I do respect money but I conscientious of the fact that money is always just a tool not an end in itself.
In current society, money helps gain freedom if one is wise enough not to become a slave to money.
Never compromise morality for money, period.
Money’s capacity to turn morality into a matter of impersonal arithmetic and by doing so, to justify things that would otherwise seem outrageous or obscene.
- David Graeber, Debt: The First 5,000 Years
In 1975, they might have done what Helga Tacreiter did: work on a farm. Helga loved the cows and enjoyed feeding them, snuggling them, and singing to them. And while she cried when each new group of calves grew up and got sent away, she made their lives as happy as she could for as long as she could.
Then one day, lightning struck a large tree on the farm while the mother cows were under it seeking shelter from the storm. Six of their calves survived, but they were now orphans. That meant Helga had to raise the babies, including Harvey, who had been temporarily blinded, couldn’t eat on his own, and turned in circles when he tried to walk.
Helga spent long days and nights hand-feeding Harvey and walking with him, pressed against his side. Slowly, miraculously, his vision started to return and he began to chew grass. One day, he walked in a straight line, then ran, then mooed for the first time. Helga was ecstatic. But as she was celebrating Harvey’s progress, she realized something: Soon, he and all the other calves would be sold. After how hard she and Harvey had worked, it didn’t seem fair.
Helga decided to buy the entire group, which she called the “Lightning Herd.” But where could a farmworker get that kind of money? While she was sitting in the barn one night, her back against Harvey, it came to her. Not everyone got to enjoy cow cuddles as she did – but maybe everyone could. Helga raced to the fabric store and back to the barn, where Harvey, seemingly sensing that she now needed his help, stood still for hours while she draped, measured, cut, and sewed soft faux-fur fabric into what would become the first cow-size “cowch.” Word of Helga’s cowches spread, earning her enough money to buy the Lightning Herd and a plot of land where they would spend their lives in peace.
Today, The Cow Sanctuary in New Jersey is home to dozens of animals – many of them rescued by PETA – including cows, emus, horses, goats, ducks, pigs, and geese. It’s funded by donations and, of course, sales of cowches.
- More Here
You can visit Cow Sanctuary in NJ : https://thecowsanctuary.org/
If you want to permanently eradicate any wrongs then focus on curbing demand rather than curbing supply.
Modern vigilantism and law is built around perpetual work of curbing supply.
True peace does not come from others. Its comes from within oneself
You can watch the full documentary online at Christspiracy
From Nazareth to the Vatican and from New Delhi to Kathmandu, the pair questioned world-renowned theologians, Christian farmers, Indigenous shamans, archeologists, and religious leaders and asked them to explain why cruelty to animals is accepted around the world, even though compassion is supposedly the uniting core principle of all world religions.
The historical texts and facts that they found—some hiding in plain sight and some deeply buried—are explosive. The new documentary Christspiracy reveals truths that many lifelong Christians, Muslims, Jews, Hindus, and Buddhists have never heard. For those of us who have felt isolated and confused by seemingly conflicting values, the film offers hope: clear and compelling evidence that great religious leaders absolutely rejected harming and killing animals. This revelation has massive implications for how we conduct our moral lives.
Getting the information wasn’t easy. The filmmakers’ vehicles were chased, their homes were ransacked, and doors were slammed in their faces. Netflix wanted to censor the film. Waters and Andersen refused, and Christspiracy became the first movie ever to have its rights bought back from the world’s largest streaming platform.
Waters was forced out of his congregation after church leaders told him to stop asking questions. And his experience rings familiar to many of us. We’ve been ridiculed for our concern for animals, reprimanded for questioning what we were taught, and mocked for our discomfort at religious gatherings in which animals’ flesh is served. But we stand firm in our belief that violence toward animals is wrong.
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The little guy now is five!
It feels like yesterday when he came home...
Happy Birthday my love; thank you for making me keep breathing within hours after Max.
Why does the U.S. lag so far behind the U.K. and E.U. on animal welfare? One view is that Americans are still influenced by a Wild West mentality that tolerates the rough handling of animals. Supporters of that view point to the survival of the rodeo, which, like the bullfight, entertains spectators by mistreating animals. People who find it entertaining to watch a frightened young calf being lassoed by a rope that chokes them and then drags them to the ground are unlikely to be concerned about the suffering of pigs or chickens.
