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Thursday, August 13, 2020
POLITICO Massachusetts Playbook: State PARTY to examine CONDUCT of MORSE accusers — The WALSH vs. WU battleground — In BOSTON, it’s a ‘RENTER’S MARKET’
RSN: Andy Borowitz | Harris's Approval Rating Soars After Trump Reminds Nation How "Nasty" She Was to Kavanaugh
13 August 20
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Andy Borowitz | Harris's Approval Rating Soars After Trump Reminds Nation How "Nasty" She Was to Kavanaugh
Andy Borowitz, The New Yorker
Borowitz writes: "Senator Kamala Harris saw her approval rating soar on Tuesday after Donald J. Trump reminded the American people that she had been 'nasty' to Brett Kavanaugh during his confirmation hearings."
READ MORE
'If President Trump is re-elected, we believe there will be another wave of people who will decide to renounce their citizenship.' (photo: Getty)
How Donald Trump Is Driving Americans to Renounce Their Citizenship
Arwa Mahdawi, Guardian UK
Mahdawi writes: "He may not have built his 'beautiful wall,' but Donald Trump is doing an A+ job of keeping people, including his own citizens, out of the US."
The US president’s mishandling of the coronavirus crisis has helped cause a 1,200% increase in people abandoning their US citizenship this year
Record numbers of people are giving up their US citizenship, according to analysis by a New York accountancy firm. More than 5,800 Americans renounced their citizenship in the first six months of 2020, Bambridge Accountants reports, a 1,210% increase on the six months to December 2019.
The US’s global tax reporting requirements are a major reason why many people decide to cough up the $2,350 (£1,775) fee required to officially cut ties with the US. Boris Johnson, for example, renounced his US citizenship in 2016 after complaining about the “absolutely outrageous” US tax demands. Nevertheless, it seems that Trump is sending an increasing number of expats over the edge.
“What we’ve seen is people are over everything happening with President Donald Trump, how the coronavirus pandemic is being handled and the political policies in the US at the moment,” a partner at the firm explained to CNN. “If President Trump is re-elected, we believe there will be another wave of people who will decide to renounce their citizenship.”
I can’t imagine Trump is too concerned about Americans socially distancing themselves from their passports; the man seems hellbent on making citizenship as unattractive as possible. The Trump administration is reportedly considering blocking US citizens and permanent residents from re-entering the US if an official “reasonably” believes they could have Covid-19. Once upon a time, an American passport let you cross borders with ease – now it makes you persona non grata around the world. Not only are most Americans banned from Europe, but they may also no longer even be guaranteed entrance to their own home.
Marjorie Taylor Greene (right) poses with a supporter in Rome, Ga., late Tuesday. Greene, criticized for promoting bigoted videos and supporting the far-right QAnon conspiracy theory, won the GOP nomination for Georgia's 14th Congressional District. (photo: Mike Stewart/AP)
QAnon Supporter Who Made Bigoted Videos Wins Georgia Primary, Likely Heading to Congress
Camila Domonoske, NPR
Domonoske writes: "A Georgia Republican who has said that Muslims do not belong in government and expressed her belief in the baseless conspiracy theory called QAnon has won her primary runoff and is all but certain to win a seat in the House of Representatives in November."
FROM POLITICO:
Republicans had just felt relief after they finally ousted Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa), a controversial member with a long history of making racist remarks, in a primary earlier this month.
Now GOP lawmakers, aides and operatives fear Greene — a wealthy businesswoman who has already drawn national attention because of her belief in a trove of QAnon conspiracy theories — could create an even bigger black eye for the party if she wins the nomination. Greene will face neurosurgeon John Cowan in the Aug. 11 primary runoff.
“These comments are appalling, and Leader McCarthy has no tolerance for them,” said Drew Florio, a spokesman for House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.).
House Minority Whip Steve Scalise (R-La.) went further, throwing his weight behind Greene’s opponent.
Post Office worker. (photo: Getty)
Is Trump Sabotaging the Postal Service?
