Bryan, who is trying very hard to go vegetarian. It's Sara Chicken's favorite biryani, and ours, too. Lots of spicy flavor without any heat, pretty easy to prepare, and heats up well. I have no idea where Steve found this recipe, but we've made it for years. We haven't tried freezing it, but that might work okay... For dessert, we had delicious frozen desserts, quite a splurge: One was chocolate hemp milk and chocolate & hazelnut coconut milk. Both were incredibly good, but I'd have to say that the hemp milk dessert had a slight edge in richness. I'd hate to have to pick, though...

Sara Chicken's Favorite Biryani with Seitan

2 c. brown rice
1 large onion, diced
2 T. olive oil (divided use)
1 lb. drained seitan, "chicken style"
1 c. peas (frozen is okay, thaw if so, or use snow peas)
2/3 c. almonds, toasted
1/2 c. raisins
1/2 cup biryani curry paste
10 oz. chopped tomatoes (canned or fresh)
3 3/4 c. boiling water

Preheat oven to 375.

Cover brown rice with cold water and soak for 20 minutes. Drain and set aside.

In small pan, saute half of the diced onion in 1 T. of the oil until soft/golden. Add the drained rice and saute 3-4 minutes. Set aside. (You could use the solar oven for this step, too.)

In a big frying pan or wok, saute the remaining onion in the remaining 1 T. of oil until soft/golden. Add the seitan and cook for a few minutes, stirring occasionally. Stir in peas, almonds, raisins, biryani paste and tomatoes.

Combine this mixture with the rice mixture in a Dutch oven. Add the boiling water, stir, cover, and bake for 60-75 minutes, depending on your oven/the sun. IMPORTANT: CHECK WATER AT 45 MINUTES. If you need to add more, use boiling water.

Serves 6-8.

A busy summer

2009-07-31T11:18:00.079-05:00

It's been too long since I've posted anything, but then, that's the irony of it...once the weather warms up, it's more of a challenge to find the time to spend on the "living in tune with the seasons" blog because the outside is singing so many songs that we need to join in on! Sometimes easier said than done, for sure. Right now, I'm feeling sort of grumpy because the solar oven (a birthday present for Steve's last birthday) is taking so long to cook my pizza. Next time, I'll try to remember to set it up sooner, so the oven has more time to heat up. This is my first solo solar oven experience, and I'm still getting the hang of it. (I've only had to call Steve once, and only knocked the whole thing over once!) It's actually pretty easy once you accept that it's going to take a little longer, and you need to work with the sun and the clouds. And it's good for making candles as well as cooking! These pictures were taken back in May; Steve's melting down candle remnants(which we get off the curb, mostly, or cheap from yard sales), using a baking powder can as a mold (and an old pot for the melting of the candles). I love that creamy vanilla color. We solar-baked chocolate chip cookies for my stepfather Andy's visit in June.

He came and visited us on Father's Day, which was great, as he has his own kids and grandkids back in Omaha, so we felt very honored. He rode here for 8 hours on his motorcycle in 90 degree heat, and he will be 86 in November!

We've had an extraordinarily cool and dry summer (I'm wearing socks and jeans and it's July 31st??), but have gotten some monstrously big shiitakes, anyway:

Even Natasha was SHOCKED!! (Sergei, uncharacteristically, had nothing to say.)

And the chicken girls (l to r, Sara, June and Rose) were more than a little intrigued. (They love shiitakes.)

I have been doing alot of yoga (keeps me happy and healthy) and drove a tractor for the first time when we visited Steve's family down in Illinois for the annual birthday May/June birthday celebrations...

...and Steve started working on the roof again this month. The cupola is not only beautiful, but contains a whole-house fan, which is the next best thing to air conditioning.

This photo is actually from last fall. The cupola is finished now, and The Roofing Crew is focusing on the north side of the roof. (We're getting lots of help from lots of friends.) This will be the hard side, with two chimneys and two skylights, as well as various solar implements (like a hot water heater), but we think the whole thing will be finished before the weather turns cold.

In late June, we took some time off to camp out for a night and see a great evening production of Shakespeare's "Winter's Tale" at American Players Theatre (an outdoor theatre) with friends Joyce, Joan and Ellen, and hung out at an art fair after stuffing our faces at The General Store in Spring Green. No photos from breakfast, sorry, but here we all are on the front porch of TGS:

As fans of Claire's fabulous blog, "Here's What You're Missing" will know, we had a few of Steve's old workmates from North Farm Co-op (a natural foods distributor that went belly up in the early 21st century) for a potluck reunion. The challenge was to bring a dish made from food from North Farm, though lo these many years. We still had some NF dried seaweed, so Steve made a pasta salad with roasted red peppers, and the centerpiece on the table was a heart-shaped bottle of bath oil I got at the NF outlet store. Here, Gary, Alan and Mike try to remember just exactly how many pallets of outdated soy smoothies the employees were allowed to take home every night...

And now for a completely gratuitious food photo! It's a stir fry that we made this spring, with mung bean sprouts, carrots from last year's garden, whole grain rice noodles, but I can't recall now any of the other things that were in it...

Cats at MAPPAR: Midwest Animal and Pot-Bellied Pig Rescue

2009-05-06T19:31:00.010-05:00

Today, I visited MAPPAR, Midwest Animal and Pot-Bellied Pig Rescue, which is about an hour north of Madison. It was the first time I've been there, and somehow, despite the name, I was surprised to learn that they have animals other than pot-bellied pigs! My friend Betsy and I were there to visit two older dogs, Cap and Winnie, who recently went to live at MAPPAR after their human, our friend Helene passed away. Of course, while Betsy hung out with the dogs, I had to go and see the cats. I didn't bring a camera today, but I wanted to share photos from the MAPPAR website of some of the cats there who are available for adoption:

This is Ms. Kitty. A fine and queenly little tortoiseshell who is front declawed, she waited until I peeled the other cats off my lap and came over to her.

Floyd is a beautiful boy, probably a Siamese mix. He was more than happy to pile on my lap with two other cats, and didn't even mind when he ended up on the bottom of the pile.

Silver Fox looks alot like Floyd, but is darker and a little bolder. He loved being petted, and gave kisses, too.

These are all older cats, who aren't as easy to find homes for. After having fostered a kitten for only three days and nights recently, I'm inclined to say that unless you've got as much energy as a kitten, an older cat is probably going to be a better companion!

MAPPAR is trying to raise more funds to build a bigger, better cat building than the one they have. Although that one is pretty good, full of treats, toys, cat trees, places to hide, etc., they would like to have one with an outdoor area for the cats, like this:

Please visit the MAPPAR website (click on the title of this post) to find out more about adopting an animal (if you live in southern Wisconsin), or to make a donation to help care for them and finish the new cat building (no matter where you live!). I hope to go to MAPPAR again this weekend with a camera and lots of cat treats, and I'll post more photos after that visit.

(Posted by Marina)

Permaculture Art: Arborsculpture

2009-04-19T11:06:00.022-05:00

Okay, earthsip is supposed to be an ad-free blog, and this posting is KIND of an ad, but if the means are the ends... Being a reader of the Celtic Tree Oracle (aka Ogham), I (Marina) have a particular affinity for trees, and maybe that's why I find arborsculpture so appealing. Arborsculpture is also permaculture in action, an ancient art form now enjoying a resurgence. Arborsculptor Richard Reames shapes the trunks of young, flexible saplings so that they grow into chairs, fences, gazebos, garden borders, benches, tables, trellises, or earth art. Some of the trees are left in the ground, to continue as living artwork or furniture, like the kitty perch, above, and some are cut after being grown into the shape that's needed, like this chair:
While some of these creations are very elaborate, and take decades to grow, you can also do something simpler. I couldn't find a good enough photo, but I particularly like the living table and chairs grown of willow, and still rooted in the ground. (And no, they apparently don't grow too big to continue using them as furniture.) As Reames says, "Everyone with sun and a container of soil can grow trees into the shapes of their desires." Arborsculpture is sustainable, cheap, unique, and beautiful, as well as an example of several permaculture principles---the First Principle of Conservation, since the use of energy would be minimal and you would use only what you need. It also illustrates the Second Principle, Stacking Functions, getting many yields (outputs) from one element (thing) in your system, because as long as the tree is growing in the earth, it can provide shade, shelter wildlife, be the building material itself, be a wind break, fertilize the soil, prevent erosion, raise the water table, and sequester CO2. Depending on your available time and skills, it could also be an example of the Third Principle, Appropriate Scale, where what we design is on a human scale and can be done with the available time, skills, and money that you have. And practicing arborsculpture will certainly help anyone learn the patience necessary to figuring out what your particular spot on earth needs. As Reames says, "The entry price to practicing this art is to check your speed at the garden gate and enter the slow motion world of tree time."

