Lori Marino – Page 10 – The Kimmela Center for Animal Advocacy, Inc.

Animal Rights and Wrongs

Lori Marino on November 30, 2013

Two events are happening this month that capture, in one case, what is right about animal advocacy today and, in the other, what is wrong.

For the first time ever, today, December 2nd, an animal rights organization, the Nonhuman Rights Project, has gone to court on behalf of a nonhuman animal, asking a judge to recognize him as a “legal person” who has the fundamental right to bodily liberty.

Later this month, the 2013 Biennial Marine Mammal Conference in New Zealand and the Society for Marine Mammalogy (SMM) Ethics Committee will be hosting a special session on the humane killing of marine mammals. The committee states that these are “complex technical, ethical and cultural issues” and there will be an expert panel with the capacity to represent a diversity of viewpoints.

One of these two events represents a potentially transformative effort towards actual enforceable rights for nonhuman beings, and the other represents a fall back to the ethical muck and mire and perpetuation of nonhuman animals as commodities.

One effort says that there is no question about the fundamental nature of nonhuman beings as individuals with a right to live their lives autonomously. The other continues to equivocate on this question, suggesting there is some room for differing viewpoints on the issue of whether marine mammals, such as dolphins and whales, even have a right to life.

The fact that the words “ethical” and “killing” can even be spoken in the same breath about marine mammals reinforces how sorely we need enforceable rights for them.

Precisely because the premier marine mammal organization in the world thinks it is worthwhile to spend time considering how to kill marine mammals is why we need enforceable rights for them.

By conceding that there is such a thing as “humane” killing of marine mammals and that this issue is “sensitive”, the SMM undermines any credibility it might have as an organization that takes the science of marine mammal intelligence seriously. If it actually did, then the very notion of killing autonomous individuals who have a sense of self, can think about their own thoughts, possess sophisticated memory and communicative capacities, and, in their own habitats, develop varied cultures, would be unthinkable.

The SMM continues to hide in the conservative shadow land of concepts like “management” and “conservation” with no acknowledgement of the individuality and inherent value of the nonhuman beings in their purview. I understand why the SMM, as a global organization, takes the tactic of incrementalism, careful not to offend any of its constituents. It is what an organization does when it has become the reason for its own existence.

But none of the marine mammals being killed every year in Taiji, Japan or in the Faroe Islands, or in captivity can afford the time it takes for the long, slow creep of “progress” defined by the SMM and other organizations who refuse to take a real stand.

Thankfully there are some efforts, like the Nonhuman Rights Project, that represent the vanguard of animal advocacy and recognize the parity across all rights issues – human and nonhuman.

Martin Luther King said: “There comes a time when one must take a position that is neither safe, nor politic, nor popular, but he must take it because conscience tells him it is right.”

Here’s hoping for more animal rights and fewer animal wrongs in 2014.

The Caring Chicken – Being a Mother Hen

Lori Marino on September 16, 2013

Guest post by Christina M. Colvin

On September 4th, 1,150 chickens from a factory farm in California, took to the air on a chartered plane and landed the following morning in New York. It was all part of a plan, spearheaded by the Animal Place sanctuary and aided by Farm Sanctuary and other groups, to retire a total of 3,000 egg-laying hens to good new homes.

Egg-laying hens are usually consigned to the gas chamber as soon as they become exhausted from laying eggs, which is usually before they are three years old. But in this case the hens got a reprieve.

Despite the continuously emerging evidence that suggests mother hens care about their downy chicks, the factory farming system prevents them from engaging in the very hallmark behaviors for which mother hens are so renowned. Human mothers and chicken mothers have something very important in common – the welfare of their children. But at factory farms, the hens have no opportunity at all to raise their young.

There are lots of very good reasons why mother hens are known as caring parents.

Throughout popular culture, children’s literature, and spiritual texts, one animal pervades as a symbol of maternal care and attentiveness: the mother hen. Despite her recognizability as an emblem of motherly devotion, however, most egg-laying hens in the United States spend their entire lives in the tiny, cramped, filthy quarters of factory farm battery cages, a place impossible for her to live up to her reputation.

Recent scientific studies of mother hens—particularly their responsiveness to the condition of their feathered children—warrant special attention for a consideration of modern agriculture’s treatment of these perceptive and sensitive animals. Indeed, such studies suggest that the care shown by chicken moms for their children is far from the stuff of stories alone, and that the mother hen earned her prestige as a caring parent for good reasons.

Don’t Talk to Strangers

When given the chance, the mother hen is constantly on the lookout for threats to her chicks. All chickens use different calls to designate aerial predators like hawks and owls from ground hunters like foxes and coyotes, showing that they can both assess a threat and tell other chickens how to prepare themselves.