Yet when Americans can vote for laws that give farmed animals more space to move around, they do so. In 2002, 55% of Floridians voted to ban keeping pigs in stalls too narrow to allow them to turn around. In 2006, 62% of Arizonans voted to ban such stalls for both pigs and veal calves. In 2008, 63% of Californians voted to ban such stalls for pigs and veal calves, plus standard battery cages for hens. In 2016, 78% of Massachusettans voted to ban narrow stalls for pigs and veal and standard battery cages for hens, and to ban the sale of pork, veal, and eggs from out-of-state producers using these systems. In 2018, 63% of Californians voted to ban the sale of pork, veal, and eggs from out-of-state producers using systems that do not meet California’s standards. (A challenge by pork producers to the ban on in-state sales was dismissed last year by the U.S. Supreme Court.)
So I suggest that the U.S. is so far behind the E.U. on animal welfare, not because Americans care less about animals than Europeans, but because the U.S. political system is less democratic than Europe’s parliamentary system. In most parliamentary democracies, political parties are stronger and individual lawmakers do not need to raise large amounts of money to get re-elected. Money and lobbying have far greater influence in U.S. politics.
The U.S. congressional committee system also serves to disempower the electorate in a way that cannot happen in a parliamentary democracy, in which the Prime Minister and Cabinet are members of the legislature and have much influence on legislation. In the U.S., House and Senate Agriculture committees in both state and federal Congresses are usually made up of lawmakers representing predominantly agricultural districts, and they effectively have a veto on proposals to protect farmed animals. They often receive substantial donations from factory farm operators. In states without provision for citizen-initiated ballots, only tiny Rhode Island has farmed animal legislation that can compare with the E.U. or U.K. At the federal level, there is no legislation that even attempts to regulate the conditions in which farmed animals are kept.
Most Americans care about animals, and would like their country to be among the leading nations in protecting animals from unnecessary suffering. The reality is more disturbing, and I hope that people who learn the true situation seek to change it.
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But this is precisely what understanding death essentially means: grasping that a dead individual can no longer do what they could when they were alive.
Some scientists who study animals’ relation to death might disagree with this conclusion. Understanding death, they might argue, implies comprehending the absolute finality of it, its inevitability, its unpredictability, and the fact that it will affect everyone, including oneself. These scientists would be in the grip of what I have termed intellectual anthropocentrism: the assumption that the only way of understanding death is the human way, that animals either have a concept of death equivalent to the average adult human’s—or none at all.
But that couldn’t be farther from the truth. Intellectual anthropocentrism is a bias that affects comparative thanatology, the study of how animals deal with and understand death. The way to extirpate this bias is by realizing that the concept of death is not an all-or-nothing matter, but rather a spectrum—something that comes in degrees. So when we study whether animals can understand death, we should not start from the hypercomplex human concept, but rather from what I call the minimal concept of death. Understanding death in minimal terms means grasping that dead individuals don’t do the sorts of things that living beings of their kind typically do, and that this is an irreversible state. And this is precisely what the chimpanzees’ behavior suggests that they had understood.
There is another bias that also affects comparative thanatology: what I have termed emotional anthropocentrism. This is the idea that animals’ reactions to death are only worthy of our attention when they appear human-like. Afflicted by this bias, comparative thanatologists have been looking for manifestations of grief in animals, exemplified by the story of Tahlequah, the orca who carried her dead baby for 17 days and over 1000 miles, or Segasira, the gorilla who attempted to suckle from his dead mother’s breast despite already having been weaned. Don’t get me wrong: animal grief is a real and an important phenomenon that we should absolutely be paying attention to. However, if we’re only looking for mourning behavior in animals, we may be missing most of the picture.
Think back to the chimps. They clearly weren’t mourning the albino baby’s death. Instead, their behavior seemed dominated by an attitude of curiosity. But this did not detract from their understanding of what had happened. Grief does not signal a special or deep understanding of death. What it signals instead is the existence of a strong social bond between the mourner and the deceased.
But there are many ways of emotionally reacting to the realization that someone died that don’t involve grieving. You might react with joy, if, for instance, it means you’re inheriting a large sum of money. You might instead react with anger, if the deceased owed you money that you’re now never going to get back. You might react with excitement or hunger, if, say, your flight crashed in the Andes and there was no more food around. Or you might be totally indifferent, if you didn’t know the person or they meant nothing to you. Of course, all of these reactions are taboo in our societies, and we wouldn’t publicly admit to having them. But this doesn’t mean that they’re not possible. And crucially: they wouldn’t mean that you haven’t properly understood what happened. The polar bear who finally manages to catch a seal might understand death just as well as the heartbroken monkey mother who hangs on to her baby’s corpse, even though the former thinks of it as a gain rather than a loss.