To learn more about arborsculpture and Reames' techniques, or to sign up for one of his classes, or purchase his most recent book, "Arborsculpture- Solutions for a Small Planet," check out his website or his blog His website includes a fascinating, well-done video on the history of arborsculpture, as well as instructions on how to grow a living chair and a living fence.

(But please don't do this with your bicycle! :))

Rose and June set up coop-keeping with Sara---and a Hawk Attack

2009-04-12T10:29:00.031-05:00

Happy Ostara/Easter/Passover/whatever holiday you may celebrate! We're just relieved that Sara is still here to play her part in the Easter animal parade (figuratively speaking, of course). Yesterday, this red-tailed hawk attacked Sara, and although we're still not entirely sure why, it seems to have been scared off when we heard the terrible commotion, and came outside. (Either that, or Sara fought back?) The hawk didn't go far, though---just flew up to the top of what's left of our silver maple (maybe 14 feet high?), and didn't even flinch when Steve tossed sticks up in that direction to try to spook it. S/he still was eyeing up Rose and June, who had wisely taken refuge under a forsythia bush.

Sara lost quite a few feathers in the attack---the hawk seems to have been systematically plucking her right underwing---and she was pretty shaken up at first, but now she seems otherwise okay.

There's a nick in her skin from the plucking (it hurts to even think about it!) but she didn't bleed, thankfully, and her feathers will come in again. Lesson learned by the humaniamals. Even in the city, hawks are hungry. So the days of our chickens wandering freely around the backyard are over. Their coop is plenty big for the three of them, of course. Still, we hate the idea of keeping them in a cage, even if it is one that's roomy and moveable, as their "chicken tractor" will be. We need to keep them safe, but it does make you think about what it means to keep what is essentially a prey animal safe from predators in the outdoors...

Otherwise, Rose and June have been settling in nicely to their new living situation with Sara. Sara's still boss chicken, and Rose, who is smaller, doesn't get as much of whatever there is to get, but...she has a secret treat source that Sara and June don't know about! Steve cut back the wild grape vine, and showed it to her, so now she drinks the sap that drips from it, as you can see from the photo.
It's still pretty brown and bare here in south central Wisconsin; we're just south of the north woods, after all. It sure will be nice when more greenery emerges. Things have at least dried out a little, though, the chickens can enjoy dust baths, and they aren't wearing boots of mud. (Wish we had a photo of that to post, because they look really funny running towards you with their mud "clodhoppers"! Next time it rains, maybe...)

Crocuses are coming up, though...

The Story of Sophia: The Luckiest Chicken in the World

2009-03-23T14:38:00.038-05:00

We lost our little "yellow bird," last Thursday, March 19th. Sophia (full name: Sophia Fezziwig Chicken) was always enthusiastic, always the first one out of the coop in the morning, chirping and clucking, She never slowed down until sundown told her it was time to go up to roost. That day was no exception. When I went out in the backyard to check on them in early in the afternoon, though, Sophia couldn't stand on her own, and while she didn't appear to be in any pain, she wouldn't eat even her favorite noodles nor drink any water. The kind veterinarian at the Emergency Clinic for Animals was unable to save her, and she passed away that evening.

The vet is still trying to figure out exactly what happened, because their grain mix (18 different grains!) is 18% protein---the % that our research indicated was appropriate---but the condition of Sophia's liver seems to indicate she was eating too much protein. Why is now the question. Moreover, she also may have died from that problem, plus a birth defect, as well as an acute condition such as having eaten moldy birdseed from the outdoor birdfeeder, or even from the supply in the coop. The small container in the coop that they ate from had probably not gotten eaten down to the bottom during the winter, and just a few days before, it had gotten knocked over. She might have eaten the feed that was at the bottom, which may have grown aflatoxin (which is about as dangerous as it sounds, both to chickens and humans). In other words, it might have been our fault that she died. Needless to say, we want to do everything we can to fix the problem, and make sure it doesn't happen again; we've moved the coop and cleaned everything, taken away the birdfeeder, swept up all the old grain, etc. Sara seems to be fine, but is now on a special diet---cooked brown rice, leafy greens and veggies and fruits only---and upon the advice of the vet, we'll be giving her milk thistle tincture to cleanse her liver, just in case.

The three nights that Sara spent alone were clearly distressing ones for her. During the day, she spent much of her time standing under the rosebush in the corner, not doing much, and sought us out whenever she could; she also didn't want to go in the coop at night. The second evening, I was sitting with her for a bit, and she jumped up on my lap, something she'd never done before---never being as affectionate as Sophia---and then started climbing up onto my shoulder and head. I realized that this was like what she used to do with Sophia, when the two of them would scramble over one another in bedding down for the night, deciding who was going to get comfortable. Clearly, we needed to find Sara more hen sisters, and fast!

Happily, yesterday some generous folks who had more chickens than they needed gave us two Rhode Island Red hens, 2 year-olds. These folks hadn't named their chickens; it feels funny not to call them something, but we're waiting to see what they're like first. Both are somewhat shy and nervous. They're almost identical in appearance, a beautiful deep red chestnut brown color, but the larger hen has a black feather in her tail and is a little bolder, and the other has lighter colored feathers at the ends of her wings, and is the shyer of the two. Unlike Sara and Sophia (Aracauna chickens), they have big, floppy combs and full wattles, and their combs are different, too. They cluck softly when interested in something, becoming much more vocal when they're confused or afraid. The bigger hen and Sara tangled at first, which is normal, (if worrisome to watch. Eventually, Sara asserted herself as queen of the coop. (It was the same with Sophia and Sara---Sara was top chicken.) It looks like they're all going to get along fine, now that the pecking order has been established. Best of all, after they all went up into the coop last night, Sara was singing, which she hadn't done since before Sophia died.

We'll always miss our cute, curious little girl, who trusted people and always wanted to be picked up and petted by everyone she met, but it helps to remember that Sophia was one very lucky little chicken. A million chickens are killed every hour in the U.S. alone. We were very lucky to have known her.

Compassion Begins with Mother Earth

2009-01-22T16:42:00.015-06:00

BY STARHAWK

Earth based spirituality covers such a wide spectrum of diverse religions and spiritual traditions, from indigenous traditions to modern NeoPagansim. We share no unified dogma, and no one person carries the authority to speak for all, certainly not me.

But I can say personally that the common thread I find in all our traditions is the deep understanding of interconnectedness. We are one interwoven tapestry of life on this earth, and from that basic insight arises compassion.

Compassion extends beyond love and sympathy for other human beings. Compassion includes compassion for the earth, for all the interrelated and interacting life forms, for the plants, animals, birds, trees, even the microorganisms that sustain life. For if we don't include that broader community in the scope of our compassion, if we continue to destroy the very systems that support our lives, we cannot survive. And we will create the devastation that leads to immense human suffering, loss and death.

Here's a compassion story: In the forest, the roots of trees are linked by a network of mycorrhizal fungi, whose threadlike hyphae interpenetrate the root hairs and extend their reach for water and nutrients. Scientists have traced pathways with radioactive isotopes, and learned that through these webs of fungi, trees feed their young. Moreover, trees growing in the sun will feed trees growing in the shade--even trees of another species. That's compassion!

