Texas Governor Rick Perry shot a coyote while walking with his dog, then telephoned the Associated Press to describe his heroism. He used his laser-sighted.380 Ruger pistol because he said the coyote was "staring" at him and dog.
The Republican governor told the AP: "The coyote became mulch."
Wendy Keefover-Ring of WildEarth Guardians said "With all due respect to his manhood, 90-pound women in tennis shoes effectively scare 30-pound coyotes away with a sharp shout." She added that "Rick Perry's fierce attack on a little wild dog doesn't bring to mind the image of a macho gun-slinging Texan on the wild frontier. Sam Houston he is not."
Androcles left a note on the governor's site: "The way you've tried to make yourself into a national hero because you shot a coyote is sad. The intersections between humanity and the "wild" inhabitants of the earth grow ever more indistinct as habitats vanish. I can understand protecting your pet but why shoot and why call the press to brag? Such encounters are a tragedy, brought about entirely by humanity. We have a responsibility as stewards of the earth. The "solution" you espouse -- carry guns and kill animals at will -- is outmoded and marks you as more pitiable and ignorant than brave. A new world is evolving. I am sorry you belong to the destructive past."
Wednesday, April 28, 2010
Sunday, April 11, 2010
Scene (Seen) near Boston's Copley Square
She had a cap of bright white hair in a swinging cut just below her ears. Her smartly-cut jacket in tangerine stopped at her waist to display her black well-cut slacks. Black wedge shoes lifted her about two inches above the ground which was important because she was five-feet tall at the most. Her body was more gently square than curved.
I was watching her out of a taxi window. Here’s the important thing: As striking as she was in general her face revealed her as being in her unsurgically-altered late eighties. But there’s more. She drew my attention because she was crossing in the middle of a block -- Boston style -- and was giving the classic “What” gesture with her shoulders and face to the taxi that had just braked to avoid her. Her upper body gesture with the accompanying facial expression could measure with the best of “street” language. But there’s more. As she made these gestures -- somewhat incongruous in the gorgeous outfit and coming from the small person capped with such a striking haircut -- she was putting a dark (Belgian?) chocolate into her mouth and held another one in her other hand.
She walked on through the next lane of traffic and proceeded with constant energy diagonally across Copley Square, a paved place with a fountain, a few trees, a few flower beds and some sculptures, in front of the Boston Public Garden.
As my taxi moved on I almost told the driver to let me out. I wanted to follow her, maybe talk with her. WHO are you? But the weight of groceries piled into the taxi’s trunk held me snared as my taxi moved on.
Who was she? Her clothing could have cost a lot or could be made up of expensive pieces she’d saved for years. The haircut was both casual and stunning in the way that either costs a lot or maybe was done in a student academy. The chocolates? Who knows?
But there was so much more: the spirit, the mien, the persona, the being that she was. Did I invent her? No, my good imagination is not that good. A fantasy? No, I was sane that day under the blue skies.
If she continued her diagonal path through Copley Square it would lead to the Copley Plaza Hotel with its gilded entry hall, its brilliant chandeliers, its Oak Room bar the most elegant in Boston. Was she staying at that stately hotel after dropping into Logan Airport on her private jet -- a roaming trillionairess who did as she pleased as the years ticked into larger and larger numbers?
Was she a free spirit who would continue on past the Copley Plaza into the deeps of the South End of Boston to her studio apartment where she had lived for decades? The South End with its historic brownstones sprucing farther every week from its polyglot past, some of its artists yet hanging on.
Who ever she was, she was a vision. Maybe an avatar? From the past? From the future? From the slippery now that some of us yearn to inhabit?
I was watching her out of a taxi window. Here’s the important thing: As striking as she was in general her face revealed her as being in her unsurgically-altered late eighties. But there’s more. She drew my attention because she was crossing in the middle of a block -- Boston style -- and was giving the classic “What” gesture with her shoulders and face to the taxi that had just braked to avoid her. Her upper body gesture with the accompanying facial expression could measure with the best of “street” language. But there’s more. As she made these gestures -- somewhat incongruous in the gorgeous outfit and coming from the small person capped with such a striking haircut -- she was putting a dark (Belgian?) chocolate into her mouth and held another one in her other hand.
