Category Archives: Animal Welfare

Day 44: 08/08/13: Cranky Quint & The Horror of Gill Nets

by in Activism, Animal Welfare, Environment, Jaws, Marine Conservation, Pop Culture and tagged , , , , | 1 Comment

Here is a rather candid remembrance of Robert Shaw from Jeffrey Vorhees, who played “the doomed Alex Kintner” (a.k.a. boy on the raft) in “Jaws”:

“Everyone filming it here was really nice, except for one guy, the old drunk, Robert Shaw. He ignored the island kids. They would have baseball games and cookouts for all the extras and kids on the island—-all the actors would show up, except for Shaw. He wanted nothing to do  with “The Island People,” as he called us. As a little kid, I would go over and talk to him, “Hi! How are you today?” He would just glare and say, “Just go away.” He was always drunk, just a mess….”   From “Just When You Thought it Was Safe: A Jaws Companion.”

Hopefully a small donation I made to ban gill nets made the ocean a little safer for sharks. Here’s the deal:

Each year, California drift gillnets kill more than 3,500 thresher, mako, and blue sharks as they fish for swordfish. The bycatch rate of sharks – as well as ocean sunfish, marine mammals and sea turtles – in California’s drift gillnets is the highest of any fishery along the US Pacific Coast.

Day 40: 8/4/2013: Shark Angels in Santa Monica

by in Activism, Animal Welfare, Environment, Shark Charities | Leave a comment

After spending the afternoon at a popular seaside tourist destination, I have one, single burning question:

How can shirtless men wear backpacks? Don’t the straps pinch? What about sweat? I’m no fashion maven, but that look is just…WOW…not..good….

Anyway, I had misgivings go to an aquarium. It seems somewhat hypocritical to protest the circus and then support so-called “aqua-prisons,” but Julie Andersen of Shark Angels was giving a talk at the Santa Monica Aquarium and so I paid my five bucks.  The little shallow tank of leopard  and swell sharks that allows kids to touch them, sort of bummed me out, although one of the leopards actually lifted (her?) head out of the water when I approached and I made eye contact with her.

DIGRESSION ABOUT THE AWKWARD DAWNING OF SEXUAL KNOWLEDGE: As a child, of course, the New England Aquarium was mecca to me. I loved the circular tank with the snuggle-toothed sand sharks. I remember once buying a postcard of a sea otter in the gift shop of the NEA in 1976. Otters can stand on their hind legs, and this guy clearly had an erection, captured in the lurid sort of messy color of the old 60s/70s postcard. “He has a hard on!” shrieked my sister’s friend Denise. It was the first time I ever heard the term.

Continue reading →

Day 39: 8/03/2013: Part 2: At the Circus

by in Activism, Animal Welfare and tagged , , | Leave a comment

I decided not to have an emotionally charged pitch, but passed out flyers to incoming families saying “Free Information about the Circus.” Eric from PETA was even nicer. “Did you get one of these?” he’d ask with genuine warmth. “Thanks a lot. We’re asking people to make this their last visit to the circus.” He was a pro. No wailing guilt trips or useless harassment as I’ve seen from some so-called activists. Many people assume that “everyone” at a protest is from PETA or some other animal welfare organization. Not true.

In the late 1980s, During my early days at anti-veal and anti-vivisection protests, a random guy named Jingles would come all dressed in bells and baggy hippie-clown attire while the organizers from Last Chance for Animals would arrive in suits. ANYWAY, although I felt fairly robotic in comparison to Eric’s humanity, I learned that it was effective to just hand out the flyer without a preamble. Perhaps some people felt “tricked” into being handed a depressing image, but others seemed quite open.  I didn’t see a lot of these pamphlets littering the ground the way I do when Vegan Outreach comes to Glendale College and I scoop up the numberless images of factory farms blanketing the campus. Only one person at the circus handed the flyer back to me. This year, like last year, a couple of people who didn’t yet have tickets to the circus changed their minds after looking at the literature–probably the baby elephants being “trained” with ropes and bull hooks. One woman actually broke down. Continue reading →

Day 39: 8/03/2013: Part 1 Elephant Sharks & Circus Elephants

by in Activism, Animal Welfare and tagged | Leave a comment

This isn’t an elephant blog, it’s a shark blog. But I like that it sometimes meanders into interesting places—into the realms of other animals—pet shop fish, frogs, elephants and tigers. But before I talk about my annual summer circus protest, I will at least talk about the elephant shark because this oddball fish offers me an interesting transition to the circus in Part 2.

