The Part That Reveals The Whole

A Wisconsin disgrace has been in the news lately. On April 20 around 1,000 Protesters gathered at a  dog breeding farm near Blue Mounds, about 30 miles west of Madison, the state Capital, in an attempt to free an estimated 2,000 beagles that have been confined there. 

The dogs were bred to be subjects of research, both on the farm and through sale to university and other researchers. There have been reports for many years about the mistreatment of the dogs, from starvation, mutilation and surgery without anesthesia. Most egregious is the practice of "debarking," where dogs have their vocal chords removed in order to silence them. 

In typical fashion, protesters in April were tear-gassed, pepper-sprayed, shot with rubber bullets and arrested by Dane County deputies. 

The dogs have now mostly been sold to rescue agencies, pending eventual adoption. The breeder, Ridglan Farms, suffered no criminal penalties, and remains in business. As long as animal testing in scientific research is legal there will be a market for live sentient beings. That includes humans, though not as zealously or ruthlessly as in times past. We now have the practice of informed consent, which, needless to say, didn't used to be the case.

I don’t see this as an isolated situation, confined to  industrialized cruelty to animals. We live in a mass system, a planetary glut of 8.2 billion people and counting. In order to accommodate such a vast number of people a method has developed that is known as industrialism. It began in the 18th century, when production shifted from small-scale, typically individual or family operations to mass production in factories and plantations.

Workers in the mass system are seen not as human beings, but as factors of production. They are components, and when combined with capital – tools, equipment, buildings - and land and management, goods can be made. When humans become no more than inputs to produce output they lose their humanity. At least to owners and managers.

This dehumanization in the mass system becomes generalized as we become more anonymous, mere faces in the crowd. Callousness ensues, and mass societies become indifferent to the lives and suffering of unknown others. In the industrial world just about anything goes in the drive for ever more goods and riches. The prospect of more keeps the system going, no matter the consequences.

The treatment of research beagles seems eerily similar to Homeland Security detention, where human beings are starved, crowded and mistreated in every way possible - similar to research animals. The brutalization and murder of protesters is similar to how the Ridglan protesters were treated.

We have nearly two million people incarcerated in this country. Officially there are 770,000 homeless people. 

Our foreign "policy" has been mass murderous since before WWII. Our latest adventure, at the behest of our client state Israel, is to surprise bomb Iran into submission. For some reason they chose not to submit. We are very slow learners.

A segment on my favorite radio show on public radio, Science Friday, offered some critical insight into this malaise. The guest interviewed was Daniel H. Wilson, scientist and science fiction writer, who also is a member of the Cherokee Nation. He offered this insight:

"So a common theme that was expressed by settlers whenever they came to North America, the first colonists, they looked out at these beautiful forests, and they compared them to the Garden of Eden. They were perfect. They were amazing. And it was clear that they were wasted on these primitive people that were actually living there.

And so I think that there’s a saying that’s appropriate here. Arthur C. Clarke, any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. And I think that was the case for those settlers. They looked out at those forests and they saw magic, but what they were looking at was Indigenous technology. So the land had been manicured meticulously for hundreds or thousands of years using farming techniques, agroforestry techniques, and all of that stuff– I think that the key difference all of that stuff is not designed to scale up and out to feed an exponentially growing population. It was technology designed to create a sustainable balance.

And so I think to from a Western perspective, that just looks really inefficient, and that looks really primitive. And the reason is because they’re grading it on a different scale. How many millions of people will that feed? Well, it won't. It’s not designed to. It's designed to keep a certain number of people imbalanced to promote the long-term survival of that human population. And so I think that’s what defines Indigenous technology."

Therein lies the answer. Demass the system. Return to a human scale. Save the planet. This of course will not be easy, and will mean a lot fewer people. The population of the U.S. when I was born was approximately 139.9 million people. Today it is 348.8 million. But far fewer people is inevitable. Our mass, infinite growth productive system is doomed. World output is now $126 trillion. Using the rule of 72, output would be $252 trillion in 24 years if growth would continue at an annual rate of 3%. At a 2% growth rate it would double in 36 years. The system will demass whether we like it or not. 

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 Some elaboration on the treatment of protesters at the March 18 event. Some more elaboration on the result of the effort to free the dogs. An interview with La Crosse County District Attorney Tim Gruenke, who was appointed to be the special prosecutor of Ridglan Farms.