Here's another: a couple of billions of years ago, life was simple. Just bacteria, simple cells without even a nucleus, floating in primal seas as they had already done for a couple of billion years. But even at that time, life was linked in complex associations. The green things, the ancestors of plants, used sunlight to make food from water and the carbon dioxide that filled the atmosphere. They gave off oxygen, and breathers evolved to make use of it, to burn food and use the energy, giving off carbon dioxide. All of life was linked in one common breath, passing back and forth from green to red.

Photosynthesizers could just lay back and be, basking in the sunlight. But breathers had to work, to go about and find food. They gobbled each other up with gusto.

But one day, as one primal organism chowed down on another, compassion intervened. Instead of dissolving and digesting its meal, the eater let its victim remain whole inside of itself, fusing into a new form of being, the ancestor of the cells in our own bodies and all complex organisms--cells with nuclei, eukaryotes.

Fusion became the rage. The new cells were bigger and could develop in all kinds of interesting ways, developing specialized organelles to do particular jobs, like making energy or propelling the whole thing around. And with their membranes relieved of many metabolic tasks, the new cells were free to combine in new ways, leading to an explosion of multicellular life, and all the strange and interesting things that came after.

And so compassion is embedded in every cell of our bodies. Imagine, then, what beauty and diversity might evolve if we made compassion the foundation of our religions and social structures.

***********************

Starhawk is, in her own words, "the author of many works celebrating the Goddess movement and Earth-based, feminist spirituality. I’m a peace, environmental, and global justice activist and trainer, a permaculture designer and teacher, a Pagan and Witch. To see how it all weaves together, follow the many strands of my web." She is also cofounder of the Reclaiming collective in San Francisco, California (USA), and wrote one of my favorite novels, the compassionate utopian/antiutopian novel of the future, The Fifth Sacred Thing (1993), which manages to see both the worst and the best possibilities for our future and, most importantly, gives us the tools to help us realize how to make the best choice. Her newest book is The Earth Path: Grounding Your Spirit in the Rhythms of Nature. Committed to bringing the techniques and creative power of spirituality to political activism, Starhawk travels internationally teaching magic, the tools of ritual, the skills of activism, and classess in permaculture (both online and off).

Letter from Humanemyth.org

2009-01-04T19:53:00.008-06:00

Humane myth. An idea being propagated by the animal-using industry and some animal protection organizations that it is possible to use and kill animals in a manner that can be fairly described as respectful or compassionate or humane.

We are a community of former farmers, animal rescuers, animal sanctuary founders, educators, and artists working to create a just and nonviolent future.

Currently, both the animal-using industry and some animal advocacy organizations are propagating the idea that it is possible to use and kill animals in a manner that can be fairly described as respectful or compassionate or humane. We believe that this "Humane Myth" misrepresents the realities of animal use, and cultivates a positive image of activities that are neither just nor kind nor sustainable. The purpose of the web site is to correct the misinformation that is associated with the Humane Myth, and to inspire a form of working for the peaceful transformation of our society that fully respects the inherent dignity and worth of animals and people alike.

The public deserves to be told the full truth of who animals are and what is being done to them behind closed doors, as well as the catastrophic impact that the continuing consumption of meat, eggs, and dairy products will have on human health, wildlife and the environment. We will do all we can to uphold this public trust.

As animal advocates committed to compassion and justice, we will refuse to take part in the exploitation of others or to collaborate with those caught up in such injustice. We will do our best to present a clear and uncompromised message to the public, a sincere and respectful message that is free of cynicism and manipulation.

Recognizing that progress toward social justice is gradual and depends on more and more people becoming aware of the truth, we will do all we can to insure that each of the steps our culture takes is toward an accurate understanding of the ways animals are being harmed, and away from the false and misleading idea that the production of meat, eggs, and dairy products can be carried out without cruelty, violence, or injustice.

Recognizing that fostering cultural transformation requires a variety of creative approaches, we will support a broad range of nonviolent programs and initiatives that eliminate or reduce the use and killing of animals, as well as measures that reduce the level of abuse and agony experienced by animals being exploited for human purposes, provided such measures involve NONE of the following:

1. Offering a misleading or incomplete portrait of the confinement, social deprivation, mutilation, reproductive manipulation, indignity and premature death endured by animals being exploited for profit.

2. Minimizing or failing to reveal the full impact on human health, wildlife and our environment from the continuing production and consumption of animal-based foods.

3. Developing, endorsing, certifying and/or promoting any animal products, including those that are labeled as being "humane," "cruelty-free," "cage-free," "free range," "organic," "compassionate," etc.

4. Developing, endorsing, praising, applauding or promoting "new and improved" methods for using and killing animals.

5. Providing individuals or corporations with promotional or public relations benefits that have the effect of making the use and killing animals or the sale of any animal product more profitable or more socially acceptable.

James LaVeck and Jenny Stein
http://www.humanemyth.org/

1616 Free-Living Buffalo Were Killed in Winter 2007-08: How Can We Stop This Carnage?

2009-01-04T15:15:00.016-06:00

IS THIS OKAY WITH YOU?

As of April 16, 2008: Yellowstone National Park had trapped over 1,600 wild bison migrating to winter range in the Gardiner Basin, and sent 1,276 bison to slaughterhouses. Hundreds more bison are trapped inside pens at Stephens Creek operated by the U.S. National Park Service. 7 wild bison died or were killed as a result of injuries suffered in captivity at Stephens Creek. 6 wild bison were shot by livestock inspectors for migrating just beyond the park borders. 112 wild bison have been separated from their mothers and family groups and sent to a USDA quarantine pen near Corwin Springs, Montana. The Montana Department of Livestock has trapped 146 wild bison on Horse Butte on national forest land and private lands, and shipped them to slaughterhouses. Another 166 wild bison were killed by hunters. By the Park Service's own estimate, two-thirds of Yellowstone's bison herd have been slaughtered or perished in the winter kill this season. Since the bison "plan" went into effect in 2000, over 3,500 wild bison have been slaughtered or removed from America's last wild bison herd. As if this wasn't bad enough, the cost of this wanton slaughter of America's last wild bison herd is all paid for by the American taxpayer, averaging $3,000,000 a year - now eight years into a fifteen year "plan".

CONTACT THE PEOPLE IN CHARGE!
http://www.buffalofieldcampaign.org/stoptheslaughter.html

Buffalo Field Campaign is the only group working in the field, every day, to stop the slaughter of the wild American buffalo. Volunteers defend the buffalo and their habitat and advocate for their lasting protection. Currently, the Montana Department of Livestock manages wild bison that enter Montana, a role authorized under MCA 81-2-120. Under this law, crafted by Montana's cattle interests, wild bison are managed as diseased pests and forbidden to enter the state without being subjected to harassment or death. "It is a serious conflict of interest having the Department of Livestock in charge of managing wild bison," said Mike Bowersox, a coordinator with Buffalo Field Campaign, "You might as well trust the fox with guarding the henhouse."

Bison Advocates are calling on the Montana Legislature to repeal MCA 81-2-120, and instead support reasonable alternative management of wild bison as outlined under the Montana Wild Buffalo Recovery & Conservation Act of 2009. The Montana Wild Buffalo Recovery & Conservation Act of 2009, crafted by the Bozeman based Gallatin Wildlife Association, would place the management of wild bison in the hands of Montana Fish, Wildlife & Parks. The bill would also recognize wild bison as a valued native wildlife species of Montana. The bill also provides for the protection of private property for landowners who do not welcome wild bison.

For decades Montana has been squandering a national treasure by perpetuating a wild bison killing spree that has no basis in sound science nor any reasonable foundation whatsoever," said Buffalo Field Campaign spokesperson Stephany Seay. "It's time for sensible change; it's time to welcome wild bison back home to Montana."

