I apologize for the interruption. We will return to our regularly scheduled programming shortly.

1. stop looking at me

b. no squid. seriouslee.

III. want my ears back.

III.

X. will also take prosthetics

7 . I can has cheezburger?

1. All obnoxious yappy dogs shall be sent to Guantanamo and confined without trial until further notice.

2. Humans are to deliver only the choicest of succulent meats.

3. I hereby outlaw the practice of veterinary proctology.

4. Heaters are too be on at all times.

1. Knitting shall be permitted in authorized areas only, under direct supervision.  (Human is demonstration model only.)

2.  Tasteless music, chainsaws, leaf blowers, loud engines, and Cheetos are to be banned within city limits.

3.  Fish on Sundays.

4. No squid.  

5. Squid.

We demandz zee equal rights of voting for teh catzorz.

Prepare to be boarded.

All your blogorz are belong to us.

A Berkeley woman died last weekend when she jumped into the surf to save her dog, who was in distress. Predictably, the comments on the SF Gate article about the tragedy were, as usual, completely charming, with commenters making lovely assumptions about the woman, her dog, and her reasons for saving her pet. I’m beginning to think that the Chronicle needs to rethink the open comments policy, because every single comment thread on every single article immediately devolves into a disgusting melting pot of bigoted prejudice. It’s really quite amazing. Write an article about flowers? There will be a derisive comment about yuppies, and then a counterattack, and then a comment about ovaries, and then a derisive comment about feminists, and one page later the conversation will have completely disintegrated.

Anyway, this is not a post about the comment threads on SF Gate, although you should check them out sometime if you ever feel like a laugh. Or an illustration of Godwin’s Law. Or you just haven’t been infuriated enough on any given day.

The article (and the comments) got me thinking about the things that people do to save their children and pets. I’m sure that the woman saw her dog in trouble and immediately went into action, not thinking about the surf, the potential for dangerous currents, or anything else, because someone that she loved needed help, and she had the power to offer it. I think there’s an instinctive and universal response to need among most humans.

And I think that’s pretty neat. It is very sad that both the woman and her dog died, but I think the case illustrates the deep connections which many people have with their animals. People make derisive comments about people who think of their pets as children, but I don’t necessarily see that as bad if people mean that people are willing to make sacrifices for their animals. Pets don’t need to be dressed up in suits and baby-talked, but I think that an owner who is willing to dive after a dog in trouble is a better dog owner, and the dog is better for it to.

Not only that, but I think if it had been her actual child, the comments in the post would have been very different. The first insulting comment might have been, say, five comments down, rather than the very first one. Or even if it had been someone else’s child, the response would have been “oh, what a hero,” instead of a string of rude assertions. There’s an assumption that we all have a moral obligation to help other people in trouble, so why not animals? What’s so bad, exactly, about recognizing need in another living being and taking action?

I don’t think that my cats are children. I am not living in some kind of fantasy world. But I do think that they deserve my care and love because I have chosen to take them into my life, and I have made (and probably will make) sacrifices for them to make them happier and healthier. And while I think that anthropomorphizing pets and using them as replacement children is unhealthy, I will defend to the death my right to take care of my animals, and to take action when I see an animal (or, yes, a child) in need. Because I see this as my duty as a living organism, to help others who need it and to speak out when I see something I don’t like.

I think that our decision to fundamentally distance ourselves from animals with disgusting comments like “another Berkeley Petophile meets her end” is a grave mistake. Comments like that are offensive on so many levels that I don’t think I need to fully explain why I was enraged when I read that, but they also explain why we tolerate animal abuse, as a society, because we don’t think of animals as worthy of the same respect that a snotty ill-behaved two year old deserves. By saying that animals aren’t worthy of respect, we can tolerate an abusive and horrific system of raising animals for meat and milk. By deriding someone who gives their life to save an animal, we cheapen our own lives. Personally, I think that reflects poorly on our society.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the intersection of animal and human rights, and when I logged on yesterday morning, I noted that the folks at the Ethicurean had already beaten me to the punch about a series in the Charlotte Observer called The Cruelest Cuts, talking about the treatment of workers in the poultry industry. If you read (or watched) Fast Food Nation, you’ve probably thought about this issue at some point, especially if you followed up with a rollicking weekend reading Nobodies, a book about slave labour in the United States.

The Ethicurean is a natural site to draw attention to an article series like this, since the site is dedicated to talking about sustainable, organic, local, and ethical food, and the treatment of workers is very much bound up in the cost of our food, both literally and metaphorically speaking. I really recommend checking out The Cruelest Cuts, because it is very good, and very extensive. There’s a lot of information in there and it will be growing all week, and if you’re up for a laugh, you can read the response from a profiled manufacturer, which made me chuckle in that dark, sardonic way that I’ve been doing a lot lately.