Mary Harris, Slate
Harris writes: "There's a slowdown in post office service that you can feel across the country. And all this is happening as it's begun to dawn on many politicians just how essential the mail will be come November."
f you click online on the “official organizational chart” for the U.S. Postal Service, you’re likely to get one of those 404 page not found messages. At least, that’s what happened to me when I recently tried to figure it out what was going on at the post office. That’s because a couple of days ago, who is doing what at the Postal Service changed radically. About 23 executives resigned or were replaced. People have been concerned because USPS is finding itself stretched increasingly thin. It’s running out of money, like a lot of businesses that are dealing with this coronavirus. It’s being led by a new postmaster general, a guy known for pushing workers to a breaking point. There’s a slowdown in post office service that you can feel across the country. And all this is happening as it’s begun to dawn on many politicians just how essential the mail will be come November.
I spoke with Slate’s Jordan Weissmann about what’s happening and what Washington needs to do to get you your mail and ensure a free and fair election. Our conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.
Jordan Weissmann: Early on in the coronavirus crisis, it was very obvious that the Postal Service was going to be in financial trouble. And they started asking for a fairly large bailout, which Donald Trump was not at all on board with because the entire Trump administration hates the Postal Service. Trump has been ranting and raving about it for years now for all sorts of reasons.
The thing to realize about the Postal Service’s financial troubles is that most of them really have been due to this prefunding requirement. Back in 2006, Congress decided that the Postal Service should have to prefund about 75 years’ worth of its retiree health benefits.
Mary Harris: Does any other organization do this?
No, nobody does this. It’s insane. It immediately started to go wrong because they passed this and then we got the Great Recession, and the Postal Service just got walloped. And so for years and years after this, the Postal Service has been putting up these huge paper losses, the majority of which have come from this prefunding requirement.
These losses are on paper, but it’s still prevented them from really investing in modernizing their operations. And they have also faced legitimate challenges. The volume of first-class mail—just letters—which is their bread and butter, has decreased enormously, thanks to the internet. That’s been balanced out a good deal by package delivery. And that’s helped a lot. So the Postal Service’s financial troubles are partly a result of its core business declining. But they are also largely a creation of Congress. And so that’s why the whole idea of just totally trashing the service to save money on the edges is so, so absurd.
Let’s talk about the new postmaster general, Louis DeJoy. As soon as he took the helm, folks started ringing the alarms. Explain a little bit who he is.
Louis DeJoy is a former logistics executive. One of the first things that most people noticed when he was selected to be the postmaster general was that he was a major Republican donor. He’s given apparently about $2.5 million to the Republican Party. He also donated to Donald Trump’s victory fund. People immediately started to worry that Donald Trump was putting a flunky in charge of the Postal Service. [Editor’s note: The postmaster general is not directly appointed by the president but by the Postal Service Board of Governors, which consists of nine governors appointed by the president.] The reason this would concern people is because Donald Trump has spent the last several years trashing the Postal Service, calling it a joke, saying how it needs to increase package prices, mostly because he hates Amazon, because Amazon is owned by Jeff Bezos, who owns the Washington Post.
He’s called it Jeff Bezos’ delivery boy. He’s call it the Amazon scam. He’s baselessly talked about how the Postal Service is supposedly giving Amazon a sweetheart shipping deal. He has had this vendetta against the Postal Service for a variety of reasons for a long time. Then also he’s been waging war against vote by mail for the last several months. And so we’ve had all these reasons to be worried about Donald Trump’s ill intentions for the United States Postal Service. And then he puts this guy who looks a lot like a flunky in charge of it.
As I was looking into this story, I wanted a better picture of how postal workers were thinking of Louis DeJoy.
They were not happy! He is not pro-labor. And that is one of the core tensions between conservatives and the Postal Service. Why a lot of conservatives despise the Postal Service is because it’s a huge, huge unionized workforce. They see it as the enemy in a lot of ways, and there’s a racial element to this because it’s a large unionized workforce with a lot of Black employees. Conservatives have wanted to spin it off and privatize it and break the union for years now. This guy they’ve put in charge is sort of the antithesis of what the Postal Service stands for. He’s a union-busting former private logistics executive. It’s very much the fox in charge of the henhouse.
Let’s lay out exactly what he did when he took this job, because very quickly he started remaking the organization.
