Year: 2011

By Andrea Scarpino

Homemade cat food: meat, eggs, vitamins all whizzed together into a concoction only a cat would eat. Except my cats won’t eat it, just look at me with evident disdain and concern. And when they do venture to taste what I’ve put in the bowl, they insist on violently vomiting it up—and then some. It has to be a medical miracle of sorts that they’re producing so much vomit while eating so little. Yesterday, one vomited an obscene amount on a cushion that he has now spent hours obsessively licking even though I cleaned it up. This morning, he vomited on an empty egg carton I had put on the floor near the back door to recycle.

Homemade. Because I’ve decided that I should make more ethical choices in what I feed my cats. The pet food industry is essentially a dump for all the meat by-products that aren’t fit for human consumption. And much of it contains ingredients like grains that cats shouldn’t be eating anyway.

I’m also worrying a lot these days about CAFOs—contained animal feeding operations. Basically, small concrete and metal areas where hundreds to thousands of animals are contained and raised to be slaughtered. The Environmental Protection Agency defines a CAFO as “agricultural operations where animals are kept and raised in confined situations” and which “congregate animals, feed, manure and urine, dead animals, and production operations on a small land area.”

Notice the definition doesn’t include the word “farm.” Because they’re not farms; they’re production lines, feedlots. The EPA says a large CAFO can include 10,000 or more pigs, 55,000 or more turkeys, 125,000 or more chickens. Confined, remember, in metal and concrete, with drainage ditches leading urine, feces, blood, dead animals, hair, antibiotics, spilled feed to vast lagoons of waste.

This worries me for many reasons: the health of the people who work and live near these operations, who wake each morning to fumes released from the waste lagoons; the environmental costs of raising so many animals in such poor conditions; the health costs to the humans who consume these animals; the harm to the animals; the ethics of it all. And my possible support of CAFOs through what I feed my cats.

Even though I don’t eat meat, even though I only consume organic and free-range dairy products (although there are a host of complexities there), could I be supporting CAFOs by buying cat food with “chicken by-products”? Most likely.

So I bought two pounds of local farm-raised organic ground chicken and mixed it with a vitamin powder made for cats. It smelled vile. I may or may not have gagged while processing it. But this would be the only way to ensure, I reasoned, that I wasn’t supporting a CAFO. Except my cats won’t eat it. Or eat it and vomit profusely—out of spite, I’m convinced. Essentially, I’ve fed them nothing but McDonald’s for 13 years and now, suddenly, I’m changing the rules.

Of course, I think I’m changing the rules for the better. But no one seems to be able to convince the cats.

Andrea Scarpino is a frequent contributor to POTB. You can visit her at:

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Here is a story: a watchmaker survives the war. He comes home having lost all interest in time. This is the oldest tale in the world. I thought of this just yesterday when I heard Vice President Biden talking to NBC’s Ann Curry about the need for American businesses to hire war veterans. The vice president is correct. But a job alone isn’t enough. The United States must double down on its efforts to help veterans with the psychological damage that warfare inflicts. Oh this is an old tale and we are still telling it. 

 

Of course it's good to be precise. Blindness, even when suffused with light isn't always easy. One morning while on a trip alone to Europe I woke with a profound head cold. I'd been traveling for days, first in Austria, then in Scandinavia. Now I was with my guide dog in an unfamiliar room in Helsinki's Hotel Hesperia. The room was black. It's only window faced north. Without daylight the place was like a tunnel, a brune chasm, and  dangerous with its Finnish modern furniture. I lay in the bed listening to the beating of my heart. I was waking like a cartoon coyote who has walked off a cliff but stays aloft. There was something wrong with my heart. My heart was too noisy. It sounded like a Cuban bata drum. My heart was making a deep and hollow sound I'd never heard before. And what was that? Was that the noise of my viscera? A splenetic hurdy gurdy? What the hell was happening? Then it dawned on me: I was deaf.

