Bio: The Animal Lover

My name is Erika and I am an undergraduate student at New York University’s Gallatin School of Individualized Study. I will be graduating in the spring of 2011 and wish to pursue a career in the field of marketing, preferably with a non-profit or caused based entity involved in animal welfare. My concentration is in Modern Consumer Culture from a sociological perspective and its implications on the environment and society with an interest in ethical and cause-based marketing. By studying the implications as well as the strategic applications of marketing, I have gained an extremely holistic perspective of the field. I have learned to view what was common to me critically through the Gallatin program and this balance has allowed me to see consumption in a new light and with different perspectives, allowing me to find mine. My hope is that this holistic perspective can help guide me in making ethical business decisions as an individual working in the field marketing. Many marketers solely care about profit and promotion, not what is going into their consumer's bodies, where products are made, what happens to goods after consumers are done disposing of them, and (the topic of my blog) the lives at stake. In addition, promotion can be a problem within itself. In the field of marketing, there is a lack of love for people & the environment.  I believe marketers should embrace these ideas in addition to promotion, because marketers are the link between people and industry and both people and industry effect the environment and society. I hope to share this perspective with you and the marketing world because it can improve the quality of our planet, people’s lives, and even the lives of animals who are often abused in the process of production. As a marketer, I want to make informed choices regarding what I decide to promote to the public, and you as active consumers can make informed purchasing decisions. I believe as marketers in a globalized economy, we are a part of something larger than ourselves and the choices we make within the system contribute to our current circumstances. There are many implications & ethical issues regarding animals in the world of production and consumption. Animal welfare has always been a an active part of my life. I volunteered at the North Shore Animal League for four years, a non-kill shelter located on Long Island, NY, where I became a senior volunteer.  I was also a volunteer at the Long Island Parrot Society (LIPS) where I rescued and assisted in the rehabilitation of injured and exotic birds and placed birds in new homes. Currently, I am engaged in a part-time fall internship program with Discovery Communication's searchable homeless pet database, Petfinder.com, whose mission is in generating public awareness regarding pet adoption and animal abuse. I hope I can always be in the position to advocate for animals throughout my career in marketing. 

"Today, more than ever before, life must be characterized by a sense of Universal responsibility, not only nation to nation and human to human, but also human to other forms of life." – Dalai Lama

Introduction

Dear reader,

As a student studying holistic marketing I have come across very disturbing industry information. Take the cosmetic industry for example, which is unregulated by the FDA, and the undisclosed toxic chemicals found in everyday perfume that is absorbed by consumer’s skin and eventually the environment, which marketers promote…or the pharmaceutical industry which takes advantage of consumers by influencing the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM), which essentially allows researchers to create new “illnesses” (please see Shyness: How Normal Behavior Became a Sickness for more information). All though the aforementioned are disturbing, the most disturbing effect of consumption are the millions of animals that suffer at the expense of our choices. In addition, the way we have incorporated animals into our lives in the form of livestock and companionship animals have negative side effects for humans as well - germs. I use Jared Diamond’s incredible book "Germs, Guns, and Steal" and research to discuss how humans arrived at domesticating animals, the lethal gift of animals, and ethical dilemmas we face with domestication today. 


Jared Diamond’s quest with this book was to uncover the roots of human inequality throughout the modern world. Diamond perplexes his readers with the question “why did history unfold differently on different continents?” A New Guinean resident, named Yali, originally asked this question to Diamond; “Why is it that you white people developed so much cargo and brought it to New Guinea, but we black people had little cargo of our own” (Diamond). There are comparable differences that separate the lifestyles of peoples from around the world, but why? Diamond believes, through empirical research, that this inequality is due to the natural resources humans had available to them in their geographic locations. "History followed different courses for different peoples because of differences among people's environments, not because of biological differences among peoples themselves" Diamond states dismissing racist explanations. Around the world people were farming but were not propelled down the same path. Diamond says that people who had access to the most productive crops became the most productive farmers and it came down to luck, not innate abilities or inabilities within the people themselves. He believes people around the world are fundamentally similar and development is primarily based on availability and access to raw materials. I am focusing on the side effects of human “progression” in terms of the domestication of animals for it has had various implications despite its many positive attributes to humanity. In Diamond's book, I will primarily be focusing on chapter 11. 

