Gods of the petridish

From The Scotsman, a look at potential ethical minefields in the animal testing arena:

A quarter of all experiments now involve genetically modified animals - mainly mice, which are easy to alter genetically - but also horses, cats and monkeys. According to the magazine Nature, Britain is facing a "deluge" of mutant mice. They are the currency of cancer research, and new phrases have sprung up to describe them. A "knock-out" mouse has a gene missing, a "knock-in" mouse has had one changed or substituted. In addition to the celebrated "oncomouse", which is primed to get cancer (and had a patent case fought over it), there are mice which have been genetically altered to make them deaf or to give them the mouse version of Parkinson's or Alzheimer's.
The question of whether a mouse's suffering can be justified is no different if that suffering is induced from the outside, by experiments, or from the inside, by genetic engineering.
The difference arises when genetic engineering changes the nature of the animal. Is a chicken still a chicken if it is bred to have no feathers, as has been done in Israel and in India? A dog is still a dog with a docked tail, but would a sheep be a sheep without wool? Woolliness, surely, is what a sheep is all about.
This idea of a clear species identity is what makes the idea of hybrids or chimeras so disturbing. Mixing human and animal cells is a hot topic in bioethics and beyond. The government is asking for views on whether scientists should be allowed to create hybrid embryos, which would have to be destroyed after 14 days.
But the focus is entirely on the human side of the process: the implications of injecting a monkey with human brain cells or creating a human-mouse embryo. Whether it makes the monkey less of a monkey or the mouse less of a mouse is rarely mentioned. Just as we looked at Dolly and saw human clones, we look at chimeras and see talking monkeys, or Jeff Goldblum as a giant fly. The ethics of altering animal nature have been subsumed by the ethics of altering human nature.

The rights of circus animals...

...are so limited it's not funny. This report is about the Apollo Circus, currently in Chandigarh, where the Deputy Commissioner has directed a vet to check the conditions of the animals performing. This is where the circus's responsibility ends:

Jain had lodged a complaint with UT District Magistrate-cum-Deputy Commissioner R.K. Rao. He said the circus owner should ensure proper watering and feeding of animals besides proper care.
The owner should also ensure that the animals are not inflicted any unnecessary pain or suffering before or during or after its training and exhibition, he said.
The Inspecting Authority added that animals should not be made to fight with each other and that the Circus owner should ensure that sedatives or tranquilisers or steroids or any other artificial enhancers are not administered to the animals.
Besides, the owner shall not deprive the animal of food or water in order to compel an animal to perform any trick.
The owner shall ensure that the animal shall not be transported or be kept or confined in cages and receptacles which do not measure in height, length or breadth as specified under the Transportation of Animal Rules, 1978, the complainant said.

It's pretty much like saying don't torture them, feed them gruel, and let them stretch--not even, you'll note, let them have comfortable living quarters, let them get proper exercise, make sure they're happy, none of that. Just make sure the scars don't show and that they're not too thin.

Our animals and other family

"Khushi was tiny, blue-eyed, and absolutely delightful. He wanted to climb all over my shirt, sit on my shoulder and generally look at the world from there." Uma blogs about the first kitten she took to the Jeev Raksha hospital in Pune.

And I sorted the monkey problem, with or without the langur (see Urgent: Langur Wanted post). Or rather, they sorted it out for me. The house we live in is a quirky place in the middle of Nizamuddin, which still has vast green areas surrounding it; we have a fenced-in verandah overhung by a sprawling Bodh tree. The first band of bandars who dropped in settled in pretty fast, didn't bother our many cats (one set lives Inside, one set lives Outside), and beyond the occasional raid on trees for fruit, didn't really hassle us. I got kind of used to their visits; the mothers would snooze on the branches keeping half an eye out on their kids and making "I need a babysitter" faces; the bulls reclined luxuriously and got the younger bimbo-type monkeys to groom their fur for lice.

