Animals – Page 3 – Feministe

Great British Bake-Off viewers shocked by ‘explicit’ image of male squirrel

All eyes should have been on the delicious array of cakes and pastries prepared by the finalists of the Great British Bake Off.

But winner Joanne Wheatley’s moment of glory had to play second fiddle to a squirrel.

The rodent, seen loitering in the grounds of the mansion where the BBC2 show was filmed, was the subject of a lingering camera shot.

And viewers could not help noticing its unmistakably masculine appearance.

Clips were posted on YouTube, while hundreds took to social networks and TV forums to discuss it.

One joked: ‘This evening’s Great British Bake Off contains full-frontal squirrel nudity which some viewers may find startling.’

Another said: ‘A squirrel is flashing everyone on the Great British Bake Off.’

Others were more disturbed by the image, complaining it was an unnecessary and unwelcome distraction on a show about baking. Since the programme was recorded some time ago, it could easily have been edited out.

“Its unmistakably masculine appearance.” This squirrel has really huge nuts, is what the Daily Mail is trying to tell you. XXX squirrel pic below the fold.

Cat About Town

This is pretty amazing: A cat got lost in Colorado in 2006, and was found yesterday in Manhattan.

Drunk Mooses Wreaking Havoc in Sweden

Move over bears, there’s a new animal threat in town: Inebriated mooses (meese? moose?).

An inebriated moose trying to get more fermenting apples apparently lost its balance and ended up stuck in an apple tree in Sweden, The Local website reported.

After returning home from work Tuesday evening, Per Johansson of Saro heard bellowing from his neighbor’s yard, The Local reported.

“I thought at first that someone was having a laugh. Then I went over to take a look and spotted a moose stuck in an apple tree with only one leg left on the ground,” Johansson told The Local.

Hate it when that happens.

Drunken moose are common in Sweden in autumn, when apples are abundant on the ground and in trees in homeowners’ yards, according to The Local.

Johansson surmised the moose had been indulging for quite a while.

“My neighbor recognized it as the animal that almost ran into her car earlier in the day,” Johansson told The Local. “She was pretty sure the moose was already under the influence.”

As far as drunken hijinks go, though, getting stuck in a tree is amateur hour. If that moose was doing naked leg-lifts at a bus stop, maybe I’d be impressed.

PETA to start a porn site, because of course.

Justin Bieber in a PETA ad — Next Bieber for PETA ad: "Animals Can Make U Hard. Adopt From Your Local Shelter." Right?

I don’t see what could possibly go wrong with this plan:

Instead of focusing on anti-fur, the porn site will raise awareness of veganism, said Rajt. “We really want to grab people’s attention, get them talking and to question the status quo and ultimately take action, because the best way we can help the greatest number of animals is simply by not eating them.”
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So how pornographic will PETA go? According to Rajt, it will have enough adult content to qualify for the XXX domain site but also some other graphic images of animals that viewers may not expect to see.

Sure. Titties, titties, titties, CHICKEN WITH ITS BEAK SAWED OFF. Sounds hot. Definitely sounds like an effective way to get people to go vegan — associate animal cruelty with sexual arousal. I see absolutely no potential downsides.

Food Visibility

Bittman has a great column this week about the ridiculous proposed laws to ban filming and photography at farms. Animal rights and sustainable food activists have embarrassed corporate farms by publishing footage of how corporate farms actually treat animals, and the disgusting and cruel conditions that they maintain (the footage is often shot by brave employees of the farm who are offended by what they see at work every day). In response, the food industry pushed legislators to just make it illegal to record what goes on in their facilities. The laws haven’t passed, but it’s still nearly impossible for journalists (or anyone else) to get into factory farms to see how things are run. Bittman tried, and was repeatedly refused.

When a journalist can’t see how the food we eat is produced, you don’t need ag-gag laws. The system’s already gagged.

The videographers that have made it into closed barns have revealed that eggs are laid and chickens are born and raised in closed barns containing (literally) hundreds of thousands of birds; an outsider wouldn’t even know what those barns were. Pigs are housed cheek-to-jowl, by the many thousands, in what are called concentrated animal feeding operations, where feeding, watering and monitoring are largely mechanized. Pregnant sows are confined in small concrete cells. Iowa is industrial agriculture’s ground zero. But when it comes to producing animals, zero is pretty much what you’re going to see.
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Which would bring us a step closer to China, whose Health Ministry is trying to clamp down on news media outlets that “mislead” the public about food safety issues. (It’s worth noting, on the other hand, that the Chinese Supreme Court has called for the death penalty in cases of fatal food poisoning.) “Mislead” apparently means reporting about pork tainted with the banned drug clenbuterol, which sent a couple hundred wedding guests to the hospital; watermelons exploding from the overuse of chemicals; pork disguised as beef, or glowing blue; and — my favorite — cooking oil dredged from sewers. (Check my blog for the details.)

