Fee-fi-fo-fum. A Smelly Adventure

by Madeleine Kando

We are at our friends, the Millers’ for Thanksgiving. They live the super rural life in Northern New Hampshire, in what is called the Great North Woods. There is snow up here already. Just a dusting, but soon our friends will be buried under a thick pack of the white stuff which will remain until the spring.

 

There is a magic feeling about ‘the North Country’, even though it was declared poor enough to qualify for Federal Assistance. People live in trailers, old cars and rusting tractors strewn about on their properties. As we drive towards Canada, big posters with Trump’s grimacing face are visible from the road. This is Trump country through and through. Are they not aware that we have a new President?

This time, our friends had no room for us, so we booked a room online at a local B&B, which looked quite charming, with a panoramic view of the hills and valley. As we are shown our ‘suite’, the pungent odor of some kind of air freshener dampens my enthusiasm.

 

‘Do you mind if we crack a window?’ I ask the hostess. ‘Unfortunately the windows are winterized’ she says. ‘You could keep the door ajar, but make sure you lock it when you leave’.

We unpack and drive to our friends’ house to spend the rest of the evening. It is hidden amongst tall pine trees, at the end of a mile-long driveway. They slowly built a little kingdom on their 200-acre property, which they bought for a pittance many decades ago. There is the barn for their horses, a new building to house an indoor lap pool and a sauna and a structure to house a giant wood furnace. Nathan, the Lord of the Manor, missed his calling by becoming a psychiatrist rather than an architect. He just loves building things.

Late at night, as we drive back to the B&B, we see a large buck stand still in the middle of the road. It doesn’t move, so we slow down to a crawl. Our headlights show every detail of this magnificent creature, and I feel sorry for him. There is a good chance he will be shot the next day or the day after.

 

I can’t sleep because of the pungent odor in the apartment. My husband always says that I should work in the perfume industry because of my excessive sensitivity to smells. I leave my snoring husband’s side and start to comb the apartment. The small fake plug-in Christmas tree on the table looks suspicious, sitting in its metal bucket. A prolonged sniffing does not result in a guilty verdict, but I unplug it anyway and put it outside. I crawl back in bed, but the smell is still there. I get up again and wave my arms like a scarecrow to activate the automatic night light.

  

In the corner of the room, shamelessly emanating fumes, is an electric air freshener. I unplug it, put it in the bathroom and close the door, convinced that I found the source of my misery. I crawl back in bed, but the smell is still there.

 

Now, the gloves are coming off. They must have put a scent tablet in the small, humble looking vacuum cleaner. Out it goes, next to Christmas tree. Back in bed, but the smell persists. I get up for the third time.

 

I notice two empty trash cans next to the sink. Out they go into the dark, cold night, but the smell is still there. I am frantic by now, but have enough common sense to stop myself, before I dismantle the entire suite.

 

As the day breaks, I finally fall asleep, the nauseating smell filling my nostrils. I lost the battle, but not the war. Tomorrow is another day.

   

I dream that I am stuck in quicksand. My back is slowly sinking down, like in a hammock and soon my body will jackknife, my toes touching my nose. As I slowly bend into a giant letter I, I hear little gnomes in the ceiling tap dance and bang on pots and pans. They stand on a blindingly lit stage, their big faces grinning at me. The sound wakes me up and I find that my mattress, which has the firmness of a marshmallow is preventing me from turning on my side. My back is stuck in the dip in the middle. The clanging in the heating system gets louder and faster, until it suddenly stops. The blindingly lit stage in my dream must have been the two porch lights outside the bedroom window, which won’t go off until daylight.

 

It is Thanksgiving morning. I get up, groggy after a sleepless night, and as I drink my morning coffee, I glance out the window. The banned Christmas tree and vacuum cleaner stare back at me, but they don’t look worse for wear. The porch lights are finally asleep. I envy them.

