The Bond

by Wayne Pacelle

  As we walked out back, into the open-air aviaries, Matt asked me to hold out my left arm while a cockatoo named Callie stepped onto it. She was a large bird with a beautiful gorgeous head, thick with colorful feathers that would make any mother bird proud. But Callie had no feathers below the neck. She had plucked out every last one—leaving only little bumps across her bare, sickly-looking body. Animals always look so small and frail without their fur or feathers. All that was left of this poor creature’s glorious plumage were the feathers she couldn’t reach and pull out.

  Callie’s previous owner had trouble coping with the noise and the persistence of the cockatoo, and his solution was to sequester her in a room where she was alone almost all of the time. In the wild, the birds live in flocks, fly for miles every day, and spend time breaking open nuts and other food with their powerful beaks. She had none of that stimulation in this man’s home—she was effectively in solitary confinement. With the downturn in the economy in 2008, he needed extra income and had to rent out his spare room—and that spelled eviction for Callie. It came to a better end than many other such stories, and at least her owner sought out a good sanctuary and found Matt Smith. Callie did not come with a dowry, only with a lot of problems, leaving Matt with the responsibility of indefinite care for a troubled creature.

  “Some birds can come from great homes and pluck,” Matt told me. “Other birds come out of outright abuse and do not pluck. But what we do know is that feather plucking does not exist in the wild.” In captivity, 30 to 40 percent of parrots pluck their own feathers.

  Matt said the best he can do is try to replicate the birds’ wild habitat as much as possible to minimize self-destructive behavior. Branches, ropes, flocks, and flight can improve the situation and provide some needed stimulation. But sometimes the birds are just traumatized. And he says that the dreadful disorder just beyond plucking is self-mutilation. “They tear into themselves. The muscle is exposed and bloody. We can use a collar, and then try to bring them a better life.”

  The numbers are depressing. Matt estimates that between parrots and the passerines, there may be fifty million birds in captivity in the United States, a much higher number than industry surveys indicate. Mira Tweti provides a similar estimate in Parrots and People, her indictment of the captive bird trade. She notes that many of the older birds in people’s homes were captured from the wild and imported to the United States for the pet trade.

  Young birds are typically captive-bred, because of the restrictions of the Wild Bird Conservation Act of 1992, which forbade the importation of wild-caught birds. This law unintentionally gave rise to an enormous industry of “bird mills”—the equivalent of high-volume breeding operations for dogs, or puppy mills—where birds are kept by the hundreds in overcrowded and permanently dark sheds, caged until they are removed for sale. It is pathetic, Matt told me, to see these extraordinarily intelligent birds locked in such squalid environments.

  “There is no escaping the intelligence,” as Matt put it. “Rescuers and sanctuary folks can use the research on their intelligence as a call to protect them, but the pet trade uses that same research to promote their ownership as pets. To realize how smart a bird is, all you have to do is live with one. Eventually, most people will realize how wrong it is to keep them in captivity. A lot of people feel guilty—it’s a recurring theme.”

  As I was about to leave, Matt showed me the flight cages he’d designed. “Flight is the most important component to a bird’s well-being,” he said. In these cages, the birds are together, and can stretch and use their wings, assuming their wings have not been clipped.

  I just wish that potential buyers of exotic birds could see his sanctuary—a large bird colony filled with examples of how difficult it is to keep and maintain creatures made for the sky. Most captive birds eventually become the responsibility of someone else. Matt and others to follow, including some good-hearted souls yet to be born, will spend years of hard work cleaning up after the foolish decisions of others, and trying to make things right for these creatures.

  I also feel so grateful to this young man for devoting his life to these birds. He is one in the growing ranks of people who see the need and answer the call, and whose unselfish efforts make a mark in the world every day. It is the mark of respect and appreciation, of understanding and empathy for creatures great and small who have the same spark of life that we do, and who so often deserve better than they receive at our hands.

  Parrots yearn for the sky, like all the fowl of the air. Elephants are called to roam, unbounded by the designs of man. Chimps want to climb and swing and dance, rejoicing in the lives intended for them. They all have their own minds and desires; they all have a place and purpose of their own. They have their own dignity and their own destinies to fulfill, in a plan ultimately beyond any man’s power to know. Sparing or rescuing them from cruelty is a picture of humankind at our best. And so often in our dealings with animals, the greatest power we have is to stand back and let them be.

  There’s so much to the mental and emotional lives of animals, and though the research affirming that fact is fairly recent, it all suddenly seems so obvious. Outside the professional journals of the behaviorist school of thought, or the animal-science departments subsidized by animal-use industries, very few people will tell you anymore that animals neither think nor feel in any meaningful way. All the evidence and every ounce of common sense tell us otherwise, even if we still do not put that understanding into everyday practice.