Within about a month of arriving, he announced an “operational pivot.” No one ever wants to hear about an operational pivot. It was a series of cost-cutting measures. He said there would be no more overtime pay. He told letter carriers that they were not to return to pick up mail that had to be left on the factory floor. If they couldn’t make it all in one trip, they were just to leave it there. You make your one scheduled delivery and if stuff doesn’t fit on the truck, too bad, we get it the next day.
Is there a charitable interpretation of this?
The most charitable interpretation is that he’s trying to save a little bit of money for the Postal Service because it’s had these big “losses” over the past decade and it’s time for it to become more efficient and lose less money. But even that is extremely penny-wise and poun- foolish. These changes have resulted in massive backlogs in mail that are undermining people’s faith in the Postal Service’s ability to do its basic job. If you were trying to fix an organization and get it in shape for the long term, this is not the approach you would take.\
And we should lay out really explicitly why a lot of politicians are thinking about this in terms of the election, because in 34 states, you don’t just have to have your absentee ballot postmarked by Election Day. It has to be received by Election Day. So you can see how a well-meaning person could drop off their ballot a few days earl, and it still wouldn’t reach the destination on time.
There is a concern about whether people will get their ballot on time and whether they’ll be able to get it delivered to the county election office on time. We’ve seen some discouraging signs already, for instance, with the Michigan primary, where some people weren’t getting their ballot until literally the day before. There have been signs that this is not an imaginary problem, that this is a real and present danger, and DeJoy has so far given absolutely no signal that he has any real plan to fix this problem.
Congress could get out in front of an election disaster here by making restoring the Postal Service a sticking point of the next coronavirus relief package. But it’ll take more than just money, right?
It’s pretty obvious at this point that just giving the USPS more cash is not good enough because it’s not clear that the Trump administration or Louis DeJoy would actually use the money. If Democrats and Republicans can reach some sort of a deal on coronavirus relief, that bill needs to contain a bailout for the Postal Service that, one, provides more money and, two, tells the Postal Service how it has to use the money and how it has to restore service. And has to speed up delivery back to where it was. And prioritize ballots. As I discovered while I was talking to some appropriations experts, there are all sorts of backhanded ways the Trump administration could actually basically impound any money Congress wanted to give it, if they’re not careful and don’t put restrictions on it.
Is it crazy to think that Republicans might want to help Democrats save the Postal Service?
It’s crossed my mind. I don’t know. It’s hard. There’s also a large contingent of the party right now that’s actually happy to just not pass any bill to deal with coronavirus relief at this point.
But the USPS is the most popular federal agency, like more popular than parks, more popular than NASA.
But again, you have to realize that they really hate the Postal Service. A lot of dyed-in-the-wool conservatives really, truly dislike it. But I think the reason why some conservatives might want to fix this issue is that Republicans are worried that their elderly voters in places like Florida are going to get screwed by this because they rely on vote by mail. We saw a little bit of movement on this from Trump, where after months and months of talking about how voting by mail wasn’t reliable and was fraudulent, he suddenly reversed course and said, except in Florida! In Florida, vote by mail is great. They have an established system and absentee ballots there are totally safe.
And of course that’s where the president votes. By mail.
And has for a while. And so it was silly. And it clearly shows how some Republicans are whispering in his ear, Hey, you might be screwing us over, too, by doing this. And so maybe, just maybe, that provides an opening to actually try to take action to fix what’s wrong with the Postal Service right now. But I would not count on a big hand from Republicans on this. Let’s put it that way. There needs to be as much volume about this as possible as soon as possible. If I’m the Democrats right now, I’m just talking every single day about how Donald Trump is sabotaging the Postal Service.
A lot of the criticism of DeJoy from postal experts has been that he talks about the USPS as a business. But they say it’s not a business, it’s a service—it’s a Postal Service. Do you buy it? Do you agree with that?
Yeah, it is a service. It’s in the goddamn Constitution. For various reasons, the Postal Service is treated as an independent agency that’s supposed to sort of be self-sustaining. And I don’t think it’s totally crazy to look for the Postal Service to kind of sort of break even. You don’t want to be spending taxpayer dollars deeply subsidizing Amazon deliveries. Private corporate customers and such should probably be paying their fair share. But at the same time, there’s no reason not to treat the mail as a government service. There’s no reason to be thinking of it as a profit-making entity. If you believe in government services, the Postal Service is kind of the original. It’s the thing that actually made this big sprawling country into something approximating a unified whole—that you could send letters across it and the government would carry them. So, yeah. I think treating it as a business is a little bit base and a little bit wrong, and it tells you a lot about the people who do that. They can’t conceive of something as just a public good.
