beliefs, ramblings, science

On Eating Animals

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A week or two ago Virginia Hughes wrote a series of blog posts on personhood for National Geographic. One of them was about our relationship with our pets. In it she says:

When it comes to animals, my choices are full of contradictions and hypocrisies. I eat meat, wear leather, and endorse the use of animal models in medical research. On the other hand, I’m totally taken with the growing body of research demonstrating that non-human animals have cognitive skills once thought to be uniquely human. I believe animal cruelty is wrong and, as regular readers know all too well, I consider my dog part of the family.

Yes, in general I agree with this, although I’m not so happy about the use of animals in medical research. I can see that it is necessary to do some initial drug testing using animals and that behavioural studies could be useful, but these have to be well controlled and strictly necessary. Which is why research institutions have Ethics Committees. That doesn’t necessarily mean I like it. But we must not be using animals for testing things like cosmetics, household cleaners etc.
I fully admit that it is hypocritical of me to eat meat and wear leather when I expect others to rear, slaughter and butcher the animals for me. This is not a comfortable position.
I know that were I to have to procure my own meat then I would never eat beef, pork, lamb etc. again. I could despatch a fish. I could probably smack a bunny on the head, or top a chicken, but couldn’t deal with anything bigger. And I would have to be driven to even this by real, real hunger.
There are few, if any, things I can kill with a clear conscience. Even things I detest, like maggots, I still dislike killing. We gaily believe that these “lower animals” are not sentient. But are they? We have no way of knowing. And if some are, where is the line to be drawn between those that are and those that aren’t. As Virginia Hughes says, the more we learn about animals the more we realise is going on in their heads.
It is a perennial moral and philosophical dilemma.
While I wouldn’t go as far as some Hindu sects who won’t eat meat or eggs because they may be the reincarnation of an ancestor, I do feel that all living creatures deserve respect and have as much right to life as humans. If this is so, who can blame a tiger for killing and eating a man, when we will kill and eat a sheep, cow or pig?
Where I do draw the line is the gratuitous killing of animals, for example hunting or angling as a fun pastime. Hunting animals for food, done as humanely as possible, is one thing. Killing for the sake of it is, in my book, well out of order.
If we are going to eat meat then the least we can do is to try our best to ensure the animals have our respect in life (eg. good farming etc.) and a humane end. There is much to be said for the traditions in some ancient cultures of honouring the meat one is eating. Something which has been perpetuated in Christian circles as the saying of grace before meals. To this end we usually, at least at main meals, drink a toast to whatever noble beast we are eating.
Honour your enemies, for they too are humans beings. And similarly honour the animals you eat for they have given their lives to give you life.
Basically, respect all life. Indeed respect the whole of Nature.

food+drink, history, topographical

Coming up in December

December is, of course, the month of Christmas and consequently that takes over most events etc. So this month’s list is rather abbreviated.
1 December
On this day in 1934 author Anthony Powell and Lady Violet Pakenham were married at All Saints, Ennismore Gardens, Knightsbridge (below).


12 December
1889 saw the death, in Venice, of poet Robert Browning on the day his last work Asolando was published.
21 December
Winter Solstice. That dark day when we in the Northern Hemisphere have the fewest hours of daylight. This day is also celebrated as the festival of Yule in many pagan traditions when the year turns and the days begin to lengthen again towards Spring.
24 December
Christmas Eve is traditionally the day for celebratory meals and the exchange of presents in many European countries. In the UK it is, of course, the final mad dash up to Christmas Day.
25 December
Christmas Day. Hodie Christus natus est. Today we have a very commercial and secularised Christmas Day whereas in much earlier times it was one of the few holidays when peasants were not expected to work but to attend church, feast and make merry (if they could afford to). There are many Christmas Day traditions around the country, so have a search for what’s happening near you.
26 December
Boxing Day and the Feast of St Stephen. Boxing Day is traditionally the day when servants and tradespeople would receive gifts (a “Christmas box”) from their bosses or employers. Although this custom has generally now died out there are many community events, both traditional and modern, on Boxing Day which often raise money for charity. The day is a public holiday in the UK and many other countries, a big day in the sporting calendar and also marks the start of the winter sales. Again seek out your local traditional events which may include Morris dancing or customs such as the Greatham Sword Dance.

31 December
New Years Eve, the last day of the old year, is another day on which there are many traditional customs as well as the usual social gatherings to see out the old year and welcome the new. Once more look out for your local customs like the Allendale Tar Barrel Ceremony. This is also one of the days on which we should be wassailing our apple trees and raising a glass to both their fruitfulness and general prosperity in the coming year.

words

Word: Demiurge

Demiurge
1. A powerful creative force or personality.
2. A public magistrate in some ancient Greek states.
3. A deity in Gnosticism, Manichaeism, and other religions who creates the material world and is often viewed as the originator of evil.
4. A Platonic deity who orders or fashions the material world out of chaos.