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On the genocide front, Palestinians are routinely raped in Israeli prisons, some by dogs. This depredation is made possible by U.S. sponsorship - our Congress, president(s) and military industrial complex. 

I think the best way to understand genocide is as a path. Once you start on the path, you continue, going farther down the path until it ends. The Israeli genocide path will end, as do all paths. The sponsor - the U.S. - will end its sponsorship for one reason or another. We may run out of money and weapons. We may have different people in positions of power and wealth. Climate change may make sponsoring genocide the least of our proclivities. Israel, a rogue state, may collapse. The U.S., now a rogue state, may also collapse. 

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Here's a song. Alternate version. John Prine. Another from Merle Haggard. Tom Jones. The Dillards. The Byrds. Brandon Rickman. Jerry Jeff Walker. Warren Zevon. Still another from Merle Haggard. Alternate version. A song for dogs (and humans) to dream about.
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Update, May 13:
Brown University Holocaust and Genocide Studies professor Omer Bartov was interviewed on the NPR radio show On Point today about his book Israel: What Went Wrong? The book is reviewed in a number of publications, such as The New York Times and The Guardian. He puts the Gaza genocide in historical and moral context, showing the roots of Zionism, the creation of the state of Israel in 1948, and the regression that culminated in the genocide we are now seeing. He predicts great difficulty in Israel as its reckoning approaches.

If you happened to watch the friendly interview with Benjamin Netanyahu on 60 Minutes this past Sunday, you might find this interesting.

Update, May 15:
I had forgotten a couple of experiences I had with animal research. In 1980 I was working as a patient transporter in the Radiation Therapy clinic at the University of Michigan Hospital in Ann Arbor. It was an easy job, only about ten patients a day to bring to the clinic on stretchers (known as gurneys elsewhere) and return them afterwards. Down the hall was the animal research facility, and every time I passed the place there was a cacophony of dog barking, howling, whimpers and whines. They were the pleas of desperation. I wanted to set them free. My dad raised dogs as kind of a hobby and to have his own line of hunting dogs.

I had become a casual acquaintance of a guy about my age who worked in the animal clinic, having much free time to roam around the area. He was probably the most negative person I have ever known, routinely complaining about some general malaise in society, though never specific. The one complaint I remember he had was "Why do they always have to throw money at problems?" A complete nothing complaint. Looking back on those times it seems pretty clear that he was suffering from depression, and hated his job. I don't blame him. He was facilitating the wanton abuse of animals. Last year PETA ranked the University of Michigan as the fourth-worst violator of animal abuse regulations.

The other experience was in early 1977, also In Ann Arbor, when I was driving a taxi. The cab company I worked for had a contract with the University of Michigan to drive 35 miles the Detroit airport to pick up shipments of rats that were used for research. I was given the assignment one night bring a load of rats to the U of M hospital. I was told I could decline, that some drivers refused, but I did it anyway, not yet being troubled by animal research.

The rats came in a large box, about 3 feet long by 2 feet wide, a perfect fit for the back seat of a taxi. There must have been about 25 rats in the box, all squeaking and scurrying around in the box. I loaded them up and drove them to the drop-off point at the university hospital.

Looking back on it, during the drive to Ann Arbor I became attached to the rats. They seemed harmless and scared, and I was taking them to their death. They were my passengers, "fares" as they were known in the taxi business. An ethic sets in when you drive a taxicab, where you kind of unconsciously become dedicated to giving your passengers a comfortable and safe trip to where they are going. Even rats. I never did another rat run. I quit the job not long after this, being hired by the University Hospital for the first of several temporary jobs. It was handy, living in an ashram at the time, working to pay the rent.
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Update, May 16:

Democracy Now had an interview Thursday with Molly Crabapple, author of the book Here We Live Is Our Country. The book is about the origins of Zionism, and how it was opposed by the Jewish Labor Bund is Czarist Russia.

Israeli lawyer Ben Marmarelli is interviewed on Zeteo about how Palestinian prisoners have been raped in Israeli prisons since 1948, including by dogs.

Then, on Electronic Intifada, Adam Johnson is interviewed about his book How To Sell A Genocide, how mainstream U.S. media are complicit in giving Israel journalistic cover for its massive crimes against humanity. Here's the YouTube version.

Also from Electronic Intifada is a debunking of the reboot  of Israeli claims of massive Hamas rapes on October 7, 2023.