The hotel room was an intricate evasion. My heart pounded. I felt my way forward with fingers and naked toes. My damned heart was Edgar Alan Poe's tell tale heart, beating from beneath the floor. And to make matters worse I hadn't left a night light on. The room was as dark as a theory of life. 

"Vidal," I said, for Vidal was my guide dog at the time, "we've never been in such a black hole!" 

My voice sounded like bees. I shouted. I couldn't make out any syllables or consonants. 

I hit my head on a door. I groped for a wall switch. I imagined that light would solve everything. But when I flipped the switch I was still deaf and the room was just formlessly yellow. 

Outside on Mannerheim Street I walked about in the thin April light hearing only my heartbeat. Vidal knew his job. He stopped at curbs, watched traffic. Without the ability to hear cars I had to guess when to step into the road. Vidal had to use his skills in "intelligent disobedience" and prevent me from making bad decisions. Without my ears I had to rely on my canine companion like never before. "Thank goodness," I thought, "guide dogs are trained to stop their owners from walking into harm's way."

We wandered for a long time without direction. Light expanded in my eyes and was more of an obstacle than I had ever noticed before. The absence of hearing made the brilliant fog seem like an ocean. My feet became disconnected from my ankles. I felt as if I was coming apart in a light beam. My heartbeat clattered in my head like the hooves of a frightened beast. Vidal pulled me, shunting left or right to avoid people or machines I couldn't see. Stumbling down the sidewalk in the center of a large Scandinavian city I felt frighteningly alone. I began to sweat. 

Vidal and I returned to our hotel. We made our way to the elevator and then to our room where I sat down and cried. I wept though I sensed that tears would make my situation worse. What could I do? I couldn't use my talking computer for email and I couldn't use the telephone. Obviously I would have to write notes and hand them to strangers. This cheered me up. I thought of Beethoven. The only problem was that I couldn't read notes in return and accordingly I'd have to rely on the clear comprehension of my readers. How long was this Helen Keller state going to last? I fed the dog and went to sleep and stayed in bed for eighteen hours. 

The next day I handed an elaborate note to the desk clerk who in turn got me a cab, guided me by my elbow and told the driver to take me to a clinic. I handed out notes wherever I found myself, held my hands up to my ears to suggest how little I was hearing. And the doctor gave me pills and elixirs and after another day and night I returned to the hearing world with a strange sensation that a plug had been removed–bilge water suddenly drained out of me. I could hear the TV that I'd left on for illumination. Tony Blair was talking to university students. Thank God for Tony Blair! Oh that lovely man! I didn't mind that he was lying about the war. His voice was the lyrical antithesis of solitude. In the end it's voices that confirm us. 

 

 

 Mithraic coins, pre-Roman, before consciousness, deep in a mineral blank, there were always two. “Let me give you my two cents worth,” said God, who gave each man a talent–the wise man saw there were two coins there, always two. As for me, I’ve just risen from sleep. I don’t remember my dream. But damn if I haven’t got two cents to rub together. 

 

Watch Anderson Cooper Friday on ABC.

From our friend Laura Castle:

Anderson Cooper is doing a program on child abuse at 10:00 a.m. Friday on ABC. There is a horrible book on raising children called "To Train Up a Child" by Michael and Debi Pearl. They advocate whipping babies on their bare skin, using whips, belts and tree branches and they recommend whipping a child as young as three until he is "totally broken." The Pearls are fundamentalist Christians who live on a farm in Tennessee. Their book has been implicated in the deaths of three children whose parents followed its teachings. Anderson Cooper is bringing this horror to the public's awareness.

I came home and lay on the bed. The house was empty, no one was home. My dog lay down beside me. Outside I could hear rain in the trees, rain mixing it up with the last leaves. What a day it had been. Human misunderstandings, people reliving their old wounds, each room a proscenium arch. I fell asleep then. And I don’t know why but I dreamt I was in Norway and it was spring and I was walking an old ox up a hill, the two of us happy in the way of human-animal kinship that we had lived through another winter.  