Our watermelons don’t explode and, for now, I can write about it. Yet when a heroic videographer breaks a horror story about animal cruelty, as happens every month or so, the industry writes off the offense as an isolated incident, and the perpetrators — usually the workers, who are “just following orders” — are fired or given wrist slaps. Business continues as usual, and it will until the public better understands industrial animal-rearing techniques.

And until the food industry stops intimidating journalists, suing anyone who speaks ill of them, and using their economic and political might to obliterate small ethical farmers.

Weasel Attack

The local news is so great:

HOQUIAM, Wash. —

Police say a man was carrying a dead weasel when he burst into a Hoquiam apartment and assaulted a man.

The victim asked, “Why are you carrying a weasel?” Police said the attacker said, “It’s not a weasel, it’s a marten,” then punched him in the nose and fled.

The attacker was apparently looking for his girlfriend and had gone to her former boyfriend’s apartment Monday night where the victim was a guest.

KXRO reports he left carcass behind.

Police later found the suspect arguing with his girlfriend at another location and arrested the 33-year-old Hoquiam man after a fight.

He said he had found the marten dead near Hoquiam, but police don’t know why he carried it with him.

A marten is a member of the weasel family.

Just normal relationship stuff.

You’re such a dog.

Via the Hairpin, this is the funnest game ever: Upload a picture of yourself, and the Doggelganger program will find a dog that looks like you and that is also in your area. Unfortunately the program thinks I am in New Zealand, so I can’t actually go and get my doggelganger Elliot. But look how cute he is! And we are definitely twins. Someone adopt him:

Ok go play.

Preventing Cruelty on the Farm

So this thread is predictably out of control — which let’s be honest, I knew was going to happen, because it happens anytime we talk about food and/or post pictures of cute animals — but some interesting and important arguments about how we eat have been raised in the comments. I’ve written about this before, again to much push-back, but I’ll reiterate that I am definitely not of the “you must go vegan in order to be a good progressive who values animal rights and the environment.” Many people are of that school and that is great! I am personally of the school that says human beings are omnivores and eating meat is not morally wrong; however, human beings also have developed enough cognitive functions to enable us to engage the moral issues that come along with eating animals, and because we have that ability we also have the burden of treating animals with respect, even if we do breed and kill them for food. That means not torturing them; it means consuming meat with the knowledge that the food on your plate came from a living being and deserves a degree of reverence; it means doing what you can, in your particular situation, to lessen the suffering of animals. For some people, that means going vegan. For the more economically privileged, it might mean refusing to buy factory-farmed meat. A lot of vegans will tell you that it is entirely possible to go vegan on almost any income, at least in countries like the United States. I would say that (a) that’s just flatly untrue given all the problems folks have accessing decent, healthy food in general; but (b) yeah, a lot of people — even most people — could definitely get by consuming less meat and fewer animal products. Totally, that is true. I definitely could, even though I’m not a huge meat-eater and mostly eat carbs, vegetables and fish.

But I’m not sure veganism should be the ultimate goal (although consuming less factory-farmed animal products is a pretty laudable one, as is focusing on a more vegetable-based diet). The New York Times has a pertinent article on this today, featuring opinions from a variety of writers, from livestock rancher Nicolette Hahn Niman to some jerkoff from the Cato foundation (his unpredictable position: “let market forces decide!”). Niman’s arguments are the ones that make the most sense to me:

links for 5-11-2011

First time!

via INCITE!

The Revolution Starts At Home: Confronting Intimate Violence Within Activist Communities , is a new and necessary anthology that needs to be read by everyone in activist communities. So often we see ourselves as above perpetuating the same oppressive and violent actions within our own communities and intimate relationships. This book delves into the ways in which revolution must be micro and macro:

Based on the popular zine that had reviewers and fans alike demanding more, The Revolution Starts at Home finally breaks the dangerous silence surrounding the “open secret” of intimate violence—by and toward caretakers, in romantic partnerships, and in friendships—within social justice movements. This watershed collection compiles stories and strategies from survivors and their allies, documenting a decade of community accountability work and delving into the nitty-gritty of creating safety from abuse without relying on the prison industrial complex. Fearless, tough-minded, and ultimately loving, The Revolution Starts at Home offers potentially life-saving alternatives for ensuring survivor safety while building a road toward a revolution where no one is left behind.