 

We drive the short distance to the Millers’, ready for Joan’s fabulous Thanksgiving meal, which I will selectively participate in, since I have become a vegetarian. ‘How did you sleep?’ asks Joan. The bags under my eyes speak for themselves, but I don’t want to share my nocturnal adventure, for fear of everyone finding out how neurotic I am. ‘Not too bad’ I lie.

 

After dinner, we go for a walk down to one of the ponds. Since it is hunting season, we all wear orange or red, just to be on the safe side. Nathan tells us that it is not uncommon for hunters to drive their truck while they shoot at anything that moves. There is no comfort in knowing that it’s against the law, since hiring a lawyer after you are shot, is not very practical.

 

Nathan is hard of hearing, but he often pretends he doesn’t hear you, when he embarks on one of his long monologues and doesn’t want to get interrupted. He is a born story teller, but his rhythm is slow, with a lot of ‘uhs’ and ‘ums’. By the time he finishes a sentence, it’s hard to remember the beginning. I wonder how he manages to keep his patients awake, as a practicing psychiatrist. Still, his stories are fascinating and full of humor. He is a transplanted New Yorker who didn’t have to learn to be funny. He would have been a great stand-up comedian.

 

Joan, his wife, functions as his mirror. She is not flamboyant, a bit self-effacing, but when push comes to shove, you can tell she wears the pants at their house. She enjoys cooking, smoking dope and yoga. She swims daily in her indoor pool, goes in the hot tub and writes in her journal. She used to make wonderful paintings, but somehow, the creative juices stopped flowing.

 

Their horses, Patrick and Max, are part of the family. Patrick, the pony, is the undisputed boss. Max, a sweet appaloosa, does what he is told. They both look furry this time of year, their winter coats nice and thick. They require a lot of care and are included in Nathan’s will. He gave detailed instructions on by whom, how and where they will be taken care of when he no longer can do so.

It's time to go back to the dreaded B&B. My husband promised he would blow up our air mattress, so I wouldn’t have to spend another night in marshmallow land. He resigned himself long ago to living with a neurotic wife and I see his sleepy eyes follow my progress as I transfer the bedding from the marshmallow bed to the air mattress. I move it around in the living room, like pulling a row boat in the water, to find the best spot. Finally comfortably settled, I am confident that this time, the sandman will not pass me by.

  

I fall asleep and dream that I am sitting in a bar. A group of hunters in camouflage gear are smoking cigars, while they exchange stories about killing. I wake up coughing from all the cigar smoke, my nose filled with the smell of stale tobacco emanating from the couch.

 

I lug the blankets, the sheets and the pillow back to the bed. I am so tired by now, that no amount of marshmallow can keep me awake. Ok. So I lost the war, not just the battle. How was I to know that everything in the apartment was sprayed to mask the smell of tobacco? Even Napoleon would have lost this one, his infantry outnumbered by thousands of enemy soldiers suddenly sprouting out of the battle field.

 

Back home in Boston, I crawl into my king-sized bed, covered by a rock-hard futon. No hint of marshmallows here. No trace of any fragrance in the air. A blissful olfactory void.

 

My husband, who is really good at calling out my obsessive behavior, sets me straight. He likes to rub my nose in it, so to speak, sniff out the truth of the matter: ‘You never appreciate what you have’ he says. ‘What about all the times you prevented the house from exploding because of a gas leak that no one else smelled? What about the spoiled milk that everybody else happily drank? What about the dead rat in the shed? Stop being such a cry baby. Don’t stir up a stink where there is none.’

 

I read a story of a woman who suffers from Hyperosmia, a heightened sense of smell so severe that she can no longer live a normal life. Who am I to complain of a measly air-freshener in the Great North Woods? I should wake up and smell the coffee.

 

Still, it would be nice to give my nose a vacation. Send it to a nose retreat with meditation classes to learn to be accepting of odors. In the meantime, I have to remind myself to pack a clothes pin the next time I travel. leave comment here

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A review of Mama’s Last Hug: Animal and Human Emotions

by Madeleine Kando

In his latest book, Dutch primatologist Frans de Waal continues to show beyond any doubt, that animals are not only sentient and intelligent creatures, but have an emotional life that is as complex as ours.