CONTACT THE PEOPLE IN CHARGE!
http://www.buffalofieldcampaign.org/stoptheslaughter.html

My Mother: Tireless Pioneer for Animal Rights

2008-12-17T19:12:00.018-06:00

My mother worked hard for animals all of her 77 years of life, until she suddenly passed away this past March. Having founded the Coalition for Animal Protection in Omaha, Nebraska, in 1991, she served as its president until 2006, working tirelessly with CAP, accomplishing real social changes for animals. Throughout the last 17 years of her life, my mother worked with many other volunteers and rescued and fostered stray cats and dogs, cared for feral cat colonies through TNR (Trap, Neuter, Release), got mandatory spay and neuter laws passed in Omaha, helped low-income people pay pet veterinary bills, held low-cost spay/neuter and vaccination clinics, held free hay giveaways for dog houses every fall, educated the public about puppy mills and spay/neuter, helped lobby for prosecution in cruelty cases, and advocated for kindness to animals by holding demonstrations against circuses, rodeos and cruel animal experiments at Boystown Hospital, and by promoting veganism and spaying/neutering cats and dogs. CAP disbanded in 2006, but if you would care to make a donation to an animal rights group in her memory, please do it in honor and memory of the cats and dogs of Omaha, Nebraska, and consider donating to her favorite publication, the online animal rights newspaper ANIMAL PEOPLE.

Missy Girl: July 12, 1992 - June 5, 2008 RIP

2008-12-17T18:17:00.007-06:00

Gengmiss Khan, Melissa Missy and the Jackbooted Missies, Missolini, Missy Girl, Saddam Missein, Slobodan Misslosevic, Slubers, T. Herman Missal, The Missy...

The Amazing Poultry Sisters

2008-12-17T17:56:00.010-06:00

AKA Sophia and Sara Fezziwig Chicken (L to R). (I gave them the middle name of Fezziwig because they have what look like sideburns, reminiscent of the character Fezziwig in Charles Dickens' "A Christmas Carol.") Here they are in August, at about three and a half months, perching on our back porch railing, hoping for special treats before bedtime. Little blue eggs appear in their nest box every other day or so. (Sophie was the first to lay, back in early November.) What are vegans doing with chickens and eggs?! (You might be wondering.) Even though we don't believe that humans need to eat animal products to be healthy, we have eaten a few eggs from time to time from my (vegetarian) sister-in-law's rescued chickens. When we started getting involved in and learning more about sustainability and permaculture, keeping chickens for eggs became a question for us since eggs are one way of getting protein without wasting alot of resources to do it. We still aren't entirely comfortable with it. But most vegans were vegetarians first, and we do plan to sell some of the eggs. If folks are transitioning from veggie to vegan, or even if they never even go veggie, better that they eat eggs than "meat," and better that they get those eggs from chickens who are treated well in every way, and who will never be slaughtered, whether they are laying or not.

Now that it's winter, Sara and Sophia live in a wonderfully snug coop that Steve built for them, where they can go out into an enclosed space during the day, and peck at their head of cabbage, as well as other morsels (soy okara, rice, tomatoes, plums, any kind of greens, and tempeh are favorites). They can go back up into their loft bedroom any time they want, where they have a heater. The temperature is easily monitored indoors, and if it starts getting too cold out there, we heat up big cans of water (empty olive oil cans) in the oven for them.

Their personalities are so different---Sara is the leader, but Sophia is more outgoing. Where Sara holds back, Sophie rushes in enthusiastically. For months, they were wild for worms, and would rush to wherever Steve was digging in his gardening to look for them. By the time fall came, they were less interested in worms, though, maybe knowing their protein needs had changed? They're very happy girls, and love to be held and scritched around their neck feathers.

Happy Horses!

2008-10-14T15:18:00.008-05:00

My (Marina's) stepfather Andy loves horses and is, for all intents and purposes, a horse whisperer. (He has two, Wendy and Kahn.) Here he is with Steve's sister, Donna, who has six horses, all rescues, like all her animals. Her newest, a two year-old filly named Brandy is in the second photo; she was kept in a stall literally all the time until six months ago, so she's small and still a bit undernourished. In the next photo, Andy's riding Dudley and Donna is on Mandy. (Are you detecting a strange theme in the names here? Donna claims it's accidental.)

All the horses at Donna's lead fabulous lives, sharing their field and barn with three llamas, three goats and two sheep, and if they get tired of each others' company, they can always trade whinnies over the fence with her friend Jackie's horses, who are right next door.

Bicycling in the Aftermath of a February Snowstorm

2008-02-23T08:48:00.005-06:00

Someone else's garbage, our treasures

2006-11-16T12:27:00.005-06:00

(by Marina)

People are amazed when they hear that we have paid off our (modest to begin with) mortgage, and they want to know how we did it. The plain answer is dumpster diving. I love dumpster diving. (We also call it "crow shopping," because crows like to check out what's on the curb, too, sometimes along with us.) I never know what I'm going to find, and while I don't always find what I thought I wanted, in the end, I seem to find what I need. And I've found that I end up needing what I find. A nice little circle there, and it's all free and legal. Where we live, the university student population moves once a year, and they throw out a truly astonishing array of things. One person's trash is another person's treasure, they say, but I have to wonder about the thinking behind some of these throwaways. I mean, just because one disc of your eight-disc complete Beethoven string quartets CD set gets broken, does it really make sense to throw away the other seven? And what about Goodwill and St. Vincent de Paul's? Some things I've found have told their own stories pretty clearly, like the handmade wooden cat carrier with "Kitty" painted on it, surrounded by flowers, and inside, a St. Jude's medal---the patron saint of lost causes: someone's dearly-loved cat who was lost, one way or another. Then there was the cardboard box containing two military-issue walkie-talkies (still working), some low-caliber ammunition, and an autographed photo of a young guy with very short hair and a name like Brett or Britt or maybe Rhett surrounded by the 1993 (I believe it was) members of the "Texas Bikini Team," whose big smiles were belied by their overly-made up eyes. I guess the Team never called him, like they said they would, so, after trying to contact them by walkie-talkie, he finally gave up and threw away their photo. (At least he got rid of the live ammunition---wasn't THAT upset about it.)

Anyhow, here's a partial list of things we have found in the "trash" in the past 5 years that have been in perfectly good condition: Cookie tins, silverware, blankets, dishes, candles, candleholders, pens and pencils, books, CDs, LP records, cassette tapes, a big recliner, wooden chairs, a cat tree, a cat scratching post cat carriers and litter boxes, aquariums, picture frames, lamps, towels, plants, pots for plants, cooking pots, cast iron frying pans, popcorn tins, microwave ovens and toaster ovens, writing and printing paper, leaf rakes, lawn chairs, insulated coolers, a mini-trampoline, exercise equipment (including a working treadmill), tables, doors, luggage, mops and brooms, reel lawnmowers, laundry racks, clothes (including a like-new North Face winter coat), shoes, bicycles, power tools, hand tools, bicycle tires, videotapes, VCRs, stereo tuners, bicycle parts, purses, CD players, bicycle trailers, dishracks, laundry baskets, notebooks, folders, a desk organizer, unopened reams of business stationary (good for printing out rough drafs), rolls of thick printer's paper as well as gift wrapping paper, sheets still in the package, a bookcase-style headboard, a huge antique chest of drawers, a small chest of drawers missing only one of its handles, spice racks, kitchen cabinets, sofa cushions, couches, futon frames, futons, incense burners, jewelry, framed art prints, charcoal grills, working radios, a beautiful purple and pink handmade and handpainted art supply case decorated with yellow tulips, crayons, canned food, cleaning products and sponges, children's toys, etc., etc.... Some of these things needed minor repairs; most didn't need more than a little wash-up.

