New Book Release!

People often ask me why I wrote this book and why I am donating half of the profits to animal rights and animal organizations from the sale of this book.

When I left the missionary life, I had not really watched much, if little, television. Back in late March of last year, I had been ‘channel surfing’ and came upon a series called “Whale Wars”. It was a reality television documentary of a small group of whale activists battling Japanese from killing whales.

What I saw only in one hour - the insanity of the Japanese Whaling vessel, plus the fact that these huge creatures are being hunted for ‘a delicacy’ - made me sick to my stomach. The truth is not that even the meat is needed for man’s survival or that some portion of the meat cures anything. Instead, some arguments are that people will lose their jobs in a small whaling village, or that these people don’t know any other vocation, or somebody just wants sushi. Another argument is that killing whales is part of an ‘ethnic tradition’ of a national culture.

It was gross and truthfully a justification.

At that moment, while watching this program, I felt I had to do something about the senselessness and insanity. I had to say something. These creatures were friends. They were and are aware. Their species is over 65 million years old. We are just beginning to understand them. We have fished them and killed them and yet, scientists are beginning to see that whales communicate, save humans at times, and travel great distances around the globe with a purpose. Because man has not figured out how to communicate with them, some of us treat them like meat on a table. Whales are not like cattle, where we grow them and replenish. It’s not even like we really need their meat as a species.

I have had very personal experiences with whales and other creatures. I felt that writing a book, telling what I had personally experienced, would be a way of raising public awareness. I had to step over the line, come out from my comfortable life and say something. Not just anything, but the truth I always knew and never spoke about.

All of the experiences existed. To help prove the point I shared intimate moments of my life. But it wasn’t just the happy moments. Having others there in those personal moments and experiencing what I was hearing and seeing, putting this down in my book, was a way that would make the book more real for everyone.

So the purpose and reason I wrote this book is for my friends, all creatures great and small. As the writer, I feel they have contributed to my story in a very big way. So I decided that half of the profits from the sales of the book would go to animal rights and animal protection. It’s how I can help them, my friends.

Another Voice for Animal Consciousness

I know that I am not alone in my thoughts. There many like me, but not necessarily willing to put up a blog about animals. All the same, it does me good to see their thoughts and the thinking:

After reading some articles (http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&ie=UTF-8&q=animal+consciousness) on animal consciousness, I was surprised to find that so many scientists, psychologists and philosphers regard almost every animal but homo sapein as completely unconscious. They were making arguments such as animals feel pain, but they don't know they feel pain, basically they reposnd as if they feel pain, but they are not really experiencing it. Some of them, referred to as Cartesians, were theorizing that consciousness did not evolve until the development of art and other forms of culture in the Upper Paleolithic. Is it just me or is this just as non-sensical as multi-culturalism? Why would otherwise intelligent, educated people espouse such ridiculous ideas?

This all began with Descartes who proposed that man's soul was a 'ghost in a machine'. To Descartes it was the ghost that made man aware of being aware, etc. I had a philosophy professor who told me one time that Descartes was a *VERY* subtle philosopher and to exercise great care in how you go about interpreting him.

His driving passion, so to speak, was his fear of the Catholic Church and the Office of the Holy Inquisition. The royal treatment they handed out to Galileo was in Descartes' lifetime. Descartes' writing about the 'ghost in the machine' was one of those subtleties. Cartesian dualism might rest entirely on a mistaken interpretation of Descartes' writing. Suppose he wanted to criticize some aspect of Church teaching, such as the doctrine of the seperate existence of the soul. He could develop an argument that would lead to an obviously false conclusion that he assumed everyone as intelligent as he would get. Except nobody got it. He proposed that there was within man a ghost (the ghost in the machine) that was not present within animals. He then deduced that animals were not conscious. In line with this hypothesis he would have assumed that since it was obvious that animals are conscious and do feel pain that the theory of the ghost in the machine would stand as refuted and so would the church teaching about the soul (without him being guilty before the Inquisition). In other words, it was his intent to set up his own theory to fail in order to refute a church teaching. However, it backfired. He was taken for serious and so was his 'ghost in the machine'. Anyway, if I am right on this, so-called Cartesians are as thick as his contemporaries and just do not get it.

It should be obvious to any rational person that animals are conscious and do feel pain. If I can doubt that animals feel pain I can just as well doubt that fellow humans feel pain. What is the difference? They both emit noises when injured but since I am the only one I know for sure is conscious how can I be sure other humans feel pain? This shows that the whole argument amount animals not being conscious reduces to solipsism.

I should also add as a P.S. that many scientists would adopt animal non-consciousness as a methodological premise. In other words they would study animals, and sometimes humans, as stimulus-response machines. This would be, however, to reduce the number of variables in their behavioral model and not because they are really thorough going Cartesians.

At the end of the day they would still go home and play with their dog and yell at their cat.

They Are Out There

I just found a site about a naturalist/artist, extraordinaire. Robert Bateman.

A rather incredible being. Animals caught in the act of being themselves and communicating. ONe can definitely see Bateman's passion for the environment. It's wonderful.

Sometimes people don't hear animals talk and communicate. And yet they DO hear animals when you see the end result of their communiaction as portrayed in their art.

Animal Mind?

This is an excerpt from a book written by one of the leading behavioral ecologists in the twentieth century, Donald Griffin.