 

 

BRIGHTON, COLORADO– [Excerpt provided by Inclusion Daily Express] When Adams County sheriff's deputies knocked down the motel-room door of a deaf couple, slammed the man to the ground and locked him in jail for 25 days without providing a sign-language interpreter, they violated the Americans With Disabilities Act, a federal lawsuit says. 

Lawyers for Timothy Siaki claim the man was not provided an interpreter until he went to court on domestic assault charges last year. Siaki eventually was cleared of the charges, said Kevin Williams, an attorney who filed the suit on behalf of Siaki and his fiancee, Kimberlee Moore. 

"There were 25 days of his life that he had access to nothing — no information on why he was being held, no information about his case or what was going to happen to him," Williams said. 

The Colorado Cross-Disability Coalition advocacy group is also a plaintiff in the suit.

Entire article:
Deaf couple sue Adams County sheriff over lack of accommodations
http://www.denverpost.com/search/ci_19414901
Related:
It Seems Like Cops Should Be Aware of the Existence of Deaf People (Reason)
http://reason.com/blog/2011/11/28/it-seems-like-cops-should-be-aware-of-th
SBI probing use of stun gun on Halifax County man who died (WRAL)
http://www.wral.com/news/local/story/10418205/

 

Scientists Create Virus That Could Kill Millions

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/11/29/bird-flu-h5n1-avian-flu-virus_n_1118673.html?ncid=edlinkusaolp00000003

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http://www.democracynow.org/2011/11/29/pepper_spray_creator_decries_use_of

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I found the following story on the NPR iPhone App:
http://www.npr.org/blogs/thesalt/2011/11/29/142891462/nestle-to-investigate-child-labor-on-its-cocoa-farms?sc=17&f=1001Nestle To Investigate Child Labor On Its Cocoa Farms
by Eliza Barclay
– November 29, 2011Politicians and food executives have been talking about ending the problem of child labor in the West African cocoa industry for the last decade. After shocking revelations that hundreds of thousands of children were forced to harvest cacao beans under abusive conditions, companies pledged to address the practice as “fair trade” entered their lexicon.But 10 years later, labor advocates say the chocolate industry doesn’t have a lot to show for itself on this issue. In 2009, the U.S. Department of State estimated that there were still more than 109,000 children working in Ivory Coast’s cocoa industry, and about 10 percent were victims of human trafficking or enslavement.Perhaps that’s why Nestlé, the world’s largest food company, has just hired an organization that specializes in accountability to investigate and document child labor on the farms that supply it with the cocoa that ends up in millions of chocolate bars.Beginning in January, the Fair Labor Association, Nestle’s new partner, will send a team of independent assessors to Ivory Coast to map the cocoa supply chain. The group has conducted similar investigations with companies in the textile, manufacturing and other industries in countries around the world. But Nestlé is the first food company to open up its supply chain to FLA’s scrutiny.”Our system is a very robust system; it’s really only for companies ready to ‘walk the walk,'” Auret van Heerden, president of CEO of the Fair Labor Association, tells The Salt. “There’s a lot of work to be done and Nestlé knows that, but they’re showing commitment and seriousness.”If FLA finds evidence of child labor, it will advise Nestlé on what to do about it, Nestle says. “Child labor has no place in our supply chain,” said Nestlé’s Executive Vice President for Operations José Lopez in a statement. “We cannot solve the problem on our own, but by working with a partner like the FLA, we can make sure our efforts to address it are targeted where they are needed most.”Ivory Coast and other West African countries produce 75 percent of the world’s cocoa. But as NPR’s Maria Godoy has reported, bulk beans grown in Africa represent just a small sampling of the many flavors of cacao. That’s inspiring chocolate explorers to scour the Amazon Basin in search of a new bounty of wild cacao. [Copyright 2011 National Public Radio]To learn more about the NPR iPhone app, go to http://iphone.npr.org/recommendnprnews

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