health scares, and First Aid books for pets

Yesterday when I woke up, Tempest was off. I didn’t notice right away - it was 5:30am, after all - but the signs started seeping into my brain as I got her food ready. She loves food, more than anything, and yet she wasn’t complaining in her usual impatience as I got the food ready. Though she’d followed me to the kitchen, she sat quietly and once I put her bowl down for her, she just sniffed it and walked away.

That’s when I knew she was feeling really horrible. She walked back into the bedroom, and I let her be as I finished getting ready for work. She was under the bed, another sign that she was stressed to some degree. I pet her, as best as I could reach her, and made sure to feel her stomach. No cramping that I could tell, and she seemed to relax as she purred for me. The only problem with purring as a sign of anything is that it can mean either pleasure or pain, from what I’ve read.

I went to work, but was fretting, and so I looked up some info as soon as I logged in. I wondered if she’d been bit by something, and so that’s where I started looking.

And pretty well freaked myself out at first. Black Widow’s are deadly, and very quickly, did you know that? Cats are especially sensitive to their venom, which is a nerve toxin, and it is almost always deadly for cats, even with quick treatment. Lucky for me, I quickly figured out that she’d already be dead if she’d been bitten by a black widow. The other spider that could cause problems was a brown recluse, but there would be time to deal with it, if that was the case.

I read as much information as I could stand, and worried all day long. Should I go home? Should I call the vet? I’d convinced myself by then that she wasn’t in danger, at least not immediate danger, but I couldn’t stop worrying, since I couldn’t check on her. It was a judgement call, and not a comfortable one to make. Deciding not to go home definitely felt like I was disregarding my concerns and putting work first, which isn’t accurate but hard to shake nonetheless.

When I got home, she met me at the door, as normal. She was maybe a tad off her usual, though the maintenance guys vacuuming the building’s hallway could have been the culprit, since she’s stressed both by strangers and by vacuums. She’d eaten all her food while I was at work, and she was eagerly awaiting more.

Normalcy had returned, it seemed.

I still have no idea why she was off yesterday morning. Perhaps it was nothing more than an upset stomach. We all have off days, after all.

What was scariest for me was realizing in retrospect how little I know, despite having lived with cats and dogs literally all of my life.

I started researching first aid books, and that highlighted again my lack of knowledge. I don’t know why we never had books like that at home, but I’ll definitely be getting one soon. I’ve started looking into them, and flipped through a few at the bookstores. There’s more than I’d have expected, which is nice. (Any recommendations?)

It is funny how something so (relatively and in retrospect) minor could drive home so strongly the responsibility I have for this precious life, and just how easy it is to fuck up.

Activism Collective

Well, I don’t know of one, it is just what I’d like to have in my life. Inspired by the Rock Doves, as well as the activists who really are.

I don’t know exactly what it would entail - depends, as always, on the others who would be interested. What I have in my mind is a network of people willing to put in time on other people’s issues in exchange for additional support on theirs.

It could be virtual, but it could also be real life help.

Like, exchanging help trapping feral cats for a letter written on behalf of whatever.

The specific exchanges are just details, the important part is the people willing to do.

That’s what I want.

The things the collective members would offer could be both general (writing letters, for example) and specific (photography, web design, research, for example).

The hard part, of course, is finding others who would be interested in something like that. It would seem that most activists would be, but…I think I’m naive that way.

I know I have two other people who are already my unofficial collective. It would simply be nice to make the idea bigger. Seems to me that we’d be more effective if we got together to get things done once in a while.

Mary posted at the beginning of the year talking about and asking our thoughts on what the “movement” would look like, if we could imagine it. I guess I’ve had it with big organizations, likely most of us have. I’ve had it with them always trying to guilt me, and yet ignoring anything I might have to say. Enough of the manipulation. Even knowing that movements don’t have to be like that, it is hard to separate out the idea of a movement from what I currently experience within this one. I want a movement that is a network, not a hierarchy. I want a movement that is simply people who can and will get together and get shit done. Together. Helping each other. Supporting. Learning, mentoring, and having a beer.

And so that is why the “activism collective” idea came up. Just add people. Any takers?

Kofa Mountain Lions - formal scoping period

Apologies for starting off with a gruesome photo. Sometimes it is necessary to know what the stakes are. That is a picture of the first Kofa Mountain Lion, killed in September 2007. Picture provided to me by Ron Kearns, who received it from the government through a public records request. This mountain lion (aka cougar aka puma) had killed more than one Bighorn Sheep in a six month period, and that is how the Kofa National Wildlife Refuge managers justified killing him.

I’ve been writing about the Kofa Mountain Lions for almost a year and a half. I stumbled on the first bit of information sort of by chance. I can’t actually remember how I came across the information. At the time, it was during a public comment period about the Mountain Lion proposed hunt. I wrote in, got some friends to write in, and in the end it was HSUS (believe it or not) that saved the day, at least temporarily, for those mountain lions, via a lawsuit against the US Game and Fishing Department.

Since then, two of the five Kofa Mountain Lions have been hunted via radio collar and killed in government sanctioned canned hunts.