And this was without even trying very hard, i.e., we don't go and hang out near dumpsters at big apartment complexes. If you did, you would likely find even more stuff. Whatever we can't use goes to friends, the Salvation Army shelter, Goodwill, St. Vinny's or the food bank. Food can be free, too----we grow our own vegetables and herbs, pick apples off trees that no one else seems to notice on public "wasteland," eat and cook vegetarian. Eating vegetarian really is cheaper if you *cook* and don't just rely on frozen "meat" substitutes. Every year, we make more pesto than we can eat out of wild garlic mustard (which grows everywhere now, it seems); I thought it would be very healthy but taste ghastly, but I was wrong, it was delicious, and a jar makes a nice gift, too. Here's the recipe from Wildman Steve Brill's edible wild foods cookbook, "The Wild Vegetarian Cookbook."

And that's how we paid off our mortgage, essentially, by gauging what it is we "need" by what we find as much as by what we want. I don't feel like I'm forcing myself to settle---on the contrary, I feel like more stuff comes my way than I can ever use, and plenty of it is high quality, too. The only reason we still work (and I work parttime now) is for health insurance, because we can get almost everything else we need from someone else's trash. Here's a great website for more fun and lots of info about "Dumpster Diving for Fun and Profit."

We also belong to a local Timebank, where we can exchange "time dollars" for other people's services, (and even fair-trade chocolate, wild rice and olive oil!), and get to know some nice people---but that's a whole story in itself. And I'm working on how to make personal care products: cheaper, better for the environment, healthier, but I do wonder: how much trouble will it be? Stay tuned...

Survival Kit

2006-10-23T16:31:00.005-05:00

What it means to resist the war---and the little Hitler inside us

2006-10-22T18:27:00.005-05:00

(by Marina)

"Dictatorship is a constant lecture instructing you that your feelings, your thoughts and desires are of no account, that you are a nobody and must live as you are told by other people who desire and think for you." --- Stephen Vizinczey

As much as this quote galvanizes resistance, I have also found it necessary to keep in mind what Mother Theresa once said, that she was led to do her work because she realized she had "a Hitler inside me." It's easy to tell other people how to live their lives, and another thing to listen to where they're coming from, important to shine a light on the suffering of the planet and animals so that others may see what was hidden, and another thing to stick with them as they show you their hidden fears and anxieties. Everyone has to start from where they are, and trying to dictate "the truth" to others dooms your efforts from the start. We on the political left need to remember this just as much as those on the political right. This Ken Nerburn quote says it all: "Remember to be gentle with yourself and others. We are all children of chance, and none can say why some fields will blossom while others lie brown beneath the August sun. Care for those around you. Look past your differences. Their dreams are no less than yours, their choices no more easily made. And give, give in any way you can, of whatever you possess. To give is to love. To withhold is to wither. Care less for your harvest than for how it is shared, and your life will have meaning and your heart will have peace."

The Gap

2006-10-22T18:11:00.007-05:00

(by Marina)

Except for one "Drawing 101" class, I'm not trained as an artist, so maybe that's why collage interests me: it's definitely grassroots, outsider art. Probably a stretch to say that it's inherently more political, though. And Wite-Out art, or, as I like to call it, "Planet Pleaser White Multi-Purpose Correction Fluid" art (since that is the vegan product that I use to create mine) is even more so. Easily accessed materials, found in most desk drawers nowawdays. Using Wite-Out/Planet Pleaser on an image feels similar to Asian brush painting: it's not about making lines go the way you want them to so much as creating spaces that weren't there before, and even further, creating what I think of as negative spaces. Like the child's eyes: what was warm and alive is negated, blanked out. The bottom right corner, where the paper pieces don't meet was intentional---only machines can make something perfect, and a machine is the last thing I want to be.

To find out how you're doing in the consumption realm, try this quick quiz.

How many choices?

2006-10-22T16:51:00.004-05:00

Illusions of Security

2006-10-22T16:34:00.006-05:00

What is that is keeping you from your life?

2006-10-22T16:20:00.004-05:00

(by Marina)

When I created this, I was thinking about how dreams often tell us the truth we can't tell ourselves in the daylight; how our dreamlife is just as real as our waking life; and how, even on a lazy, hot afternoon, we contain the seeds of that dreamlife self from when it's 3 am on a black and windy night. For one of my friends, it made him think, "What is that is keeping you from your life?"

You might have entirely different thoughts about these images...

"A standard beef slaughterhouse kills 250 cattle every hour"

2006-10-22T16:03:00.003-05:00

"The high speed of the assembly line makes it increasingly difficult to treat animals with any semblance of humaneness. A "Meat & Poultry" article states, 'Good handling is extremely difficult if equipment is "maxed out" all the time. It is impossible to have a good attitude toward cattle if employees have to constantly overexert themselves, and thus transfer all that stress right down to the animals, just to keep up with the line.'" --- from FactoryFarming.com

Lessons From a Dry Garden

2006-10-11T20:39:00.004-05:00

This is what a Feminist looks like...

2006-10-11T11:19:00.004-05:00

Historical choices

2006-09-23T17:07:00.004-05:00

Patriotic Choices

2006-09-23T16:58:00.003-05:00

A simple solution to war and global warming

2006-09-23T16:20:00.008-05:00

(by Marina)

A friend of mine, who has just turned 60, is quitting her job, retiring so that she can live on a $734 a month retirement income, thus, living below the federal poverty line, so that she'll no longer be paying taxes that go to support war. She is an utterly amazing woman. When the U.S. military was blaming a lack of yellow "caution" tape" for its failure to protect Iraqi children from abandoned munitions, my friend bought reams of tape and mailed it to them. She has also visited Iraq as a member of a christian Peacemaker team, and in the article she wrote about the experience, she points out that among its many "downsides," war contributes to environmental degradation and global warming. Hoping to minimize her impact on the planet, my friend uses almost no electricity, has no car, avoids recreational travel, and buys locally produced food. In a local newspaper article about her decision to be poor, she says, "It's wrong for people to keep looking for someone to lead us. We all have to take personal responsibility. I want people to know this is an alternative." I would add that to take responsibility is to empower yourself, an invigorating and peaceful act. I only hope I can do so much.

The trees and the forest

2006-09-06T10:30:00.009-05:00

(by Marina)

I recently left a job that I had done for nearly six years, a social services government job that meant a great deal to me, that I considered a part of my spiritual practice. This job was, I hoped, a way to practice Thich Nhat Hanh's Fourth Mindfulness Training: awareness of suffering, trying to be present for those who suffer, so we can understand their situation and help them transform their suffering. And this is where the limitations of this job revealed themselves. Being with my clients meant I needed to take the time to listen to them, and be open to what they needed help with, but that wasn't acknowledged as part of the job, really. The "real" job was grilling them for information so I could decide whether or not the government considered them deserving of a monthly sum that most of us would not consider to be enough to do much more than pay rent and buy some very basic groceries. I wasn't there to be a guide or to be present: instead, I was a judge. Either they met the standards for the program, or they didn't, and if they didn't, I wasn't able to refer them to some other potential source of assistance because we had no training in that area at all.

What I learned is that the U.S. social service safety net has a big hole in it, and eventually, I began to feel complicit in this corruption of democracy. The Eleventh Mindfulness Training deals with right livelihood, and reminds us not to live with a vocation that is harmful to humans and nature. Every day, I had to ask myself: Does this work help realize my ideal of understanding and compassion? Is it at least a step in that direction? I barely had time to answer the question; I was too busy working, doing what they wanted me to do. I was becoming cynical, angry, closed off, abrupt and irritable. I wasn't sleeping well, and had little energy to do anything when I got home from work. Being a judge wasn't something that I could stomach any longer...in truth, I was starting to feel like a jailer, herding people back into cages where they could be kept under control and away from more fortunate members of society---as though any one of us couldn't just as easily find ourselves in the same position.