She walked on through the next lane of traffic and proceeded with constant energy diagonally across Copley Square, a paved place with a fountain, a few trees, a few flower beds and some sculptures, in front of the Boston Public Garden.
As my taxi moved on I almost told the driver to let me out. I wanted to follow her, maybe talk with her. WHO are you? But the weight of groceries piled into the taxi’s trunk held me snared as my taxi moved on.
Who was she? Her clothing could have cost a lot or could be made up of expensive pieces she’d saved for years. The haircut was both casual and stunning in the way that either costs a lot or maybe was done in a student academy. The chocolates? Who knows?
But there was so much more: the spirit, the mien, the persona, the being that she was. Did I invent her? No, my good imagination is not that good. A fantasy? No, I was sane that day under the blue skies.
If she continued her diagonal path through Copley Square it would lead to the Copley Plaza Hotel with its gilded entry hall, its brilliant chandeliers, its Oak Room bar the most elegant in Boston. Was she staying at that stately hotel after dropping into Logan Airport on her private jet -- a roaming trillionairess who did as she pleased as the years ticked into larger and larger numbers?
Was she a free spirit who would continue on past the Copley Plaza into the deeps of the South End of Boston to her studio apartment where she had lived for decades? The South End with its historic brownstones sprucing farther every week from its polyglot past, some of its artists yet hanging on.
Who ever she was, she was a vision. Maybe an avatar? From the past? From the future? From the slippery now that some of us yearn to inhabit?
Friday, April 9, 2010
DISCOVERY TV SIGNS PALIN TO TALK ABOUT NATURE
Discovery TV has signed Sarah Palin to host a program about Alaska's wildlife and nature. Defenders of Wildlife has a petition opposing this move, which is wrong-headed as well as bizarre. On the website Androcles said:
"Palin has tried to pay bounties for parts of animal corpses, and promotes an image of herself/as a hunter/killer as part of her self-aggrandizing ego-driven need to be some version of the cute girl who hunts and socializes with the "real" guys. In reality "hunting" as practiced by Palin and the guys is not hunting. It is slaughter and massacre of defenseless creatures using assault rifles from protected cover to kill them at food lures or to shoot them from the air. Humans acting in this way are as outdated and dangerous to the soul of the world as were those who created the entertainment-killing in the Roman Coliseum. Don't you remember she asked for bloody wolf haunches to be brought to the Alaska State House so bounties could be paid?
Her views show no respect, honor, or concern for the planet or for nature. Putting her on Discovery would be a horror and a betrayal of the enlightenment we have been accustomed to see on Discovery."
"Palin has tried to pay bounties for parts of animal corpses, and promotes an image of herself/as a hunter/killer as part of her self-aggrandizing ego-driven need to be some version of the cute girl who hunts and socializes with the "real" guys. In reality "hunting" as practiced by Palin and the guys is not hunting. It is slaughter and massacre of defenseless creatures using assault rifles from protected cover to kill them at food lures or to shoot them from the air. Humans acting in this way are as outdated and dangerous to the soul of the world as were those who created the entertainment-killing in the Roman Coliseum. Don't you remember she asked for bloody wolf haunches to be brought to the Alaska State House so bounties could be paid?
Her views show no respect, honor, or concern for the planet or for nature. Putting her on Discovery would be a horror and a betrayal of the enlightenment we have been accustomed to see on Discovery."
Sunday, April 4, 2010
OH HAPPY DAY
OH HAPPY DAY
During the long days of an illness … reading about the world …
I thought mostly: s i g h.
On the second day of April in this year 2010 I was sitting on the “T” going to a doctor’s appointment when my world changed as quickly as if I had been swept (by a worm hole?) into a fantasy.