The word is derived from the Greek δηµιουργ-ός (Latinized dēmiūrgus), literally a public or skilled worker. According to the OED the word is first recorded in English around 1678.

links

Your Interesting Links

More links to articles you may have missed the first time round.
Starting with the latest update on an old theme: progress on the clean-up of the Fukushima nuclear site. In a word: slow.
And now immediately onto the easier, more accessible and more interesting stuff …
There are loads of misconceptions and myths out there. Here in one infographic is the bust on 52 such myths.
One piece of medical equipment to put fear of God into the heart of all females is the dreaded speculum. Rose Eveleth looks at its history and why there probably isn’t a better design. (Why do they always look to me like angry ducks?)
Talking of stinging things, here’s Simon Barnes on the wonder of wasps and why we should be grateful for them. Yes. Really!
George Monbiot is as usual in stinging mood in his Guardian piece on the critical decline of wildlife because of the uncritical doings of politicians and their friends.
Some things though are intractable, or at least they should be. Ian Urbina looks at the surprising and secret world of passwords. They mean so much more than we know.
I love maps. Every one is fascinating in some way. Here are 12 maps that sum up London in ways you wouldn’t have expected.
And another which looks at London through the lens of the most common non-English language spoken at each tube station.
While we’re talking about London, here’s something of what it’s like to do the knowledge to become a London taxi-driver. This is why I have such a great respect for London cabbies. [Long read]
And the Mormons are coming out of the woodwork too! They have finally opened their kimonos just slightly to revel some of their sect’s inner secrets. Like admitting that their founder Joseph Smith really was a polygamist with an estimated 40 wives. Oh and their special underwear isn’t magic either. Well who would have guessed!
In other things you maybe didn’t know, here are eight things you should never feed your dog or cat.
And then there are five of the UK’s most poisonous plants. I think I’ve met all except the first.
From things you wouldn’t want to eat to things that you should. Surprise, surprise, doctors are now saying the Mediterranean diet is good for us. Didn’t we always know this?
While on things Mediterranean (well vaguely at least) here’s an interesting potted history of nudity from ancient times to the more recent.


And Nikola Novak thinks deeply about why nudity is about freedom. Or is it?
Finally on being a happy person, here are the Pope’s top 10 tips. Seems a good list to me!
Toodle-pip!

medical, personal

On Depression — V

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This is number five in my series of articles on depression — my depression. They are written from a very personal perspective; they are my views of how I see things working and what it feels like on the inside. Your views and experiences may be vastly different. My views and experiences are not necessarily backed by scientific evidence or current medical opinion. These articles are not medical advice or treatment pathways. If you think you have a problem then you should talk to your primary care physician.

Questions & Answer
In the course of writing these posts I’ve collected a small number of articles which throw some interesting lights on various aspects of depression. I’ve already mentioned some, but this post is to try to gather some of the others together.
The first is a quote from The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, mind, and body in the healing of trauma by Bessel van der Kolk

If your parents’ faces never lit up when they looked at you, it’s hard to know what it feels like to be loved and cherished.

Now that’s a fairly telling statement and if, like me, it fits your childhood then any wonder we get depressed.
This next is a link to a cartoon, about just how badly we treat the mentally ill (not just the depressed but I guess it happens to us more as our illness isn’t always so apparent). So what would it be like if physical illness were treated as we treat depression.
And now a short animated video which explains a little of the science behind depression but also highlights, perhaps, how little we really know.
Unfortunately research into depression struggles to attract funding in a way which would not be tolerated for, say, cancer. This Scientific American article demonstrates how important it is to change this especially now that useful technologies are becoming available. For those who don’t want to read the whole article here are a few key comments.

If the extent of human suffering were used to decide which diseases deserve the most medical attention, then depression would be near the top of the list.
[…]
[A]lthough depression is common, it is often ignored. Three-quarters of people with depression in the United Kingdom go undiagnosed or untreated — and even if the disorder is diagnosed, today’s medications will work well for only about half of those who seek help.
[…]
Research into depression … seems to have floundered.
[…]
Although … extra money would have solved some challenges earlier, the technology needed to crack others — by probing the brain and analysing its circuits, for example — is only now emerging.
[…]
[A]nother major factor is the long-standing stigma associated with depression. Many people still do not acknowledge that it is a legitimate condition … A large proportion of people believe depression is just something that we all feel … They think you should pull your socks up and get back to work.

One thing which seems to be common to most depressives is sleep disruption in some form, whether that is a disrupted or inappropriate sleep pattern or just plain old insomnia. But there may be some distant hope as scientists seem to be homing in on disrupted circadian rhythms being the underlying cause.