In "Truth or Dare: Encounters with Power, Mystery and Authority," Starhawk poses the question: What would you do, how would you live, if the revolution wasn't something far off, was already here, happening right now? I thought more and more about that...and it became obvious to me that if compassion (instead of the economic bottom line) was designing a world, the job I was doing for the government simply wouldn't exist. I got out of there a few months ago, and feel much better about what I'm doing now, a job at a college, working directly with students. I'm still kind of a judge, but I'm in a better position to help them navigate the system, at least.

I don't understand much about economics, but all around me, I see the evidence: We need to start taking care of people, and, instead of judging them for what they lack, ask ourselves if their basic needs are being fulfilled, and what they have to offer. In the process, we will all benefit.

You can read about the 14 Mindfulness Trainings and see Starhawk's homepage

How it starts

2006-09-05T12:20:00.006-05:00

Whose values? ("Busting the Bunker")

2006-09-05T12:01:00.005-05:00

Look for the words hidden in the drawing...

2006-09-05T11:52:00.004-05:00

CEO or Savior?

2006-09-05T11:29:00.004-05:00

Labor Day: Do we work for caring or for killing?

2006-09-04T17:38:00.001-05:00

"As a kid I dreamt of becoming a doctor. I wanted to help people in my village who did not have the money to pay for even basic health services. I never became a doctor. My family could not afford it. Instead, I worked for the pharmaceutical industry. My job was to peddle the myth that good health can be bought in the form of pills. I was good at it. Money came quickly and easily. One day, a friend asked me to help with health work with grassroots people. It hit me that the lies I helped peddles had mothers scrimping on their family's food to buy medicines they didn't need. Without food---the very thing they did need for their health---many died. They died so that I could have an easy life and drug companies could make huge profits. After four years, I quit my job. My experience taught me that refusing to kill is not only a call to people directly involved in the military machine. It is a call for all of us to consider whether we are complicit in people's death and disability. Do we work for caring or for killing? I am now actively involved in the campaign to put an end to the business of killing lives in the greed for money and power. Like the doctor I never was, I have vowed to use my skills to make people better. The killing business thrives on lies. It is my business now to help tell the truth." ---from www.globalwomenstrike.net

"Not Left Behind: Rescuing the Pets of New Orleans"

2006-09-02T13:31:00.008-05:00

Best Friends Animal Society, the group I worked with after Hurricane Katrina, has just published an amazing new book of photos, "Not Left Behind: Rescuing the Pets of New Orleans," (publication date: August 21, 2006; $19.95 hardcover). Best Friends calls it "a collection of images of hope and stories about happy endings for the pets stranded as the waters rose," by photographer, Troy Snow, who was a member of the first rescue team that scoured the flooded streets of New Orleans by boat, seeking the pets that evacuees had been forced to leave behind. With the typical Best Friends can-do attitude, the press release says: "At a time when the country continues to analyze what went wrong during and after Hurricane Katrina, it's refreshing - and inspiring - to be reminded of what went right. Best Friends Animal Society operates the country's largest sanctuary for homeless animals, and works with its members, and with shelters and rescue groups nationwide, to provide adoption, spay/neuter, and educational programs, and to bring about a time when there will be no more homeless pets." To see photos and find out more about the book, (and order a copy---or two!), go to: http://www.bestfriends.org

"My Action is My Refuge": Hurricane Animal Rescue Work as a Journey Towards Understanding

2006-08-27T13:35:00.011-05:00

(Posted by Marina)

Ordinarily, I don’t watch television. At all. But the week that Katrina hit, my partner was out of town and unreachable by phone, and I started watching hurricane coverage. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing---the human suffering and how as the days passed, not much seemed to be changing. I wasn’t sleeping well, and I was feeling helpless, angry, and upset. Then I went on the Internet, and began realizing how many animals were in trouble. What really touched me most deeply was the story of Snowball. You probably heard about this, or saw the clip on the news: A young boy was carrying his little white dog onto a bus, to be evacuated, and he was told by someone in a uniform that he had to leave the dog behind. He put him down and then started screaming, “Snowball! Snowball!” over and over, and crying and sobbing until he vomited.

In her book, "Animal Grace: Entering a Spiritual Relationship With Our Fellows Creatures," Mary Lou Randour says: “Animal suffering usually goes unrecognized and is tacitly supported by normative culture, the government, and other public and private institutions.” Seeing what had happened to Snowball was a reminder of that reality, a very painful one, because it was so unnecessary that this child be separated from his dog, but the path to spiritual wholeness often begins with the invitation to become aware of suffering.” I felt I had no refuge from these feelings, but then I realized that this was really an invitation, a gift, in disguise, and I knew I needed to take action. There is a verse in the Buddhist text, "Anguttara Nikaya":

"My action is my possession,
my action is my inheritance,
my action is the womb which bears me,
my action is my refuge."

So last October, I went down south, to Mississippi, to work with other volunteers at an emergency animal rescue center, helping animals displaced by Hurricane Katrina. This wasn’t something I decided to do so much as I took refuge in it. My action literally became my refuge. I had signed up to help with animal rescue with three or four groups, went online a lot, sent money. I was starting to think that this was all I COULD do. Then, on September 26th, Best Friends Animal Society called and asked me to come down to southern Mississippi, to the St. Francis Animal Sanctuary. St Francis is located near Tylertown, Mississippi, which is a very beautiful, very poor and very rural area 100 miles north of New Orleans. I left home on October 1st. It took me 27 hours to get there, by bus to Chicago, then by train to Jackson, Mississippi, and then I rented a car and drove 100 miles further south .

Before I get too deeply into what it was like there, a bit about Best Friends Animal Society: They’re based in Kanab, Utah, and they are the largest animal sanctuary in the country, very focused on creating positive alternatives; they put out a quarterly magazine with the subtitle, “All the good news about animals, wildlife and the earth.” To see lots of photos of all the good work they do, watch videos (some heartbreaking, some sweet, some funny), join and donate, go to http://www.bestfriends.org . You can also buy their book, Not Left Behind, a photo book about the rescue. From September 5th, 20005 until May 10th, 2006, their hurricane animal rescue headquarters was set up at St. Francis Animal Sanctuary, a modest-sized animal shelter founded by Francis & Sylva Battista about six years ago; he’s head of the Outreach program in Kanab. Best Friends worked with the Humane Society and many other groups to locate and rescue animals abandoned, lost, and injured, in New Orleans and all of the areas affected by Katrina and Wilma. When I was there last fall, Best Friends and other groups would send trucks into New Orleans every day, and then bring animals back to Tylertown, to the St. Francis Sanctuary, with its buildings, staff and infrastructure already in place, so it was a good place to base this kind of operation. We had half a dozen volunteer vets and vet techs, and Best Friends staffers, as well as volunteers, to care for the animals. St. Francis was built on the grounds of an old dairy farm. It has three buildings: one a medical clinic, another was the main cat building, with a small office, and the third has a kitchen, room for stores, some screened rooms for cats, and living quarters upstairs for the sanctuary staff. And each of these buildings had a laundry---we used a lot of water, and they actually had to have their well drilled deeper while I was there, as they were running out.

There was at that time a 30-day quarantine before the animals could leave the state. Trucks left Tylertown every day---except on those days when the government was preventing them from going in---to go to New Orleans and bring back as many animals back as they could fit. They often had to leave animals behind because there wasn’t enough room for them all. Animal rescue groups (all no-kill shelters) from all over the country as well as Canada drove to Tylertown and would take back as many animals as they could, and then, if the animals weren’t reunited with their people, the groups would foster them until permanent homes could be found. Best Friends took animals back to Utah, too, of course.

To give you a rough idea of the numbers involved, and what it was like when I was there, as of October 25th, they had had more than 2,000 animals come through the rescue center. In November, they had about 450 animals on any given day. Reunions that had occurred at the center at that point numbered 112, plus more from foster homes and groups around the country. By the time they closed down in May, it was up to 3,300, and over a thousand people had come through as volunteers. Most of the rescued animals were dogs and cats, but I also saw about a dozen rabbits, a small flock of chickens, a few ducks, a 400-pound pot-bellied pig, two iguanas, some tanks of fish, some tarantulas, and a corn snake, who was given her freedom, of course, in an appropriate and undisclosed area. (Pet stores abandoned animals, in some cases, but we did hear of one where the staff came back as soon as they could and took them all home.) Horses were being taken someplace else, and I was told by one of the vets that the reason we had no birds or “pocket pets,” (i.e., gerbils, mice, rats, hamsters) was because those animals can only go two days or so without food and water.