Then they disappeared for a few days, and we assumed they'd moved on. That's when Band of Bandars Two came in and created havoc. They were aggressive around humans; two of them had trailing ropes around their necks, so they must have been pressed into service at some stage by a madari, and had probably escaped. They made it clear they didn't like or trust humans, and I suspect they'd been treated badly: the marks on their necks from the rope were livid. It was a band of misfits, clearly; the bulls were young and aggressive with each other, and there was no clear leader or older bull. There were babies, whose response to humans was to first chitter in absolute fear and then make threatening gestures; the mothers looked young, exhausted and defensive. We didn't get the same sense of "family" off them as we had from the first troupe; they seemed to be suspicious of each other, like stragglers who had banded together out of necessity, or perhaps they had been part of a larger band that had been dispersed.

For the first few days, we had a lot of trouble doing the peaceful co-existence thing: they rampaged everywhere, broke through the fencing, chased anyone they saw, destroyed anything they could find, and went after the kittens and dogs who live in the compound. Thankfully, no one was injured. But while we went looking for a langur man (for reasons I explained earlier), we also warned everyone living in the compound not to respond to the monkeys' aggression with a similar display of force. (The langur man was located, but his langur had, I kid you not, gone to the hills on holiday. I hope she had a nice time.)

In a few days, I thought I saw a change. The monkeys seemed to settle down; perhaps they just had more food and water at hand and they were no longer on the run. They started looking at us with puzzled curiosity: maybe I'm imagining it, but I thought they began to figure out that we weren't going to threaten them or beat them. Then I started asking the baby monkeys not to do certain things (shake the fencing, throw muck through the fence, pee through the fence--you know, all the stuff human visitors do at the zoo). The first few times, they responded with aggressive displays and posturing. Then that was replaced by a sort of toddler's tantrum; they'd stop doing what they were doing, but only after they'd made it clear it was their idea to stop, not mine. After a while, they started listening without prejudice, especially to my husband. Then the older monkeys began to relax around us. They'd listen if we asked them to please quit jumping on the roof. They weren't friendly, they were still wary, but I had the sense a truce of sorts had been called. The destruction of property stopped completely.

Just as we were settling down in this new, cautious detente, the old band of bandars came back and reclaimed their turf. I haven't seen the smaller, more aggressive troupe for the last few days, and while I'm happy to have the "family" I know back--we kind of waved at each other shyly, the mothers said, oh hello, you're still there?--I wonder whether those dudes and us would eventually have settled into some sort of mutually comfortable routine.

I know most people in Delhi hate urban monkeys, often with reason; they are hugely intelligent, can figure out locks and doors, can be destructive and have been known to bite. But they're migrants, just as much as the endless flow of people who come into the city, and they're migrants because we've built office blocks and apartments in the green spaces where they used to live, without offering them anything in return. We feed them at temples, we leave garbage dumps (think fast food centres for simians and other animals) tantalisingly strewn across the city, and then we chase them away. Most of these monkeys seem to spend their lives moving endlessly from one neighbourhood to another, driven off by violent methods, or by the langur man I was thinking of bringing in. I don't quite know how to deal with them, but so long as they're not bothering me, I don't see why I should chase them away. They're citizens of this crazy city just as much as any of us, I guess; they're part of the ranks of the homeless and dispossessed who live in Delhi. The humans sleep on pavements, the monkeys sleep in trees: sooner or later, someone tells them to move on, and so the cycle continues.

Zoo stories

Courtesy Amit, this story says visitors to the Byculla zoo have been pelting animals with stones:

The animals in the city zoo, (Veermata Jijabai Bhonsale Garden), at Byculla, are being harassed by insensitive visitors.
The visitors pick stones from heaps of rubble and raw material left behind by the BMC contractor repairing the zoo roads, and pelt them at the animals.

Why would anyone do this? The saddest stories come out of Indian zoos; staff report that visitors have offered monkeys lit cigarettes and razor blades, pushed plastic bags into animals' cages, poked them with sticks, shouted in order to wake sleeping babies so that they can "perform".

I'm thinking we should round up these guys and ask the London Zoo whether they'd like to make their Human Exhibit permanent--and throw away the key, yeah?