The book opens with a heart wrenching description of a dying chimpanzee called Mama, the matriarch of the colony at the Royal Berger Zoo in Holland.

She receives a visit from Jan Van Hooff, an 80 year old Professor whom she has known for 40 years. As she recognizes him, her whole face turns into a huge smile. She strokes his grey hair, puts her large hand on his shoulder and makes yelping sounds to show how happy she is to see him. Then, like my own 100 year old mother did, when I went to see her before she died, Mama curls up again into a ball. The brief visit took all the strength she could muster at that moment.

De Waal doesn’t leave any stone unturned when it comes to debunking false beliefs about primates and humans. The fact that we descend from an ‘apelike’ ancestor, does not mean that the primates of today are a more primitive version of us. The evolutionary history of the bonobos, chimpanzees and gorillas goes as far back in time as our own. They are not our evolutionary parents, a more primitive version of us, but have separately evolved for as long as we have.

 

What made Mama the Alpha Female of the Colony? In one of his famous Ted Talks: ‘The Surprising Science of Alpha Males’, de Waal explains that the qualities that make a good leader are not strength and bullying, but traits like generosity, peacekeeping and empathy. Mama had those traits in abundance. She was what de Waal calls ‘the consoler in chief’. She was the boss because she broke up fights, knew how to compromise and make coalitions.  Not only was Mama the boss, she was also the focus of intense male attention. By describing the colony’s sexual habits, de Waal shows us that we are not the only species capable of impulse control. Mama’s admirers did not openly fight to have 'a go at it': they knew that by allowing one of them that privilege, the price was to receive a grooming session afterward. If one of them broke the rule, there was hell to pay. Read more...

Confessions of a Grizzly Groupie

by Madeleine Kando

It all started with an innocent article about France’s efforts to repopulate the Pyrenees with brown bears. After the last female, Cannelle, was shot dead by hunters in 2004, an attempt was made to atone for hundreds of years of bear genocide. In 1994, the French authorities decided to introduce four female brown bears and a powerhouse of a male called Piros from Slovenia into the Pyrenees. This quickly resulted in many little bears, but since there was only one papa bear in the harem, there were concerns about inbreeding.

There was talk of catching Piros and snipping off the family jewels, but since Piros was already a geriatric bear, a new male was introduced in the area to create a more varied gene pool. This new bear’s name was Goiat, which means bachelor in Catalan.

All these efforts to bring back the rightful inhabitants of the Pyrenees didn’t go without a fight. The local sheep farmers didn’t see kindly to these large, furry immigrants that liked to eat their sheep for lunch, but there are now 50 bears in the Pyrenees, thanks mostly to Piros’ virility.

My fascination with bears didn’t end there, I am afraid. Since the closest I can get to anything resembling wildness in my daily life are the squirrels and rabbits in my backyard, I got completely addicted to watching the largest carnivore in the northern hemisphere amble across my screen at the touch of a key. We do have black bears here in New England, but they look like pretend bears compared to ‘ursus arctos horribilis’, which is the real name for brown bears a.k.a. grizzlies.

Instead of spending my time mopping the floor or cleaning the toilet, I have turned in to a virtual grizzly groupie. It actually goes beyond voyeurism. I am learning that for many large carnivores, the only thing that will save them from extinction is our willingness to share our space with them. We took most of what was theirs from them, basically telling them that their life is not worth living. Now it is our responsibility to become their stewards.