The reason given for the killing was that the Bighorn Sheep population was at the lowest level since the 1980’s. Potential causes for population decline would include: drought, disease and sickness, and disturbance and/or destruction of habitat, especially sensitive areas, in addition to whatever impact the mountain lions have on the population. Hunters, who all along have been sold hunting permits for the Bighorn Sheep despite the low sheep population, are never included in the “official” lists of possible causes of lowering sheep numbers. For that, among other reasons, the list I mentioned is not exhaustive. It is safe to say that no one has bothered to find out, yet, exactly why the sheep population has dropped. They simply used it as an excuse to kill mountain lions in radio collar canned hunts.

The government agencies also neglected to mention that the sheep population rose by close to 20% between 2006 and 2007. While all five mountain lions were alive. (The first was killed in September of 2007, so in the interests of accuracy, all five lions were only impacting the populations for 3/4 of 2007, and only four lions for the remaining quarter of 2007.)

So the government mislead the public. The government used partial information to justify killing mountain lions that had killed two sheep in a six month period. The government, however, refused to even limit the number of sheep hunting permits they were selling, even while they claimed the sheep population was in danger due to the predation of the lions.

PEER (Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility) stepped up to the plate this time, and again the mountain lion hunting has been halted, this time for a year. In this next year the government is going to go through the formal analysis process, including a “formal scoping period”, to start research into the impact the mountain lions are having on the sheep populations.

We all know that the government is already biased towards the hunters, against the mountain lions, against biodiversity, against letting animals live their lives for themselves, rather than as entertainment revenue. The hunting permits for the Bighorn Sheep are the refuge’s biggest source of income. We know this, and yet the government is actually obligated to go through this formal process to justify what they are doing.

And this is where we come in. You, and me, and everyone else can write in and give our arguments against the mountain lion hunting.

From now until May 24, 2008 it is what they call the “formal scoping period” and we can send letters, electronically or via snail mail, with our thoughts, and have them entered formally and officially in public record. And, especially importantly, we should include our suggestions for alternatives. For instance, no hunting of mountain lions on Kofa NWR by agencies or hunters.

That would be a really fantastic alternative to propose.

And since this is the government, it isn’t just the logic, the science, and the information that will count, but the number of people who register with that opinion.

It is “just” three mountain lions that we’re fighting for, but it is more than that too. It is the right for animals to live their own lives. We argue for this all the time when we try to convince people to go vegan, and I think most of us sort of assume that the wild animals already have this freedom…freedom to live. Yet, that is far from the truth. The government likes to manage the wildlife just as much as they like to manage everything else. (This should be no surprise: deer, wolves, mute swans, pigeons, canadian geese, coyote, bear, seals, squirrels…just about every animal exists on the sufferance of people in power who make decisions about their lives.)

So it isn’t just mountain lions we’re fighting for, but all animals. How can we argue for “domestic” animals to have freedom if we can’t even guarantee it for wild animals?

Well, we clearly can and need to do both. It isn’t mutually exclusive.

Ron Kearns is the main reason I’ve kept up with everything going on with the Kofa Lions. He worked there for most of his career, he has a lot of contacts in the area, and one of those contacts supplied him with a great chart that shows the process, and the impact that this formal scoping period can have.

It isn’t often that they are required to listen to us. Of course there is a danger as well - our silence, if we stay silent, makes the voices of those who want the death of the mountain lions that much louder. To my mind, the letter writing for the scoping period is both an opportunity and an obligation.

The Fish and Wildlife Service has (finally) posted the pdf explaining the formal scoping period for the Mountain Lions on their website. The press release is also available, and there are additional links on that page that might be helpful to read.

If you want to write but aren’t sure where to start, or have any question on either the process or the science or whatever, please let me know and I’ll do whatever I can to help. You can read other things I’ve written about the Kofa Mountain Lions.

It doesn’t have to be elaborate, but the more letters that the government receives on behalf of the mountain lions, the more impact that point of view will have overall. It is just three mountain lions, you might be thinking, but it is more than that too. It is a chance to make a stand for wildlife, to make a statement that wildlife is no more there for our purposes than any other animal is.

You can visit http://www.fws.gov/southwest/refuges/arizona/kofa/ for additional background information.

Comments must be submitted in writing by May 24, 2008.
Email: KofaLionComments@fws.gov
SnailMail: U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, 356 W. 1st St., Yuma, AZ 85364

Some websites to look at for information on cougars (aka mountain lions aka pumas):
http://www.cougarnet.org/ (“Using Science To Understand Cougar Ecology”)
http://www.mountainlion.org/index1.asp
http://www.cougarfund.org

An article that discusses the importance of predators in maintaining biodiversity, written in readable science: Predator-Prey Relationships

Some issues I think are important to bring up:

• Biodiversity, and the importance of predators
• The lack of concrete knowledge of how much a mountain lion will actually eat
• The negative impact caused by human intrusion on sensitive areas
• Disease, especially that transmitted from domesticated sheep; this is impacted also by habitat pressure
• The refuge managers’ refusal to halt bighorn sheep hunting despite the lower-than-normal sheep numbers
• The refuge managers’ behavior in misleading the public about the current state of the sheep population, which grew by almost 20% from 2006-2007 (according to their own surveys) while all five mountain lions were still alive, and using the only the data from 2001-2006 (during which there was a decrease in sheep populations) to justify killing the mountain lions in late 2007 and early 2008.

