My Vegetable Love

    Reading the Guardian at the moment feels a bit like speaking to a “left-wing” relative and realising that she doesn’t realise that her views are somewhere to the right of Sadiq Khan. But cheers to it anyway for publishing Jeremy Hance’s review of Brilliant Green by Stefano Mancuso and Alessandra Viola. 


    Hance’s article got me thinking about plant sentience and behaviour, and made me much more aware of the complex ways plants negotiate and interact with their environments. They have (at last count) 20 senses as opposed to the human 5; they are able to communicate within and between  species, cooperatively and aggressively; they register and respond to being damaged, and dying.



Some of my friends - Tree looked depressed, so I gave him a beer.

    Allowing for some semantic give-and-take, we can say that plants feel pain (also that they are dickheads, see below).The former idea can be a sore point for vegetarians and vegans who get ribbed about cruelty every time they eat a salad. As Hance points out, plants have evolved not to be individuals in the way animals are - Mancuso conceives of single plants as ‘colonies’, many of which are designed to be eaten, or at least to survive the odd nibble. And, of course, plants are so ontologically different from animals that it’s not easy to ascertain what pain is to them.

    That said, it is undeniable and of interest that plants do feel. They send out distress signals when attacked; they deliberately set each other on fire (lookin at you, eucalyptus); someone once told me that flowers scream at rival species, like the bodysnatchers. I have included a 1914 account of a carrot being tortured below this post, for anyone who wants to feel as weird as I do.

(spoiler alert)

    That’s all fairly creepy and opens up visions of a sentient and suffering universe that might encourage those so-inclined to stop up their moral ears and think “anything goes”. And on the flip-side there’s a risk of turning into some Avatar-watching pantheist (kudos to a film that thinks it can mask its crass racial stereotyping through cunning use of the colour blue). But a more curious and even respectful attitude to Auntie Flora might be a good thing, because 1.) plants make the planet habitable, and that’s a bit of an issue, and 2.) I think being, in principle, is worth something, if only in the sense that destruction shouldn’t be unconsidered or gratuitous. Attentiveness to things is a bit of a trendy concept, but a good one. Philosopher Simone Weil wrote that attention presupposes love, which I believe, though being attentive does not entail anything as alienating as soppiness, so it’s a good starting point in unfamiliar ethical territory.
 

In case you were wondering, mate, I am not going to stop eating my green brethren. We understand much more about the suffering of most farmed animals than about the suffering of plants. Harm felt by animals is harm we can understand, unless we choose not to. Comparing humans and animals (especially other mammals) makes endlessly more sense than comparing animals to plants, on account of the shared genetic material and all that. But comparing plants to Donald Sutherland, it turns out, makes the most sense of all.

 

"In a room near Maida Vale there is an unfortunate carrot strapped to the table of an unlicensed vivisector. Wires pass through two glass tubes full of a white substance; they are like two legs, whose feet are buried in the flesh of the carrot. When the vegetable is pinched with a pair of forceps, it winces. It is so strapped that its electric shudder of pain pulls the long arm of a very delicate level which actuates a tiny mirror. This casts a beam of light on the frieze at the other end of the room, and thus enormously exaggerates the tremor of the carrot. A pinch near the right hand tube sends the beam seven or eight feet to the right, and a stab near the other wire sends it far to the left. Thus can science reveal the feelings of even so stolid a vegetable as the carrot."

(Extract from Sir Jagadesh Chantra Bose's article in Nation magazine, quoted in The Secret Life of Plants, Tompkins and Bird)

   

Having it large with Nigel Farage

i.

I had a dream about Nigel Farage last night. Essentially what happened, minus details, was that I went to a party at his place and, after initial hostility, unbent to his view that he really wasn't that bad once you got to know him; the dream ended with him holding me tenderly against him in a paternal hug. Before any low-minded types start jumping to conclusions, I'd like to say that the hug was entirely chaste, with only, at most, a vestigial erotic frisson. I woke up with some lingering warm feelings towards him, but cured them by looking at his photograph.

