Juvenile Delinquents of the Sea

Pulling at masks, yanking hoses and lights. Carnivorous calamari.

This was too good to pass up, a bunch of So. Cal soft-shell thugs.

Thanksgiving Thought

"We need another and a wiser and perhaps a more mystical concept of animals. Remote from universal nature and living by complicated artifice, man in civilization surveys the creature through the glass of his knowledge and sees thereby a feather magnified and the whole image in distortion. We patronize them for their incompleteness, for their tragic fate for having taken form so far below ourselves. And therein do we err. For the animal shall not be measured by man. In a world older and more complete than ours, they move finished and complete, gifted with the extension of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear. They are not brethren, they are not underlings: they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendour and travail of the earth."
~ "The Outermost House" by Henry Beston

Henry Beston was a naturalist who lived from 1888-1968. He spent a year in the outermost house on Eastham Beach, Cape Cod, and wrote the book The Outermost House about that year. I love this quote. I first saw it hanging in the vet's office.

A View from the Yard

This morning, I heard one of the three neighborhood fawns crying for its mother. There are two twin fawns and one singleton, and two does. They all hang around together, but the does sometimes leave the fawns. Anyway, one of the does answered with the funny clicking sound they make, and the fawn went to it, but apparently It Wasn't Mom, because the fawn shrank away and trotted off, still crying. The doe followed it, the way you follow your friend's crying kid...

Have I said how annoying the deer usually are? Eating all the flowers and spreading ticks. It was nice to have a different experience of them.

It's Happening

Brave New Meat

Can we have animal-grown meat and a planet too? It's a good question.

It continues to amaze me how prophetic science fiction can be.

Make Room, Make Room (Soylent Green)

And, read Brave New World before you pop your next Xanax, Ambien, Prozac, or whatever.

The Easy Way to Slow Global Warming...

...is to eat less meat, according to a study cited by the Associated Press.

Eating less meat could help slow global warming by reducing the number of livestock and thereby decreasing the amount of methane flatulence from the animals, scientists said on Thursday.

Disturbing, isn't it, that we warehouse so many animals in feedlots that their flatulence, their farting, has an effect on our climate. And there really is no need to eat as much meat as most of us do, we're just responding to an age-old craving for protein from the days when we were protein-starved. Now, overeating is the problem.

Powles and his co-authors estimate that reducing meat consumption would reduce the numbers of people with heart disease and cancer. One study has estimated that the risk of colorectal cancer drops by about a third for every 100 grams of red meat that is cut out of your diet.

"As a society, we are overconsuming protein," Brewster said. "If we ate less red meat, it would also help stop the obesity epidemic."

Read this Article

And never feed your pet commercial pet food again. In the NY Times.

these diets commonly consist of byproducts cooked into sterile and viscous masses, sheared into the simulacrum of a bone or a patty, and then, according to a report by the National Research Council in Washington, spray-dried with minuscule beadlets of fat, protein and calibrated savor.

I'm relieved there isn't a photo of the six female hound dogs with permanent tubing coming out of their sides, who are only permitted outside twice a week. It might be prudent to ask ourselves what kind of people could work with animals in these conditions, and to what remote and inhospitable emotional lepers' colony we should banish them.

Speaking of Moby Dick

How hard is it to believe that a 100-year-old creature could have the intelligence to sustain a grudge against the dislikeable Ahab?

A 50-ton bowhead whale caught off the Alaskan coast last month had a weapon fragment embedded in its neck that showed it survived a similar hunt — more than a century ago.

Embedded deep under its blubber was a 3 1/2-inch arrow-shaped projectile that has given researchers insight into the whale's age, estimated between 115 and 130 years old.

The whale was killed as part of allowed "harvesting" by native Alaskan villages. The photo shows a bowhead whale and two beluga whales.

Pet Foods, Organic Produce and a Death Sentence

Are we supposed to feel better now that the former director of the Chinese State Food and Drug Administration has been sentenced to death for taking bribes?
Chinese Produce Not What It Claims To Be from Business Week:

China's record with food imports isn't reassuring. Just last month, 107 food imports from China were detained by the Food & Drug Administration at U.S. ports, according to The Washington Post. Among them were dried apples preserved with a cancer-causing chemical and mushrooms laced with illegal pesticides.

Another scary article about Chinese food imports. China is quickly becoming the world's largest exporter of fresh produce. Much of what is sold in Wal-Mart is imported from China. Further, produce sold as "organic" has not been.

Now that my own dog has taken ill, although not with kidney failure, I'm even more curious about where all this will lead. I think it's disgraceful to try to limit pet owners' damages to the "replacement" cost of an irreplaceable animal. At the very least, the cost of all the defective dog food should be refunded. People were not getting what they paid for. As well as the cost of veterinary care, special foods, etc. That is what the class action is seeking.

Time to Boycott All Chinese Products

Not just melamine, but now also cyanuric acid -- Another Chemical Emerges in Pet Food Case -- has been found in pet food, and the combination has been deadly.

Deaths from false glycerin may be in thousands. This was added to cough medicine that may have killed thousands of adults and children. China's response? Denial, mainly. Followed by foot-dragging.