Hundreds gathered to walk from the New Haven Green to the New Haven Police Department during a peaceful protest Friday. (photo: Kassi Jackson/The Hartford Courant)
Calls to Defund the Police Are Joining the Demand to Cancel Rent
Francisco Pérez and Luis Feliz Leon, Jacobin
Excerpt: "The combination of rising property values and billowing police budgets have transformed New York City since the 1970s. Now, movements to defund the police are coalescing with calls to cancel rent."
Puerto Ricans are furious after botched primaries forced officials to reschedule voting at centres lacking ballots. (photo: Eric Rojas/Getty)
Puerto Ricans, Upset at Botched Primary, Demand Answers
Associated Press
Excerpt: "Puerto Ricans demanded answers Monday after botched primaries forced officials to reschedule voting at centers lacking ballots, an unprecedented decision being called a blow to the U.S. territory's democracy."
The island’s elections commission remained silent as anger and embarrassment spread across Puerto Rico one day after hundreds of voters were turned away from shuttered centers that for unknown reasons received ballots several hours late or never received them at all.
It was the first time primaries have been halted and led many to worry that it has cracked Puerto Ricans’ confidence in their government and could affect the outcome of upcoming November general elections on an island with a voter participation rate of nearly 70%.
“That scar will never leave Puerto Rico,” said political analyst Domingo Emanuelli. “It was a hold-up of the country’s democracy.”
Gov. Wanda Vázquez and other officials from Puerto Rico’s two main parties demanded the resignation of Juan Ernesto Dávila, president of the election commission. He declined comment via a spokeswoman but told NotiUno radio station that he would resign once the primaries are over, saying it would be irresponsible to step down before that.
Meanwhile, questions about why Puerto Rico held a primary if ballots were not available and how it was possible that no one knew about the problem until it was too late remained unanswered.
The electoral commission officials for the pro-statehood New Progressive Party and the main opposition Popular Democratic Party did not return calls or messages for comment.
The primary is one of the most closely watched races in the island’s history since it pits two candidates who served as replacement governors following last year’s political turmoil. Vázquez faces Pedro Pierluisi, who represented Puerto Rico in Congress from 2009 to 2017.
Pierluisi briefly served as governor after Gov. Ricardo Rosselló resigned in August 2019 following widespread street protests over a profanity-laced chat that was leaked and government corruption. But Puerto Rico’s Supreme Court ruled that Vázquez, then the justice secretary, was constitutionally next in line because there was no secretary of state.
Meanwhile, the main opposition Popular Democratic Party, which supports Puerto Rico’s current political status as a U.S. territory, is holding a primary for the first time in its 82-year history. Three people are vying to become governor — San Juan Mayor Carmen Yulín Cruz, known for her public spats with U.S. President Donald Trump following the devastation of Hurricane Maria; Puerto Rico Sen. Eduardo Bhatia; and Carlos Delgado, mayor of the northwest coastal town of Isabela.
A federal control board that oversees Puerto Rico’s finances dismissed accusations that the electoral commission did not have enough funding, saying it approved all of its funding requests.
“The disruptions ... are the result (of) inefficient organization at an agency that only two weeks ago struggled to procure the printing of ballots for an election that was originally supposed to take place on June 7,” the board said in a statement. “The State Elections Commission has sufficient money, and it has the more than enough staff to perform the one task it is charged with.”
While another primary is scheduled for Aug. 16, some expect lawsuits and legal loopholes to potentially upset those plans.
Edgardo Román, president of the Bar Association of Puerto Rico, said the situation is in a legally gray area since it was never contemplated. A new date has to be set for those who didn’t get a chance to vote because the ballots never arrived, he said, but it’s less clear what will happen to those who didn’t return to centers to vote because they didn’t find out in time that the ballots eventually arrived.
“Everything has been rather abrupt,” he said. “We have had the worse electoral experience in the history of Puerto Rico.”