First, the elephant shark (also known as the “ghost shark”) lives in the waters of Australia and New Zealand. It’s silvery and strange and vulnerable to overfishing. It ends up in fish and chips a lot. With its eerie color and the floppy “hoe-like” appendage hanging off its snout, (it can sense the movement and weak electrical fields of prey), the elephant shark frankly makes the goblin shark seem a creature of sublime beauty.

As alien as these sea beings are, they are also being studied as a link to human ancestry, in the elephant shark genome project. I couldn’t find a way to save elephant sharks tonight, but I did stop to sign this petition about ending shark finning in New Zealand where elephant sharks live. I admit, it’s a rather thin connection, but a rising tide lifts all sharks or something like that.

Day 38 8/2/2013: Absurdly Simple Shark Activism For All Ages

by in Activism, Animal Welfare, Environment, Marine Conservation, Shark Charities, Shark Finning and tagged , , | Leave a comment

SharkSavers is a great resource.

Click here to find out what restaurants in your area are serving shark fin soup.

Click here to download & print a “FINished WITH FINS letter to send to the restaurant.

This is so cool/cute. Click yet again here to download an educational shark coloring book for your kids or for yourself if the waxy intoxication of crayons makes you nostalgic for those early years when you fell in love with utter terror and majesty of apex sea predators.

Day 37: 08/01/2013: The Secret Lives of Fish

by in Activism, Animal Welfare, Inner Turmoil | Leave a comment

As I work more on the “Jaws” benefit, I’m reflecting on our relationship to fish. While generating empathy for sharks can be tricky, it’s pretty difficult to get people to feel much about fish in general.  Are they lower than reptiles on the human empathy scale ?

Does it depend on how pretty they are?  Or are all fish “forever other” to us?

This fish at the Liberty Aquarium lives in a kind of solitary confinement:

bigfishsmalltank1

Across the aisle, these fish teem and roil in their too-small aquarium:

koi1

“Sea horses have complicated routines for courtship, and tend to mate under full moons, making musical sounds while doing so. They live in long-term monogamous partnerships. What is perhaps most unusual, though, is that it is the male sea horse that carries the young for up to six weeks. Males become properly “pregnant,” not only carrying, but fertilizing and nourishing the developing eggs with fluid secretions. The image of males giving birth is perpetually mind-blowing: a turbid liquid bursts forth from the brood pouch, and like magic, minuscule but fully formed sea horses appear out of the cloud.”

Once I remember commenting to a shopkeeper on the popularity of the octopus. “They’re everywhere,” I said. “On pillows and t-shirts, rings and necklaces.”

She nodded. “Yeah well, that’s what often becomes popular. What’s disappearing.”

I never expected to hear such haunting words in a hipster boutique in Silverlake. And later, when I saw someone eating octopus at a restaurant, the poignant tentacle on the plate reminded me of the story Cousteau told about the octopus who could see his own reflection in a mirror the researchers presented him with.  Puzzled, the creature tried very hard to wipe away his own reflection.

I wish these dazzling little stories were enough to change the world. I wish sad pictures were enough or knowing that the seas are not an infinite resource was enough.  I wish startling facts were enough like Foer’s description of the real cost of sushi:

“Imagine being served a plate of sushi. But this plate also holds all of the animals that were killed for your serving of sushi. The plate might have to be five feet across.”

Day 34 7/29/2013: The Ghost of Jack Webb & Me

by in Activism, Animal Welfare, Jaws, Pop Culture and tagged , , , , | Leave a comment

I felt the ghost of Jack Webb working through me today. In the morning, I showed my international students the documentary “Los Angeles Plays Itself” which uses movies to explore L.A.’s identity crisis. Multiple shots of city hall stirred up some heavy “Dragnet” nostalgia. The spirit of Sgt. Joe Friday sparkled in the bright badges of the LAPD officers I spoke with about the horror in Chinatown. As I dropped by PETA’s fancy office in Echo Park, I imagined  Jack Webb reborn as an animal rights crusader. In another era, he could have broken up backyard dogfighting rings, or brought down poachers with the same relentless moral superiority that he used to lecture acid-addled hippies. I hope PETA can help me with the turtle-pet store crisis. Stay tuned.

As for sharks, besides buying a 6-pack of Great White beer that features a slick, glossy and too-manic shark clutching a mug of froth and a chewed up surfboard, (I just had to buy it, I hope it’s not horrible), I’m reminding everyone to send comments  asking the National Marine Fisheries Service not to undermine the Shark Conservation Act with loopholes and exceptions.

I also want to finish dividing “Jaws” into readable “chunks.” I hate that word.  It evokes chewed up humans. Chunks of human flesh remind me that although I did succumb to using the word “Sharktastic” yesterday, I’m trying to outlaw cute shark language here–no “bite-sized” monologues, for example.  Even the Great White beer package doesn’t resort to cutesy words, although I just noticed that the shark mascot stands on a sandy shore littered with a shell, a starfish and a bloody human hand, a kind of nautical crime scene.