Oh, on the subject of poking cigarette butts in at animals? You're creating a Marlboro Chimp.

Zoo Keepers at the Qinling Wild Animal Zoo in Xi'An in China are encouraging a 26-year-old chimpanzee called Ai Ai to quit smoking.
Ai Ai, which means "love love" in Mandarin, has been smoking for 15 years. She started by picking up tourists' cigarette butts.

Urgent: Langur Needed

If anyone knows how to contact a "langur handler" in Delhi--the men who hire out their langurs by the day, week or month in order to scare away the more aggressive urban monkey troops--please let me know through the comments section as soon as possible.
The old band of monkey brothers who used to drop by were never a hassle; they'd sleep in the branches of the tree, do the occasional raid on dog food, but that was about it. A few days back, a new bunch drove out the first band; this one is composed largely of teenage males and adults fighting for dominance and babies, which makes for a very aggressive combination.
So if you know of langurs who're willing to work Sundays--get in touch. As soon as possible; these rhesus macaques are picking on my kittens.

Its beak can hold more than its bellycan

Think of it as an Independence Day present.

The Independence Day horticultural show at Lalbagh in Bangalore has a new attraction this year: five spot-billed Pelicans, deemed an endangered species, were sighted at the Lalbagh lake. The birds were spotted on Friday by Mr J Ramesh, wildlife photographer and artist, who has been engaged in bird-watching at Lalbagh since 1993. “This is a pleasant surprise,” he says. The attraction for the birds, he adds, could be the fish in the recently-desilted lake.

Grisly evidence

I'm trying to figure out how many slaughtered snow bears and wild pigs it takes to fill nine cartons with animal hair. Something tells me I really don't want to know.

From The Kolkata Telegraph:

A consignment of nine cartons of animal hair, seized at the Tatanagar railway station last week, has been traced to Nepal and adjoining areas of north Bihar.
The state forest department officials said the hairs, 8 to 10 centimetres long belonged to wild animals, namely snow bears and wild pigs.

College fests: garbage pail kids?

A bunch of students who got together to form the Green Festival Initiative would like college fests to clean up their act:

The GFI team collected over 63,000 branded Pepsi and Nestle cups. Pet bottles totalled 2,700, along with 43,000 plastic spoons and forks.
The banner audit showed that 16,459 sq feet of banners made of PVC or other plastic material were put up by 23 sponsors. Hutch, Nokia and Sunsilk accounted for 14,400 sq ft, or 91 percent of the non-biodegradable banners.

That was generated by the hugely popular IIT Madras festival, which is right near a wildlife sanctuary:

The sanctuary has about 3,000 spotted deer (about 300 of them roaming in the IIT area itself) and about 700 blackbucks, besides monkeys, foxes, pangolins and a variety of birds.
Supervisor of IIT's civic team, K.S. Pannerselvam said, "Attracted by the sweet residues in disposable cups, monkeys and deer often consume the entire container and sometime they die."

Given the intelligence and creativity of the average IIT student, I'm pretty sure they can come up with a solution--perhaps one that could be exported to other college fests across the country.

The tiger doesn't get a cut

Peter Foster reports in The Standard:

Tourists who pay up to 30,000 rupees to watch Indian tigers from luxurious eco-lodge hotels are contributing almost nothing to the animals' well-being or their parks, according to a new conservation report.
Its findings will astonish tourists who visit parks such as Ranthambore Reserve in Rajasthan and leave convinced that, with their patronage, they are helping to save the species.

The report he's quoted from, Joining the Dots, is controversial. Valmik Thapar doesn't agree with the conclusions of the Tiger Task Force, while Sunita Narain defends their position.
In absolute terms, you've got to agree with Valmik, who's seen attempts at conservation and resettling humans around tiger sanctuaries come up against realpolitik time after time--and the ones who pay the price are the animals we're supposed to be protecting. Sunita Narain's platform is pragmatism, which is another way of saying that there isn't much you can do about a situation where humans encroach on sanctuary space except try and handle it, since it's going to happen anyway.
And you can't get a soundbyte from a tiger; so the focus always stays on the sufferings of humans, with the sufferings of the animals who are forced to live with us on our terms blanketed in silence.