At least one voter filed a lawsuit against the commission and the electoral officials of the two main parties late Sunday via the American Civil Liberties Union. Pierluisi also filed a lawsuit against the commission and the two officials as he rejected its decision to hold another primary next Sunday.
The political upheaval was demoralizing to some, but Gireliz Zambrana, a 31-year-old federal employee who didn’t get a chance to vote on Sunday, said he would try again on Aug. 16 even though he is frustrated and said what happened is irrational.
He stressed that Puerto Rico’s situation had to change: the island is still struggling to recover from Hurricane Maria and a series of strong earthquakes amid a pandemic and a 13-year economic recession.
“One has to go out and vote,” he said. “The only way to fix all of this is kicking people out.”
'Something has gone badly wrong with the way we keep pets.' (image: Guardian UK)
Love You to Death: How We Hurt Animals We Cherish, and Earth in Turn
Esther Woolfson, Guardian UK
Excerpt: "Something has gone badly wrong with the way we keep pets. Our casual cruelties are a symptom of our unhealthy relationship with other species."
must have been about four when we drove to buy a dog. The day is now only a haze of Sunday afternoon impressions of rain and green, of the muddy track somewhere in the Stirlingshire countryside, a room, a log fire, and the two chosen puppies who would be the confidants of my growing up. The black dog died when I was in my early teens, and the brown one, the last dog I knew well, shortly before I left school. Our buying them must have been part of the growing tendency for post-second world war pet-keeping, which had been increasing since Victorian times, and was about to expand into the vast pet trade of today.
But what makes us choose one creature over another? Many studies have evaluated the importance of a species’ appearance in determining its popularity, commercial potential or conservation status. The conclusions are dismaying: “An animal’s attractiveness substantially increases support for its protection,” one study says, while another concludes: “A few charismatic and cute species … tend to receive most of the conservation funds and policy attention.” Creatures are ranked – “the 20 most charismatic species” – or described as “powerful commercial icons” or “the world’s cutest animals”. Even the birds in our gardens are subject to our caprices. The results of a study on the “likeability” of garden birds show that we like songbirds (even though we may not be able to define correctly what a songbird is), preferring robins and blackbirds to corvids, gulls, pigeons and starlings. We consider the former attractive but the latter argumentative, competitive and noisy – all necessary, natural behaviours of wild birds. “Charismatic”, “iconic”, “cute” – in a time of devastating and irreversible species loss, can these really be the measures of our love?
What about invertebrates? In any measure of love, we do not include thoughts of ecological niches, of trophic cascades, of the unseen, unknown benefits that we gain from other species in ways we might not understand. Species we regard as malign – the ubiquitous Highland midge, or winter moths – may be problematic simply because they are inimical to the interests of humans. Parasitoid wasps are efficient controllers of common garden pests. Parasitiformes and acariformes, the mites and ticks, more than a million species of them – most as yet undescribed – have important and complex roles in ecology, but fall very far outside the boundaries of our interest or concern.
Earthworms, who we tolerate because we know of their benefits to our gardens, are never likely to be regarded as “charismatic” species, but Charles Darwin himself, in his monograph The Formation of Vegetable Mould Through the Action of Worms, With Observations on Their Habits, writes with enthusiasm and even warmth of his discoveries of their likes and dislikes, of their intelligence and their unexpected abilities. That the vast majority of the world’s species, 95% of them invertebrate, will fail all the common tests and judgments we construct, belies their overwhelming importance and significance. The organisation Buglife suggests that for life to continue on a healthy planet, invertebrates play a more important role than we do.
In an astute and moving essay, Praise Song for the Unloved Animals, the American writer Margaret Renki pays tribute to the role played in the complex systems of life and renewal by some of the reviled creatures of the Earth, among them opossum, vulture, spider, wasp, bat and snake, and their place in the cardinal cycles of consumption and continuity. She writes beautifully of the red bat’s “canny wings”, of mosquitos providing food for the “chittering chimney swifts” and of the “glossy vulture” – often mistaken in flight for eagles, ospreys or hawks, “creatures we thoughtlessly love much more” – whose eating of the bodies of dead creatures is a vital stage in the process of returning flesh to life. She reminds us that perhaps, had our love been different, the world might have been, too.
