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...