Healing Thoughts for Henry

Henry is the kitty of one of my dearest friends. I was there the day he was adopted. I adopted our Gustav the same day. Henry fell suddenly ill this week and it is not getting much better. I’m sure he would appreciate healing energy from all the cat lovers out there.

Get well soon, Mr. H.

A Hard Winter for Animals

Here is an article in the Globe that deals with the issue of shelters being overrun (and adoptions being down) due to the economy. This relates to my post just a few days ago about little ways that you can help shelters struggling during this time.

A Free Way to Help Others This Holiday Season

(Scroll down for bolded text to get to the gist of this message! And the free way to help…)

So, no-kill (and probably those that also euthanize animals) are being totally overrun in recent months. As people struggle to feed and care for the human members of their families and lose their homes, they are increasingly unable or unwilling to care for their animal companions. Donations are down to shelters. It is harder and hard to adopt cats and kittens OUT to families to make room for more (we have had four kittens since April that we cannot find suitable homes for). There is no room at the “inn” at all for many animals, but also no manger for them either. It is so difficult to watch for those that run and volunteer for these shelters that already operate on a shoestring budget and zillions of unpaid hours by people who really and truly give up big parts of a normal existence in order to care for abandoned animals. We do a little bit, but it is really quite little.

Of course, it is hard for many of us to give more money or time. But, for those that do Chrsitmas shopping online, there are ways to funnel a bit of money to these organizations. Animal Umbrella is a shelter in Revere, MA that kindly took three 15 year old cats from us that we rescued from a woman’s house who left town and left her five cats behind to freeze to death (you might remember reading about it a few years ago on this blog). We found a home for one of the kitties, kept for a year and a half Marisol the attack cat who was finally adopted by a kind and loving woman in New Hampshire who wanted to rescue an otherwise unrescuable kitty, and Animal Umbrella took J.R., Goldie and Mama Calico even though they were already truly overun by cats in a small area. Of course, you can imagine it is hard to find homes for very elderly cats. Someone from the shelter actually adopted them shortly after they moved in because they were so sweet.

Anyway, I realized that Animal Umbrella has a link to amazon.com on their website where they get a small percentage of all of our amazon purchases, and this is where we buy significant portions of our books (we buy a lot of books, as a student and professor) and we also buy many Christmas gifts here.

I bookmarked this link which automatically always links directly to amazon but with the code of the Animal Umbrella so they get some of (y)our purchases. So there is no extra work to do. Also, if you shop at other places online, you can register for igive here and part of your purchase price will go to Animal Umbrella. This lovely shelter operates on such a shoestring that seriously cents matter. So don’t think it doesn’t make a difference! This shelter is especially sweet in that they just can’t say no even if they are out of room. Which is sweet, but also causes a host of other challenges, so they are particularly in need of help.

If you feel like writing a check or gifting someone with a donation to a shelter, we volunteer for Second Chance Shelter in Jamaica Plain, MA and this is another small shelter all-volunteer run (just like Animal Umbrella) that is truly amazing. The person who runs the shelter really has dedicated her life (and her house – she turned her house into a shelter when she married/moved in with her husband) to loving and saving cats.

You can send donations, litter coupons, litter, toys, cat medicine, towels, food, to: Second Chance Shelter, 675 VFW Parkway #266, Chestnut Hill, MA 02467.

Anyway, just some thoughts. I have meant for a while to post something about Heifer International, and will do so soon enough. As you can tell from my lack of blogging, things have been a little hectic lately.

Happy Holidays, all! E

p.s. If you know of other good ways to “donate” without actually paying anything (i.e. clicking through or registering or whatever) feel free to leave in comments.

p.p.s. Isn’t is strange that wordpress spell check flags the word blogging as misspelled? You would think they would add that to the dictionary.

Vegetarianism In the Unitarian Universalist Blogosphere

I have taken it upon myself to keep an eye on vegetarianism in the UU blogosphere. Two awesome new posts: one by Peacebang (aka Veggie Vicki) who writes about her first month as a vegetarian and one by Everyday Unitarian who blogs about October as vegetarian awareness month and has a little story about fishing as a child which I can relate to.

Happy Vegetarian Month!