I’ve been thinking a lot about meat consumption in general lately, because I don’t think that eating meat is ethical or environmentally sustainable, and yet I eat meat and animal products. It’s an awkward place for me, because I think it’s wrong and I do it anyway, and it makes me feel like a hypocrite when I try to think about environmental issues and ways in which I could play a role in making the world a better place to be, for both humans and animals. I at least try to source my meats locally, which is some compensation, but not compensation enough.

Reading this series reminded me that meat consumption isn’t just wrong from an environmental* and ethical** standpoint, it’s also questionable from the standpoint of human rights. Now, obviously, this isn’t the case with all meat, but meatpackers have been notoriously abused since the era of industrial meat began, as anyone who has read The Jungle knows.  Working in a meat processing plant is dirty, harsh, grinding work, and most processors are focused on the bottom line, not on the health of their workers.

The fact is that illegal labour keeps our food supply cheap. And that really, really sucks. As anyone who buys at a farmers’ market knows, the cost of real food raised by humanely treated workers is high, and some people find that cost unacceptable, because they aren’t thinking about the hidden cost of that $.99 avocado, or the $1.50 eggs at Safeway.

The article series talks about the issue of immigrant labor in a way which I think is extremely intelligent and well thought out. One of the things discussed is the simple fact that plants hire illegal workers because they are less likely to complain and to report violations. Even if you don’t give a fig for workers who are being exploited (and if you’re reading this site, I doubt that), you should care about what this means for your food. When workers cut themselves on the production line and the production line doesn’t stop, guess where the blood ends up? When workers are told to think about the bottom line and the bottom line only, how many downer cows enter the food supply? It’s not just illegal to slaughter downer cows because we feel bad for the cows, people, it’s because downer cows are a potential vector of a number of diseases, including Creutzfeld-Jakobs.

Exploiting workers isn’t just wrong from an ethical standpoint, it’s also wrong from a food safety standpoint. And expect to see a lot more exposes like this in the coming months; I think the American meat industry is cracking wide open, and we’re going to be seeing some ugly truths this year. Maybe enough ugly truths to encourage people to think about going vegan, or to lobby for serious changes in our food supply. I’m really glad to see the Ethicurean talking about this issue, because I think it’s a dirty little truth in this country. We all know our food comes from exploited workers, and we don’t do anything about it. Here’s hoping that’s about to change.

*Why is meat wrong from an environmental standpoint? Well, the generation of meat is extremely inefficient. If protein is your main concern, protein containing legumes, grains, and nuts could be grown in a fraction of the space used to raise animals. Meat production has led to mass deforestation in places like Brazil, and as the developing world is learning to seek out the Western lifestyle, the demand for meat is skyrocketing, leading to even more pressure on the world’s already limited wild space. Raising herd animals like cattle is also hard on the land, as cattle contribute to erosion and a host of other environmental problems. Not only that, but animal products need to be shipped somewhere for sale, thanks to our increasingly centralized methods of meat production, so meat comes with a pretty hefty carbon footprint. And that’s not counting the, ahem, greenhouse gases that are, er, emitted by meat as it is raised. There are lots more reasons, of course, this is just a brief overview.

**I understand that this is somewhat debatable, as not everyone thinks that eating animals is wrong. (I obviously don’t, because I do it and I’m not a total psychopath.) However, I think most people could agree that abusing animals is wrong, and if you buy commercial meat, there’s a good chance it was abused during its short and miserable life. Same goes for eggs and dairy. This is one reason I try to buy locally sourced meat from farms I know, to be assured that the animals I eat at least enjoyed their lives before my appetite truncated them.

But to explain why, you need to see the following chronicle of my workday yesterday.

I started out in The Chair with Mr. Bell. We have a good working relationship; he curls up in the front, I rest my keyboard on him, and we call it good. Then he got up, and Loki came over.

Loki is not so familiar with being a keyboard stand, but he started to get the hang of it. He actually makes a pretty good keyboard rest, because he’s so broad. And warm. It was cold, so it was nice to have a foot warmer.

This post gets pretty image heavy, so I am sticking it behind a jump so that it doesn’t totally clog your browser. I am also doing this because stories about cats are not fascinating to everyone, so I wanted to provide you with the option of not reading this one.

[...]

When I work in Mr. Bell’s chair, he likes to sit with me, typically between my knees with the keyboard on his back. I was amused today when Mr. Shadow tried to horn in, essentially making it impossible to work by packing the chair with cats:

I like having a job which allows me to sit around with a cat on my lap all day.