Please also mention that you want an alternative to be considered…such as no hunting of mountain lions on Kofa NWR by agencies or hunters.

When it comes time for the other parts of this process, only alternatives presented during this formal scoping period will be considered. If we don’t suggest no hunting of mountain lions, who will?

Thanks to anyone who will write. Thanks to Mary for posting about this a couple days ago, and Ron for making sure I have been kept up to date on everything going on.

Picture of “K03″, killed earlier this month, picture given by the refuge officials to Daniel Patterson.

personalities in birds…what do you see?

When I first started going to sanctuaries, the chickens were a mystery to me. I was somewhat wary of them - their movements were very unpredictable, and I was always worried that I was going to step on one. Actually, to some degree I do still worry about that.

I’d try to take pictures of them as much because I felt like I couldn’t neglect them when I was taking pictures of everything else (including buckets, mice ladders, and poop!), and so I’d try. I had tons of pics with blurry heads, and I felt like I mostly would get odd angles that would make them look sort of strange.

Being a shutterbug, I kept trying, and I also got to know the chickens more. I held chickens and learned to pick up the ones that like the attention. Babies came and I watched them grow up. I listened to people talk about them and to them who knew chickens.

And through a combination of the two - continuing to take pictures of them, and learning more about them - I found that my pictures of them improved. At least half the pictures I take of them are captured when they are holding their heads still. I don’t have to put effort into predicting their movements (as much as anyone’s movements can ever be predicted, anyway). And I really see their personality, and I think I’m able to capture it to some degree.

What I don’t know is whether others can see what I think I see. Birds, and their expressions, are so different from our own faces, so different from the faces of the cats and dogs we tend to grow up with, that I wonder if their personalities remain hidden to us until we start to learn their language.

Has anyone else had this experience, slowly learning what chickens (or other birds) are all about?

Kofa Lions granted reprieve

*updated to add the picture of the last Kofa lion that was killed, obviously before his death. picture courtesy of Daniel Patterson, who received the photo from USFWS Southwest Arizona NWR Complex Manager Mitch Ellis.  They would not release the “mortality” photo, which has some implications that do not reflect well on them.*

The state and federal groups have announced that the Kofa NWR lions have a one year reprieve from being hunted via radio collars. PEER (Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility) put pressure on Kofa and the AGFD, which appears to have resulted in the Kofa NWR and AGFD’s announcement of the reprieve, though of course the refuge managers themselves deny that PEER had any influence at all on the decision. I find that hard to imagine.

From PEER’s article:

Arizona Game & Fish derives significant revenue from selling bighorn hunting tags and is concerned that cougar predation may be costing it potential revenue. The federal refuge also expends significant funds to kill cougars in the name of bighorn protection, yet refuge management still allows the annual hunting of more than ten bighorn rams on the Kofa NWR itself.

What a mass of contradictions that is! And it looks like it tells most of the $tory of the motivation of the AGFD.

What does this reprieve mean? It means that the AGFD and Kofa NWR will not kill the mountain lions on Kofa land for the next year, though they “might” continue to trap and collar them. Hunters are not supposed to use GPS to track and kill the lions, but they are still allowed to kill them off refuge land. I can’t help but to wonder whether there is some back room winking and nudging going on, since the Kofa management has been consistantly anti-predator in every document they produce and action they’ve taken. Not to mention in their concern for their revenue stream.

In the next year, Kofa will research to determine (to the best of their ability) what has been causing the decline in herd size of the Kofa Bighorn Sheep. In the most recent Yuma Sun article, they’re making it clear what outcome they expect. For anyone trained in science, you know that such bias going into a research project generally means you do a piss poor job of analyzing the data, and that the research procedure itself has a tendency to be flawed when you make no attempt to be unbiased. Why do I think that the AGFD and the Kofa management is biased? Because in the article, they are quoted as saying that they will spend the next year to determine what role the lions have played in the sheep herds.

They are broadcasting what they expect to find. I didn’t see any mention of the many other factors that will almost certainly have played a contributing role:

• drought (and thus reduction in resources available to the sheep),
• herd health (sheep are well known to be vulnerable to respiratory problems, which kofa nwr itself says is more prevalent during drought conditions, which would mean now),
• environmental pressure and destruction by humans, and
• other environmental factors that could contribute to low-fertility and/or high mortality of the young sheep.

One other tidbit is that sheep populations are going up. And that, folks, was between ‘06 and ‘07. Before 2 lions were killed.

Given the ever increasing amounts of poisons in the world, given the connection that environmental scientists have found between pollen amounts and carbon dioxide, given that ecology and population biology is never a simple equation with two variables, it seems to me that the answer to what is causing the herd decline is a complicated question that doesn’t lead itself to an easy answer. What exactly are the Kofa managers doing to examine the entire ecology, rather than just counting heads?