If an emphasis on appearance has had vastly damaging effects on all species, it has exercised a cruelly malign influence over those we keep as pets. Once bred for their qualities as working or hunting animals, for speed and strength, the “selective” breeding of dogs over centuries created diverse breeds from the single canine line, but in more recent years criteria for selection have changed in response to the demand for “pedigree” animals who conform to particular standards of behaviour and appearance. Not just for dogs, the way a creature looks seems a major determinant of their fate. Beginning with an already narrow gene pool, selective breeding has greatly increased the incidence of disease in these animals, many of whom, as a result of our choices, suffer from life-limiting or chronic, painful conditions.
I stand at the traffic lights waiting to cross. A young man beside me holds a lead – at the end of it is a puppy standing patiently between us. In the moments before the crossing signal, I listen to the dog breathe. The sound is old and bronchitic, a dissonant issuing from this neat little body, the laboured wheezing of a young dog’s breath. The man is fashionably dressed, and the dog most probably loved and precious. I’m not sure if the dog is a French bulldog or a pug, but he’s one of those that now form a widespread, snuffling, breathless band of canine respiratory distress. The lights change, and man and dog walk off, the dog carrying his possibly malign genetic destiny, his future skin-fold pyoderma, the corneal ulceration that may affect his protruding eyes, the upper airway obstruction that is probably already causing him to wheeze. It’s not the first time I’ve wondered – what made this man and others seek out and pay for creatures who may live shortened, suffering lives?
Deliberate selection for short limbs and long backs has caused dachshunds, shih-tzus, basset hounds and other breeds to suffer from a painful bone condition called chondrodystrophy. Larger dogs such as rottweilers, St Bernards and retrievers experience hip dysplasia, arthritis, osteosarcomas and degeneration of the joints. Eye problems are common in many breeds, as is deafness. Skin diseases and inflammation are caused by breeding for wrinkled skin in basset hounds, bloodhounds and shar peis. Blood, kidney, gastrointestinal and neurological ailments are common – many King Charles spaniels, griffons and chihuahuas suffer from the spinal-cord destroying syringomyelia, caused by having skulls too small to accommodate their brains. It is a condition that has increased greatly over the past 20 years, and continues to do so. Cavalier King Charles spaniels also suffer from mitral valve disease, while other heart conditions afflict boxers, rottweilers and dobermanns. Very small “teacup” dogs suffer from increased bone fragility while “flat-faced” or brachycephalic dogs – such as pugs, bulldogs and Pekingese – frequently suffer from brachycephalic obstructive airway syndrome (Boas), which causes breathing difficulties and shortens their lives. Many dogs are artificially inseminated, and as a result of selection for large heads and narrow pelvises, are unable to give birth without a caesarean section.
Cats, too, suffer the results of breeding for “desirable” traits, most often those associated with colour and appearance. Pedigree cats suffer disproportionately from dystocia – difficulty in giving birth, and subsequent high death rates for pedigree kittens. Manx cats may suffer from a number of ailments related to selection for short or no tails including spinal deformities, spina bifida and digestive problems.
Scottish fold cats are subject to cartilage problems, leading to arthritic conditions, while Burmese cats are prone to diabetes mellitus, cranial deformities, glaucoma and kidney stones. Both Burmese and Siamese cats may also suffer from Boas, diabetes, asthma, lymphomas, strabismus, hip dysplasia and small intestinal adenocarcinomas. Rabbits such as the English “lop” have significant health problems caused by their overlong ears. Selectively bred rats are subject to a number of health problems, including greatly increased risk of tumours.
The small dog at the traffic lights is just one of many. Their popularity has increased to the point where, despite widespread publicity about their health problems, demand for them greatly exceeds supply, which has brought about not only the irresponsible breeding that produces unhealthy animals, but has also led to a huge increase in the hazardous and cruel “farming” of dogs, and their illegal trade and importation across borders. At least one danger of this trade is the possibility of the reintroduction of rabies, as a result of faked certificates and the importation of affected creatures. Images from puppy farms look remarkably similar to those from fur farms, showing the dirty, caged, abused and suffering creatures we still continue to buy.