The bear was once considered the king of the animal world. It was and still is the largest and strongest animal in Europe and was feared to the point where even his real name ‘Arctos’ became taboo. If you mention the "true" name of a ferocious animal, you are likely to call it forth. So, they called it ‘the brown one’. (Norse ‘björn’, Dutch ‘beer’, German ‘Bär’). The original word completely disappeared from our language. This kind of linguistic tour de force is called ‘taboo deformation’.**

In its effort to combat paganism, the Catholic Church began demonizing the bear. It portrayed it as an oversexed animal and turned it into a symbol for gluttony, anger and lust (Ursus Diabolus). This most feared and respected creature of the wild, emblazoned on coats of arms and emulated by warriors and kings, was used for entertainment at town fairs, chained and muzzled. It was made to ‘dance’ over burning ambers, torn to shreds by dogs in ‘bear baiting’ and underwent its final transformation as A.A. Milne's lovable idiot, Winnie the Pooh, a bear so dumb, that it needs to be set straight by a donkey. (See: The History of a Fallen King)

Bears have been on our planet for around 33 million years. They had a great time until we came on the scene, about 7 million years ago. Here in North America, Grizzlies once lived across much of West, until the Europeans arrived and soon shot and killed most of them. In the past 100 years, 91 humans have been killed by grizzlies and more than 200,000 grizzly bears have been killed by man. There are now approximately 200,000 bears worldwide, most of them in Russia.

On my groupie adventure, I met several fascinating ‘naturalists’, who have dedicated their life to learn about bears by living in the wild. I call them bear whisperers. Some are well known, like Timothy Treadwell, made famous by film maker Werner Herzog in his ‘Grizzly Man’. With its tragic and gruesome ending, Timothy’s story has added to the perception that grizzly’s are ferocious, dangerous and unpredictable creatures.*

But there are others who show another side of these magnificent creatures. My favorite and most admirable bear whisperer is Charlie Russell. He lived amongst bears for 30 years on the Kamchatka Peninsula in Russia, about as far east and as close to Alaska as you can get. The beauty of the scenery in the Documentary is breath taking and so is the footage of the furry brown subjects.

Charlie, who died recently, was not only a bear whisperer, he was also a surrogate mama bear. He rehabilitated many orphaned cubs over the years, teaching them how to fish, how to find the right plants to eat and protected them from predator males who are known to kill cubs. If you have some spare time, I highly recommend you watch The Bear of Kamchatka, in which you see Charlie stand between the cubs and an enormous alpha bear. Armed with a camera, his voice and a pepper spray (which he only uses at the very last minute), he convinces the male to move out of the way. People often criticize Charlie and others like him, for acting irresponsibly.

True, there is the danger of habituation, i.e. getting a wild animal used to people by feeding them or getting too close to them, which is how bears get into trouble. But these brave men do what scientists are unwilling to do, they do field work. They might not have fancy degrees but their dedication and courage gives the rest of us and the scientific community a glimpse of what the wild still has to offer humanity. Do we have a problem with Jane Goodall with her gorillas? Or filmmaker Craig Foster who spent a year forging a relationship with an octopus, while free diving for hours on end, reluctantly surfacing every hour or so to take a breath? (Here is a clip of My Octopus Teacher, but you can watch the whole thing on Netflix). Thanks to them, we now know that gorillas are not monsters only fit to be killed, that octopuses are extremely sensitive, intelligent animals and that grizzlies love to play by stealing a camera’s microphone cover to get you to chase them. You can even hurt their feelings by scolding them too much. Bears are perfectly adapted to their niche in nature. Cubs are basically born twice, once in the middle of winter, in the darkness of their den, and a second time in the spring when they first open their eyes and emerge in the daylight. In a female grizzly’s 20 years of reproductive life, only 2 cubs survive, which is one of the reasons they need extra protection. Another bear whisperer by the name of Reno Sommerhalder puts it this way: ‘We are the top of the food chain and have been for a long long time and are way past the survival stage as a species. Bears, on the other hand are busy trying to survive on a daily basis, meaning they have different reactions to certain situations. Grizzlies don’t need us on a daily basis, but they do need us for their species’ survival.’

So, what is the final message I want to convey at the end of this convoluted post? Let our ‘natural’ fear of wild carnivores (which includes humans) subside and replace it with something more rational, which will allow us to rescue and protect the little that remains of what we have tried to destroy for most of our history.