This dream was not (as the low-minded might say) related to the state of my psyche. It was about you, England. It was about the reasons we may sink into Farage's embrace. To the sensitive dreamer, watching Newsnight is like eating a piece of bad cheese, and I was probably influenced by a particular vox-poppin' fresh who had been featured the previous night, saying that he voted Ukip because they 'answered his questions' in a way that no other political party did.

Of course, the thing about Ukip is that they don't really answer anyone's questions, they just point away from them - literally away: Farage's answer to all our questions about welfare, unemployment and poverty is 'foreigners', and his answer to most other questions is 'beer'. The recent success of Ukip could be put down to them tapping into deep anxieties, but in both their media image and their policies it seems that what they primarily address is our need not to think about our problems. Window posters for the local elections said 'I'm voting Ukip. No more leaflets, thank you'. They are a party you vote for to express embattled impatience with everything. Every time I look at a Ukip manifesto I age ten thousand years, but in abstract the party's vibe is pretty tempting to those of us who basically hate everything and don't want to think.

ii.

If the theme of this post is 'Not Thinking', rather than 'Fantasy Liaisons with Reactionaries', then I can manage a tenuous link to a vegetarian issue. The recent heavily-processed kerfuffle over halal meat being served in the country's two most hallowed institutions - Nando's* and Oxford University - was, as many have pointed out, not about animal rights. There would never have been a big scandal if a secular abattoir was neglecting to stun animals before slaughter - it's the fact that Muslims did it that really freaks people out. This outbreak of halal horror is tied up with the Trojan-horse idea that the UK is going to be taken over from the inside by something that is not itself (even though the place has never been culturally homogeneous, but whatever).

The point I'm gradually getting to is that two things that have been pointed to as consequences of foreign invasions - unemployment (one of Ukip's focal points) and and cruelty to animals - are fostered by long-standing structural faults and iniquities in British society. You could say that these issues are being used as a smokescreen for xenophobia and racism, but it's also true to say that xenophobia itself acts as a distraction from whatever's rotten in the UK. 

There is no self-contained safe place to scuttle back to, and if we feel threatened by outside influences we should look at ourselves and see what kind of utopia would be left if we created some kitsch fantastical hermetically-sealed Middle England. But, as Nigel came to me and told me in a dream, it's easier to go around sticking pitchforks into straw men.

*ok, it's South-African

Something Special

"Call her once before you go.

Call once yet.

In a voice that she will know:

'Margaret! Margaret!'"

Holla atcho Proles

Look at Jonathan Meades. He is the coolest person in the world. Why doesn't everybody dress like that?

In a rare moment not spent reading the Mail Online or re-watching my favourite film, Blades of Glory, I i-playered his latest documentary, The Joy of Essex. It ended with a brilliant if slightly jingoistic tribute to 'The People's Essex', which he presented as a sort of surreal architectural lost-property bin that shits all over stylistic uniformity and where 'DIY resourcefulness and bricolage were employed in the service of a better life'. He also expressed plenty of scorn for the people who don't like it, including 'bien-pensant environmentalists of all shades'. It made me think of a fallacy that I quite often encounter in people who care about other people, one which puts the claims of social equality and those of the environment ('Nature, whatever that is,' as Meades says) and animals in competition with each other. There's an idea that animal rights or the preservation of rural areas are a distraction from more pressing concerns.

There's something in this - environmentalism, vegetarianism, organic food-fancying etc, are the sorts of issues that the bleeding-heart bourgeois have the luxury to get puffed up about, like Zac Goldsmith, or celebrity tub-of-guts Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall. The stable feature of the neo-conservative green movement is its blatant hypocrisy: remember the economic fat-times, and the whole vote-blue-to-go-green thing? David Cameron on a bicycle with his shoes being driven behind him? That didn't last long. Even the ones who believe their own beliefs don't even remotely practise what they preach - I refer you to Prince Charles, who I will not even bother to insult here.