It isn’t that Kofa managers aren’t aware…at least, information taken from their website would lead me to believe that someone at Kofa was knowledgeable about this at one point:

Disease in bighorn sheep is most prevalent when animals are stressed and during severe drought. Multiple diseases may also combine to increase mortality. Bighorns seem particularly susceptible to respiratory problems like bacterial pneumonia. Pasturella, for example, can be carried by healthy domestic sheep and goats, but is deadly when transmitted to wild sheep. Scabies is another common disease easily transmitted to bighorns; it was responsible for a significant decline on San Andres NWR in 1978. Disease transmission from burros or horses to bighorn sheep has not been substantiated; however, isolated cases of transmission from cattle to bighorn sheep have been documented. Since the late 1800s, diseases transmitted by domestic sheep and goats have caused large, recurrent population-level declines in bighorn sheep throughout the western US. These declines have been well documented, and subsequent regulations restricting contact between domesticated and wild sheep have been enacted. It is imperative to keep any domestic sheep or goats well away from bighorn sheep range.

Chronic sinusitis is prevalent in bighorn sheep throughout Arizona. In severe cases, necrosis of the frontal bone and thinning of the braincase creates holes and abscessing in the brain, which is fatal. The leading theory for cause of this condition is bacterial infection secondary to necrotic bot fly larvae (Oestrus ovis), which are deposited in the nostrils of bighorn sheep. Evidence of chronic sinusitis has been common in the Kofa bighorn sheep herd, though it appears to be less prevalent now than during the 1980s and 1990s.

We already know how many sheep the hunters kill, as well as generally how many the lions have killed. The sheep herd dropped by almost 400 in the space of 2 years. We are to believe that the lions were killing 40 sheep per year, each? Let’s account for the hunters and make wild guesses as to the possible impacts of predation on the birth rate, and assume 20 sheep per year, by each of the 5 lions that had originally lived at Kofa, before two were killed in this past year. That still leaves us well below the 400 by which the herd dropped. If 20 per year is a normal amount for each lion, why are lions considered to be “offending” if they have killed two within six months?

Either four sheep per year is a more typical amount for each lion, in which case it is ludicrous to assign them blame for the reduction of the sheep herd size by 400, or Kofa management came up with a ridiculously low “allowed” meals on the part of the lions so that they could give a superficial appearance of not being anti-predator, and yet stacking the deck in favor of death to every lion on Kofa.

Ron has requested that we comment on the Yuma sun article and mark it as “recommended” to help keep this issue in people’s minds. You have to register in order to be able to comment, but anyone can “recommend” an article. Daniel Patterson has a quick blog post about this as well, with instructions on getting onto the mailing list to comment as part of the public process that will soon be started.

Ariel the silver turkey

Last week there was a new arrival at Poplar Spring. Well, two - one is a young female turkey, a silver one, by the name of Ariel. She seems to be about six months old, and she’s a sweetie. Loves attention, even when the attention is that of Victor, the big man on campus, who tends to step on his girlfriends in lieu of being able to do anything more enticing. She didn’t seem to mind! You can see his wing feathers in the background. All the boys were displaying for Ariel, and even one of the other female turkeys!

There was also a new pig. I didn’t get a good picture, but she had something stuck in her nose to prevent rooting (digging up food from the ground), which was heartbreaking. She was found wandering, and she is quite skinny right now, which you’d expect from a pig that had an implant designed to prevent her from finding food. It is a bit of a mystery, the nose thing is quite unusual because most farmers (big farm or family farm) don’t actually let their pigs outside.

She is super friendly, that or just incredibly hungry. She’d come right up to the gate of the quarantined area of the pig barn and snuffle my hand. Sometimes she’d end up bumping the gate with her nose, and then she’d flinch. It made me want to cry. That poor baby! They have to increase her food very very slowly when pigs are that skinny, so even though she seemed really hungry, they have to be careful. The nose thing is embedded in such a way that it will require her to be under anesthesia to have it removed - it is just too painful any other way, there is no chance you can even touch that thing without causing her pain.

There was someone at the sanctuary filming this past weekend. Some of you might remember the video on youtube from Poplar Spring with the little boy, Ari, narrating? “Nowman is enowmous!” Very cute! Well, Chris, the videographer, was back getting a bunch of video, which she wants to use to make a series of 2 minute videos, which she’s going to publish in vodcast format. I meant to get her website, because it sounds great!

In case you missed it before, here’s the old video:

I found another video Chris did at Poplar Spring, this one is just 2 minutes of chickens and turkeys being their own selves!

Current reading list

I go through ebbs and flows where I am reading a lot of non-fiction or I am reading a lot of vampire fiction. (Don’t ask, I need a vice! Or, only ask if you want recommendations!) Having first been motivated by the upcoming anarchist bookfair in nyc of last weekend, and then fired up by the people, ideas, and event itself, I’ve been reading less of the vampire stuff and more of the thought-provoking stuff in the past couple weeks.