It was the kind of subway car where you can sit on parallel rows facing each other. Across from me I noticed a woman absorbed in an old black book, which, squinting, I could see was Antigone. She was 40-ish, absorbed, dark hair drawn back, a former ballerina? Next to her a woman, older, her countenance weary, was absorbed in a paperback, Cabin 333. I realized that five of those in this seven-place seat-set were lost in reading: a young woman, perhaps 27, a hardcover copy of God Is Not Great…a slender bookish-appearing man, The Economist. A handsome dark-haired man, perhaps early 30s, had his hands wrapped so securely around his hardcover book I couldn’t read the title. As I was leaving the car I asked him for the title: Treasures of the Earth: Need, Greed and a Sustainable Future. Friendly and curious he said “Why do you want to know?” I’m surveying what people read on the T, I said. He gave a big smile.
I paused on an outside bench to ponder: If five out of seven people on a random subway car were reading what I just saw they were indeed reading, then the world is better, it has to be! Maybe the change is coming. My heart had lifted up, reasonable or not. The world seemed hopeful. My persistent hyper-seriousness danced in my mind a semi-hostile tango with my intermittently-appearing happy heart. I swept it all away and walked on with my happy heart.
Coming back I was walking from the far end of the Charles Street Station’s platform when I remembered a scene from years before. Two young teens, black, were standing with their backs to the river; I heard one say “Maybe we can see Charles.” I thought to help: “No, you have to turn around, it’s the river, the Charles River, over there.”
On an instant their faces were startled. One said “It’s our cousin Charles. Sometimes we can see him in the yard.” They had been looking with such great intensity in the correct direction: at the Charles Street Jail. While I, a white busybody stranger, had thought she would “help” them understand what Charles was. “I’m sorry to interrupt,” I awkwardly said as I took a step away. Oh! My chagrin arrived like a lightning strike. I was consumed with a grievous awareness.
Life lessons.
Now on today’s day I crossed over for the first time to the hotel developed in 2007 out of the imposing building that had been built in 1851 as a “humane” jail for short-term prisoners. I entered beneath a modernist sign “The Liberty Hotel,” walked past a bar café labeled in jaunty sans serif letters: “Clink.” The concierge told me the jail’s history was illustrated in a small space around the corner of the gigantic atrium.
Among the prisoners in the early decades were murderers awaiting trial and young boys fined $3 and two days in jail for “playing ball in the street.” In 1945 a U-Boat commander, seized in the Azores and imprisoned in Charles Street Jail with his crew, killed himself with glass from his sunglasses.
The exhibition heralded one of the most well known residents: birth control activist William R Baird imprisoned in 1967 for giving out birth control devices at Boston University. State law at the time banned distribution of contraceptives except to married couples with a doctor’s prescription, a case eventually overturned by the Supreme Court.
Standing in the great atrium I registered how confidently architects and designers had transformed the old building into “Can you believe it!” Vast walls of nineteenth century brick, uncovered in their careful beauty, sweep around the atrium like upright meadows. Hugely ornate round windows drew visual focus in a way that must not have been possible before.
And there is a slight eeriness, like the thrill we deny we feel when we see an accident. The past can easily be felt. Some will no doubt sense the prisoners, the bad times.
The concierge had an impeccable and solicitous manner far beyond what we usually see in these helpful professionals. A kind of shield? For him? For us?
I walked away to find and eat unwashed strawberries out of their box. To daydream about the subway readers, the black teenagers, the prisoners, the privileged guests lounging at the bottom of the atrium’s vastness. How fascinating to see the world. I was super alive. I was happy.
During the long days of an illness … reading about the world …
I thought mostly: s i g h.
On the second day of April in this year 2010 I was sitting on the “T” going to a doctor’s appointment when my world changed as quickly as if I had been swept (by a worm hole?) into a fantasy.