These clowns use the green thing to sell us stuff, or reinforce their feudal sense of privilege, or distract from the cartoonish evil of their governments, but we shouldn't let their corruption taint the  causes that they use to conceal it. Of course it is no good sentimentalising nature, but even the most realistic among us shouldn't be ashamed to admit things that are not man-ufactured (oh snap, what a pun!), things like trees and animals, are not only pretty good mechanisms for running a planet, but are also worth protection and love and respect. If it matters that people are comfortable and are spared suffering, with or without the balm of some imposed teleology - Marxist, religious, whatever - then surely it follows that other life forms matter too?

By all means be hard-nosed, pragmatic and anti-nostalgic when thinking about Mother Nature - she doesn't love you, she doesn't stand for comfort and all she ever intended for any of us is an un-palliated death. But any politics that places an intrinsic value on human happiness ought to question the grounds on which it separates this Good from the wellbeing of other animals, and the places where they live.

In the Dog House

Yeah, I'm back and, readers, I bet you missed me. All of you. Millions of readers, I've got.

I was perusing the Mail Online this evening, as I often do, and clicked, as is my wont, on all the animal-related stories. Here's a doozy: they ran a feature on a Tumblr blog devoted to 'dogshaming', where people post photos of their dogs along with signs written in the first person describing (or 'confessing to') whatever 'crime' the dog in question has committed.

I'm not saying I didn't find any of them funny - the dog who pukes under the bed looks like a lad, and I like the one about humping the cat - but scrolling down a page of these images began to feel more and more unpleasant. The problem was that the signs were not always celebrations of the fundamental wack-ness of dogs. They were accusations written in character but expressing the frustration of owners who seem to see behaviour that is either natural (eating everything they can get hold of) or the result of poor training as genuinely shameful. But dogs have no shame, only submissive responses to disapproval.

Look at the site if you think I'm exaggerating: there is one dog that is shamed for destroying carpets when left alone - this is a well known symptom of anxiety and boredom. There is a dog that is obviously unhappy whose sign reads 'I like peeing on everything'. That is another classic symptom of anxiety and fear.

These pictures are posted as jokes but many of them depict attitudes to animals that are potentially if not actually abusive. I like animal pictures, I like dogs, I like the Daily Mail (yeah, shoot me) but seeing this just made me think more than ever that there should be legal processes in place to make pet ownership less easy to walk into. A dog is a dog and it cannot be publicly humiliated by having its picture online. The desire of some owners to revenge themselves in this way on dependent animals is the real exhibit in the dogshaming gallery. And it's not funny.




Addendum: the twat who runs this blog has put up a message encouraging viewers not to 'waste [their] breath' on criticising the premise of the site. 'Shaming people for shaming dogs is a tad ironic, no?' sayeth the twat. I don't think he/she has a very strong grasp on the location of the irony in this case.

Riding Meat

Horseracing. That's still a thing. Once a year the Grand National happens and Britain's papers  are filled with pictures of women in hats and disingenuous headlines that refer to the death of some horses as a 'Tragedy' despite the fact that it is really more of a Formality, and is anything but unexpected. Two horses were injured so badly they had to be put down at Aintree last weekend; the same thing happened to five horses at Cheltenham last month. This is par for the course.

The races are sick. That's obvious. But the systematic cruelty of the industry behind them is less well-publicised. The champs that get to die at Aintree are only the tip of the iceberg: Around 380 horses can be expected to die each year on courses or in training, and around 2,000 will be slaughtered before that stage if their bodies are found to be 'unsuitable' -  sometimes it's hard to be a woman. I mean horse. In terms of inhumanity and waste, horseracing can be compared to factory farming, but this isn't for food, it's for fun.


The Grand National has been adapting the courses a little bit to try and cut down on the corpse-count, but since everything about horseracing is cruel, the practice should be scrapped, not reformed. Inbreeding and the stresses of jumping over fences (a noble cause!) leave the majority of racehorses with conditions including gastric ulcers and bleeding lungs. And as this report explains, vivisection is being used as a method of finding solutions to this problem. Inflicting suffering to  find a cure for suffering that is completely unnecessary. If we don't allow fox-hunting or bullfighting, then why is this bloodsport still legal?