And it’s on tour! Check out the dates in select North American cities
here.

Colonial heteropatriarchy comes out in defense of reprehensible billboards targeting the reproductive rights of black women in america yet again, in The Chicago Tribune. Author Dennis Byrne’s ugly, condescending racist sexism gets taken down at Abortion Gang.

An in depth, challenging and inconclusive piece about the politics of representation and recognition in drag for Asian American queers, that’s also been taken on by Hyphen, The New Gay, and Yellow Peril , which have all given incisive and on point critiques which I absolutely agree with. But as someone who simultaneously loves and is frustrated by performance, I appreciate the ways in which this particular author navigates the ways in which parody is an inconclusive and fine line, that, in failing or succeeding individuals and/or communities, can offer an important investigation of the ways in which power is distributed and communicated through and between colonial and colonized audiences and performers.

As a queer woman of colour, who is also a vegan reconnecting to her animal rights activists roots, and who absolutely ADORES burlesque, this article was a must read for me this week.

Everyone as sick of hipsters appropriating indigenous headdresses as I am? Thought so.

Meanwhile, over in the State of Prop 8, The Governator and Maria Shriver are getting divorced, and Shark-Fu’s response is priceless.

I suspected the product integrity of Prop 8 when celebrity couples kept getting divorced after the measure passed…but lots of those folks lived elsewhere and for all I knew the power of Prop 8 diminished with physical distance from it’s state of origin.

This young woman (David Suzuki’s daughter!) should CLEARLY be replacing the UN. Although there are privileged children all over the world, and children living in poverty in north america, what she says is still powerful, beautiful and so necessary.
The girl who silenced the world for 5 minutes

Finally, Lois Lane is awesome (As is Kate Beaton. If you didn’t already know her, you’re welcome).

But what about when boys call me “foxy”?

Ay yi yi:

Animal ethicists are calling for a new vocabulary about animals, shunning words such as “pets,” “wildlife,” and “vermin” as derogatory and even suggesting “animal” is a “term of abuse.”

Common language on fauna betrays an “anthropocentric bias” and impedes an understanding of our interaction with the non-human species sharing the planet, argue the editors of the first academic journal dedicated to animal ethics in their debut issue.

Instead of “pet,” the Journal of Animal Ethics suggests “companion animal.” Rather than “wildlife,” they are to be called “free-living.” “Differentiated beings” or “non-human animals” is preferred to simply “animals.”

Words such as “vermin,” “beasts” and “critters” are stricken completely, along with similes such as “sly as a fox,” “drunk as a skunk,” “eat like a pig,” “slippery as an eel,” “breeding like rabbits” and “stubborn as a mule.”

“We will not be able to think clearly unless we discipline ourselves to use more impartial nouns and adjectives in our exploration of animals and our moral relations with them,” the editors write.

Sorry, this probably makes me insensitive to the feelings of non-human animals — good thing they don’t read blogs! — but “differentiated beings”? GTFO. Or get a new hobby or something, I dunno, anything other than insisting that the word “pet” betrays an anthropocentric bias (ANTHROPOCENTRIC, also, just saying). And as long as we’re Outraged about really ridiculous things like the word “critter,” maybe we should be upset about the fact that there’s a photo of a fox on the front page of this blog — if any mollusks are reading, they are really freaked out right now. Let’s Ask A Spider about it.

Also, if “animal” is a “term of abuse” (um), why is “companion animal” ok? If I call a puppy my “companion bitch,” am I in the clear as long as it’s a girl-puppy? SO MANY QUESTIONS.

(Usual caveats: Language is important and I love animals as much as the next cat lady. But who exactly is being offended here, and how is shifting language going to help anything in this particular situation? Also eels really are slippery, foxes are pretty sly for the most part, drunk as a skunk just rhymes, and you’ll pry the word “critter” out of my cold dead jaws.)

(Also, I had a friend once whose dad used to say was “built like a brick shithouse.” Not the nicest way to describe her, but as a simile, not insulting to the shithouse.)