and every dog needs a guardian like Mickey Rourke.

Check it - here’s Mickey Rourke’s acceptance speech from The Independent Spirit Awards. As with his Golden Globes acceptance speech, Rourke gives a shout-out to his dogs - and chokes at the mention of Loki, his recently departed friend and companion of eighteen years. Loki passed on February 16th, reportedly in Rourke’s arms.
 

 
In case y’all can’t view the video, here’s the part of the speech where Rourke mentions Loki:

You know, I’ve just gotten thousands of letters and shit from my - people, strangers, people that know me - about my dog that died six days ago. Loki, Loki - [pause] - this is for you, baby. [laughs]

Apropos my previous post, Rourke’s Wiki entry also notes,

He is well-known as a pet fancier, particularly fond of small-breed dogs. A spay/neuter advocate, Rourke participated in a protest outside of a pet shop in 2007 and has done a public service announcement for PETA.

His first little dog was reportedly a gift from his second wife. Though Rourke’s dogs are generally referred to as “chihuahuas,” some are not pure-bred. Loki, his most-publicized dog whom he described as “the love of my life,” was a chihuahua-terrier mix.

If any of Rourke’s dogs were bred, it appears to have been either unintentional or not something he’d do again.

Which means I can blub without ambivalence. Which I did, when the husband told me of Loki’s death. At least she had a good life; so many other dogs don’t.

If you’d like you send Rourke your condolences, try the guest book on his official site, www.uniquelyrourke.com. There, you’ll also find an announcement about Loki’s passing, as well as some photos of Loki with her human.

For snail mail, check out Rourke’s listing on fanmail.biz.

(h/t, ecorazzi)

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Or, a sab is a cat is a dog is a wife.

“Sabbing” really came into its own in the mid-1970s after enjoying some favorable publicity in the British media. “Sabs” [...] disrupted the hunt by laying false scents, wiring up gates to slow down the hunt’s progress, and setting off fireworks in woods to scare the foxes away. Some sabs developed an amazing expertise with a hunting horn and even succeeded in gaining control of the pack from the hunt master.

Hunters, of course, retaliated by attacking sabs. In 1976 the Joint Master of the Essex Union Foxhunt was widely quoted as saying, “Horsewhipping a hunt saboteur is rather like beating a wife - they’re both private matters.”

Excerpted from Kim Stallwood’s “A Personal Overview of Direct Action in the United Kingdom and the United States.”

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In discussing the “dislodg[ing of] pornulational programming” from dudely brains, Twisty stumbles upon a method of “reprogramming” those who have internalized misogyny:

Blamer Jonathan avers not only that it is possible to dislodge pornulational programming from your brain, but that he has done it himself.

You just, he suggests, need to get your lost empathy back.

Which sort of blew my mind, because I had just watched a cheesy episode of “The Twilight Zone” (not the real one; the mediocre 80’s one) about this spooky Lost & Found Emporium existing in some sort of nebulous hyperspace at the back of a sex shop. The protagonist shows up looking for his lost compassion (he gets it back after breathing in some compassion-gas. He also gets the girl, and, since this is a Hollywood TV show, the plot works out so he’s the boss of her and she’s just fine with that, but I’ll get into that some other time.). I was kind of intrigued by the idea of walking into a lost & found and reclaiming nebulous concepts.

Anyway, blamer Jonathan got his nebulous concept back, he says, by volunteering in aid of sexual assault survivors in emergency rooms, where, I’m guessing, he witnessed firsthand the catastrophic results of porn poisoning. It reprogrammed him in a hurry.

It’s a simple idea. Empathy and domination cannot coexist. Other stuff that cannot coexist with domination: compassion, enlightenment, love, truth, beauty, and whatever else H. sapiens fans are always touting as the best part of humanity.

(Emphasis mine.)

Misogyny, racism, homophobia, speciesism - unrelated, they’re not. Same shit, different expression. IBTP.

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This C. David Coats quote (from the preface to his 1991 book, Old MacDonald’s Factory Farm) has been floating around the animal rights blogspherz for a few weeks now. While I think Coats is dead-on in his analysis, his choice of phrasing strikes me as a little…curious, shall we say.

Take a look:

Isn’t man an amazing animal? He kills wildlife - birds, kangaroos, deer, all kinds of cats, coyotes, beavers, groundhogs, mice, foxes, and dingoes - by the millions in order to protect his domestic animals and their feed. Then he kills domestic animals by the billions and eats them. This in turn kills man by the millions, because eating all those animals leads to degenerative - and fatal - health conditions like heart disease, kidney disease, and cancer. So then man tortures and kills millions more animals to look for cures for these diseases. Elsewhere, millions of other human beings are being killed by hunger and malnutrition because food they could eat is being used to fatten domestic animals. Meanwhile, some people are dying of sad laughter at the absurdity of man, who kills so easily and so violently, and once a year sends out a card praying for “Peace on Earth.”