A Brief History: The development of Agriculture & The Domestication of Animals

"It was only within the last 11,00 years that some peoples turned to what is termed food production: that is domesticating wild animals and plants and eating the resulting livestock and crops" -Diamond

I use Diamond’s book to focus on the historical context of the domestication of animals because it shows the early stages of consolidation and the introduction of germs. Humans have learned how to confine natural resources, like grain & goats for example, to maximize food production and therefore caloric intake. Human’s started off as hunter gatherers in small nomadic groups who were frequently on the move; that is hunting animals and gathering plants wherever they could find food sources. But the fundamental problem with hunting is that it has never been a productive way to find enough food - It takes time to track each animal & hunting is extremely unpredictable so most hunter gathers relied more on gathering then hunting. But, most of the biomass in our natural environment does not yield anything that humans can eat. “Most biomass (living biological matter) on land is in the form of wood and leaves, most of which we cannot digest” (Diamond) so producing food rather than hunting and gathering is more effective for it produces more edible biomass per acre, or calories per acre. Hunter gather populations were so sparse because food sources and food intake is low. If you want to feed a lot of people you have to find a more productive method to hunting and gathering because this method only supports small groups of people. There was a radical shift in human behavior due to climate changes that caused food to become sparser due to colder and dryer weather - people started growing their own food. Rather then following food sources around to different locations, for the first time, people started bringing these resources back to them by planting seeds. People were becoming farmers. In the early stages of farming, without knowing it, people started to control nature. Humans started to interrupt the natural cycle of plants, actually changing the plants themselves, known as domestication. There was also a transformation in the way humans interacted with animals. People started domesticating animals because they provided another steady source of food in addition to crops. Instead of going out to hunt, humans had a dependable meat supply. Animals could also be used for their milk (which was extremely high in protein), hair and skins could be used for clothing to keep humans warm in the winter, and animals could be used for transportation and muscle power to plow land. Domesticated animals proved to be invaluable and thus became an integral part of the agricultural way of life in addition to plants. The combination of animals and plants were complementary because the combination created a beneficial cycle. Animals could plow the land, eat the crop, and fertilize the crop. The transition to farming was a pivotal turning point in human history. “Today, most people on Earth consume food that they produced themselves or someone else produced for them” (Diamond). Hunter gathers could not nearly produce as much food as farmers so farming societies started to prosper in terms of population. “Plant and animal domestication meant much more food and hence much denser human populations” (Diamond). The domestication of animals and plants has reaped many benefits for humanity but also came hand-in-hand with many negative consequences for us and animals...

Germs of Animal Origins: "The Lethal Gift of Livestock"

The rise of germs are linked to the rise of food production, particularly in the domestication of once wild animals. One of the major side effects of livestock are germs, that is human diseases of animal origins. Animals are so prevalent in human society in the form of livestock and companionship animals it is hard to imagine our lives without them. When one thinks about their beloved Dog, an ancestor the domesticated wolf, we rarely think about their nasty germs that they are passing along to us. “Some of us adults, and even more our children, pick up infectious diseases from our pets” (Diamond). Many of these germs, of animal origins, have become major killers of humanity throughout our recent history. These animals we have chosen to live with side-by-side have led to the spread of disease, a major consequence hand-in-hand with the domestication of animals. These microbes that once infected animals “transferred themselves from their original animal hosts” (Diamond) to humans. A characteristic of epidemic microbes is that they once lived in other animals and evolved to infect the human species. This evolution happened while humans were living in close proximity to animals giving the microbes a chance to adjust themselves to infect us. When living in dense populations humans are living among their own waste compared to hunter gathers who leave their waste behind as they move across the land. These conditions found in dense populations of people provided a breeding ground for these microbes. Animals that carried these microbes were mainly social animals living naturally in large populations “hence when we domesticated social animals, such as cows and pigs, they were already afflicted by epidemic diseases just waiting to be transferred to us” (Diamond). These diseases, such as the measles virus, which evolved from cattle, changed its properties to adapt to us. “Given our proximity to the animals we love, we must be getting constantly bombarded by their microbes” (Diamond). Animal microbes evolved into specialized human pathogens to the point where it can become transmitted directly between people causing epidemics. One of the most notorious human epidemic of animal origins is AIDS, a major killer of modern humanity, which derived from monkeys. These infectious diseases can be traced back to the diseases of our animal friends. Pathogens tried to make the jump from animals to us once they discovered humans do to our close proximity to animals and were ultimately successful. Despite many of the positive attributes the domestication of wild animals have brought to humanity there were also devastating consequences. This is the lethal gift of livestock.