So my current or recent reads (no particular order):

• Conquest of Bread by Kropotkin
• Nowpopia by Chis Carlsson
• The Joy of Conflict Resolution by Gary Harper
• Social Economy And Communalism by Murray Bookchin
• From Yale to Jail by Dellinger
• Confessions of an Economic Hit Man by John Perkins

And a whole bunch of photography books that likely no one is interested in. Plus some stuff on buddhism, depression and meditation. Fun stuff! Oh, and code stuff, which likely is about as interesting as watching rocks grow to most people.

So the books on my bookshelf that are waiting for me to read makes a much longer list (thanks in large part to AK Press, who faithfully sends me books every month, and which I not as faithfully get to eventually):

• Durruti in the Spanish Revolution by Abel Paz
• Free Comrades by Kissack
• Granny Made Me an Anarchist: General Franco, The Angry Brigade, and Me by Stuart Christie
• Beyond Bullets by Boykoff
• Possibilities: Essays On Hierarchy, Rebellion, and Desire by David Graeber
• Marketing Social Change by Alan Andreasen
• Carbon Trading - a critial conversation on climate change, privatisation and power: development dialogue no 48, september 2006
• Bird Flu: A Virus of our own hatching by Michael Greger
• Rebel Alliances: The means and ends of contemporary British anarchisms by Benjamin Franks
• The Subversion of Politics: European Autonomous Social Movements and the Decolonization of Everyday Life by Georgy Katsiaficas
• Empty Cages by Tom Regan
• Speciesism by Joan Dunayer
• Che Gurevara and the Latin American Revolution by Manual “Barbarroja” Piñeiro

I have many more, such as “Rogue Economics” and “The Revolution Will Not Be Funded” that I definitely want to read. Probably “End Game” as well.

I can’t recommend, yet, the books I haven’t read, but for anyone interested in anarchism (who hasn’t already read a lot on it), I think that “Conquest of Bread” is a great book. For people interested, in general, in living sustainably and likely a bit outside the confines of wage-slavery, “Nowtopia” and “food not lawns” are great books, with “food not lawns” being (surprise) very focused on gardening. I have found both to be incredibly motivating. They definitely make me feel that if I am not happy with the way things are, then I should change what I have the most power over - which happens to be me and my life. So gardening, forming community and performing acts of mutual aid, these are the things I can do right now.

Other books that I think we should all read would include “Aftershock” and “The Joy of Conflict Resolution” (and that last one, maybe both, are books I’d recommend to everyone everywhere, not just activists, or people interested in AR or anarchism).

So that’s where I’m at in my reading at the moment. I have a lot of reading to get through - so much, in fact, that I often ignore those great heaping piles of books and reach for the fascinating world of vampires.

What are you reading? What would you recommend?

Mutual Aid

I went to the 2nd Annual Anarchist Bookfair in NYC this past weekend. I went last year as well, and it was interesting to see what had changed and what had stayed the same. Overall I got a lot more out of it - perhaps because we were more organized about it, and made sure to look ahead of time at the talks we’d want to go to, or maybe the talks themselves were better this year. It is hard to know, since of course we can only go to one talk at a time!

The talk that got me the most fired up was on on mutual aid.

I’d read “Conquest of Bread” by Kropotkin on the bus on the way up to NYC, and it was pretty much the perfect reading material to have in my head going into the talks at the bookfair. It is an incredibly practical book, addressing many of the common questions people have about anarchism. I found it very interesting, other than the discussion of animal exploitation, which I mostly skipped. He was writing in the late 1800’s, and he’d come a long way from his beginnings as a Russian aristocrat who owned people! We are in a position today where we’re starting from a point where the thought of ownership of humans makes us recoil in revulsion, and so it is natural for us to go further, see the connections between all forms of exploitation.

I always wonder about some of these influential anarchists of times past, Emma Goldman and Peter Kropotkin (to name two that stick out in my own mind) - all the connections they made, all the thought they put into it…I wonder if they’d have been able to see the connection with animal exploitation if they’d been alive today? It seems like most anarchists I meet are vegan, to the point that I actually expect it, and am rarely disappointed.

So the talk on mutual aid…it was absolutely incredible. There were five panelists, with a wide range of experiences. Most of them had a background in social work. The audience was filled with thoughtful people, many of whom had also had experience and/or education in social work. Everyone was interesting, and the issue of harm-reduction was something that got me thinking. But what I can’t get out of my mind is a collective that a small group of local anarchists had formed based entirely on the concept of mutual aid.

The Rock Dove Project is an anarchist project composed of a two-pronged network. This network aims to connect people in search of cheap/free health care (”seekers”) to health practitioners who offer cheap/free services and agree with our mission statement (”providers”).

As a collective, Rock Dove will facilitate the process by offering seekers access to a directory of participating providers, and forwarding service requests to providers who are looking for people to serve. See below for details regarding both aspects of the Project.

They network among themselves and help others find access to health care, and they have a whole-person view of health. Part of that is reflected in the way they make sure that they take care of themselves, first and foremost, to avoid burn-out. (I wanted to ask them if they’d read “Aftershock”!) They are pretty much the embodiment of “prefigurative” if you ask me! Everyone always says “be the change you want to see” and that’s exactly what they are doing.

