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

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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

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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

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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

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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.”

TAMPAX TERROR

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I love how this ad shamelessly and hilariously exploits the weird embarrassing “don’t swim when you’ve got your period” advice. The other one I remember is “Don’t swim with a yellow or other bright-colored bathing suit,” don’t swim at dawn or dusk, etc. I wish the U.S.of A had the guts to run such ads.

Day 36: 7/31/2013: Hear Ye! Hear Ye: Auditions for “JAWS”

by in Activism, Humor, Jaws, Marine Conservation, Shark Charities, Shark Finning | Leave a comment

Today with the help of my dear friend Dan, we brought the “JAWS” charity reading one step closer to reality with our Facebook group.

Check it out:

https://www.facebook.com/events/546709615393682/546809945383649/?ref=notif&notif_t=plan_mall_activity

Many people have graciously volunteered to read. If you’re interested, PLEASE let me know.  Perhaps you’ll channel discontented, philandering housewife Ellen Brody, her beleaguered husband Martin, or the GREAT FISH himself!

We’re still deciding on a venue, so if you have a cavernous net-strewn sea shanty you’d like to lend us for an evening, gimme a holler!

Day 35: 7/30/2013: God the Hunter

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I have a cold, so between guzzling ginger ale, filling out a volunteer form for Sea Shepherd and feeling mildly sorry for myself, I’ve been contemplating Mary Oliver’s vision of God in her mysterious and powerful poem “The Shark” (see whole poem below this entry).

A lot of literature that explores animal consciousness reckons with the basic and inevitable idea of speech/speechlessness and power/powerlessness. But Oliver does something really interesting with this idea:

“speech, that makes all the difference, we like to say.

And I say: in the wilderness of our wit

we will all cry out last words—heave and spit them

into the shattering universe someday, to someone.

Whoever He is, count on it: He won’t answer.”

God, like the shark hunter is lost in his work. But this total absorption isn’t transcendent oneness, but abandonment, loss:

“The inventor is like the hunter—each

in the crease and spasm of the thing about to be done

is lost in his work. All else is peripheral,

remote, unfelt. The connections have broken.”

There is so much more to say about this poem than my feeble stuffed up consciousness can muster at the moment. Oliver’s makes such a bold and striking connection far more unsettling than her work normally is. I don’t mean to suggest she’s usually a light, happy-nature-lady poet at all, but this one leaves me in a place without the comfort of easy answers or associations. That’s good. I keep  seeing an “old man in the sky” style God leaving his creation spinning like a globe, how great whites always felt like ancient displaced Gods to me,  and the “God” that the hunter becomes for that brief triumphant moment when he removes the fish from its world of water, drowns him in the air.