It was the kind of subway car where you can sit on parallel rows facing each other. Across from me I noticed a woman absorbed in an old black book, which, squinting, I could see was Antigone. She was 40-ish, absorbed, dark hair drawn back, a former ballerina? Next to her a woman, older, her countenance weary, was absorbed in a paperback, Cabin 333. I realized that five of those in this seven-place seat-set were lost in reading: a young woman, perhaps 27, a hardcover copy of God Is Not Great…a slender bookish-appearing man, The Economist. A handsome dark-haired man, perhaps early 30s, had his hands wrapped so securely around his hardcover book I couldn’t read the title. As I was leaving the car I asked him for the title: Treasures of the Earth: Need, Greed and a Sustainable Future. Friendly and curious he said “Why do you want to know?” I’m surveying what people read on the T, I said. He gave a big smile.
I paused on an outside bench to ponder: If five out of seven people on a random subway car were reading what I just saw they were indeed reading, then the world is better, it has to be! Maybe the change is coming. My heart had lifted up, reasonable or not. The world seemed hopeful. My persistent hyper-seriousness danced in my mind a semi-hostile tango with my intermittently-appearing happy heart. I swept it all away and walked on with my happy heart.
Coming back I was walking from the far end of the Charles Street Station’s platform when I remembered a scene from years before. Two young teens, black, were standing with their backs to the river; I heard one say “Maybe we can see Charles.” I thought to help: “No, you have to turn around, it’s the river, the Charles River, over there.”
On an instant their faces were startled. One said “It’s our cousin Charles. Sometimes we can see him in the yard.” They had been looking with such great intensity in the correct direction: at the Charles Street Jail. While I, a white busybody stranger, had thought she would “help” them understand what Charles was. “I’m sorry to interrupt,” I awkwardly said as I took a step away. Oh! My chagrin arrived like a lightning strike. I was consumed with a grievous awareness.
Life lessons.
Now on today’s day I crossed over for the first time to the hotel developed in 2007 out of the imposing building that had been built in 1851 as a “humane” jail for short-term prisoners. I entered beneath a modernist sign “The Liberty Hotel,” walked past a bar café labeled in jaunty sans serif letters: “Clink.” The concierge told me the jail’s history was illustrated in a small space around the corner of the gigantic atrium.
Among the prisoners in the early decades were murderers awaiting trial and young boys fined $3 and two days in jail for “playing ball in the street.” In 1945 a U-Boat commander, seized in the Azores and imprisoned in Charles Street Jail with his crew, killed himself with glass from his sunglasses.
The exhibition heralded one of the most well known residents: birth control activist William R Baird imprisoned in 1967 for giving out birth control devices at Boston University. State law at the time banned distribution of contraceptives except to married couples with a doctor’s prescription, a case eventually overturned by the Supreme Court.
Standing in the great atrium I registered how confidently architects and designers had transformed the old building into “Can you believe it!” Vast walls of nineteenth century brick, uncovered in their careful beauty, sweep around the atrium like upright meadows. Hugely ornate round windows drew visual focus in a way that must not have been possible before.
And there is a slight eeriness, like the thrill we deny we feel when we see an accident. The past can easily be felt. Some will no doubt sense the prisoners, the bad times.
The concierge had an impeccable and solicitous manner far beyond what we usually see in these helpful professionals. A kind of shield? For him? For us?
I walked away to find and eat unwashed strawberries out of their box. To daydream about the subway readers, the black teenagers, the prisoners, the privileged guests lounging at the bottom of the atrium’s vastness. How fascinating to see the world. I was super alive. I was happy.
Saturday, April 3, 2010
We win on this one
Massachusetts Senator Sonia Chang-Diaz reported that the House Bill prohibiting devocalization of dogs and cats was passed by the Senate.
She said This legislation will make the very painful and cruel act of devocalizing dogs and cats illegal in Massachusetts, except when deemed medically necessary by a licensed veterinarian. The bill will also pose strict criminal penalties on anyone, including a veterinarian, who conducts this surgical procedure unlawfully, including imprisonment, fines and/or losing their practicing license.
In my letter on this issue I said: "This bill is being opposed by commercial animal sellers who want to add destructive amendments.
"Commercial breeders want to devocalize animals so they can locate their often-suspect "breeding mills" in any area at all without complaints about loud sounds. Additionally they want to expand their client base by selling the "convenience" of customized bark-free animals.