Bears and all other wildlife species should be able to expect and deserve the same that humans take for granted: they deserve their freedom and a fulfilled life in the wild, which is exactly what the process of thousands of years of evolution had in store for them. What right do humans have to put an end to all that? Would that not be called murder in any other context? Why do we fear and kill something that does not threaten us any more?

Bears are particularly worthy of protection because they are an ‘umbrella’ species. Grizzlies, especially, require large, intact, and relatively undisturbed ecosystems and keeping the bears (and their proverbial bowel movements) in the woods, goes way beyond the bears themselves. When you keep spaces wild for grizzlies, you also save space for elk, deer, mountain goats, mountain lions, and bison. This article explains: Come On Under the Grizzly’s Umbrella.

One final note: The US has a lot of public land but that doesn’t mean it is protected. (Of all the land on earth, only 15% is protected). But the North American Continent is a good candidate for re-wilding, since almost 30% of the country is publicly owned, not privately owned. It is up to all of us to decide what to do with all this natural wealth.

 * Charlie Russell doesn’t have many kind words for Werner Herzog and how he portrayed both Timothy Treadwell and the bears in ‘Grizzly Man’. Before his death, Timothy spent an incredible 35,000 hours living with the bears in Katmai National Park without any incidents, but Herzog insisted on portraying Treadwell as an idiot with a death-wish. Herzog’s idea of ‘the wild’ is the exact opposite of Russell’. To the filmmaker, the wild is a place where man doesn’t belong, at least not without a gun.

** Many taboo names for wild animal are ‘hunting-taboos’. Hunters apparently always have been (and still are) a superstitious lot. If you mention the "true" name of a ferocious animal, you are a) likely to call it forth when you are not prepared for it, or b) it is likely to hear its name and be warned. Another classic example is the word ‘deer’, replacing the true name of the hunted animal by a more general word. The Germanic word for 'wild animal' is ‘Tier’. (http://listserv.linguistlist.org/pipermail/indo-european/1999-April/001462.html)  leave comment here

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The End of Animal Farming: A Brief Overview

by Madeleine Kando

This essay is dedicated to Helen and Steve Ray-Shick

who are giving sanctuary to so many

abused and neglected farm animals.

In 1792, Mary Wollstonecraft, a forerunner of the feminist movement, published her Vindication of the Rights of Woman, in which she argues that women are not naturally inferior to men, but appear to be so only because they lack education. Her views were regarded as absurd. ‘It is just as absurd to grant women rights as to grant them to animals’ wrote distinguished philosopher Thomas Taylor. What would the world look like today if we had followed that line of reasoning and not moved ahead with the Women’s movement?

Similarly, Jacy Reese *, author of The End of Animal Farming: How Scientists, Entrepreneurs and Activists are building an Animal-Free Food System, believes that “by the year 2100, all forms of animal farming will seem outdated and barbaric.”

Many books have been written about the atrocities that take place on factory farms, such as Michael Pollan’s the Omnivore’s Dilemma and Jonathan Safran Foer’s Eating Animals. This knowledge helps a person switch to a vegan diet, but that is not enough. Only 5% of Americans do not eat animal-based food. Knowing that something is wrong doesn’t necessarily translate in making it right.

Ending Animal Farming is not an Impossible Dream

Reese’s book shows that ending animal farming is not an impossible dream, but it lacks the how, not the why. It is a masterfully crafted call to action and asks the reader to consider (and join) one of the most important and transformational social movements of the coming decades: ending the inhumane system of animal farming. Read more...

The Casanova of the Pyrenees

by Madeleine Kando

Pyros (Greek for ‘fire’), a.k.a. ‘the Stud’

Species: Ursus Arctos (a.k.a. Grizzly)

Pyros is a 500-pound alpha bear, born in Slovenia. He was relocated to the Pyrenees in 1997 as part of an effort to bring back the bear population. Hunters killed the last remaining native bear, a female called Cinnamon, so two Slovenian bears, Ziva and Mellba, both already pregnant were brought in, followed by the dominant male Pyros.