  Darwin himself, in the 1870s, recognized and captured the rich emotional lives of animals. Yet by a strange selectivity, his theory of evolution had a profound impact on how we humans see ourselves, while his evidence about the emotional lives of animals had almost no impact on how we treat them. And for all the pathbreaking work of Donald Griffin, the Harvard ethologist who a century later picked where up where Darwin left off, somehow we’ve still had a hard time getting past the mechanistic dogmas of the behaviorists. In part because of the falsehoods they have spread, with their way of fitting every animal they study with the same scientific straitjacket, we’ve been in denial. Whatever common sense or our own good instincts tell us, we are still reluctant to ascribe sadness where we see tears and suffering where we hear cries, and to act accordingly.

  It all reminds me a little of the scene of Terminator 2: Judgment Day when the Terminator, played by Arnold Schwarzenegger, notices human tears and asks, “Why do you cry?” He has developed an unlikely bond with the boy he’s been sent to save, and the boy explains to the Terminator that people cry when they are sad or experience loss, or occasionally even when they are happy. The Terminator looks on skeptically, but the boy is providing a lesson on what it means to be human—seeming, for just a moment, to stretch the Terminator’s understanding beyond his programmed knowledge.

  For a long time, in our dealings with animals, we have conducted ourselves like beings from another world, unfeeling, all-powerful, and strangely disconnected from the realities of animal consciousness and emotion. But it shouldn’t be such a stretch to recognize how much we have in common with creatures made of the same flesh and blood, or to imagine ourselves in their place—helpless, vulnerable, and afraid. It’s been slow to come to us, since in some manner we seem to have been programmed to see the world a certain way. As we gain greater understanding about animals, we cannot help but begin to develop a closer bond with them and to open our hearts to their plight.

  Refusing to believe that animals have intelligence, or even conscious life, is not only counterintuitive, but also a little too convenient. Leaders of animal-use industries have hired their own veterinarians and other scientists to deny the emotional intelligence of animals or to say the industry’s treatment of other creatures is just fine—much like the biological determinists of another time who twisted reality to prove that certain races were inferior. When pseudoscientists tell us that animals are not conscious or aware, and are instead driven by mechanical, unfeeling instinct, the mo
ral path has been cleared for economic interests to do as they please.

  Mechanical and unfeeling, moreover, better describe humanity in action when we permit the boundless cruelties that modern industries inflict. In the treatment of animals, there’s a vast gap between what we know and what we allow, what objective science affirms and what the laws permit. And much of the modern animal-welfare movement is working to close that gap—to bring consistency into the moral equation. We know too much, and what might have been excused in other times can no longer stand up to reason. We know that pigs and other animals are intelligent, social creatures, and with that understanding comes moral responsibility. It is wrong to condemn them to the dark, wretched existence of the factory farm. In the same way, we now know better than to treat primates as if they are the raw and disposable material for experimentation, or to drown dolphins by the thousands as if they were just acceptable bycatch for fishing fleets, or to consider companion animals as expendable surplus when there are no companions to claim them.

  In matters of animal welfare, as in everything else, stubborn denial only makes things worse. And the better outlook is to view these questions not just as moral problems, but as moral opportunities. Thinking for yourself always takes a little extra effort, and shaking off old ways always requires that extra measure of courage. But it sure beats having to go through life making excuses for harsh and unpleasant things, and there are plenty of brave and good-hearted people to show us the way.

  PART II

  The Betrayal of the Bond

  CHAPTER THREE

  A Message from Hallmark: Exposing Factory Farming

  WE HAD A FULL day ahead of us, and I told Maggie Jones, a staff writer for the New York Times Magazine, that I’d scout out a good place for lunch. The plan was, I’d pick her up midmorning at Los Angeles International Airport and from there we would drive into the heart of the Inland Empire—the sprawling desert counties of Riverside and San Bernardino that extend all the way to the borders of Arizona and Nevada.

  This was our first meeting, although Maggie and I had already covered a lot of ground on the phone. She was a mother and a Bostonian, perhaps in her late thirties, and pleasant as can be. I could tell from our conversations that she was well informed on animal-cruelty issues, and not afraid to face the details. Even so, I was on my guard. We’ve all seen the occasional public figure become too relaxed during interviews with reporters who tag along, only to produce some gaffe or silly statement that defines the whole story. I didn’t want that to happen to me or to the case I was making for Proposition 2, a California ballot initiative addressing some of the severest confinement methods in animal agriculture. On a long drive with a New York Times reporter, I knew I had to stay focused.

  Maggie was doing a story about the rising political strength of HSUS, with an emphasis on our campaign confronting the mistreatment of animals in industrial agriculture. I wanted her to see some of the places where animals raised for food live and die. Only from afar can one be indifferent; there’s nothing like a firsthand experience to awaken the detached skeptic. I knew well enough what she would see, and how people typically react when they haven’t seen it before. And reacquainting myself with the sights and sounds of industrial agriculture could only renew my energy for the big fight we had taken on in California. She was here to cover that unfolding battle. And I wanted to give her all the background on a campaign that would be either an epic failure for the cause, or one of the biggest victories ever for animal welfare in America.