Especially considering the only part most people are interested in is Ladies' Day. Hooray for an opportunity to call women fillies and pore over photos of them while saying how stupid they look! And people pay to be treated like that. Fair enough if they enjoy themselves, though they might have a rethink if we renamed the event Whoresracing, and laid bets on who would turn up the least dressed and orange-est. I'm not sure if the people who make the Telegraph's Worst Dressed List get taken out and shot, but it would be keeping with the spirit of the occassion.

Hey vivisectionists, why so tense?

"Why don't you make your blog about something interesting, like vegetarian recipes? That way,  people might read it."


"Shut up, Mum."



Two good things happened last month. I mean, good in my opinion: Wales decided to scrap its proposed badger cull, and it was revealed that all relevant ferry companies and 64 airlines are refusing to import lab-animals to Britain. This has happened as a result of what the BUAV refer to as 'reasoned argument allied to letter writing by our hundreds of thousands of supporters.' On the other hand, ex-Labour Minister Lord Drayson said that medical research was being 'choked off' by 'extremists' who target 'weak links' in the chain of the animal-transporting industry. The violence of Drayson's language suggests a campaign of intimidation of which no evidence is provided, but it is clear that the pro-vivisection movement feels threatened.


Writing on the 14th of March, respectively for the Times and the Guardian, Drayson and the BUAV's Michelle Thew both claimed (in Drayson's words) to be  'speaking out for science and democracy.' Both plausibly claimed to have public opinion behind them: given this country's conflicted attitude to animal welfare, it isn't difficult to believe that the majority of people are 'against causing suffering to lab animals' but in favour of animal research.

The benefits of animal testing are also debatable. Some scientists argue that it is the only way to ascertain  the effect of medication on an entire body, not just specific cells; others consider it to be increasingly outmoded and ineffective in the treatment of human bodies. What I take from Drayson's article, in which he claims that the loss of just 1% of Britain's lab animals will directly and definitely cause 'more people to suffer and die', is the sort of sensationalism and emotional blackmail that is stereotypically the domain of animal rights activists.


Here is a selection of responses to Thew's article from the Guardian online comments section.


"This fluffy bunny flim flam attitude doesn't help anyone."


"Perhaps if you spent a little more time paying attention in Science lessons, and a little less going "Awwww, look at the little fuzzy-wuzzy... he's so cuuuuute" you'd realise..."


"You are regarded as nutters by the large majority of the population."


 "Is it only the fluffy ones you want to protect?"


"I once asked one of these anti-testing loonies who she'd save from a burning house first: a child or a mouse."


"God, I lived with one of these anti-vivisection loonies at university. They are so unpleasant...muchelle, we need to experiment on animals to save lives. I hope that you refuse any treat for any illnes or disease you have in the future. If not, you are a hypocrite like PETA's vice-president because she uses insulin, a medication derived from animal testing."

Well, I've got hurt feelings.



I've chosen the most extreme and least fair responses to show that the tactics of hysteria and intimidation can be found on both sides of the vivisection argument. I also feel these remarks demonstrate the problems that rational animal rights campaigners have in being taken seriously. The trolls quoted above rely on dismissing both the value of animal lives and the intelligence of anybody who cares about them.


Why do they get so angry? Well, if they believe in the medical efficacy of animal testing, fair enough.  No one likes cancer, heart disease or Alzheimers, no one wants to pass up any chances of finding cures. But the aggression shown towards people who are really only encouraging progress - focusing on the development of humane and accurate research, moving on from the brutal techniques of the past - seems to me like a sign of cowardice. These commentators, whose general attitude is basically considered normal and not 'unpleasant', refuse debate, and, by belittling the motivations of anti-vivisectionists, close their eyes to the full moral difficulty of the animal rights question.


Some people are frightened of widening the boundaries of ethical responsibility. Making decisions is much easier if we focus solely on human needs, to the exclusion of animal welfare. It is as natural to do that as it is to prioritise people's immediate comfort over the protection of the environment, or people close to us over people we don't know. Campaigns like the BUAV's threaten the progress of medical research, in its current models. They demand change and development in social, scientific and humanitarian practices. It is a daunting prospect.