So what is mutual aid?

It is about community, ethics, and being non-exploitative. It is about finding ways around the capitalist mindset and hopefully giving yourself some breathing room from the wage-slavery. Here’s their description of it:

The term “mutual aid” has been used in various ways over the past two centuries by everyone from political theorists to emergency workers.

However, when we use it, we are referring to as Wikipedia so aptly puts it “the economic concept of voluntary reciprocal exchange of resources and services for mutual benefit.” In other words, it’s a much fairer and effective way of giving and receiving services and goods than using money. An example of how mutual aid can be used is if I walk Jane Schmane’s dog for an hour, in exchange for one session of acupuncture.

While we do not directly discourage Seekers from giving money in return for the services they receive from Providers, as it may be the most practical means of payment in any given situation, we do encourage practicing mutual aid, and not just in regards to the health services facilitated by this collective, but in as many aspects of life as possible. Rock Dove believes that by incorporating mutual aid increasingly into more instances in our lives, it will help to set the foundation for a freer and more just world.

It was fitting, then, to begin reading Nowtopia on the way home.

There are so many ways we can incorporate this into our lives. And you know what? It is almost the same thing as “building community.” Incidentally, the best way to reach and help people on an individual basis. My yoga teacher is already doing some of this in a very natural way. She’s exchanged massages for yoga classes. Maybe I’ll talk to her, see if she and others would be interested in a more formal network. I doubt they’d identify as anarchists, but mutual aid relies more on community and a desire to help others than it does on a political identification. It can easily transcend such flimsy boundaries.

It makes me think about one aspect of my dissatisfaction with some of the major animal “rights” groups. They encourage us to get on their email lists, to take action based on their alerts for their pet projects. And what I have learned is that I can take action until the end of time in support of them, but unless I am “a major supporter” in a financial sense, they won’t offer help in return.

And that’s crap, pure and simple.

Which only tells me what I already knew - it’s up to us, to the connections we make on a personal level and the community we form, to create change in the world.

More mountain lion killings on Kofa NWR

I’ve written about Mountain Lions and Kofa NWR in the past - the Arizona Game and Fish Department (which could be renamed to “Arizona Hunting Revenue Department”) periodically kills mountain lions on the Kofa National Wildlife Refuge. This is not limited only to Kofa, but I’ve ended up posting specifically about the situation at Kofa several times, and Ron, a former employee from there, keeps me updated with the latest happenings.

There are a lot of prejudices against predators as a general rule, and much of it is due to a lack of understanding of basic biology principles. (To put it simply: kill off all the predators, and you interfere with the checks and balances of entire populations, and this leads to extreme overpopulation by one species, and ultimately the deterioration of individual and group health.) This annoys me to no end, perhaps because Biology was my major for my first degree, and I think I’m justified in expecting that the people managing wildlife refuges would be at least as educated as I am on the topic. Likely they are, and simply rely on general ignorance of the topic to push their agendas with little outrage from the general population. Mostly it is only hunters, to whom they pander, who pay close attention to the decisions being made at the refuges in any case.

There are, however, many hunters who are just as outraged as animal rights activists over the killing of mountain lions, which should tell all of us something.

Underlying the decision making by the refuge managers is the essential view of the AGFD and USGFD towards these wildlife refuges; from their decisions and actions I can only infer that to them, refuges are primarily places to hunt. The refuge management wants to maintain the prey species population so that there is a large enough population of the prey species to justify the “need” for hunting, and thus make the hunters happy. You get one guess as to where a large amount of the refuges’ money comes from. A more accurate name, instead of wildlife refuge, would be hunter refuges.

In addition to ignoring basic population biology principles to justify killing mountain lions and propping up hunting revenues, the AGFD is using radio collars on the mountain lions to track them down to kill them, in what amounts to a canned hunt. Why are they wearing radio collars to begin with? As part of a costly research project which is obviously being made absolutely worthless by the fact that the subjects are killed. That’s our tax money wasted, and while it is a drop in the bucket compared to what has been spent on one day of the Iraq War II, it is still a significant amount of money. At least $142,000 is an amount I would consider significant.

The criteria, by the way, for killing the mountain lions, is if they are known to have killed more than 2 bighorn sheep in a six month period. (Though whether there is any attempt at confirming that the death of a sheep is actually caused by a mountain lion, who would kill by jumping at them from behind and biting through their skulls, making it hard to mistake, is something that the AGFD is not willing to let us know.) At that point, as soon as they wander off refuge land, they’re killed.

Think about that one.

I’m just not sure how we have communicated to them the slimming regime we’ve put them on that we’re making a life or death issue of, let alone communicated the boundaries of the refuge, their relative safe zone.

Of course if they ate only once every 3 months, I’m not sure they’d be surviving in any case. Not that Bighorn Sheep are the only species that a lion will prey on, but since Kofa has helpfully built “big game guzzlers” (artificial ponds) for the sheep, they’ve also built in easy access to a big meal for the lions. And large game is indeed their main meal.