  It was the last Saturday in July 2008, and the vote on Proposition 2 was then just three months away. I was as keyed up as I always get before one of our ballot initiatives. The election seemed at once around the corner and an eternity away. After Labor Day, thirty-eight million Californians, including the state’s nearly eighteen million registered voters, would pay more attention to the candidates and issues in November’s general election. We’d been building this campaign from the ground up, starting just weeks after we achieved resounding wins on our slate of ballot measures in the 2006 mid-term elections. There was plenty of reason to be optimistic, but we knew that the polls don’t count for much until the electorate is actually tuned in to the campaign.

  As in any competitive statewide race, the battle would largely be won or lost in the final sixty days. During this stretch, the press, too, would pay closer attention, and its coverage would frame the debate for voters. Most important, both sides would spend the bulk of their money—ultimately, close to $20 million combined—on television advertisements to sway the undecided, to respond to perceived or actual misrepresentations, and then to make their closing arguments.

  The main event was, of course, the presidential race between Barack Obama and John McCain. It would not be close in California; the state had last gone Republican in the 1988 presidential election. But there were lots of interesting down-ballot races, and some were highly competitive. California is the nation’s prime staging ground for initiatives and referenda, and the debates that play out there can quickly become national debates. The political contest that drew the most coverage and campaign cash was Proposition 8, the attempt to ban gay marriage that attracted $80 million in spending from rival campaigns. On this same ballot were measures requiring parental notification for minors seeking abortions and alternative energy development.

  In this crowded field, HSUS and other animal-protection groups would be fighting for Proposition 2, a reform to ban the extreme confinement of twenty million animals on concentrated animal feeding operations, known as CAFOs and more descriptively referred to as factory farms. Prop. 2 was the latest and biggest political clash between animal advocates and Big Agribusiness. Voters in other states had approved similar restrictions on factory farms—Florida in 2002 banned the confinement of breeding sows in small confinement stalls called gestation crates, and Arizona in 2006 began to phase out both gestation crates and veal crates. Now California was considering a proposal to outlaw those crates, and to take it a step further by adding a ban on the egg industry’s confinement of chickens in battery cages.

  The Slaughterhouse Next Door: Inside a California Meat Plant

  AS A WELL-INFORMED REPORTER, Maggie knew this recent history, and she knew as well that the agribusiness lobby was determined to stop our momentum. The way they figured it, if they could hold the line in California—a largely Democratic state, with its major population centers closer to sand than soil—then that would likely discourage us from taking the fight to heartland states. But if they lost a vote of significance in California, it could well prepare the way for major reform of factory farming across the country.

  Laying all this out for Maggie, I explained that today HSUS is not your grandmother’s humane society, helping only stray dogs and cats while other forms of neglect and cruelty went unanswered. In fact, this image of HSUS has never done us justice. From its founding in the 1950s, our organization has never limited its everyday work and moral concern to companion animals. We have major programs to protect pets, but our concern reaches to all animals, and I have sought as CEO to assemble the whole range of assets that any modern animal advocacy group needs—lobbyists, lawyers, scientists, undercover investigators, tech-savvy writers and editors, grassroots organizers, and more. That is news to some people—but not to Big Agribusiness, the furriers, and other industries that try to portray our broader reform efforts as a neglect of traditional sheltering of needy pets. In fact, we help animals of every kind wherever help is needed—and the need is greater than ever. These industries regard us as a threat to business as usual; if they didn’t, I’d start to worry.

  When I became president of HSUS in 2004, I pledged that America’s largest animal-protection group would not fear to confront America’s largest animal-welfare problem. I promised investments in programs to challenge the systematic mistreatment of animals in industrial agriculture. Nearly ten billion animals are caught up in the food production system in the United States. How could we not try in ear
nest to reform this industry, when even modest and incremental changes in production, transportation, and slaughter practices could reduce suffering enormously?

  I had suggested we take this day trip outside of Los Angeles because there were factory farms and slaughter plants to see, and also because this was a crucial swing voting area in the state. Riverside and San Bernardino counties are also an area where middle-class families are striving to find affordable housing and their piece of the California dream. It has its share of white-collar professionals, but it is still largely working class, with a fast-growing Latino population that will soon become the largest ethnic group in the region. More important, it is where two powerful trends in California collide. There’s the vast and enormously productive agricultural economy, dominant in the state’s interior, and then there’s the sprawling, suburban new economy typified by Los Angeles, Orange County, and other coastal counties in the Southland. This area is a bellwether of California, with lots of votes to be won or lost.

  The Inland Empire is due south of the state’s Central Valley—the expansive floodplain between the Coastal Range and the Sierra Nevada that is one of the most fertile regions in the world. Thanks to its year-round warm climate and rich, deep topsoil, California has long been the nation’s top farm state in revenues generated, with its wide array of vegetable crops, fruits, almonds, avocados, and more. It’s not the breadbasket of America, but rather its salad bowl. And, for our purposes, it is also a major animal agriculture producer. It is the biggest dairy state in the nation, with two thousand farmers managing about 1.8 million cows, yielding 41.2 billion pounds of milk in 2008 and $6.9 billion in revenue.