Quality of Life

Consolidated Livestock: 

Humans have a tendency to act in their favor even if it results in inhumane conditions for other species. This is especially true when there are strongly held values that are “good” in the most visible circumstances. Economies of scale are valued so more is better, getting ones money worth, with cheep produce is accepted with little question. Consumers often only see what they buy, products, and are therefore extremely disconnected from the product life cycle. This is the case for consolidated livestock. Consolidating livestock allows people to live the American dream of more is better. In terms of consolidated livestock, people can have more animal produce because it costs less through mass-production keeping prices down. The cheapest way to raise animals is all in the same place. The concern of cheep food is caused by “the single-minded existing pursuit of biological efficiency” even though it is at the expense of quality of life says J. Hodges in “Livestock, Ethics, and Quality of Life” published in the Journal of Animal Science. “Animal science and business management have turned livestock into disposable biological resources that are processed swiftly on a huge scale to supply animal products to distant markets” (Hodges). In addition this system of intensive animal production is unsustainable as well as unethical. It produces a lot of waste and consolidation causes us to use a lot of energy to transport food. Author Bill McKibbens in Deep Economy challenges the basic presumptions of modern economists, who promote economies of scale and consolidation of ownership. “One farm in Utah, with 1.5 million porkers, has a sewage problem larger then the city of Los Angeles” (McKibben). McKibben proposes moving from large-scale systems of agriculture to community-supported agriculture (CSA) in order to conserve our planets natural resources and environment. In addition, focusing on local economies will improve the quality of animal's lives by not forcing them to live under inhumane & miserable conditions that often occur with consolidation (industrial farming). An alternative to mass-produced food are local green markets where there is less waste produced, less energy used to transport food, and better quality of life for livestock. Some of the practices of industrial farming involve cruel confinement, force-fed animals, and cruel slaughter practices.

  Foie Gras Practices

they are forced to live in filth 

they are confined to small body cages where they cannot move for their entire lives

they receive no medical care and are often in excruciating pain

Puppy Mills: 
Another ethical implication that arose out of the domestication of animals are puppy mill operations. Owning a dog is an American commonplace and are now being produced like products rather then living things. A form of animal cruelty known as puppy mills, is when dogs are consolidated and bred to mass produce small designer breeds to be sold in the commercial pet trade industry (primarily pet stores). The ASPCA defines a puppy mill as “a large-scale commercial dog breeding operation where profit is given priority over the well-being of the dogs. Unlike responsible breeders, who place the utmost importance on careful husbandry for the integrity of their litters, breeding at puppy mills is performed without consideration of genetic quality. This results in generations of dogs with unchecked hereditary defects.” These mills, usually found in the Midwest, breed dogs in absolutely despicable and inhumane conditions fueled by our desire to have cheep designer dogs. The animals are forced to live in their own filth among hundreds of other dogs continually being inbred and forced to have litters of unhealthy puppies as often as possible. The health and happiness of these animals are ignored for their main purpose is to produce puppies for profit even if it is at their demise. Spending time with them would take away from work and taking them for proper vet checkups would cost money. The more dogs that are produced the more money the puppy mill farmer makes and once females are no longer able to produce offspring they are destroyed inhumanely to cut expenses. Living without the luxury of cheep designer dogs could have saved millions of lives. These dog-breeding operations are consolidated and mass-produce puppies to ensure low prices. This concept is similar to consolidated livestock and agriculture. Rather than going to an expensive breeder, people are able to purchase a purebred dog for a couple hundred dollars. Puppy-mill offspring are prone to having congenital diseases and suffer from them throughout the rest of their lives due to inbreeding. “With millions of unwanted dogs and cats (including purebreds) dying every year in animal shelters, there is simply no reason for animals to be bred and sold in the pet-shop trade” (PETA). Rather than breeding dogs in these inhumane conditions, we can open our homes to animals that are constantly being put down in shelters because they are unwanted. These unnecessary and cruel breeding operations are facilitated by people buying dogs from pet stores rather then adopting. Adoption is the best and most humane option and also reduces populations. If you are interesting in a dog please visit your local animal shelter or go to Petfinder.com. 

dogs are forced to live on uncomfortable wire surfaces cutting up their feet

dogs are confined to small crates for their entire lives

they receive no medical care and are not bathed 

they are left outdoors to face the elements

Conclusion: 

Although the domestication and eventually the consolidation of animals has reaped many benefits for humans, such as cheap food and animals, there have been many ethical problems and implications as well. For humans, domestication caused the rise of many epidemic diseases and for animals their quality of life was diminished. We may have the power to but we do not have the right to take away millions of lives for such unnecessary purposes; having the option to buy a cheep purebred dog or the option to eat Foie Gras is not worth the horrifying consequences these poor souls are forced to face. The most detrimental effect of contemporary consumption are the millions of animals that suffer at the expense of our choices. Animals have become prisoners of our greed. Is our anxiety over making sure we have what we want (not what we need) worth the pain, suffering, and even death of millions of animals?