So, the latest Mountain Lion was killed recently. Ron, the former employee of Kofa who keeps me updated on these things, wrote to the AGFD and requested very specific information, such as the exact GPS location of the Bighorn Sheep that was (presumably) killed by the Mountain Lion, and other information that we are all free to request as part of the Arizona Open Records Act.

Here is one of his recent comments about the Mountain Lion who was tracked via radio collar and killed:

What bothers me most Deb, is this old tom had lived many years free and wild living an existence evolution allowed him. Then, with a split second pull of a trigger, his wondrous life was over just for fulfilling his ecological niche. I have lived in the same harsh climate as this old tom did, and for over 31 years I have spent many days and nights afield and I love my life and freedom.

The AGFD took freedom away for that tom and I got a knot in the pit of my stomach when I heard this news. I tried for over 5 weeks to get information from the AGFD that might have saved this lion’s life, but the Department staff just ignored me and there was simply nothing I could do to help the tom. I was powerless for the first time in my life and I have a kind of emptiness I have also never experienced in my life before. I will do everything ethically and legally I can to ensure that the Department does not kill another Kofa lion.

One thing that seems clear to me - this isn’t merely the killing of a tom, or the second killing of a tom on Kofa. This is one more killing in what amounts to an extermination program. This program began as soon as it was confirmed that there were 5 resident mountain lions living on Kofa. So far they have killed two of the five for certain. The collar “fell off” a third, which could be any number of things. The first thing that comes to my mind is a cover up of an “unsanctioned” kill. There is one known Lion queen still living on Kofa land. Maybe one more tom.

Kofa is 665,400 acres. You’d think it would be more than enough for a few mountain lions, but that is only true if humans don’t feel that their “entertainment” via hunting is impeded.

And the truth is that Kofa, like almost everywhere in this country, has been in drought conditions for several years. Here’s a shocking biological fact - populations of almost every species (though certainly not humans) decrease when drought limits the amount of food that is available. Who would have thought!

Well, the Kofa Refuge managers are apparently unaware of this. They seem to expect the Bighorn Sheep populations to remain at earlier levels, irregardless of drought conditions. This is likely a myth they maintain to keep hunting permit revenue flowing in, as well as to give them an excuse to eliminate the only known competition (that can actually be fought with a gun) for the Bighorn Sheep.

The refuge managers have also illegally installed additional man-made water sources (which they tellingly call “Big Game Guzzlers”) on protected Kofa land. Hunters often hang out near these water sources to get easy kills.

Daniel Patterson, an Arizona local, has posted more on this topic, including linking to a legal brief filed by PEER (Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility), and some quotes by Ron. Another post of Daniels’ add some insight to the priorities of the refuge managers and the groups that support them.

Okay, so what can we do about this? I haven’t come up with anything especially creative, but here is my current list of ideas:

• comment (with knowledge and politeness) on this article: http://www.yumasun.com/news/killing_40802___article.html/officials_lion.html
• write to the Kofa and AGFD officials, in protest against the illegal big game guzzlers, the killing of the mountain lions, the hunting permits for bighorn sheep that continue to be granted to hunters, and finally against the collaring of any other Mountain Lions, since it has proven to be a death sentence for them.
• write to whatever national or local animal group you support, and urge them to take action
• write to any reporters for your local paper who you know have an interest in animal, environmental, and/or wildlife issues, and ask them to cover it. Reporters with an interest in misdeeds by government officials might also be interested in covering this issue. (any attention, regardless of motivation, at this point…)
• write a snail mail or make a phone call (emails are considered worthless to them) to any politician you know is sympathetic to environmental and animal concerns
• Edited to add: Contact your favorite podcast hosts and ask them if they’d cover the issue!
• encourage anyone who would be willing to take action on this to do one or more of the above

The people at Kofa and AGFD to send emails to are as follows:

RDTuggle at fws dot gov (Region 2 Director Benjamin Tuggle, Ph.D.)
Chris_Pease at fws dot gov (Chief NWRS Region 2)
Thomas_Harvey at fws dot gov (Region 2 Refuge Supervisor AZ/NM)
directorsoffice at azgfd dot gov
mitch_ellis at fws dot gov (SW Arizona NWR Complex Manager)
BHernbrode1 at azgfd dot gov AGFD Commissioner
JMartin at azgfd dot gov
lvoyles at azgfd dot gov Larry Voyles, Director AGFD (they promoted the guy who is anti-predator and anti-wilderness and who lied about the secret McPhererson Tank project.)
sferrell at azgfd dot gov Steve Ferrell Assistant Director AGFD
mgolightly at azgfd dot gov Mike Golightly AGFD Commissioner
rwoodhouse at azgfd dot gov Robbie Woodhouse AGFD Commissioner
donna_shoemaker@fws.gov; Tuggle’s secretary

The consequences for our inaction are clear. This is the tom that was killed this past fall.

in gratitude

I just want to thank everyone who has commented in the past couple days. I’ve been heartbroken about Sally’s death, but I pushed through to tell some other stories, and to write a rambling post about something that had been on my mind for a while. And the responses, to both, have been really encouraging, motivating, uplifting. I have really benefited from the interactions, which pushed my thoughts out of the loop they’d been stuck in and I’ve also gotten a few book recommendations that I want to share. For anyone who was interested in or engaged in the previous post, on using our personal strengths, I think that both these recommendations will add quite a bit.