In the course of his patriarchy blaming, Coats assumes the language of the very patriarchy he’s indicting. Specifically, he continually employs variants of the term mankind when he’s actually referring to humankind: man is an amazing animal; he slaughters wildlife so that he can raise and eat “food” animals; man suffers from dietary-induced health conditions, which leads man to torture millions of “lab” animals in search of cures for these self-inflicted illnesses, and so on.

In fact, Coats only switches from androcentric to gender-neutral terms near the end of the paragraph - when he transitions from describing the actions of the oppressor (man) to the consequences of these actions on other human animals. To wit: “millions of other human beings are being killed by hunger and malnutrition”; “[m]eanwhile, some people are dying of sad laughter” (”at the absurdity of man,” natch).

Possibly, this is an unintentional example of casual sexism - i.e., Coats accidentally employed largely androcentric verbiage when writing this preface. Since this isn’t primarily a feminist blog, allow me to explain why Coats’s choice of terminology is problematic. By using language which explicitly refers to men - necessarily, at the exclusion of women - we erase women from the public sphere, from our written and oral histories, from our cultural narratives. These seemingly innocuous, male-specific terms have very real, very harmful practical consequences. Language shapes the way we think; words matter. In eliminating women from our discourse, so too do we eliminate them from our consciousness - shoving them from the public (political) to the private (domestic) sphere. “Man,” “mankind” and the like simply are not inclusive, universal terms for “men and women.” Nor is “convenience” an excuse - it’s not very hard to use “humankind” in place of “man” or “mankind,” “people” in place of “men,” etc.

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I’m not really big on Mickey Rourke, but I damn near tear up every time this video of his Golden Globes acceptance speech pops up on MSNB:

After a rather heartfelt speech, Rourke concludes by recognizing his dogs: “I’d like to thank all my dogs…the ones who are here, and the ones who aren’t here anymore. Because, sometimes when a man’s alone, all you got is your dog and they meant the world to me.”

The St. Louis Examiner, writing about Rourke’s (unfortunately) unusual speech, includes a video of Rourke taken at the Venice Film Festival last year. Rourke’s Chihuahua/terrier mix, Loki, accompanied him onto the red carpet. Rourke explained, “My dog is very old, she is 16 and she is not going to be around for long so I want to spend every moment with her.”

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I founded and moderate a local freecycle group; for practical reasons, we don’t allow live animal listings, although “meat” is acceptable (conflicted emotions, I has them). Recently, a member requested unwanted meat, as well as…unwanted livestock and sick or dying animals. I deleted the post and removed her from the list, as this was her second strike.

Naturally, she took issue with the strike. This is a direct quote from the email she sent in reply:

The other issue you have with me I don’t understand because any meat is any meat whether it is in frozen form or live form.

Let me repeat:

The other issue you have with me I don’t understand because any meat is any meat whether it is in frozen form or live form.

“Meat is meat” whether it’s already dead, slaughtered, prepared and packaged…or is walking around, nibbling on grass, playing with other “meat,” and just generally living life.

“Life” is simply a transitional state on the road to consumption.

Wow. Just…wow.

I wonder if she has visions of drumsticks while conversing with other humans?

The Colbert ReportMon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c

The Ghost of Stage Manager Bobby

Colbert at Christmas
Colbert Christmas DVD

Green Screen
Bill O’Reilly Interview

Echoes of (the ghost of) Bobby, anyone?

Sometimes I’ve just got to laugh, otherwise I’d never stop crying.

(Crossposted.)

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Tagged: animals animal rights animal welfare meat life ethics the colbert report stephen colbert stage manager bobby video pop culture medianimals quotables

In Maine they tell of an old man walking along the beach with his grandson, who picked up each starfish they passed and threw it back into the sea. “If I left them up here,” the boy said, “they would dry up and die. I’m saving their lives.”

“But,” protested the old man, “the beach goes on for miles, and there are millions of starfish. What you are doing won’t make a difference.”

The boy looked at the starfish in his hand, gently threw it into the ocean, and answered: “It makes a difference to this one.”

The quote is from Second Chance Wildlife Sanctuary’s website. SCWS was profiled in Rochester’s Democrat & Chronicle some time last year. I learned of the group when my mom, having read the article, asked me to make a donation to the sanctuary in her name as a Christmas (?) gift. I distinctly remember being moved by SCWS’s founder, Joyce Smith, who was 77 at the time the article ran in the D&C; she had been rescuing and rehabilitating injured and orphaned wildlife from her home for a quarter century.

I just happened to click over to the website today while doing some early holiday shopping. Maybe I’m feeling sentimental, but the story of the starfish had the same impact as when I first read it last year.

I was saddened, too, to see that Ms. Smith passed away on August 22, 2008.

Blub.

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Tagged: quotes quotables second chance wildlife sanctuary joyce smith activism starfish flickr photos

Ladies and gentlemen:

There are times in the history of our nation when our very way of life depends upon dispelling illusions and awakening to the challenge of a present danger. In such moments, we are called upon to move quickly and boldly to shake off complacency, throw aside old habits and rise, clear-eyed and alert, to the necessity of big changes. Those who, for whatever reason, refuse to do their part must either be persuaded to join the effort or asked to step aside. This is such a moment. The survival of the United States of America as we know it is at risk. And even more - if more should be required - the future of human civilization is at stake.