Mother hens in particular evaluate predators according to another criterion—size—in order to determine if a hungry carnivore poses a threat to her chicks specifically. By judging a predator’s size relative to the size of her children, mother hens only sound an alarm when the predator looks big enough to take her chicks away.

Eat Your Spinach

Mother hens even get involved with what their kids eat. One recent study showed mother hens discouraging their children from consuming food they understood to be unsuitable. Conditioned to identify one color of food as preferable and another color of food as unsuitable, this study had mother hens watch from a separate room as their chicks chose to eat the color of feed they (the hens) deemed less preferable.

Perceiving the chicks making an error determining which food was palatable and which was not, the mother hens responded by pecking and scratching the ground more frequently in attempt to attract their chicks away from the bad food and toward the better food.

Come to Mommy!

Mother hens also seem to really empathize with their chicks. One group of researchers exposed hens and chicks to a mildly upsetting (but not harmful) stress: a puff of air. Watching from a connected room but unable to get to their chicks, mother hens responded more intensely when they saw their chicks receive an air puff than when they (the mothers) received one: seeing their chicks in distress, the hens’ hearts beat more quickly, their body temperatures changed, and they attempted to call their chicks to their sides, away from the perceived threat.

Although none of the 3,000 hens rescued by Animal Place had ever been outside, seen the sun or stepped on the grass, the first group of them were soon doing all the kinds of things that are natural to hens – like enjoying their first dust baths. We’re delighted that they’re finding their way to good new homes where they can live out their days as nature intended.

Christina Colvin, who will graduate with a Ph.D. in English from Emory University in May 2014, specializes in 20^th and 21^st-Century American literature and animal studies, with a particular interest in texts depicting ecological crises and odd encounters between humans and animals. Her most recent writing and professional presentations have focused on William Faulkner’s critique of speciesism, the permutations of taxidermy as a cultural signifier, and the vexed relationship between animal welfare and the rhetoric of sustainability. Christina aims for her academic and public scholarship to spark renewed interest in animals in both literary studies and the world.

In Major Medical Journal, Kimmela Discusses Dolphin-Assisted Therapy

Lori Marino on September 2, 2013

Kimmela Center executive director Dr. Lori Marino is quoted extensively in an article about animal-assisted therapies by Adrian Burton in the prestigious medical journal The Lancet Neurology.

The article, entitled “Dolphins, dogs, and robot seals for the treatment of neurological disease” asks:

A growing body of evidence suggests that animal-assisted therapies and activities involving all kinds of real and even robotic animals can have beneficial effects in people with neurological disease or mental illness. But what is the quality of that evidence, and do these interventions really provide any health benefits?

Burton notes that while there are numerous reports of animal-assisted activities and therapies being beneficial to people with neurological or mental disorders, this growing field lacks “high-quality evidence regarding the value of such therapies.”

Dolphin-assisted therapy is an especially lucrative activity that’s offered by facilities all over the world, making claims, among others, that swimming and interacting with dolphins increases attention span, motivation, motor function, and language skills in severely disabled children, and provides similar therapeutic benefits for those with autism, epilepsy, Angelman’s syndrome, dyslexia, or Tourette’s syndrome.

But how good is the science behind these claims? Dr. Marino says most of it is of very low quality:

“Many reports in the literature are observational or, when prospective, involve very small numbers of patients or lack critical control conditions. As a result, most suffer from problems with construct validity—i.e., the inability to identify which components of the study (being in a pool, human interactions, new settings, etc.) are causally related to any observed short-term changes.

“… Most studies are plagued by major threats to construct validity such as placebo effects, novelty effects, demand characteristics, experimenter expectancy effects, [and] informant bias,” she says. “If it cannot be determined that the dolphin is an important therapeutic ingredient then there is no basis for most of the claims made by the lucrative industry that has grown up around dolphin-assisted therapy.”

Burton described the difficulties and expenses involved in constructing clinical tests that could provide valid evidence. Trudie Lang, a trials expert at Oxford University, U.K., describes a possible trial to assess whether interactions with a dog helped to reduce depression. You might, for example, recruit patients of the same age, who lived in the same kind of setting, have the same kind of depression, and are all given the same kind of dog, all trained in the same way.

“There is no basis for most of the claims made by the lucrative industry that has grown up around dolphin-assisted therapy.”

“However,” she tells Burton, “it would be difficult to apply any findings to more elderly depressives, or those given a terrier! Setting up a study with more variables would give more meaningful data—ie, it would measure real effectiveness—but would need to be vast and therefore very expensive.”

