When Lazzaro Spallanzani in the late 18th century pondered what enabled his captured bats to orient in the dark, he resorted to drastic methods. Gluing their eyes wasn't enough, he could rule out the significance of the eyes only after cutting them out.
He continued his investigation by stuffing wax into the bats' ears, and finally, cutting off the outer ears and piercing the eardrums to be safe, he was able to conclude that it was the ears that were essential to the bats' peculiar ability to orient in the dark.
During the 1960s, Harry Harlow deprived young rhesus babies of their mothers to replace them with wire and cloth dolls. He wanted to study how the bonds between children and parents arose and his method was to break the bonds.
In ‘Pit of Despair’, a small closed box, he placed rhesus monkeys for months and years to study how they were affected by physical restraint and social isolation. The animal rights movement is said to have arisen as a reaction to his atrocities.
A young student had to write a thesis to get a first taste of what it means to work with natural science. Her task was to investigate 137Cesium in anthills 24 years after the Chernobyl accident.1 The following is from the report (my translation): “Samples of ants and material from different vertical layers in the ant hills were collected. /.../ Ants from each stack are sucked up with a small vacuum cleaner. The ants were then drowned (in the field) in 70% ethanol. /.../ (in anthill four the ants ran out).”
In an educational context, one sometimes speaks of ‘the hidden curriculum’. What is meant is what a school teaches, not openly, but through norms, values, and beliefs.
The purpose of a students essay is to give the young student an insight into scientific methodology. The ant study has all that: literature review, method discussion, modelling, detailed descriptions of the approach, statistical processing, summary, discussion, results—everything that a student should be aware of and learn from.
There is also something else, something like planting a mental graft, the transmission of an attitude, an approach. A young person learns that a scientific research goes on top of respect and consideration. The ants' right to their communities weighs lightly in comparison to the researcher's curiosity. He who possesses superior power can hog whatever benefits him.
This is a reflection of man's relationship with nature. What gives us the right to let millions and millions of animals be strapped down and mutilated just to create knowledge? What kind of knowledge comes out of that?
In the Swedish Agricultural Agency's statistics for 2018, 20 371 house mice, 2 931 brown rats, 6 rabbits, 1 dog, 7 pigs, 2 100 amphibians, 76 fish, a total of 25 492 animals were exposed to ethical approved trials of the degree ‘substantial’, i.e. they have been subjected to “trials which have caused animals severe pain, severe suffering or severe distress or a long period of moderate pain, moderate suffering or moderate distress and trials which have caused considerable deterioration of the animal's well-being or general condition.” 2
In a cult film from 1954, Creature from the Black Lagoon3, a group of scientists travel into the swamps to investigate a mysterious lagoon. They discover a peculiar creature. Although they are intruders, the film tells us about the scientists' right to capture this strange being, whose home they invaded. It loses all rights and turns into a monster.
There is no land to steal, no souls to save, just a monster that science demands right to investigate.
More famous is the predecessor King Kong from 1933,4 but the theme is the same. An unknown creature lives its life in peace, but is kidnapped to civilization and must therefore be killed. Just like the monster in the Black Lagoon, King Kong fell in love with a human woman. When King Kong is shot down by the planes in the final scenes, Carl Denham, the leader of the expedition, says that it wasn't the planes that killed him, it was love (“It wasn't t the airplanes—it was beauty killed the beast”).
A giant ape kidnapped to civilization falls in love with a Barbie doll! Could the hidden message be clearer? It was the expedition members who led King Kong to his death, but the ending of the film is completely in line with the values of our civilization.
In the history of science there are many examples of abuse and recklessness. Scientific research is no less ruthless and greedy than the society that created it.
It must be remembered that science is nothing but a set of methods that gives a certain kind of knowledge that perverts humanity if it is not mature for it.
It is said that among some nations of the original inhabitants of North America that the chief of the tribe was elected by the women. This gave them a wise and caring leader. When it came to war the leader was elected by the men.
The warlord way seems to pervade Western civilization, nature its enemy whose secrets must be revealed using appropriate violence.
There is war everywhere. In sports language the opponent is ‘crushed’, companies are ‘knocked out’. Conquer and defeat instead of approach and understanding. Debate as opposed to conversation. Don't ask, don't listen, move on. Better luck with the arguments next time!
Debates are battles with a winner. It starts early at school. The concept of competition penetrates society and is omnipresent. Sports are a cornerstone of today's society.
In a conversation, it makes no sense to talk about winners. The aim there is to reach mutual understanding, in spite of dissenting perceptions.
In the Swedish Animal Welfare Act5 there is a strange passage. Ch. 2 § 1 reads: “Animals must be treated well and protected against unnecessary suffering and disease. Animals used in animal experiments shall not be considered to be exposed to unnecessary suffering or disease during use if this has been approved by an animal experiment ethics board.” (my translation)
The suffering is obvious. ‘Unnecessary suffering’ must reasonably imply that there is necessary suffering. For whom? In Sweden, there are ethics committees that decides how much human benefit that will balance animal suffering. Committees that masks cruelty with the words ‘unnecessary suffering’.