Cowboys turn, well, Indian

So you have cows on the road. So they're blocking traffic. So instead of setting up a proper animal welfare organisation that might actually prevent Delhi's holy cows from corrupting their intestines with plastic bags and the like, and that might look after stray cattle, what do you do? You put a bounty on their heads and exhort the general citizenry to go catch cows.
No, seriously. This really happened, courtesy a court order that sounds like arrant b..., er, cow-manufactured natural products. It's not working very well, though:

With the prospect of instant cash fading with each passing day, the public's enthusiasm to capture and hand over stray cattle to the civic authorities in the capital is waning.
The Delhi High Court Thursday directed MCD to reward anyone who captured the stray animals and deduct the reward amount from the salary of veterinary officers posted in its 12 zones.
In the wake of the court ruling, many an adventurous person took on the cowboy role in the city, herding the stubborn animals towards a cattle pound on bikes, cars and even military trucks.

And the end result of this? Terrified animals. Unhappy veterinary officers. Unpaid cowboys. And, well, more paperwork. Nice going, gentlemen.

Dedicated to Uma..

..who held the fort while I was away. My apologies for such a long absence; spent eight days in Sri Lanka and the next eight back in Delhi with a hacking cough and high fever, which reminds me: if you're ever in Colombo, cough or no cough, take that walk down the seafront. It's gorgeous.
One of the things I did in Sri Lanka was visit the Pinnawela Elephant Orphanage. Pinnawela's pretty well known; it hosts about 70 rescued elephants at this point, and has never had less than 50 pachyderms since 1997.
I had "seen" elephants in the way most urban people do. Cruelly, at the circus, where these gentle creatures looked so miserable sitting on painted wooden tubs. Penned up in zoos, which feels all wrong for animals that live in large herds and are used to acres of roaming space. Or making waves in Delhi's already-chaotic traffic as they marched down the road, on their way to a marriage procession.
The thing is, you never really LOOK at elephants; you look at their size, their bulk, sometimes at the decorations their mahouts have caparisoned them with.
If you look at an elephant closely, this is what you see. The skin is hard, wrinkled, often dusty, unless they're bathing, in which case it transmutes into a gleaming black shell. Their mouths are very large, their trunks capable of extracting a peanut from a pocket with the greatest of delicacy, or thwacking an errant hathi backside with some energy. Their eyes? Even the youngest elephants I saw--the babies at Pinnawala and the baby fellow with the topknot at Kelaniya--seem to be born with those sad, old, watchful eyes. They take in everything, especially if "everything" includes "bananas".
I love the way they splashed each other in the river. I loved watching the babies shuffle around spraying water in a slightly tentative fashion, and loved the way the elephants took turns protecting the babies from too much roughhousing. The Pinnawala elephants are used to humans, so they took not the slightest notice of the crowds watching them, unless we proffered fruit. They love the time in the water; they sulk when they have to come out and march crossly up the path, expressing their disapproval of short bathing times by smacking each other--and once in a while, the odd careless human who's strayed on to the path--with their trunks.
I suppose Pinnawela counts technically as "captivity", but the elephants there looked so much happier than the ones you see in most Indian zoos. They had friends and relatives in the herd. They knew their mahouts well. They had conversations with each other; they looked us up and down, and one young male cheekily patted me with his trunk in a terribly familiar sort of way.
The one who stands out in the herd is Sama, who had part of her left foot blown up by a land mine when she was just two years old. Sama limps, terribly, but if you drop bananas in the water by accident, she's the first to scoop them out of the waves with her trunk. Her spine is curved like a question mark; as she grows older, the curvature will increase, the mahouts said. The people at Project Lucky Sama are trying to train Sama to accept and use a prosthetic foot. Meanwhile, she gets around, on three legs, as best as she can. And if you have a bunch of bananas secreted on your person, she'll sniff them out faster than any of the rest.