Pyros saw, came and boy, did he conquer. He sired over 30 little boy and girl Pyros and is still going strong as a geriatric bear at the ripe old age of 29.

Sponsored by French actor Gerard Depardieu (no relation to Pyros, appearances notwithstanding) he has become a symbol of virility. Spanish Pyros fans started a Twitter account under his name identifying him as the “father of all the bears” and the French call him “the stud of the Pyrenees”. Read more...

Of Eggs and Chickens

by Madeleine Kando

Today was another gorgeous Indian summer day with the smell of fall in the air. The streets will soon be covered with a thick layer of multi-colored leaves, helping the soil to replenish itself in the woods and the yards.

It was a perfect day for a stroll down the street to the local Farmer's Market where I go every week, hunting for pasture-raised eggs for my husband. I myself, am an eggtotateler because I can no longer ignore the horrors of factory farmed chickens.

This time I saw a booth with 2 large posters. On the right, a picture of a flock of red chickens posing for the camera, in a vast green pasture. An identical photograph of a green pasture on the left was filled with white chickens, all happily prancing about. I knew before I read the captions that the red chickens were 'layers' and the white ones' broilers'.

The farm stand sold eggs for $6 for a dozen. You can call this either a steal or a rip-off, depending on your point of view, but I could live with the idea of paying 50 cents for an egg, knowing how much time and effort it took that red chicken to lay it. As I took out my wallet, I asked the lady how many chickens she had on this local organic farm of hers. About 1700, she said. Read more...

License to Kill: Deer Hunt in the Blue Hills

by Madeleine Kando

I like deer. They are elegant herbivores that often come in my yard to nibble on the birdfeeders and I often wonder how they survive the harsh winters in New England. I see them get thinner and thinner, and by the end of January, their ribs show through their matted coat, some of them limping, but always in groups, sharing the feed in the buckets that we put out for them, when we know there is nothing else for them to eat.

I like them so much that I have become involved in fighting against so-called ‘controlled deer hunts’ in my area. One hunt is underway in the Blue Hills, a 6000-acre state park near Boston. This hunt was proposed and approved by the Mass Department of Fish and Game, who did its own study and determined that there were too many deer in the Blue Hills, knowing that it gets most of its funds from hunting licenses. Do I detect the smell of conflict of interest here?

Why Blame Deer?

It is easy to blame the deer for things that people have no control over. They are blamed for spreading Lyme Disease, for causing collisions and for destroying the forest. But the only crime that deer are guilty of, is that they have the ability to co-exist with people.

Even though deer are hosts to ticks, they do not "carry" or "spread" Lyme Disease. In fact, they provide a buffer between the host (white-footed mouse) and humans by collecting the ticks on themselves, mostly adult ticks that usually are no longer infected. "There is no direct correlation between deer density and prevalence of Lyme disease", says John Rohm of the Virginia Department of Game & Inland Fisheries. “When the deer are killed, the ticks seek alternate hosts, such as pets and people.”

Forest growth is influenced by so many factors other than deer that it is hard to mention them all: acid rain, insect damage, disease, development, pollution, loss of soil fertility and invasive species. Even non-native earthworms have significant influences on forest ecology. But it is harder to shoot earthworms or chipmunks and field mice, than it is to shoot a deer, so they get the blame.

Many people believe that reducing the deer population will result in fewer car collisions. But over an eight-year hunting period in Millburn New Jersey, the number of deer-car collisions did not decline. Read more...

The Lives of Animals: A commentary on J.M. Coetzee's Novella

by Madeleine Kando

In October of 1997, the South African novelist J.M. Coetzee was invited to give a lecture at Princeton on the subject of human values. Rather than give a lecture, Coetzee began to read from his novella 'The Lives of Animals'. In his short story, Elizabeth Costello, an ageing novelist, is invited to give a lecture at a fictional college in Waltham, Massachusetts, to speak to the need for a change in consciousness in human attitudes and practices regarding animals.