How do you balance benefit against suffering? How many benefits must there be in a bowl of suffering to reach balance? Whose suffering stands against whose benefit? Is this something that makes us all live under threat? It is conceivable that at some point we all may be needed in any extreme of the scales: perpetrator or victim.
Vipeholm experiments 1947–1955, forced sterilization laws from the 1930s (removed as late as 1976), the Swedish state's violence against the Sami (the same pattern as in all colonization), are three large-scale examples of abuse according to the same principle: the suffering of few for public benefit.
Vipeholm was an institution for the ‘senseless’ opened in 1935. The background to the experiments was the uncertain state on the impact of sugar on dental health. With the approval of the Swedish Medical Board (Medicinalstyrelsen), a selection of patients were provided with large, sticky and sugary gums and it was proved that sugar made teeth rot away. This was behind the back of their relatives and no consent was asked for.
Certain animal testing methods are more or less standard worldwide. For example, if you want to create stress in a mouse, you can use ‘immobilization’: You lock the mouse in a narrow tube for several hours per day, which is repeated over several weeks. Or you can use the well-known ’Forced swim’ where you let the mouse swim in a glass jar where he cannot sink or climb up. A dose of 20-30 minutes per day for a few days usually creates the desired stress response.
Both of these stress methods were used in a pain study and are included in an (approved) application for ethical review6 from the Karolinska Institute's Department of Comparative Medicine (in plain text ‘Institution for animal testing’).7 The experiment aimed at finding the nerve cells that control how much pain the brain allows us to experience, and also try to explain why pain increases under stress. Therefore, they also applied for permission to work with mice that have been bred with a reduced capacity for pain relief.
Equality in stress and pain, difference in respect and rights.
Was Spallanzani cruel or did he not understand the pain he inflicted on the bats through his experiments? At that time, the rise of modern science, a growing belief was that animals and nature could be seen as self-moving machines.
Now we have knowledge about the emotional and cognitive abilities of animals, but still do not seem to understand. Knowledge alone is not enough. Brain without heart can be a disastrous force, not least when insights are hidden behind layers of denial, convenience, greed, habits and unwillingness to see.
Science is tools and methods to examine that part of reality that can be measured one way or another. What is real to science possesses the property of being possible to be transformed into numbers in one way or another.
A perception of reality that is based solely on matter and material phenomena is like a magical spell with the power to transform spiritual reality into superstition. The dilemma for science is to explain the nature of consciousness, why we at all experience reality.
Blue may be stimuletad by electromagnetic radiation of a certain wavelength, but blue is not the same as an electromagnetic radiation of that wavelength, it is an experience of a single, subjective soul.
This is where science stems from, a subjective self that never can be examined as an object since it cannot be observed as an object by an external observer. The subjective self can only be examined by itselt. Therefore science will never get in contact with reality and therfore it lacks a true relation to the living world.
Proven to have been a magic wand to swing over the world to make it dance, bit like the legend of Sorcerers Apprentice, science really has power. Without knowledge of how to stop what is started, the apprentice faces horror.
Moral, trust, empathy in a world where just matter exists will be homeless, easy to deny and forget. Then the landscape lies open for greed, disrespect and ruthlessness.
Respect is a rare flower in a world where the majority of our fellow beings are forced to a life in Death Row. Their life starts and ends there. How ever will civilization survive with an attitude like that?
A civilization full of extinction camps!
This may hide a possible turning point, a turning point urgently needed. In our time, to nature human is more of an ever-present tearing and demolishing machine than a living being.
A final question in regard to this matter is if a bearer of truth can act as an agent for separation. Is it really a truth about our world that. creates a wall between us and the rest of the creation? On the other hand, could something that brings us closer to the rest of creation be called truth? Something that unites instead of separates?
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We are not brought up to see the big picture. The cotton sweater seems cheap because it is not you who pays the full cost. The majority of the cost is loaded on the environment and low-paid workers with lousy working conditions. Meat, eggs and dairy products become cheaper and cheaper because an industrialized animal husbandry transfers the costs over to the animals.
We look at the world and describe it in a way that protects us from anxiety and guilt. You want so badly to be goodhearted, but if that doesn't work, maybe it is better not know?
How can anyone believe that a pig can behave naturally crammed into a stall of a few square meters on a concrete floor with other pigs that it may not even get along with? How could anyone imagine that litter on a concrete floor could satisfy an intelligent pig that wants moist soil, roots, grass, herbs, worms and slugs to poke around with?
How can one even imagine that chickens can live out their natural needs to stroll around the yard investigating tufts of grass and find out what is hiding in the turf, when all that is missing and replaced by an easy-care floor under artificial lighting?