"Devocalization goes along with "declawing" in being a misleading euphemism used to advance sales and mislead the public. Declawing means amputation of parts of the cats feet. Devocalization means surgical excision of the vocal cords and larynx, a complex operation performed in a delicate and important part of the animal's body, with the risk of collateral damage, infection, leisons, scarring and the assurance of pain along with permanent psychological harm to the animal.
"Devocalization" is against the law in the UK and parts of Europe.
Commercial breeders treat animals as product, therefore no moral obligation to the animals' lives. They seek buyers who want a modified (read mutilated) animal in order to reduce the amount of care and attention to the animal.
When barking causes neighborhood disputes and legal problems, it usually begins because the owners have not provided the dogs with the basic needs for their lives.The dilemna of chronic excessive vocalization by dogs rests on the shoulders of the owners, usually guilty of improper socialization, care and training, conditions of stress, boredom, neglect, fear or frustration. Some owners make insensible decisions, such as putting a German Shepherd or other large breed in a tiny apartment with no provision for walks or other exercises. Many dogs are led out of the house for five minutes twice a day, taken a few feet down the sidewalk to relieve themselves and dragged back into what is -- in fact -- a prison.
Mutilating dogs and cats for human "convenience" violates the tenets of many spiritualities in the world. Those who push these mutilations exist on a continuum of degraded behavior that harms the world and the spirits of those who seek new answers for life on the planet. We humans are OF the earth. Those we call "other" animals are OF the earth. A new consciousness has begun to evolve seeking ways for us to live congenially, pragmatically and spiritually with all the rich life forms sharing the earth with us. There are hopeful signs we may yet transcend the horrors of the present and the past.
She said This legislation will make the very painful and cruel act of devocalizing dogs and cats illegal in Massachusetts, except when deemed medically necessary by a licensed veterinarian. The bill will also pose strict criminal penalties on anyone, including a veterinarian, who conducts this surgical procedure unlawfully, including imprisonment, fines and/or losing their practicing license.
In my letter on this issue I said: "This bill is being opposed by commercial animal sellers who want to add destructive amendments.
"Commercial breeders want to devocalize animals so they can locate their often-suspect "breeding mills" in any area at all without complaints about loud sounds. Additionally they want to expand their client base by selling the "convenience" of customized bark-free animals.
"Devocalization goes along with "declawing" in being a misleading euphemism used to advance sales and mislead the public. Declawing means amputation of parts of the cats feet. Devocalization means surgical excision of the vocal cords and larynx, a complex operation performed in a delicate and important part of the animal's body, with the risk of collateral damage, infection, leisons, scarring and the assurance of pain along with permanent psychological harm to the animal.
"Devocalization" is against the law in the UK and parts of Europe.
Commercial breeders treat animals as product, therefore no moral obligation to the animals' lives. They seek buyers who want a modified (read mutilated) animal in order to reduce the amount of care and attention to the animal.
When barking causes neighborhood disputes and legal problems, it usually begins because the owners have not provided the dogs with the basic needs for their lives.The dilemna of chronic excessive vocalization by dogs rests on the shoulders of the owners, usually guilty of improper socialization, care and training, conditions of stress, boredom, neglect, fear or frustration. Some owners make insensible decisions, such as putting a German Shepherd or other large breed in a tiny apartment with no provision for walks or other exercises. Many dogs are led out of the house for five minutes twice a day, taken a few feet down the sidewalk to relieve themselves and dragged back into what is -- in fact -- a prison.
Mutilating dogs and cats for human "convenience" violates the tenets of many spiritualities in the world. Those who push these mutilations exist on a continuum of degraded behavior that harms the world and the spirits of those who seek new answers for life on the planet. We humans are OF the earth. Those we call "other" animals are OF the earth. A new consciousness has begun to evolve seeking ways for us to live congenially, pragmatically and spiritually with all the rich life forms sharing the earth with us. There are hopeful signs we may yet transcend the horrors of the present and the past.
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