Lenn recommended Marketing Social Change by Alan R. Andreasen, which I ordered a used copy of since my library doesn’t have it. It looks very interesting, and likely will be pertinent to the general question of being effective. Book Summary:

This important book offers a revolutionary approach to solving a range of social problems–drug use, smoking, unsafe sex, and overpopulation–by applying marketing techniques and concepts to change behavior. For example, it shows that at-risk teenagers are consumers who decide whether or not to “buy” safe sex practices. This successful approach is based on Alan R. Andreasen’s more than twenty years of experience in consulting, teaching, and research with social marketing programs around the world.

Andreasen shows that effective social change starts with a thorough understanding of the needs, wants, and perceptions of the target consumer–who has ultimate control over the outcomes. The book offers a detailed explanation of how to design a step-by-step program that will move the customer from ignorance and indifference to action and ultimately maintenance of that action. Marketing Social Change offers a wealth of information for developing an effective social marketing plan.

It is easy to see how this is applicable to our activism.

Colin recommended a video that talks about protest culture. It is about 50 minutes long, and I watched it this evening. I found it very interesting and definitely worth watching. While it could be considered something of a tangent, it definitely helped me see a bigger picture, different patterns. The summary of the video:

Clay Shirky joined an intimate group at the Berkman Center for a deep dive discussion on one chapter of his new book, Here Comes Everybody, which deals with protest culture — ad hoc vs institutional, and what it means.

I was very interested in what Clay Shirky had to say, so I put myself on the waiting list for his book at the library. Book summary:

A revelatory examination of how the wildfirelike spread of new forms of social interaction enabled by technology is changing the way humans form groups and exist within them, with profound long-term economic and social effects-for good and for illA handful of kite hobbyists scattered around the world find each other online and collaborate on the most radical improvement in kite design in decades. A midwestern professor of Middle Eastern history starts a blog after 9/11 that becomes essential reading for journalists covering the Iraq war. Activists use the Internet and e-mail to bring offensive comments made by Trent Lott and Don Imus to a wide public and hound them from their positions. A few people find that a world-class online encyclopedia created entirely by volunteers and open for editing by anyone, a wiki, is not an impractical idea. Jihadi groups trade inspiration and instruction and showcase terrorist atrocities to the world, entirely online. A wide group of unrelated people swarms to a Web site about the theft of a cell phone and ultimately goads the New York City police to take action, leading to the culprit’s arrest.

With accelerating velocity, our age’s new technologies of social networking are evolving, and evolving us, into new groups doing new things in new ways, and old and new groups alike doing the old things better and more easily. You don’t have to have a MySpace page to know that the times they are a changin’. Hierarchical structures that exist to manage the work of groups are seeing their raisons d’tre swiftly eroded by the rising technological tide. Business models are being destroyed, transformed, born at dizzying speeds, and the larger social impact is profound.

One of the culture’s wisest observers of the transformational power of the new forms of tech-enabled social interaction is Clay Shirky, and Here Comes Everybody is his marvelous reckoning with the ramifications of all this on what we do and who we are. Like Lawrence Lessig on the effect of new technology on regimes of cultural creation, Shirky’s assessment of the impact of new technology on the nature and use of groups is marvelously broad minded, lucid, and penetrating; it integrates the views of a number of other thinkers across a broad range of disciplines with his own pioneering work to provide a holistic framework for understanding the opportunities and the threats to the existing order that these new, spontaneous networks of social interaction represent. Wikinomics, yes, but also wikigovernment, wikiculture, wikievery imaginable interest group, including the far from savory. A revolution in social organization has commenced, and Clay Shirky is its brilliant chronicler.

One lightbulb for me during this process of coming to my own mental dead end and then hearing what other people thought about this topic, I realized that for all the thought I’ve put into being an animal rights activist, for all the discussions I’ve heard and sometimes participated in about “the movement”, I really didn’t have a deep knowledge of movements in general. When discussing the AR movement, things get political, fast. I know it isn’t unique to AR, it’s something all movements deal with.

And I just can’t find the interest in that aspect, though I was left with a nagging feeling that I needed to put some thought into my role, even though I didn’t feel that what I needed to think about was in the same line of thought that most of the discussions I read or had got stuck on. What Clay Shirky and the commenters here had to say was much more interesting to me, and certainly far more relevant.

So thanks again to everyone. I now have some more paths to follow as I think about this issue!

Right, the giant eye and nose. Tempest, my cat, loves to pose, and I love to take her picture. Add in some photoshop classes and a lab class where the point was to play with our pics and the techniques we learned, and a giant Tempest eye and nose pic is the natural result! I have it as a background at work, and I’m pretty sure it both fascinates and freaks out my coworkers.