What makes us do it? Why do we encourage a trade that exploits the sufferings of others? One suggestion is that the “childlike” appearance of dogs such as pugs and bulldogs attracts us – according to a theory in evolutionary psychology, Kindchenschema, also known as neoteny, a positive response to the appeal of babylike or cute faces is an evolutionary way of ensuring the survival and nurturing of offspring. The theory may be correct (if you really think that bulldogs look like babies), but it does not prevent us from making an ethical decision about who and what we buy. I watch at the traffic lights as the man leads the dog away, a lifelong victim of our desire for “cute”.
No longer simply a matter of small, personal decisions, our animal owning has implications far wider than the privacy of our homes. It is increasingly subject to the moral, financial and political questions raised by our knowledge of animal cognition, and urgent considerations of consumption and resource. Feeding our pets involves similar questions to the ones we ask about feeding ourselves – what is healthy, affordable, necessary, ethical and environmentally sustainable?
A 2017 study assessed the environmental impact of companion animals in the US. The findings were that dogs and cats were responsible for 25-30% of the environmental impact of all meat consumption, that they created 64m tonnes of carbon dioxide and methane, and produced 5.1m tonnes of faeces annually, the same as 90 million humans. The study suggested that, in the light of these figures, increasing pet-keeping worldwide will make a hugely significant contribution to our current ecological crisis. (The suggestion that the food fed to animals is a byproduct of human food production is refuted by the same study that points out that, increasingly, pets are being fed higher-quality meat and much of what is regarded as unfit for human consumption is deemed so more on aesthetic than other grounds.)
As pet numbers increase, so do our purchases. Browsing pet product websites is like entering an anthropomorphised nightmare of overextended consumerism. One site offers 698 varieties of dog “treats”. Another sells pet beer, wine and herbal tonics for pet anxiety. There are the luxurious beds, the electronic toys, the whimsical clothing. There are socks and shoes, hats, bowties and dresses. There are shampoos, conditioners, dog-nail polish, fur dyes and whirlpool tubs. There are extensive ranges of veterinary psycho-pharmaceuticals to treat anxiety and behavioural problems, aromatherapy candles, colognes and fragranced sprays to mask the creature’s natural odours. There are the fancy-dress costumes – sharks, spiders, sumo wrestlers, light-up Halloween pumpkins and hundreds more.
Looking after the health of our pets may once have been simpler, when treatments were limited and they had fewer complex problems. Now, in an endless cycle of concern and responsibility, we have to decide on the treatments and insurance, which may be too expensive for many pet owners, creating yet another division of privilege, an irreconcilable dilemma for those who cannot pay for treatments they know to be available for their beloved animals.
Another decision is whether or not to have a newly acquired pet neutered. It may be a responsible action in limiting the future numbers of free-roaming animals such as cats, but while it may be convenient for owners, there may be future health consequences for the animal, such as obesity, cancers or joint disease. We are embarrassed by the manifestations of our pet animal’s sexuality, the subject usually being referred to through jokes or awkwardness – reflections of our reluctance to accept that, however sensible the decision may seem, in terms of our own or their benefit, neutering is a denial of the natural right of another being. It is just another aspect of the total power we exercise over the lives of the animals we choose as companions. Writing in the poem Another Dog’s Death of the early spaying of his dog, John Updike describes her as knowing “no nonhuman word for love”.
We expect so much from other species. For our purposes, they must be sufficiently like us for us to want to understand their behaviour and believe it very much like our own, but sufficiently unlike ourselves for us to be free of our concerns. They have to be easily sent to kennels when we wish to go on holiday, and content to be left on their own all day, often confined in places much too small, or in conditions utterly unlike their natural habitats.
In 1943, the Nobel prize winning author Elias Canetti wrote: “It is not good that animals are so cheap.” He might have been writing about the hamsters, mice, rats, guinea pigs and gerbils frequently bought as suitable pets for children, some of whom will be loved, tended and eventually mourned, others of whom will be neglected or worse. Solitary creatures will be kept in pairs or groups, or social ones alone. Crepuscular or nocturnal creatures, as many of them are, will be expected to provide entertainment for diurnal children. Reluctantly, I remember school-gate conversations about unfortunate fates: the school rabbit forgotten over a summer when the parent who was to look after him went on holiday, the escaped mice, the hamsters who fell, disappeared, were drowned or squashed or found burned at the back of a gas fire. The incidents were invariably presented as amusing, told in a tone of mocking self-exculpation. I see a succession of online adverts selling unwanted hamsters and guinea pigs. The child for whom they were bought “lost interest”, the family is moving house, there was an accidental mating. (“Oops!”) What they are being sold for, the cost of a cup of coffee, is the cost of another creature’s life. What is the Umwelt of a puppy-farmed dog, a lone rat, a desert gerbil, a Syrian hamster in a small plastic box?