On the other hand, a pilot study in Australia that enabled elderly people with dementia to interact with a robotic baby seal, has produced some very interesting results. According to Burton, it paves the way for more such studies – perhaps “a controlled trial in which residential aged care facilities will be randomized to one of three conditions: the robotic animal, a plush toy, or the usual care.” Those studies, in turn, could pave the way for studies including real animals.

For Marino and other scientists who require convincing scientific evidence that animal assisted therapy offers more than general short-term “feel good” effects, the evidence, particularly for dolphin assisted therapy, is long overdue.

The Lancet is one of the world’s best known, oldest and most respected medical journals, founded in 1823, and editorial offices in London, New York, and Beijing.

NOAA Says No to the Georgia Aquarium

Lori Marino on August 9, 2013

In a stunning victory for the anti-captivity movement this week, the U.S. government’s National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) denied the Georgia Aquarium’s application to import 18 wild-caught beluga whales from Russia and share them around the country with SeaWorld and Shedd Aquarium.

It would have been the first time since 1993 that an aquarium had imported dolphins and whales directly from the wild. And it would have set a major precedent, regressing to a time before public outcry forced the captivity industry to agree to stop capturing marine mammals to put on display.

Animal protection groups organized major opposition to the Georgia Aquarium’s plan. The Kimmela Center played a key role in providing scientific support for opposition arguments and reaching out to colleagues in the scientific community. Executive Director Lori Marino helped to create and submit a Scientists Statement Opposing the Beluga Imports by the Georgia Aquarium to NOAA last year and it was signed by nearly thirty prominent marine mammal scientists. She also provided testimony opposing the application at a public hearing last October.

A decision by NOAA has been expected since February. And word went around in May that NOAA was expected to give a thumbs-up to the Georgia Aquarium any day.

But this week, NOAA issued its decisions: No to the Georgia Aquarium. The agency described its decision as having hinged on three key criteria:

* NOAA Fisheries is unable to determine whether or not the proposed importation, by itself or in combination with other activities, would have a significant adverse impact on the Sakhalin-Amur beluga whale stock, the population that these whales are taken from;

* NOAA Fisheries determined that the requested import will likely result in the taking of marine mammals beyond those authorized by the permit;

* NOAA Fisheries determined that five of the beluga whales proposed for import, estimated to be approximately 1½ years old at the time of capture, were potentially still nursing and not yet independent.

More details from NOAA on their decision are here, where the agency also describes what comments from the public were the most impactful:

The comments that were most helpful to our decision-making process addressed the specific MMPA and regulatory criteria that we must use to make a decision and discussed why the commenter felt the application did or did not meet them.

The comments we received pertaining to humaneness determinations (capture and transport), the age of the animals at capture, the status of the Sakhalin-Amur beluga stock, and the effects of the ongoing capture operation on beluga stocks were directly related to the MMPA issuance criteria and considered further in the decision making process.

In general, comments regarding opposition to captivity were not considered substantive as the MMPA allows for public display of marine mammals. Also, the comments we received related to the care and maintenance of marine mammals in captivity fall under the purview of the Animal Welfare Act and the USDA’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service, so we were unable to respond to them as part of this process.

The Georgia Aquarium issued a statement saying they have yet to decide whether or not they will appeal. On NOAA’s decision, they offered the standard talking points used to justify keeping wildlife in captivity:

“Sadly, the decision places the long-term global sustainability of an entire species in limbo. The animals in question would help to ensure the sustainability of beluga whales in human care in the U.S. for the purposes of education, research and conservation.

“Through ongoing conservation and research efforts, our team is proactively seeking solutions to learn all we can to protect these incredible animals in the wild in the face of increasing challenges to their survival as the effects of climate change, increased shipping and exploration for natural resources impact them in their natural habitats.”

Neither the Georgia Aquarium, nor SeaWorld, nor any other marine mammal captive facility has, in fact, presented any evidence that they are helping to protect and “conserve” belugas. It is striking that the criteria NOAA used to deny the imports directly mention the possible negative impact upon the whales by the Georgia Aquarium’s proposed actions.

NOAA’s decision is not the end of the story. Beyond the fact that the Georgia Aquarium may well appeal the decision, there is the question of what happens to the belugas now.

However, this decision has been important for preventing the proliferation of the international trade in wild-caught marine mammals in the U.S., which the Georgia Aquarium was hoping to reinstate.

Some Special Folks from the Someone Project

Lori Marino on June 30, 2013

The Kimmela Center has just finished the first stage of our work for the Someone Project, a joint project with Farm Sanctuary that will be used to increase awareness about the complex minds and lives of farmed animals and influence farm animal policy for the benefit of the animals themselves.