There has been a recent explosion of scientific research on animal mentality. Are animals consciously aware of anything, or are they merely living machines, incapable of conscious thoughts or emotional feelings? How can we tell? Such questions have long fascinated Griffin, who has been a pioneer at the forefront of research in animal cognition for decades, and is recognized as one of the leading behavioral ecologists of the twentieth century.

With this new edition of his classic book, which he has completely revised and updated, Griffin moves beyond considerations of animal cognition to argue that scientists can and should investigate questions of animal consciousness. Using examples from studies of species ranging from chimpanzees and dolphins to birds and honeybees, he demonstrates how communication among animals can serve as a "window" into what animals think and feel, just as human speech and nonverbal communication tell us most of what we know about the thoughts and feelings of other people. Even when they don't communicate about it, animals respond with sometimes surprising versatility to new situations for which neither their genes nor their previous experiences have prepared them, and Griffin discusses what these behaviors can tell us about animal minds. He also reviews the latest research in cognitive neuroscience, which has revealed startling similarities in the neural mechanisms underlying brain functioning in both humans and other animals. Finally, in four chapters greatly expanded for this edition, Griffin considers the latest scientific research on animal consciousness, pro and con, and explores its profound philosophical and ethical implications.

The point is, something is happening and something that is being measured scientifically. It's no longer something one just wonders about, but something that surrounds us everyday. We just have to listen, if we wish to.

Never Eat Meat?

It is tough on a 'carnivore' like myself to consider being a vegetarian. But is being a vegetarian really dealing with the issues of animal welfare? You can have another group that asks about plant welfare/the environment and plant consciousness. Crazy at it seems, plants do respond to thoughts and to pain. So what do we humans eat - air?

Within the food chain of life, man exists. His only real known predator is himself. That would be on a planetary scale. Aside from his mental prowess, his 'body' requires food. In the animal kingdom there are no supermarkets, no fast-food chains, no health-food chains. The taking of life for another is matter-of-fact.

What separates us from the animal kingdom, experts say, is our consciousness, our mental prowess and our ability to convert the natural resources which exist around us to our benefit and our defense. As a result, man has created time for thought, reflection and consideration of his actions.

At an early age I was confronted with a problem. You see in my new book, "True Tails", I was forced to realize that animals DO talk and the DO communicate. That is an idea so off mainstream beliefs that I have had to deal with it my entire life. I hear them and they respond to me.

Hand that reality to a 2 year-old child. Tell him to ignore it. Tell him it isn't true and then go watch him sit in a field where butterflies suddenly land on him, or wild birds sit on his hand.

Convince him that he is 'just seeing things' and while you are at it, convince yourself , too, because YOU just saw it.

This is not fantasy, like the new movie "Avatar", directed by James Cameron. Here, beings need to 'plug in' to each other in order to have communcation. But my reality is that no one needs to do something to 'plug in' to life. They already are.

There were many wonderful messages in the movie. So much that the Vatican church has 'pooh-poohed' it and China has taken it off the silver screen.

But after the early experiences in my life and as they continue through the present, I have realized that if animals to a greater or lesser degree, eat meat and actually have nothing on that action, why should I? The realization (for lack of a better word) is that where one's actual food chain requires meat for survival and not pleasure (or because it's nice), then in my opinion, and it is my opinion, it's OK to eat meat.

To clarify. Where man eats meat, raises it, cares for it, and because of his understanding and consciousness takes its life in a manner it does not suffer, that to me is acceptable. But, for example, raising foxes only for their fur to line the sleeve of an ice skater (Weir), it is ludicrous.

What about whales? Well, they don't have a lot of natural predators. They are hunted by Eskimos, yes, but that is pretty limited. Certain countries do continue to hunt them en masse

such as the Japanese. But no longer for survival needs. It's a 'taste' need, or as someone put a 'cultural relativism' need. It's that, well we shouldn't interfere with ethnic tradition and the fact that Japan has been fishing whales for a very long time. So we 'should just let them continue'. Or another thought that 'well, whales are no longer endangered - the population is basically safe now'. So I guess that means that as long as it is 'safe', well someone can keep killing them.

Now, like we have in the United States, become semantic freaks - garbage man is now a 'sanitation engineer', we do the same with killing whales. Japan claims killing for 'scientific research'. Yes and my grandmother played football for the Minnesota Vikings!

Japan, doesn't need the industry any more. That is just the fact. Truth be told, it is an expensive delicacy. A nice to have.

My personal feeling is if there is a culture that requires the killing of whales for it's existence, well then, OK. Like the Eskimos. But that is a rather small population.

I think that as our population increases, then we, as a part of this planet, need to look at how we can maintain a balance, rather than rape and pillage life as most of us do.

I am still never going to be a vegetarian, but I won't do the special order stuff. That's a promise.

Do Japanese eat Akitas?

You know, I just was on a blog site which was talking about Japanese Whaling. Some were for it, some against. Some were just busy doing nothing - you could see by their comments that it wasn't about whales. They just had nothing better to do!

I had this thought. You know, we all have our taboos, what is OK to eat and what isn't. Well, if every animal was 'fair game', I don't hear of Japanese eating Akitas, do you? What is the difference?

I don't think the Japanese take a long time to change their minds. I think it's just a choice. But honestly it boils down to dollars and cents. In this case, yen.

Real life Avatars

I just saw the movie "Avatar". Although it is a Science Fiction movie, I wonder if there are other people out there who have the ability to communicate to animals. It's not "Hi, how are you" but actual communication. Where you know you are communicating to the animal and you know it hears you. Where a question or a problem was resolved and where, sometimes, there has been one of your friends with you that observed this.