I don’t remember a time in our country when so many things seemed to be going so wrong simultaneously. Our economy is in terrible shape and getting worse, gasoline prices are increasing dramatically, and so are electricity rates. Jobs are being outsourced. Home mortgages are in trouble. Banks, automobile companies and other institutions we depend upon are under growing pressure. Distinguished senior business leaders are telling us that this is just the beginning unless we find the courage to make some major changes quickly.

The climate crisis, in particular, is getting a lot worse - much more quickly than predicted. Scientists with access to data from Navy submarines traversing underneath the North polar ice cap have warned that there is now a 75 percent chance that within five years the entire ice cap will completely disappear during the summer months. This will further increase the melting pressure on Greenland. According to experts, the Jakobshavn glacier, one of Greenland’s largest, is moving at a faster rate than ever before, losing 20 million tons of ice every day, equivalent to the amount of water used every year by the residents of New York City.

Two major studies from military intelligence experts have warned our leaders about the dangerous national security implications of the climate crisis, including the possibility of hundreds of millions of climate refugees destabilizing nations around the world.

Just two days ago, 27 senior statesmen and retired military leaders warned of the national security threat from an “energy tsunami” that would be triggered by a loss of our access to foreign oil. Meanwhile, the war in Iraq continues, and now the war in Afghanistan appears to be getting worse.

And by the way, our weather sure is getting strange, isn’t it? There seem to be more tornadoes than in living memory, longer droughts, bigger downpours and record floods. Unprecedented fires are burning in California and elsewhere in the American West. Higher temperatures lead to drier vegetation that makes kindling for mega-fires of the kind that have been raging in Canada, Greece, Russia, China, South America, Australia and Africa. Scientists in the Department of Geophysics and Planetary Science at Tel Aviv University tell us that for every one degree increase in temperature, lightning strikes will go up another 10 percent. And it is lightning, after all, that is principally responsible for igniting the conflagration in California today.

Like a lot of people, it seems to me that all these problems are bigger than any of the solutions that have thus far been proposed for them, and that’s been worrying me.

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All I know is that, when I went out into the chicken yards early yesterday morning, I actually staggered, made drunk by the intensity of a floral scent that filled up all of the air in my head, sending my brain into paroxysms of surprised delight. Can you imagine: A chicken yard that smells like a perfume factory? Even though it happens every year, I kept looking around for the source of the scent, almost unable to believe that I could be lucky enough to experience something like this accidentally.

Maybe that was nature’s way of bracing me for what was coming. My favorite bird had died the day before and I had to face the first morning of doing my chores accompanied by her absence. [...]

“Broiler” hens are like wild blooms, having a ragged beauty that you sometimes must look closely to perceive and always living less long than you would like. Bred by the poultry industry to have heavy flesh that burdens their organs and stresses their skeletons, they often perish abruptly due to heart attacks, heatstroke, or the enigmatic cause of sudden death known as “flip over syndrome.” The metabolic acceleration that allows the industry to “grow” birds to slaughter weight in only six to eight weeks continues throughout their lives. [...]

The New Mosselle was older than two, a great achievement for a “broiler” hen. At first, she had no way of knowing I had a special affection for her, as I tend to dote on all of the “broiler” chickens (by, for example, bringing treats right to them so that they won’t have to compete with with the faster birds). But as she got older, I started whispering, “you’re my favorite” whenever she happened to be close by. On what I had no idea would be her last day, I told her that first thing in the morning and again when I happened to pass her resting by a water bowl at midday. A couple of hours later, when I went out to put straw in the coops, I saw her sleeping in the shade and then looked more closely and realized she was dead. I howled.

That was Monday. Today is Wednesday. My favorite hen is buried with some blueberries and a sprig of honeysuckle underneath the plantain she and her friends so loved to munch. Right up the road, thousands of birds like her are choking in crowded sheds. They will never smell honeysuckle or taste a blueberry.

Go read the whole damn beautiful thing.

And, if you can, consider sending some money pattrice’s way. She cares for hundreds of discarded “food” animals at the Eastern Shore Chicken Sanctuary, dontchaknow.

(Crossposted to.)

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Tagged: quotables verbatim animals animal rights animal welfare pattrice jones eastern shore sanctuary eastern shore chicken sanctuary poultry chickens hens roosters spring companion animals grief mourning superweed

Speaking of the disappearing honeybees, one Dennis van Engelsdorp of the Apiary Inspectors of America says:

“For two years in a row, we’ve sustained a substantial loss. [...] That’s an astonishing number. Imagine if one out of every three cows, or one out of every three chickens, were dying. That would raise a lot of alarm.”

Dude, I hate to be the one to break it to you, but somewhere upwards of 99.99999% of American cows and chickens are dying. To the rate of roughly 10 billion per year. To break it down even further, that’s about 9 billion chickens and 25 million cows. Per year. In America. America alone.

Dennis, you don’t even need to imagine such a thing. Look no further than your dinner plate.

(Crossposted from.)

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Tagged: animals animal rights animal welfare food meat bees cows chickens clueless