As I said, Tylertown is just two hours north of New Orleans, so it was an excellent place to base animal rescue efforts, but it felt almost dangerously close to me, I really didn’t know what I might be getting into. I was excited to be going, but afraid to go, and I almost turned back at Amtrak in Chicago. I was afraid of camping out, bringing all our own food & water, being completely self-sufficient, fearing the heat, dirt, running out of food, fire ants, my health, wanting to take all the animals home. Most of all, I was afraid because of an image that kept running through head from the movie, “Gone With the Wind,” of Scarlett O’Hara on the battlefield, where she’s kneeling by a wounded soldier’s cot, and then the camera moves further and further away, up into the sky, until she’s only a tiny dark speck in a sea of white beds and bandages, overwhelmed, and overwhelming by sheer numbers. I think that’s why most people are afraid to do this kind of work: fear of being overwhelmed by suffering. But it wasn’t like that at all. It was more like being at a huge animal shelter, with lots of activity, people running around with cell phones (our only phones), looking for laundry detergent or lugging dirty kennels over to the power washer, lots of dogs barking, and so on.

And there are other reasons why it wasn’t overwhelming, and why I felt empowered, not helpless. I could always make choices about how I wanted to spend my time: so when I needed to rest, I did. There was a screened-in room in the main cat building where, once cats had been there for a few days and met certain health criteria, as many cats as could comfortably fit left their carriers to spend all their time. When I was there, it just so happened that all the cats were young, black cats---they were all from the same house---and if you went in and lay down in the middle of the room, they would come and climb all over you. When someone started feeling, they’d say, “I’m going to go do some Black Cat Meditation," or "Black Cat Therapy.”

And I also chose not to unload the trucks when they returned from New Orleans every night (anytime after 10 pm up until 2 am), and that was one way I witnessed suffering so as to raise my awareness, but not to brutalize my psyche by exposing myself to more than I felt I could handle. I knew that there were animals who made it through the ride from New Orleans, but died shortly after arrival, and others were in such bad shape that they went straight to the Medical Clinic, so I never saw them. (Only the vets and vet techs were allowed to enter that building.) These were animals who had been swimming in toxic water and sewage, who had chemical burns all over their bodies and internally, as well, from drinking the water, who had been eating rodents or garbage, and who were often traumatized, terrified to the point where it could be hard to tell a feral cat from one who had been someone’s companion.

But what the animals needed as much as they needed to be taken out of peril was simply to feel loved and attention paid to them. That’s easy, of course, but because there were so many of them, I felt overwhelmed at times. My primary spiritual practice is that of Thich Nhat Hanh’s Order of Interbeing, socially engaged Buddhism; I had an awareness of how ahimsa, which is harmlessness to all living beings and the bedrock principle for all religions, is a process, not just a goal. You may have heard the story of the boy who was walking down the beach, littered with hundreds of starfish who had washed up on the sand and were dying, and of how he was tossing starfish back in, one after another. His father said to him, “What’s the point of doing that? You’ll never be able to save all those starfish. It doesn’t matter.” And the boy replied, gently lofting a starfish into the water, “It mattered to that one.” I tried to keep that story in mind, especially when I was tempted to make the cats wait for attention until I’d cleaned their boxes and fed them---you can’t do that, I quickly learned. You must love them as you go. When I was actually there doing the work, I had a strong sense of how I couldn’t help them all at once, just one at a time, but it was enough---that in itself was making a difference.

I spent four nights at St. Francis, camping out in a tent near the front gate, which was locked every night at ten. Right away, I told the staff that that I know cats better than dogs---although I love dogs, too, I’ve not lived with any since I was very small---and was told that they needed new cat workers since two were leaving the next day. So I was now an official cat building volunteer. The days went like this: No matter how late we had gone to bed, we all got up with the dogs, who started barking at about 5, we dressed, ate (many of us stood to eat out of the trunks of our cars, although some had brought luxuries like campstoves and chairs), maybe washed a little, and then went up to the cat building, not to return until after lunch (which Best Friends fed us---great vegetarian meals, I might add). I fed and cuddled cats, cleaned cages & litter boxes, changed water, and I did loads and loads of laundry: Literally 24 hours a day, the washer and dryers were running---we went through that many towels and blankets). I also made phone calls, and input info into the database of lost animals. At its peak, I believe there were around 10,000 hurricane animals on PetFinders.com.. When the trucks came back from New Orleans, usually very late, as I said, I helped with intake: each animal got a Best Friends number, had its picture taken, got vaccinated and microchipped, and we filled out paperwork to track every detail that might help reunite the animals with their people.

That was, and still is, a primary goal of Best Friends in this effort: to reunite these animals with their people. The first day, two men, tired and dirty, came looking for their three dachshunds. We had only one of them, but they were overjoyed. They cried. While I was at St. Francis, I made some phone calls to a woman who was staying in a hotel in Baton Rouge; she and her husband had been forced to evacuate without their two cats, Fifi and Cici, but they had sent a letter to Best Friends, describing their whereabouts, in hopes that they would be rescued. I looked through a few hundred photos, and there were several anxious phone calls (with the cell phones forever cutting out!) to try to figure out if we had rescued their cats. As it turns out, Tasha and Daryl not only found Fifi and Cici through Best Friends, but they were reunited with them on Tasha’s birthday. She was so happy, she said, “You don’t know what this means to me. It’s like you’ve given me my life back.”

Everyone worked together, regardless of religion or political differences. There is such political polarization in this country right now that I was almost wondering if such a thing was possible---to cross the red & blue lines and work together on something. But we did. You didn’t know people’s last names. Usually we just told each other where we’d come from, and maybe what we did for a living. It was a challenge in many ways. Personality differences constantly threatened to make us forget why we were there; this is true at any job, I suppose, but how we resolved these differences was unique---the animals were part of that. We disagreed on how best to care for the animals at even the tiniest level (e.g., should the cats be fed treats, and if so, what kinds, etc., etc.) People got very territorial about how best to do the laundry, whether or not we should rearrange the supply shelves, etc.. And sometimes in the cat building, we got too loud, and the cats would become distressed; they’re very sensitive to raised voices and angry gestures---and then we would all calm down, knowing the effect we were having on them. This is another way the animals taught us spiritually---not harboring anger is a component of ahimsa.

There were also disagreements about whether or not animals should be returned to those who had left them behind while they fled to safety. Some felt that anyone who would do such a thing didn’t deserve to have their animals back; there were arguments. Everyone thinks, “I would NEVER leave my animals behind,” but suppose the rescue boat’s at your roof’s edge, where you’ve been waiting for three days and nights, there’s only so much room in the boat---and you can see your next-door neighbors and their four children, waiting on their roof for that boat, too. And we had to be reminded that people had often been told that they would be gone for only a couple of days and left their animals thinking they would be okay until they got back. There are no easy answers here. And that’s another ahimsa practice: loving one’s enemies. It was uncomfortable at times to be reminded that we were connected to those who left animals behind as much as with those who were saving them.

As you can probably tell, what happened in Tylertown was not that we all became saints. Not only did nothing miraculous happen to us, I would say that nothing happened to us at all. Instead, we simply moved through our days, cared for the animals and each other by being aware of why we were there, by deciding and choosing, and we learned where to go next in this unfamiliar territory precisely because it was unfamiliar: we were stepping outside the circle of our usual thinking and experiences. There were people of all ages, and whatever your abilities were, there was a niche for you. There weren’t any children when I was there--- the youngest person was maybe 18. There was a retired couple who guarded the front gate and checked everyone in and out. There was a woman who looked to be in her 80s who pretty much stayed in one spot, under a canopy out of the sun, but when you were looking for some specific item that had been donated, like waterless cat shampoo, and needed it fast, she knew right where it was.