450 species can't be wrong

Hmmm.
From the Seattle Times:

"From whales to buffalo to Caspian terns, a profusion of animals exhibit behavior that in humans would be called gay.
In his book "Biological Exuberance: Animal Homosexuality and Natural Diversity," Seattle biologist Bruce Bagemihl estimates 450 species display some form of homosexuality, which can include same-sex courtship, displays of affection, sexual activity, long-term pairings and parenting.

To paraphrase the old Cole Porter song has it, birds do it, bees do it, bonobos on their knees do it...

Thorny problem for white peacocks

Madurai's rare white peacocks are under threat as their habitat disappears to make way for a teak plantation:
A report says:

"But peacock lovers like Pandiyarajan are also concerned about the future of these rare birds as temple authorities in Thiruparangundrum have begun clearing the dense growth of wild shrubs and trees in the area for commercial plantations.
However, temple authorities say thorns in the wild shrubs could hurt the birds and raising commercial plantations is for their good.
"Those trees had thorns and we do not want the birds to get hurt. That is why we removed them. We have teak plantations and want to add another 5,000 teak trees," said Padmanaban, Subramaniaswamy temple.
But it may take close to two years for the trees to grow in the area. And with no place to hide, the rare birds have become easy targets for poachers and hounds.

The P word

Uma had an interesting post about PETA a while back, that got me wondering why PETA is so widely seen as the bogeyman of the animal rights movement. (Out of the last four stories I browsed about zoos, three mentioned PETA in deeply negative terms.)
I think this is an important point to address, because it throws an illuminating light on common perceptions of both PETA and the animal rights movement. PETA is often identified only by its celebrity-studded no-meat ads, often in terms of some disapproval: aren't they wasting money that could have funded shelters, hospitals and better care programmes for animals?
It often surprises me is how little people know about the rest of PETA's work. It supports and runs animal shelters. It lobbies big companies in order to improve conditions for animals on factory farms. It's been at the forefront of the gathering demand to stop laboratory experiments on animals and other abuses. And the organisation can come out with positions that are very nuanced, as with Ingrid Newkirk's explanation of why PETA might encourage a ban on the breeding of pit bulls and reluctantly endorse the "automatic destruction" policy that many shelters have towards pit bulls. Anyone who thinks that PETA is lacking in subtlety should read her letter. It's a lament for the tragedy of a dog created by human beings as the ultimate weapon, subjected to constant abuse by most of its owners, and it's a recognition of the terrible paradox that animal lovers are faced with in the case of pit bulls: "we can only stop killing pits if we create new ones".
I like the fact that PETA saw earlier than many NGOs the importance of grabbing mainstream attention: you won't run animal rights stories because they're unsexy, but you'll run a go-veggie feature because it features stars in the buff, no problem, here's one star to go. Part of PETA's job is to get people who might not otherwise think about animal rights to consider the subject; if they do that because they're confronted with some model wearing a cabbage leaf or two on a billboard, that's okay by me.
What I don't like about PETA is simple: I hate the hectoring tone, I hate the stridency, I dislike being at the receiving end of a lecture, and I wish they'd use their website to answer issues of this sort, where two of their employees have been arrested on animal-cruelty charges. [It's frustrating that PETA doesn't use its website to either explain what happened, or to correct misconceptions. To take a small example, the story mentions a website called Peta Kills Animals, and also mentions that the website is aided by the Center for Consumer Freedom. What it doesn't mention is that CCF is not quite as disinterested a body as it appears to be: it represents the interests of the food and restaurant business (Wiki has a list of 1998 members of its advisory panel, which includes several members of the meat supplying and processing industry--you can hardly imagine that they'd be paid-up PETA supporters!)]
Now here's the larger point about the animal rights movement: like so many other 21st century rights movements, this is not a neat army of the faithful going out to march for a specific mission. It's a loose coalition of people at different levels of awareness, commitment, fanaticism, caring and knowledge, held together only by the fact that they care about what happens to animals. PETA is one of the many organisations that works on behalf of animals; the fact that PETA inspires so much fear and loathing is also a tribute to the way in which it's managed to catch the public eye. You don't have to support or even agree with PETA in order to be part of the animal rights movement. But you do have to acknowledge the fact that the history of the animal rights movement in this century would have been radically different without PETA. It's because they scream so loudly that someone like me has the luxury of keeping the conversation pleasant.

