|
|
|
|
Why include information about animal rights and rescues on a website devoted to "biocentric education"? Because life of all living things contribute to the wonderful diversity and balance our our earth. When individuals and companies demean, destroy and damage the life and integrity of non-human species, it effects everyone in a very negative, but often no so obvious way. Many of the cruel experiments using animals do not help improve human health or environmental conditions. Information from "animal experiments" seem to give so little to the name of science, except an evil reputation. Do animals have rights? Yes, of course they do. It depends on who you ask as to what "level" of rights are issued to them. Here we present some resources for reading and further exploration via the internet. Many of these resources are simply excellent and others are more for pleasure reading. At least you have a place to start. Two really good books to read (of course there are many others out there on the market - one just needs more time to read them!):
Other Animal Rights/Interest Books to try:
Resources regarding Animal Rights (general and domestic):
A little more on the controversial side (and the dark side of animals used for profit):
Check out Cruelty Free Retail! Check out Animal Rescues for more information.
The Plight of the Farm Animal: Farm or food animals are often treated like non-living machines and so often live in horrible conditions while they wait to be killed for their meat, hide and bones. There are many resources for more information, some of them graphic, some based on science and some based mainly on emotion. What are some basic things you can do to be more aware or help out the plight of the farm animals? Try: becoming a vegetarian or at least buying meat from farmers that treat their animals humanely, become a supporter or activist of animal rights. try to buy organic products, protest the use of antibiotics and genetically enhanced food, do research on the current products you buy, try a more natural lifestyle.
For more information about Factory Farms and what you can do to help visit:
Voices (Sometimes) Unheard - a sample of poetry regarding animals
Animals are Passing from Our Lives - Philip Levine (1968) It's wonderful how I jog on four honed-down ivory toes my massive buttocks slipping like oiled parts with each light step.
I'm to market. I can smell the sour, grooved block, I can smell the blade that opens the hole and the pudgy white fingers
that shake out the intestines like a hankie. In my dreams the snouts drool on the marble, suffering children, suffering flies,
Suffering the consumers who won't meet their steady eyes for fear they could see. The boy who drives me along believes
that any moment I'll fall on my side and drum my toes like a typewriter or squeal like a new housewife discovering television
or that I'll turn like a beast cleverly to hook his teeth with my teeth. No. Not this pig.
Death of a Fly - Johann Wolfgang Goethe (1800's)
Without pause she drinks the treacherous brew, more powerfully seduced with each sweet sip; she feels serene, invulnerable, although her slender legs already have grown stiff, no longer skilled enough to wash her face or clean her delicate, translucent wings. Thus, in delight, life smoothly slips away. The numbness spreads, she barely feels a thing; yet on she sips, and even as she does, death covers with a cloud her thousand eyes.
The Bull Calf - Irving Layton (1959)
The thing could barely stand. Yet taken from his mother and the barn smells he still impressed with his pride, with the promise of sovereignty in the way his head moved to take us in. The fierce sunlight tugging the maize from the ground licked at his shapely flanks. He was too young for all that pride. I thought of the disposed Richard II.
"No money in bull claves," Freeman had said. The visiting clergyman rubbed the nostrils now snuffing pathetically at the windless day. "A pity", he sighed. My gaze slipped off his hat toward the empty sky that circled over the black knot of men, over us and the calf waiting for the first blow.
Struck, the bull calf drew in his thin forelegs as if gathering strength for a mad rush... tottered...raised his darkening eyes to us, and I saw we were at the far end of his frightened look, growing smaller and smaller till we were only the ponderous mallet that flicked his bleeding ear and pushed him over on his side, stiffly, like a block of wood.
Below the hill's crest the river sniffled on the improvised beach. We dig a deep pit and threw the dead calf into it. It made a wet sound, a sepulchral gurgle, as the warm sides bulged and flattened. Settled, the bull calf lay as if asleep, one foreleg over the other, bereft of pride and so beautiful now, without movement, perfectly still in the cool pit, I turned away and wept.