Disrupted sleep is so commonly a symptom of depression that some of the first things doctors look for in diagnosing depression are insomnia and excessive sleeping … scientists have observed for the first time a dysfunctional body clock in the brains of people with depression.
[…]
People with major depression … show disrupted circadian rhythms across brain regions.
[…]
[G]ene activity in the brains of depressed people failed to follow healthy 24-hour cycles. They seem to have the sleep cycle both shifted and disrupted.

The article goes on to explain how looking at the brains of dead but non-depressed people the scientists could pinpoint the time of death from how various genes were switched on or off. This was impossible with depressed subjects whose clocks were both shifted and disrupted. It isn’t simple as there are many genes involved, but variations in the gene expression could potentially cause all sorts of different sleep pattern disruptions.
Here are two more articles on sleep and depression. This first Sleep and Depression is a fairly simple explanation of the sleep disruption you may encounter and some pointers to what you can do to try to alleviate it. The second by David Nutt & Louise Paterson is an academic review from 2008 of what was then known; needless to say it contains lots of data.
Finally in this short round-up we must return to the question of body clocks, because another aspect is Season Affective Disorder (SAD) which affects many people during the darker winter months probably because we don’t get enough light to reset our clocks every morning. A very recent article by Katherine Hobson on Nautilus summarises some of what is known about high intensity light therapy to treat not just SAD but potentially other disorders too.

Light therapy has become standard for treating seasonal depression … light has a benevolent influence on mood during the dark days of winter instinctively makes sense: As hazardous as sunbathing is, it certainly feels good … research into the circadian underpinnings of chronic depression, bipolar disorder, Alzheimer’s disease, and fatigue suggests that light could help these patients readjust too.
[…]
Exactly how light works isn’t known, but many researchers suspect that bright lights help SAD sufferers by regulating their sluggish circadian clocks.
[…]
[C]ircadian rhythms appear to be disturbed in non-seasonal maladies too, which means there is a potential for light therapy beyond SAD.
[…]
In general, bright light therapy is a low-risk and low-cost option for treatment … it may speed up patients’ responses to antidepressants.
[…]
[T]he elderly might be particularly susceptible to the benefits of light therapy because their light perception declines with age, which might be throwing their internal clocks out of sync.

While SAD is one of the factors in my depression — and I know I feel much better on bright sunny days — it is far from the only one and is not the most crippling. I have tried light therapy two or three times over the years and never had much success with it. But it doesn’t work on everyone: while it doesn’t work for me it might work for you.

photography

Weekly Photograph

This week something from the archives to bring a little Spring to this dismal November. These delightful crocuses were taken in our garden a few years ago.

Click the image for larger views on Flickr
Crocuses
Crocuses
Greenford; February 2011

current affairs, ramblings

Criminalising Behaviour

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A couple of weeks back, on 6 November, Simon Jenkins launched a stinging attack in the Guardian on the government’s propensity to criminalise various behaviours. His full article “Our addiction to criminalising human behaviour makes a mockery of private responsibility” is worth reading, but here are a few key extracts.

If poisoning your foetus with alcohol is a crime, why is it not a crime to abort it? If alcoholism in pregnancy is “attempted manslaughter”, as a QC told the court of appeal … surely abortion is murder.

We need a philosopher — as Raymond Chandler would say — and we need one fast.

The advance of criminal law into these recesses of private morality is ominous.

Now we have the proposed crime of “emotional violence” – including “reducing self-esteem” by calling someone fat – showing there is no limit to the law’s ambition. To be against jailing people for such offences is not to condone what they do, merely to apply some sense of proportion.

Oxford’s Jonathan Glover sought to apply moral precepts to everyday life in his excellent book, Causing Death and Saving Lives. He quoted from Karamazov the brother’s euphoric cry that “everyone is responsible for everyone else and in every way”. It was, he said, heavy with “nightmare implication”.
[…]
Such paternalism – or perhaps control freakery – led the last Labour government to create 4,300 new offences through 50 criminal justice acts. It led Tony Blair to justify war against one state after another, for its own good.
[…]
Glover asked only that we “work out what things are most important and then try to see where we ourselves have a contribution to make” … There must be some room left for private responsibility.

Indeed there must be some room — I would say a lot of room — for personal responsibility. We are too good at insisting that someone — anyone — is to blame except us. It is never our fault or our responsibility.
This has to stop. We have to start taking responsibility for our own actions. Just as we cannot be responsible for other people’s emotional reactions, we cannot expect them to be responsible for things which are down to us to attend to.
Guys & gals … We have to grow up and take responsibility for ourselves, and tell our politicians to get out the way.