In this first stage, we’ve been compiling the scientific evidence for cognitive, emotional and social complexity in pigs and chickens. The next stage will involve doing the same for other factory farmed animals such as cows and goats.

A great deal of work has gone into gathering all this evidence, and much of it has been done by the all-volunteer team of scholar-advocates who are invaluable members of the project:

Christina M. Colvin: Tina will graduate with a PhD in English from Emory University in May 2014. She specializes in 20th and 21st century American literature and animal studies, with a particular interest in texts depicting ecological crises and odd encounters between humans and animals.

Her most recent writing and professional presentations have focused on William Faulkner’s critique of speciesism, the permutations of taxidermy as a cultural signifier, as well as the vexed relationship between animal welfare and the rhetoric of sustainability.

Christina aims for her academic and public scholarship to spark renewed interest in animals in both literary studies and the world.

Heather Harrison: Heather is attending Antioch University of New England for a Masters in Environmental Studies with a concentration in advocacy, and recently completed an internship with the Humane Society of the United States’ Farm Animal Protection Campaign. Through her work with the Someone Project, she hopes to enrich her knowledge of farm animal intelligence in order to effectively increase public awareness.

Heather is currently working as the education intern at Farm Sanctuary’s Animal Acres shelter in California.

Beth Snead: Beth is the assistant acquisitions editor at the University of Georgia Press. She graduated from UGA in 2007 with a BA in English and has been working in the field of scholarly publishing ever since. She is currently exploring the possibility of implementing an animal studies series at the UGA Press.

Beth is a strong advocate for animal rights and is particularly concerned about the plight of laboratory animals and factory farmed animals in the U.S. She is thrilled to be assisting Farm Sanctuary with the “Someone” project.

Julia Tsai: Julia is an undergraduate at Stanford. She entered college intending to major in Biology as a pre-vet, but after living on an organic farm, became increasingly interested in the social and environmental issues surrounding our food system and society’s perception of food.

Now, her focus has turned to our production of animals for food. The Someone Project’s goal to use scientific material to influence the policies surrounding the treatment of farm animals is such a novel approach to advocate for a change in the way we view animals and use them for our benefit.

Julia is still thinking of attending vet school in the future, but her goals have become more nuanced, shifting from learning how to treat animals in a medical setting to how to understand and treat them psychologically and educate others about them.

* * *

Scholar-advocacy, the basis of Kimmela’s approach, focuses on applying scholarship, science and expertise to animal advocacy issues, and these talented and accomplished volunteers exemplify this model perfectly.

Many thanks to all of them as we move on to the next stage of the project.

India Bans Dolphinariums

Lori Marino on May 19, 2013

In a stunningly progressive move, India’s Ministry of Environment and Forests released a statement on May 17th that they are banning dolphinariums in India.

The Ministry of Environment and Forests, Government of India have decided not to allow establishment of dolpinarium in the country.

The State Governments are advised to reject any such proposal for dolphinarium to any person/ persons, organizations, Government agencies, private or public enterprises that involves import, capture of cetacean species to establish for commercial entertainment, private or public exhibition and interaction purposes whatsoever.

Kimmela collaborated with the Federation of Indian Animal Protection Organizations (FIAPO) and their international partners to provide the scientific evidence that convinced the Indian government that it would be morally wrong to keep dolphins in captivity because of their complex intelligence and poor survival in captivity. The Ministry noted this in its preamble, saying:

Whereas cetaceans in general are highly intelligent and sensitive, and various scientists who have researched dolphin behavior have suggested that their unusually high intelligence, as compared to other animals, means that dolphin should be seen as “non-human persons” and as such should have their own specific rights and [that it] is morally unacceptable to keep them captive for entertainment purpose.

Whereas cetaceans in general do not survive well in captivity, [and] confinement in captivity can seriously compromise the welfare and survival of all types of cetaceans by altering their behaviour and causing extreme distress.

The Kimmela Center was originally contacted by FIAPO which was preparing to advise the Animal Welfare Board of India (which advises state governments and wildlife wardens) on efforts to capture, transport or keep dolphins and whales in captivity. The board then ruled that dolphin shows and exhibits would violate the 1960 Prevention of Cruelty to Animals Act. In its new policy directive, the Ministry has now ratified that ruling.

The Indian government’s decision is advanced in comparison to the United States, which still permits dolphin captivity for entertainment. Moreover, their acknowledgement that dolphins are nonhuman persons with basic rights is an unprecedented step forward for animal advocacy.