Emily Dickenson - Untitled
The spider holds a Silver Ball In unperceived Hands- And dancing softly to Himself His Yarn of Pearl-Unwinds-
He plies from Nought to Nought- In unsubstantial Trade- Supplants our Tapestries with His- In half the period-
An hour to rear supreme His Continents of LIght- The dangle form the Housewife's Broom- His boundaries-forgot-
Black Cat - Rainer Maria Rilke
A host, though invisible, still is like a place your sight can knock on, echoing; but here within this thick black pelt, your strongest gaze will be absorbed and utterly disappear;
just as a raving madman, when nothing else can ease him, charges into his dark night howling, pounds on the padded wall, and feels the rage being taken in and pacified.
She seems to hide all looks that have ever fallen into her, so that, like an audience, she can look them over, menacing and sullen, and curl to sleep with them. But all at once
as if awakened, she turns her face to yours; and with a shock, you see yourself, tiny, inside the golden amber of her eyeballs suspended, like a prehistoric fly.
Laboratory Poem - Lames Merrill (late 1950's)
Charles used to watch Naomi, taking heart And a steel saw, open up turtles, live. While she swore they felt nothing, he would gag At blood, at the blind twitching, even after The murky dawn of entrails cleared, revealing Contours he knew, egg-yellows like lamps paling.
Well then. She carried off the beating heart To the kymograph and rigged it there, a rag In fitful wind, now made to strain, now stopped By her solutions tonic or malign Alternately in which it would be steeped. What the heart bore, she noted on a chart,
For work did not stop only with the heart. He thought of certain human hears, their climb Through violence into exquisite disciplines Of which, as it now appeared, they all expired. Soon she would fetch another and start over, Easy in the presence of her lover.
Names of Horses - Donald Hall (1978)
All winter your brute shoulders strained against collars, padding and steerhide over the ash hames, to haul sledges of cordwood fro drying through spring and summer, for the Glenwood stove next winter, and for the simmering range.
In April you pulled carloads of manure to spread on the fields, dark manure of Holsteins, and knobs of your own clustered with oats. All summer you mowed the grass in meadow and hayfield, the mowing machine clacketing beside you, while the sun walked high in the morning; and afternoon's heat, you pulled a clawed rake through the same acres, gathering stacks, and dragged the wagon from stack to stack, and the built hayrack back, uphill to the chaffy barn, three loads of hay a day from standing grass in the morning.
Sundays, you trotted the two miles to church with the light load of a leather quartertop buggy, and grazed in the sound of hymns. Generation on generation, your neck rubbed the windowsill of the stall, smoothing the wood as the sea smooths glass.
When you where old and lame, when your shoulders hurt bending to graze, one October the man, who feed you and kept you, and harnessed you every morning, led you through corn stubble to sandy ground above Eagle Pond, and dug a hold beside you where you stood shuddering in your skin,
and lay the shotgun's muzzle in the boneless hollow behind your ear, and fired the slug into your brain, and felled you into your grave, shoveling sand to cover you, setting goldenrod upright above you, where by next summer a dent in the ground made your monument.
For a hundred and fifty years, in the pasture of dead horses, roots of pine trees pushed through the pale curves of your ribs, yellow blossoms flourished above you in autumn and in winter frost heaved your bones in the ground - old toilers, soil makers:
O Roger, Mackerel, Riley, Ned, Nellie, Chester, Lady Ghost.
The Cow in Apple Time - Robert Frost
Something inspires the only cow of late to make no more of a wall than an open gate, and think no more of wall-builders than fools. Her face is flecked with pomace and she drools a cider syrup. Having tasted fruit, she scorns a pasture withering to the root. She runs from tree to tree where lie and sweeten the windfalls spiked with stubble and worm-eaten. She leaves them bitten when she has to fly. She bellows on a knoll against the sky. Her udder shrivels and the milk goes dry.
Check out Cruelty Free Retail! Check out Animal Rescues for more information.
|
Send mail to biocentriceducation@lycros.com with
questions or comments about this web site.
|