I've noted before that the contaminated wheat gluten used in pet foods was "human grade" meaning it may have found its way into food for people as well. Wheat gluten is commonly used as an ingredient in bread. Glycerin is used in many products.

The Ongoing Pet Food Scandal and Recipe

Now that we have discovered that the Chinese feel that melamine is an acceptable additive for animal food -- recall that our own food laws were passed to eliminate such items as brick dust from prepared foods -- what can we do but avoid processed foods for ourselves and our pets?

Sasha's Beef Stew

2-2 1/2 lbs London broil or other cut of beef,
cut into strips and then into squares
1 1/2 crowns broccoli
1/2 cup brown rice
1/2 cup white rice
1/2 cup baby carrots
Add a half sweet potato or parsnip, as available.

Put brown rice in large stew pot with 4 cups water. Chop up carrots and add. Let cook for 10-15 mins. Add white rice, chopped broccoli, and London broil. Cook until rice is done. Serve with vitamins, including glucosamine and chondroitin supplement as recommended by your vet.

Save 3 days' worth in the fridge and freeze the rest in small freezer bags to be thawed as needed.

Pet Food Recall and Human Food Safety

Does it need to be said, as the pet food recall continues, and now includes biscuits, that human food is subject to the same possibility of contamination? Another reason to buy locally grown, minimally processed food. Wheat gluten is not something you'd add to your food in your own kitchen, so why buy food that has added gluten? Yet I checked the two loaves of bread in the fridge and both had added gluten listed as ingredients. I read somewhere that Menu Foods used "human quality" gluten, meaning, that the same supplier could have sold the gluten that's in my bread.

It also makes you wonder what was going into pet food until now, that just wasn't detected. The cheap brands of pet food are something of a slow poison anyway, in my opinion, akin to feeding yourself a diet of very bad junk food. Dogs and cats get cancers and other diseases that are directly related to the garbage-like byproducts in the food we feed them -- feathers are a chicken "by-product" by the way.

At the very least, there should be procedures for testing pet food supplies for pets before animals start dying.

Otterly Adorable

They float around holding hands. They nap, wake, drift apart and then hold hands on the other side.

Milan Kundera au Jardin des Tuileries

Sometime ago, I was in Paris, and I saw Milan Kundera in the Tuileries, feeding the birds. His eyes were mesmeric, and the sparrows sat on his fingertips, eating seeds from his palm. I did not recognize him until I returned home, and checked the photo on the back of The Unbearable Lightness of Being. How fitting that the man to write that title communed with the beings most attuned to lightness. If I ever meet him, I will dredge up this line of French, "Je vous ai vu au Jardin des Tuileries, il y a dix/quinze/vingt ans." If I have the nerve, I will add, "avec des oiseaux." At the time, he gave me a small nod of acknowledgment, not to disturb his small friends. I smiled, and went on my way. Probably to the Eiffel Tower.

Meanwhile, I read this. From the Guardian.

And this, in the NY Times, where Russell Banks points out that "he’s not inclusive enough. He does not discuss a single female novelist, even in passing. It’s as if no Western woman has ever tried writing a serious novel in 400 years. And, in his appreciation of non-European novelists like Fuentes, García Márquez and Chamoiseau, he colonizes them, as if culturally they gazed longingly toward their European mother- and fatherlands instead of their homelands. But then, he’s not writing literary criticism; he’s writing the secret history of the novels of Milan Kundera and teaching us how to read them."

What can you expect when the NY Times also features this lineup of the Best American Fiction of the past 25 years -- the winner, center and four runners-up.

Zen is about reality...like it or not

The fine art of letter writing seems to be lost on the Bush Administration. Bothering elderly citizens who exercise their freedom of speech is not exactly what we were hoping for but I guess we should expect it. Yahoo news.
Should we expect this too? PETA workers helping animals by killing them? What's ethical about that? Granted, these workers were acting on their own, killing animals randomly regardless of age or health, but I'd argue this kind of thing arises from a "kill with discretion" policy such as PETA advocates. Too subject to abuse to be justifiable. Read the article.

I'm indebted to Nan Shin ("Diary of A Zen Nun") for pointing out that when we do not like to look at things like this, and choose instead to look the other way, we wind up living somewhere next to our real life, rather than in it. (I apologize for the paraphrase.)

And finally: Tell us something we don't know. Daydreaming is brain's default setting.

Red Devils

It has now been conclusively proven that the tenants in the attic of our house are red squirrels, as we suspected from the speed of their movements (at 6:30 am) and the fact that the outdoor areas around the house are full of chewed up hemlock cones. The proof consisted of temporarily catching one in a Havahart trap, which jammed, allowing the prisoner to escape.

Oh, and they prefer cashews to either Brazil nuts or almonds, a fact you can test for yourself by using Gorilla glue to fasten one nut of each type to the bait plate of the trap.

Update: Jan 8. We caught a red squirrel in the trap and released it in the park nearby, with a complimentary slice of bread as a consolation prize. She (you look underneath them) was attacking the bars of the cage with scary-looking teeth, and lost no time at all in pushing the trap flap open once the bar was lifted. Even better news: online sources tell me these little guys are solitary, so there might actually be a full night's sleep in my near future.

Zen of Looking

He is very good at looking.