What do we really know of the animals we buy? Our perceptions of their behaviour tell us that often they experience things in a similar way to ourselves, and that we may describe their behaviour as love, anger, jealousy, delight, embarrassment, joy or grief, because we have no other way to explain it. We all know what another creature’s happiness or distress looks like, because they look very much like our own.
When we force explanations of their behaviour on them – “She likes it!”, when possibly she does not, or “He doesn’t mind”, when clearly he does – we skew the relationship by manipulating an animal into being what we want. Other species possess “intelligence”, but too often we want it to be a mirror of our own. Assessing intelligence in our own species is hard enough, and the attempt to understand cognitive ability in other species is an unfinished and never-ending quest.
Potential danger in other creatures is difficult to assess. We’ve all heard the dazed excuse “I thought he wouldn’t hurt a fly” expressed by the owner of the dog who kills or maims, the person who seems tragically unaware that a dog should not be expected not to hurt a fly, or anything else, and that dog and victim should both have been prevented from either suffering or causing harm. In Jonathan Safran Foer’s book Eating Animals, he writes of his relationship with his own dog, and her “foreignness”, which includes being sufficiently unknown for him to feel uncertain that the dog wouldn’t maul his baby. He is wary and sensible, unlike the advice I find on a website promoting the qualities of a particular breed of dog, which suggests they are entirely suitable be left alone with children. Would anyone leave a creature of any sort, or indeed some humans, in a room alone with a small child?
When we are considering the potential risk an animal may pose, appearance affects our judgment. Some dogs may be more belligerent than others, made so by training or treatment, but for those who do not know a dog personally, it may be difficult to tell. We bring our prejudices to the perception – some dogs are subject to the discrimination that afflicts us in our views of the other, and often it is the owner who is judged. Staffordshire bull terriers, or Staffies, are particularly subject to negative views, often because of associations with cross-bred “fighting” dogs. If people keep dogs who have an air of menace, it may be because they feel more protected in a particular dangerous world when they do.
Considering the total dependency of domesticated and pet animals on humans, the law professor and ethicist Gary Francione talks of the “netherworld of vulnerability” to which they are subject. It is a vulnerability manifest in every facet of our dealings with them. The cruelties of every day spin out, major and minor, our national claims of love often sounding hollowly over the cold ring of statistics – the 74,000 or so animals abandoned annually in Britain, the shameful list of prosecutions for hideous acts perpetrated daily against other species, the estimated 1.5 million abandoned “shelter” animals killed annually in the US, the 3,500 or so stray dogs killed in Britain. These are just the ones we know about. Once, while driving down a suburban street one quiet Saturday afternoon, I saw see a woman with a dog stop and look around briefly before raising her foot and savagely kicking the dog’s side.
In an essay, the American writer Alison Hawthorne Deming remembers her cat, one of a feral litter found under the poetry centre where she works. The mother cat was fierce, disdainful of humans, “like a war correspondent who has seen too much ever to believe in human kindness”. One of the staff tames the kittens and gives them away on the understanding that they’ll be given literary names. Deming calls her cat after one owned by the 18th-century poet Christopher Smart. A vocal lover of life, her cat lives as if “each moment were his first on Earth”. When one day the cat shows signs of neurological damage and tests positive for antifreeze, an agent commonly used for poisoning, Deming does not know if the act was deliberate or not, writing that she can imagine a neighbour doing it in irritation over some minor matter, but cannot be sure. The vet puts the cat to sleep, and Deming reflects on the initial bitterness that encouraged her to believe the mother cat wise in staying away from humans – a feeling she overcomes by remembering the happiness of the cat’s life, and her appreciation of his quality of innocent simplicity.
The vulnerability that Francione writes about extends beyond the boundaries of species. Our love for others – human or not – makes us vulnerable, open to pain and loss, and to the use and abuse of power and domination.
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