The biases of emotional anthropocentrism and intellectual anthropocentrism have prevented us from seeing that there are many more ways of reacting to death than what is considered politically correct in our societies. In fact, the concept of death, instead of being a complex intellectual achievement within the sole reach of the most cognitively sophisticated species, is actually quite easy to acquire and linked to abilities that are crucial for survival. If we manage to extirpate these two biases, we will see that the concept of death, far from being a uniquely human trait, is widespread in the animal kingdom and more diverse than we will ever know.
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What a beautiful life is this one we have? Now, imagine that beauty is amplified in multitudes plus in multitude of dimensions when we share this bond with another non-human animal.
Bloody, I am so damn lucky to have this in this lifetime with Max. I am so damn lucky!
Now that Max is not present and my time is ticking, he left with Neo, Fluffy, Garph and now this year Saroo and Blue.
Well, I am not the only one who is lucky; Caleb Carr's final book before he passed away is about his relationship with his cat Masha, My Beloved Monster: Masha, the Half-wild Rescue Cat Who Rescued Me (review here).
The beauty of Carr's relationship is - for the first time someone writes this in an inverse way. He is not anthropomorphizing Masha but he thinks Masha was reverse anthropomorphizing.
In this exquisite book novelist Caleb Carr tells the story of the “shared existence” he enjoyed for 17 years with his beloved cat, Masha. At the time of writing she is gone, he is going, and all that remains is to explain how they made each other’s difficult lives bearable. The result is not just a lyrical double biography of man and cat but a wider philosophical inquiry into our moral failures towards a species which, cute internet memes notwithstanding, continues to get a raw deal.
Carr explains how Masha picked him as her person when he first visited the animal rescue centre nearly 20 years ago. She was a Siberian forest cat – huge, nearer to her wild self than most domestic moggies, and utterly delightful, a long-bodied streak of red-gold whose forward-facing eyes gave her the look of a delighted baby. The rescue centre staff are desperate that Carr take her, and equally anxious that he should understand what he is getting into. This cat, apparently, fights, bites and is unbothered about seeming grateful. But then, why should she be? Abandoned by her previous owners, she was locked in an apartment and left to die. It is an obscenity, says Carr, that goes on more often than we can bear to imagine.
Once Carr gets Masha – a name he hopes sounds vaguely Siberian – home to his farmhouse on Misery Mountain in upstate New York, she starts to show her true “wilding” nature. Mice and voles are taken down with industrial efficiency. She even sees off a bear, dispatching it with a bloody nose. The only creature that gets the better of her is a wicked kind of weasel native to the area called a “fisher” which bites off her luscious tail and leaves her less nimble for the closing part of her life.
With Carr, though, Masha shows a different side. She is not a lap cat in any sense, but something better, an actively attentive partner. When Carr is racked with pain from his chronic neuropathy, Masha bores her broad Siberian forehead into his clenched body to release the agony. Or she sits by his head for hours at a time, looking anxiously for signs that the discomfort might be easing. “What will cynics call this,” Carr asks rhetorically, “if they will not call it love?” In return he makes her mixtapes of her favourite music, mostly Wagner. And, to help her through the August moon, a time when all cats in the American north-east long to stay outdoors all night, he sets up a halfway house for them on the porch with blankets, camping lights and a television, so that they can get through the high summer madness safely together.
There had been plenty of previous cats in Carr’s life, a succession of spirit animals who accompanied him as he grew up in a household that sounds frankly feral. His father was best friends with Kerouac, Ginsberg and Burroughs. Lucien Carr, who was prodigiously clever, madly violent and free with his fists, battered his middle son into profound anti-sociability. Caleb explains how he has spent most of his adult life dealing with these accumulated wounds – a fractured body with a cats’ cradle of internal adhesions, and an inability to hang on to a romantic relationship for more than a few months. Masha is the salve for this lifetime of self-loathing: “how I lived, what I chose to do, my very nature – all were good enough for her.”
The question of anthropomorphism inevitably raises its head. Carr tetchily denies it, maintaining that everything wondrous about Masha – her emotional receptivity, careful social etiquette, even her tactical stealing of visitors’ socks – can be explained as intentional either by the growing academic literature on animal consciousness or the close observations of her clever vets. Altogether more plausible is his suggestion that it is Masha who is doing a kind of anthropomorphism in reverse, ascribing traits of her own species to Carr in order to make his behaviour comprehensible.
By the end, though, it barely matters. Carr has become so enmeshed with Masha that it is getting hard to tell them apart. When she is diagnosed with terminal lymphoma you know that it will not be long before he follows. And, indeed, in May this year Caleb Carr died of cancer at the age of 68. He has left behind a beautiful book, one of the finest meditations on animal companionship that I have ever read.
