Ant misbehavin'

Last weekend, I spent a couple of gleeful hours pulling weeds and dying plants out of our front yard to make way for a few new future dead things. In the process I came across a few spiders, some nasty earwigs, and a whole lotta ants.

I respect insects, really I do. I love them so much I let them thrive in the damp plant debris of my overrun yard for months at a time. But I could swear the earwigs I unearthed were stalking me. Two of them came out of the ground and headed toward my feet while I was standing on the sidewalk. And each time I moved, they changed direction to follow me. I'm not kidding. So I squashed them with my spade.

Then, less than thirty minutes later, I found piles of ants busy pulling apart and carrying away the sticky goodness of earwig carcass. Mmmmm...earwig carcass.

At least the earwigs were crushed first. Shortly after we moved into this place, I was walking down our front steps to head to the grocery store when I saw a thrashing, oozing caterpillar being attacked by hundreds of merciless ants. When I returned a few minutes later, the caterpillar was mostly gone and decidedly dead.

I figured at that point that my battle with the ants already inside our home was doomed. Turns out, though, that the hundreds of tiny spiders that stand guard near every crack or hole in our creaky home mostly keep them in check, leaving behind piles of ant carcasses stacked neatly in the corners of our windowsills. As long as I avoid spraying ant and spider killer, and clean mostly with castille soap and vinegar, they keep up their important work. In fact, I've found that not cleaning the nooks and crannies at all works equally well.

I would prefer not to come into contact with ants. It makes me grumpy when ants invade my compost bin, or carry aphids onto my burgeoning herb garden, or herd up my son's leg when he steps onto the grass. And it makes me especially grumpy when I see or read more about just how incredible they are. For intance, a recent study reports that one ant species will throw itself into holes and dips in an ant trail to make the road smooth for the rest. My favorite quote: "Broadly, our research demonstrates that a simple but highly specialized behavior performed by a minority of ant workers can improve the performance of the majority, resulting in a clear benefit for the society as a whole." Darn it, I just can't stay mad an insect that will clean dead earwig meat off my sidewalk, or let 200,000 of its peers literally walk all over it for the good of the colony.

Sanity, thy name is Keith Richards?

The Rolling Stones have been trying to schedule their first concert in Serbia for some time. A 2006 date had to be cancelled when Keith Richards famously fell out of a tree in Fiji. During the rescheduled European tour, they were scheduled to play at the Hippodrome racetrack. There are a few (300) horses living in stables at the track, but no problem--organizers said they would just sedate the horses through the concert to keep them calm.

At first, the Stones didn't see any problems with this. Who doesn't need horse tranquilizers to get through a concert? But then some animal rights activists gently pointed out to them that if a potential concert venue is also essentially a home, and if its residents must essentially be drugged into a stupor in order cope with its visitors, perhaps an alternate venue would be more suitable. It's just proper etiquette--like at least offering to stay in a hotel and have dinner in a restaurant when you are visiting friends from out of town. Perhaps the horses would like a few complimentary tickets and a backstage pass to the relocated concert, maybe a gift basket of apples and sugar cubes, but don't force them to clean up their stables and self-medicate.

The animal rights appeal has worked--on Wednesday it was announced that the Hippodrome concert will be relocated. Or, in the words of Raka Maric, manager of the production company organizing the concert, "We didn't manage to convince The Stones' management that the concert would not harm the horses." But we tried. We really, really tried.

Cows and chickens going on a diet

There's a familiar disconnect in today's Reuters article about meat. The story is that the high cost of feed, driven up by ethanol demand, will cut the amount of meat produced by reducing the weight of cattle and the number of chicks hatched. But the story takes little notice per se of the animals who will be eating less feed. Instead, it talks of beef output, meat and poultry production, beef and broiler production, and a "decline in beef carcass weights" (my personal favorite). Just as "freeze damage would cut the Florida orange crop by 6 percent and California's by 20 percent from a month ago," apparently "beef output would dip by 62 million lbs and chicken by 124 million lbs from last month's estimate." The production problem is real, but that doesn't make Reuters' euphemistic approach to the story of our animal farms any less jarring. Are the poor animals going to starve, or just be force-fed a tad less or kept alive a bit longer before they are harvested?

A horse is a 14-year-old girl is a Joe Montana

Kentucky Derby winner Barbaro has been euthanized due to some progressively deteriorating health issues. Barbaro was known as a gifted race horse, but eight months ago suffered a mid-race "breakdown" of some kind that, as it turns out, was the beginning of the end. Since that time, Barbaro has endured surgeries, complications, painful recovery, and, now, death.

As you might deduce from the general lack of detail or nuance in the previous paragraph, I'm not much of a horse racing fan. But I had heard of Barbaro. I knew he was considered phenomenal. I read about it when he broke down, and, like many, assumed death-by-needle was merely hours away. I was vaguely aware that he was instead treated to the best in horse medicine and encouraged to fight back. That was eight months ago. Just enough time had gone by that my mind had wandered onto greener pastures.

Roy Jackson, one of Barbaro's "owners", said of the decision to euthanize the horse, "We just reached a point where it was going to be difficult for him to go on without pain." When I read this, two things came to mind: middle-aged men with fused spinal vertabrae, and limber 14-year-old girls.

I recently read a story about the pain endured by former football stars in the post-retirement years. Football players place enormous pressure on their bodies for a few years of their lives. They are injured every single time they play. They undergo treatments that are something like placing layer upon layer of spackle over an ever-widening hole in a wall. The San Francisco Chronicle interviewed 30 retired NFL players and found that 20 of them cope with severe chronic pain, 3 have had joint replacements, and 9 have been told they will need joint replacements in the future. The men are in their 40s and 50s now. (See the original article, and my previous commentary on it.)

The football players were grown men when they played. Although they may have begun playing at a young age, these players reached the height of their careers as adults. They were old enough to choose their paths. So I have few problems with the choices of the adult individual athlete, even if they regret their choices 25 years later. In fact, I admire many of them. I nevertheless feel somewhat uncomfortable with the system that pushes these men to push themselves beyond reasonable limits in order to sell diet Pepsi.

I am even less comfortable with those sports whose star athletes hit retirement before they are old enough to hit the bars. Last weekend, I watched a women's (more accurately girls') figure-skating championship while holding my sick and napping (and thus far non-athletic) four-year-old. At one point, just before breaking for commercials, they showed an old home video of one of the competitors at age three, skating to a full-scale routine in full-scale costume through an act reminiscent of JonBenet Ramsey.

The figure-skaters are 14-17 years old now, high-school age, gangly and awkward as they wave to the cameras and mumble through interviews. Yet they skate, many of them, beautifully, sliding onto the ice with grace. I have great respect for their abilities. And I have great fear for their futures.

In an extract from 'In defense of Animals' (a longer portion can be found here), Peter Singer explains:

The animal liberation movement [. . .] is saying that where animals and humans have similar interests - we might take the interest in avoiding physical pain as an example, for it is an interest that humans clearly share with other animals - those interests are to be counted equally, with no automatic discount just because one of the beings is not human. A simple point, no doubt, hut nevertheless part of a far-reaching ethical revolution.

I'm not suggesting we euthanize retired or injured athletes, that we judge that their quality of life is as unacceptable as Barbaro's was. What I am suggesting is that in the area of certain (profitable) sports, humans and animals already receive similar treatment: they are groomed, prodded, pushed to the limit, then left to languish with deconstructed joints and brittle bones. While the feats and abilities of the star athlete are admirable, there is a point at which public admiration of them is pushed into the realm of exploitation and commercialization. Both horse and human deserve better.