Outside the cage

Do I like zoos? It depends. I haven't been on the other side of the bars, so how would I know what it feels like from the perspective of the inmates? But this story is moderately heartening.
From The Financial Express:

"From being mere amusement park where wild animals can be shown to children, zoos in India are fast turning into institutes where not only endangered species are saved but various research works are also being carried out.
The Central Zoo Authority (CZA) has come up with a novel initiative to improve the management of zoos and give them a new look, besides converting them into wildlife research centres.

As I said in a previous post, I'm not a big fan of zoos, especially the kind that don't protect the animals from animals like us. But as long as you still have zoos, it's worth fighting for better conditions for the animals who have to live there.
In The Chicago Tribune, Charles Madigan sums up the love-hate relationship many of us have with zoos:

"Of course, I have a conflict of interest because I have been in love with the zoo for 26 years. When we moved to Chicago from Moscow in 1979, Lincoln Park Zoo was where my little boys and their mother went to escape apartment living and city noise. I can't go there today without seeing all three of my sons as infants, scrambling around the pathways and staring, absolutely fixated, at the chimps and big cats.
They knew the now-departed Otto when the lowland gorilla was Chicago's biggest celebrity.
That being said, I still don't like the idea of zoos, particularly for large animals. Elephants need vast spaces for roaming. Big cats do indeed need red meat that comes from a kill, not from a kitchen. Wild birds have to fly."

Passing the buck

Pataudi turns himself in, just as the media focus shifts to hunting:
From The Kolkata Telegraph:

"It is difficult to accept that a person of Pataudi’s intelligence and educational background (he went to Winchester, the famous British public school, and to Balliol College, Oxford) is ignorant of the many prohibitions on hunting that exist in India. But he chose to flout the law. Shikar has a long tradition associated with the princes of India. In the past, when there were no restrictions on hunting, princes and rajas shot wild animals indiscriminately and thus decimated India’s rich wild life heritage. Pataudi, it would appear, is committed to continuing this tradition. The only problem with this commitment is that it runs counter to the laws of the land."

Outlook devoted its cover story to the scandal of shikar:

"It is the rich who hunt for pleasure. And for this category in the social ladder, the country's laws are at best non-existent; at worst, a nuisance that can be tackled with money and a phone call to a cocktail party acquaintance. And so ingrained is this blood lust that when Outlook contacted Maneka Gandhi to comment on the Pataudi episode, her first reaction was to try to dissuade us from doing this story as it might inadvertently glamourise hunting. We compiled a list of all the areas around the country where the wildlife laws are being broken with impunity every night, and the various modus operandi of the illegal hunter, but have decided not to publish this information, because it could get some people to head for their jeeps to seek out new prey."

Ctrl+Alt+Delete rabies

Rachel Wright took seven years to work out this project; kind of fitting that an animal lover who wants to eradicate rabies should come from a place called Dogsthorpe :)

Rachel (31) has also set herself the ambitious target of ridding the country of rabies and creating an environment where animals are free from suffering.
The charity is being set up in Rajasthan, to provide treatment to animals in remote locations.
Rachel, of Fairchild Way, Dogsthorpe, Peterborough, is delighted to finally be fulfilling years of ambition.
She said: "It has been a massive effort to get all this set up. People forget how well looked after animals are in Great Britain – in India they have virtually no vet care whatsoever.
"We are used to taking a sick pet to the vet. However, animals in India have to put up with suffering for their whole lives, and many die because they do not get the treatment they need. This causes rabies to spread across the country and this is something I want to reverse."