Day 33: 7/28/2013: Sharktastic Sunday!

by in Activism, Animal Welfare, Shark Charities, Shark Finning and tagged , , | Leave a comment

As I wrote a few blogs back, I know what it’s like to want to avoid “the clipboard,” and today My friend Jen and I hoofed it around Los Feliz collecting signatures for the Shark Defenders petition.  Between the two of us (or three, if you count the large inflatable great white head we took turns carrying), we signed up 45 Shark Defenders in about two hours.

Bees hunted us, hostile indifference stonewalled our efforts near House of Pies, but we persevered. Sadly, we met quite a few sympathetic folk who didn’t have e-mail addresses. “I still live in the ‘70s,” one surfer confessed.

Along with names and e-mails, we collected a host of non-sequiturs:

Q: “Hi, would you like to save sharks from extinction?”

A: “I’m fine.”

Q: “Hi, would you like to save sharks from extinction?”

A: “We solved that problem in San Francisco.”

Q: “Hello! Did you know 100 million sharks are killed every year for their fins?”

A: “Jesus.” (Not “Jesus” as in “Jesus, that’s terrible,” but a beatific implication– “I hope you find Jesus.”)

That enlightening comment made me think of tailoring our signature gathering. Hanging out at the Catholic Church: “Would you like to save Christ’s most miraculous and misunderstood apex predators from extinction?”

Certainly the faithful would agree that the greedy, wasteful and violent practice of shark finning is an abomination.

We debated going to The Rustic Inn, thinking that people might be more amenable to signing anything after staggering out of a tavern, but ended up zigzagging between shops and bus stops and street corners.

Some people refused to sign because they were afraid. “A shark bit my boogie board.” Others signed BECAUSE they were afraid, “Sharks are terrifying–but we need them.”  One sly dude made me go through my whole spiel, took the clipboard, poised the pen above the page, nodded encouragingly and then handed it back. “I’m just curious,” I queried, as he fled into Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf. “Why wouldn’t you sign?” No reply.

But human indifference did not triumph!

THANKS to my dear friend Jennifer for making it so fun and THANKS to all the people who stood up for sharks, especially:

The sweet girl at Pop Killer who not only signed my petition but helped me to inflate my shark head.

The kind people outside the Gurdwara Sikh Temple who thanked US for our service, especially Paulo who wants to sell shark paintings to raise money for conservation.

And extra gratitude to the young guy near the newsstand who tackled the awkward clipboard and pen DESPITE having two broken legs and being on crutches.

YAAAY!

Day 31 7/26/2013: The Turtles of Chinatown

by in Activism, Animal Welfare | Leave a comment

First: Good news for Sharks Today. New York signed its Shark Fin Ban into law today.

I went to L.A.’s Chinatown today to see if I could see shark fin for sale anywhere after California’s ban.  I saw dried sea horses, dried starfish, dried octopus. I found one bag of what looked like shark fin, but the price seemed very low and the man who ran the shop was asleep behind the counter. I checked a couple restaurant menus and didn’t see shark fin soup.

Then I saw the turtles—tiny, illegal baby red slider turtles in an ounce of water or so —little plastic “aquariums” outfitted with tiny plastic islands $4, $6, $7–every single one struggling endlessly against a plastic wall.

I thought of Sysiphus pushing his boulder up the hill—of the seemingly endless instances of animal suffering in the world. I wondered how or I could (or if I should) develop tougher psychic armor so as not to get completely depressed when I see doomed lobsters in restaurant tanks, pet stores with dirty aquariums overflowing with baby rabbits, chicks and ducklings. (I did report that pet shop to the SPCA).

As I walked around the gift stores I felt my own sense of futility: No matter how much their captivity depressed me, I couldn’t release these turtles into the wild. I remembered a ranger at Franklin Canyon telling me how often people let Chinatown turtles go in the lake there and screw up the ecosystem. The babies can carry salmonella, which is why I think the sale of these turtles is illegal. They also grow to be pretty big, a fact that is seldom disclosed by the vendors in these odd gift shops.

The guy at the pet shop near my house recommended that I call a reptile rescue and report the vendors to animal control. His shop is overrun with donated (adult) red sliders that they are now selling at a discount.

But there is another dilemma: if I buy the turtles in Chinatown and give them to the rescue, does that mean I am encouraging those vendors to purchase more of them? I left messages with a couple herpetology rescues and eagerly await their guidance. In the meantime, I worked on organizing the “Jaws” benefit.