How many want to know that the prerequisite for the milk they drink is a cow that is constantly inseminated, gets pregnant and gives birth to a calf that immediately is taken from her? A calf that is deprived the warmth support of its mother. Or want to know the cost for bull calves in the diary industry, often regarded as ‘leftovers’.
There are many defence mechanisms to protect an ingrained lifestyle. You can label it many ways: convenience, laziness, fear, insecurity, cowardice, what will the neighbours think, security—join the others. Why just me when everyone else ..? You are looking for a defence that helps you maintain your lifestyle as it is so that you at the same time still can see yourself as a good person who only wants everyone to have a good life.
Our industrialized western culture does not work that way. Not a good life for all.
The following video clip may be at limit, but is shows two extremes of human behaviour. (May take a while to load)
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The gray goose Ado had lost his true half; a fox took her and made Ado a widower. For a goose it is just as affecting as for a human – pairs of geese usually remain faithful to each other until death.
A grieving goose is defenceless and grieves in the same way as humans do. The physiological reactions are almost the same: the muscles lose tension, the head hangs, the appetite disappears and is replaced by lethargy.
In Selma, Ado finally got a new wife, but unfortunately she was already married and had children with her husband Gurnemanz. Now a drama of jealousy developed which, after a fistfight (fought with a callus on the carpal joint, the joint that sits at the angle of the wing) which ended in Ado's favour. Gurnemanz lost not only his wife but also his social position.
Konrad Lorenz tells this in his book Grågåsens år 8 (The Year of the Greylag Goose) and shows geese as conscious and sensitive creatures, dependent on social relationships. Humans have similar behaviours in many respects.
And Now for Something Completely Different
Goose liver on toasted white bread with apple jelly, pistachios, baby spinach and balsamic vinegar is a taste experience. Great as a starter or appetizer with a good wine. You can choose a sparkling dry wine such as Champagne, Cava or Cremant de Bourgogne, a wine with a fruity, very fresh taste.
If you have already served Champagne as a welcome drink, you can choose a semi-dry Gewurtztraminer or a Pinot Gris from Alsace. You can fry the bread with butter and if you want to spice it up a bit, you can choose brioche that you have toasted. You can also use foie gras pate or terrine, but if you want to go big, choose the more expensive option Foie Gras Entier with whole liver.
Feel free to have a few jars at home – they last a long time, but leave them in the fridge for a couple of hours before serving. Cut slices with a thin knife that you rinse in warm water between each slice. If you are really careful, use a butter cutting thread.
The raw material can also be duck, which is perhaps the most common product in the trade. The taste is stronger, more robust compared to the sublime taste of foie gras.
Geese and ducks that are used to grow the fatty liver are force-fed by having a tube inserted into the stomach, which is then completely filled with fatty, carbohydrate-rich food, often corn cooked in oil. This goes on until the limit of their survival. This is repeated three to four times a day during the last month of life. When they are killed, a liver enlarged ten times its natural size can be extracted.
In the book Hur mår maten 9 (How is our food), Per Jensen tells that he, together with researchers from Europe, ethologists and veterinarians, with “genuine knowledge of animal health and welfare”, tries to solve tasks given to them by the EU Commission who seeks scientifically based results for future legislation concerning various animal welfare issues within industrial animal husbandry. Seen from the perspective of the animals.
One day the group was given the task of investigating the animal welfare consequences of goose liver (foie gras) production. What for the observer (also for Per Jensen and the research team) was a clear case of animal cruelty, could not be passed on to the commission, because they expected a report based on science, not a subjective opinion. Via scintific methods it took the group three years to conclude that force-feeding geese and ducks is animal cruelty.
What went wrong? How did we end up in a state where empathic ability and emotional judgments are ranked lower than intellectual constructs? Where a living subject can be transformed into an objective generalization and ceases to exist as an individual, and an obvious suffering must be proven scientifically.
Why must practical animal management be based on scientific research? It casts a shadow of ridicule over both science and animal handling. The kneeling before science makes it appear that no observations are worth anything unless they are scientifically established.
Should it be difficult to understand that a goose is tormented by being fed with a tube in its stomach to get its liver grotesquely enlarged?
Maybe force-feeding doesn't need to be so obviously brutal? Laura Ratliff talks about how she loves animals and force-fed a duck, enjoyed it and that the duck got used to the slight inconvenience and after a couple of days even seemed content with the treatment. This was not a duck that had to spend its life in a cage before it was killed, but ran freely with other ducks in a large enclosure.
Was the duck happy with Laura Ratliff's force-feeding? Content to waddle around in a pen with other ducks waiting for the knife; not, like Ado the goose, to live out his duck life with children and marital entanglements?
What has the desire to eat duck liver with cherry compote done to Laura Ratliffs as a person? How far can a man go for his lust?
Blossom will act as an ambassador and remind us of who we lose every time a throat is cut and a body is dismembered.