It feels inevitable that we evolve in the process of seeing other people evolving: There was a lawyer, who was obviously used to being in charge and, as he put it, “yelling at people---I don’t get paid to be nice!” He spent his first evening at St. Francis Sanctuary trying to redesign the entire Best Friends animal identification system, despite gentle opposition from the staffers who had lost several nights of sleep to create it. The next day, someone suggested his size and strength would be useful down in New Orleans with the extraction teams, enduring 20-hour days catching terrified and hurt animals in surreal conditions---there was, for example, four inches of oil on the ground in one parish---and this was a deserted, flooded city, its waters a toxic sludge of chemicals from people’s basements and garages. He’d never done anything like this before, he said, but he went, and by the fourth night, he had dropped his façade and was saying, “I know I’m a jerk. I’m turning into my father. I can see it happening. But I only had to apologize for being a jerk three times today, and that was an improvement.” The next morning, I saw him tenderly hold and kiss a frightened white cat, who snuggled against his chest and closed her eyes as he stroked her---and I realized that I had not seen beyond his bluster to the evolving human underneath.

I thought I knew what to do when it came to cuddling cats (how hard is that, right?), but the animals taught me something new every day. There were LOTS of , cats, and they were in big cages stacked on top of each other in the cat building. We were always busy, always trying to find time to pay attention to ALL of them. But there was this quiet black cat who lay in the back corner of his cage at the bottom of the stack; with the cute kittens and very vocal cats demanding attention, he was almost forgotten. When I realized he was being ignored, I opened his cage door, not sure if he would respond with aggression or not---trauma can make even friendly cats hostile---but his eyes just lit up, right away, he began meowing and purring, and came right to me. TLC, one of the vets told me, was as important a component to their survival as veterinary care. This is no place for the animals to stay for too long; we had some “owner hold” cats who grew a little aggressive, starting to bite and scratch after being held for only a minute or so. (Owner-hold meant that their people had been located, and wanted them back, but were living in a shelter and unable to take them.) These two, Tender and Mikey were really ready to go HOME, and we all felt for them so. This is what animals can teach us: empathy, the opportunity to revere the sacredness of all life. And, as I said, all the cats made it, of course, as they had been injured too badly or their exposure to toxins was too great for their bodies to stand. So we learned to let go, a primary spiritual practice in all religions, by loving creatures with such short life spans.

After I got back, Linda, one of the volunteers who helped set up the shelter in the very earliest days of the rescue work, and came back again to help the week I was there, sent me an amazing story about a women’s prison in Virginia, which had taken in two dozen cats displaced by Katrina:
"Four Pocahontas Correctional Unit inmates have been caring for the cats since they made the cramped 20-hour truck ride last month from an overwhelmed Mississippi shelter. The women see it as a chance to help not only the abandoned pets, but also the hurricane relief effort, and even themselves. 'They've had a long journey,'said inmate Wendy Brickey, 45, her eyes brimming with tears. 'I get the chance to make it okay. It makes us feel like we can be a part of something - to be a part of the storm - to help out. We are so secluded from the world and there's somebody waiting on their pets. And while I might never meet them, I took care of them while they're getting their life together.' She immediately connected with Scarlett, a kitten so traumatized she wouldn't let anyone touch her. After months of love and patience, Scarlett began trusting Brickey, and now the two often cuddle up together. 'When I look at her, I see that after all this time, I'm not so wild anymore - and she's not so wild anymore.' (Associated Press, copyrighted)

As I said earlier, I think we’re afraid to enter into this kind of work because we’re afraid we’re going to be overwhelmed by suffering. We don’t volunteer at the local shelter, look at that animal rights display on the street corner, or make it a point to know what really goes on in a slaughterhouse, because, as Randour says: “…acknowledging such suffering, we fear, would have fundamental implications for how we lead our lives. But the price we pay for this self-protection is the restriction of our spiritual growth. To absorb the extent and depravity of animal suffering can raise us to a new spiritual level. This is the price of the ticket for animal grace. OUR expanding awareness may lead us to feel that we are experiencing disorganization of the self, a significant price…but what feels like a disintegration of the self in these periods of intense transformation is not the SELF breaking down but its DEFENSES. The breakdown of these defenses needs to be welcomed rather than feared, for they have dimmed our awareness and stunted our compassion. Their dissolution can free us spiritually…the structure of the old defensive self must die so that a new, larger, and more encompassing structure can be born.”

Maybe you want to go down South and help. The common assumption is that any animal who hasn’t been rescued by now must have died. But the truth is that the emergency is far from over: Animal Rescue New Orleans, aka ARNO, is still finding animals ALIVE INSIDE OF BUILDINGS. For those they haven’t been able to catch, they’re putting out food and water. They’re providing medical care, including spaying and neutering, which is the most crucial element in this equation. The Humane Society of the United States estimates there may have been as many as 50,000 animals left behind in New Orleans alone. And all the animals who survived the storm and weren’t spayed or neutered---and only around 2% of those who were rescued had been fixed---all of those animals are now breeding. 50,000 starving animals having babies, and time is running out. Animal Rescue New Orleans’ website is the place to donate, volunteer, and get updated: http://www.animalrescueneworleans.com. And check out the documentary that opens in a few weeks, “Dark Water Rising: The Truth About Hurricane Katrina Animal Rescues” its website is: http://www.darkwaterrising.com.

And sending money is important, definitely, but it isn’t always something that feels like a “complete” action---we all want to “do more,” and there’s a good reason for that: writing a check isn’t enough. To truly find your way to animal grace, to any kind of place of peace within, it’s necessary to refuse to be a passive spectator, and instead, become an active participant; the more you do, the better you will feel---as long as you know your limits. And you don’t even have to adopt or foster an animal---although that would be wonderful. At least 8,000 animals were rescued in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, and most are still in need of fostering or adopting. The tragedy of animal overpopulation is a preventable one, and it has been created a lack of mandatory spay/neuter laws, and control by death is the way we essentially allow Katrina to happen on a daily basis all over the United States---with an estimated 4-5 million cats and dogs being put to death in shelters every year. Another way to look at it is that by adopting an animal, any animal, from a rescue group, you will be freeing up space in those shelters for hurricane animals.

And what else can you do? You can make choices, every day, that will have a positive impact on the lives of animals---actually, you DO make choices every day, because your life intersects with so many animals, ones you don’t even see. Every day, we make choices: through the foods we eat, the personal care and household cleaning products we choose to buy, the clothes we choose to wear. Someone once told me that the only thing you can do wrong when it comes to helping animals is to do nothing at all. There’s a whole, undiscovered world of animal wisdom out there: we now know that animals have the capacity to create art and music, to use language, to grieve---you may have heard of Koko, the gorilla who uses sign language, and how she grieved when her kitten (whom she had named AllBall) was killed accidentally. We can choose to respect that world which is so connected to ours, so magical and important in the fabric of life here on Earth. When we do this, we grow spiritually and the animals benefit, too.

I don’t want to violate non-violence, ahimsa, or the Third Precept of the Order of Interbeing by trying to force you to adopt my views. I would like, however, to start a compassionate dialogue, within you and between you and everyone you meet, to become aware of our schizophrenic attitude towards animals that ranges between sentiment and violence, with little in between. None of us can attain perfection, but the idea of love can always keep us moving in the direction of compassion, love and awareness. As humans, we go to great lengths to separate and distinguish ourselves from other species, when we have so much to gain by instead moving closer to compassion by crossing boundaries, and finding kinship with all of life and creation. I never felt the truth of this as strongly as I have since my trip to Mississippi---and it’s changed my life forever. I was given a great gift, and it’s one we can all receive, every day.