So here I am, writing about a writer who writes about a writer trying to make her case. His is a brilliant approach to discuss a subject which is loaded with moral and ethical dynamite. Coetzee, who is a vegetarian, has become a vocal critic of animal cruelty and advocate for the animal rights movement. He wanted to be a candidate in the 2014 European Parliament election for the Dutch Party for Animals, the only party of its kind in the world, but he was rejected on a technicality.

In the story, Elizabeth's son John, is the one who has invited her to give a speech, which he regrets the moment he sees her at the airport. John's wife Norma dislikes Elizabeth thoroughly, both for herself and her opinions on animals, which she finds sentimental.

Of course, I immediately identified with Elizabeth, being an ageing woman myself, who lives in Eastern Massachusetts and who has been struggling with the issue of my relationship to animals for quite some time. Read more...

What Animals Can Teach Us about Right and Wrong

by Madeleine Kando

This post is dedicated to my daughter Aniko,

who never needed to learn how to be compassionate.

I only wish there were more people like her.

One of the loftiest qualities of humans is their ability to distinguish right from wrong. We call it morality. Without a sense of morality, we would soon descend in a state of anarchy, where no one is accountable for their actions. Some societies are already on the brink of anarchy, the so-called 'failed states' of the world, where citizens are never sure whether they will live or die any day of their lives. Morality is the glue that binds people together, it creates the space where the give and take between people takes place. Without it, life would be worse than death since being dead at least doesn't cause someone to suffer.

But why do we aspire to be moral to begin with? We want to be healthy, happy, free of pain, that is understandable. We call these 'natural' desires, but why do we desire to be moral? A biologist would ask: What do we gain by it? How does it serve our survival as a species? Thomas Hobbes thought he had the answer by saying that the natural state of man is "warre of every man against every man" and to prevent people from hacking each other to death, they needed to have a moral code. Obviously Hobbes didn't believe in man's innate goodness.

That is pretty much how our culture has branded human nature over the past few centuries. We are selfish bastards who have developed a system which forces us to cooperate with each other by submitting to a self-imposed structure. Thanks to our superior intellect, we have escaped the fate that nature imposes on the world, the cruel, barbaric law of the jungle that all species is subject to. With the help of philosophers like Malthus who anticipated Darwin's principle of the struggle for existence, it is widely accepted as a law of nature. This view leads one to assume that if you are nice, you are a patsy.



But just because we have irrevocably painted ourselves in the corner of selfishness, doesn't mean that we don't have the capacity for compassion. Primatologist Frans De Waal explains in Good Natured-The Origins of Right and Wrong in Humans and Other Animals, 'In the same way that birds and airplanes appear to defy the law of gravity yet are fully subjected to it, moral decency may appear to fly in the face of natural selection yet still be one of its many products.' Read more...

Animals Like Us

by Madeleine Kando

Like most of us, I have an instinctive sense of ‘morality’. I know when something is clearly good and when something is really bad. I cannot explain it to you in one or two clear sentences, because my sense of morality is so much part of who I am. I wouldn’t be ‘me’ without it. I am not trying to sound saintly or anything, that’s just part of the human condition and it probably counts for most of us.

The fact that my sense of right and wrong is so deeply ingrained in me, is what makes it so difficult to put into practice. The devil is in the details, as they say. How do I decide how ‘bad’ it is to steal a five-dollar eyebrow pencil from the drug store? There is no chart posted at the entrance of CVS that gives the stealing of eyebrow pencils a ‘goodness/badness’ rating. It would be impractical because CVS would have to compare it to everything else that I potentially could do that qualifies as bad. And that is an infinite amount of things. In other words, if we gave every action a goodness/badness rating, morality would become so unmanageable that we would drown in a morass of dos and don’ts and we would soon throw the moral baby out with the bath water. Read more...