Something Nice (for a change)

With all the dire news about the economy and world, and me feeling really quite busy and a little bit overwhelmed with school and work, I am very pleased to sit here and hear our neighbors talking to our cats from their window to the cats in our window. They have just moved into the building next to us and it must not occur to them that we are home (or maybe they don’t care) because they going, “Meooowwwww! MEEEE-OOOOOW. Mew mew mew! Hey, there’s another one! Wow, how many cats are there in that house? MEOWWWWW. MEOWWWWW. Mew mew mew. Hey kitty kitty kitty. Meowwwwwww.” It is very cute. Our cats are super impressed.  Except Leo who is hiding. He is shy.

Now back to work.

Murray – April 2007-September 2008 -

He was very loved little cuddle bunny who very much enjoyed watching the foster kittens play, being groomed by his best friend Gustav the cat, and eating Papa Johns pizza and as many treats as he could get his paws on. He left us gently this evening at Angell Memorial Hospital in Boston after looking at us and saying (with his eyes), “I’m ready to go, okay?” Wolfgang and I were with him as he felt gently to sleep.

The heart has its reasons which reason does not know.

And such is the case with the passing of our Murray. He still breathes shallowly, his little eyes opening just a slit every once in a while. But his time is here. I have written about him several times on here. He has been sick on and off for many months. We thought he might be better. But on Thursday he got much worse, very fast. Our vet tried some alternative treatments. But they merely perked him up for a few hours, until he descended back into that space between this world and the next. We hope he will pass gently on his own, comfortable in his little fuzzy bed, tucked in his favorite closet where he is happiest. But if he hangs on until tomorrow, we will gently take him to the vet and give him the help he needs to let go. I thought that I would be okay with it – sad, but not too sad, knowing that he has always been a bit weak and sickly, and that he would be far more comfortable in some world beyond this one. But instead I am just overwhelmed with sadness and wishing he could be better and it, well, it just hurts. Logic about how this is best for him and was partially expected doesn’t make it much better that my kitty is dying, and he is uncomfortable and, as a mostly feral cat, even less consolable than a regular sick cat.

My partner, Mr. Philospher, told me so ministerially and lovingly that the heart has reasons which reason does not know. It is so true. Our hearts so often just do their own thing, no matter what we tell them.

Such is this life of suffering and joy and struggle and hope.

May your passing be smooth and comfortable, sweet Murray. We love you.

.

Here is Murray just last week cuddling his favorite foster kitten, Juliet.

The Sexual Politics of Meat and PETA

Carol Adams wrote a good book in 1990 called The Sexual Politics of Meat: A Feminist-Vegetarian Critical Theory. While not without its faults (what book is perfect?), I appreciated the way she made connections between oppressions and subjugations, highlighting what is one my key mantras – oppressions and subjugations are related and you can’t just address one without attention to the others (and certainly not at the active exclusion of others). If you could see the small picture on the cover, you would see that it is a woman divided up into “cuts” – and the question written is “What’s your cut?”

A quick summary – women’s bodies are objectified. The bodies of animals who are eaten are objectified – their pain, suffering, life becomes irrelevent to us because they are objects for our consumption, not beings.

But the whole point of this post is an ABHORRENT image that I stumbled-upon this morning from PETA (see below). I know, I know. PETA doing something that angers someone? Upsets them? Being provocative? Even questionable? Not a surprise. But I found it so upsetting that I will be canceling our $10 a month donation to PETA and finding an organization that does work to lessen the suffering of non-humans animals that doesn’t also promote sexism and objectification of women. It isn’t like I didn’t know that they ran sexist ads before, but somehow this was so upsetting to me that it was the last straw.

Because women and cows are alike, right? And you wouldn’t eat a woman so you shouldn’t eat a cow?

Thoughts and Pictures From Ohio

I’ve been in Ohio for a week visiting my parents on their farm (which they don’t actually farm), going to Arcanum Old Fashion Days where I used to run around every May with my best friend Katie chasing boys and trying to be cool, visiting the young men I mentor and their beautiful families, working at The Kettering Foundation, and thinking about and trying not to stress over my upcoming Regional Subcommittee on Candidacy Interview on June 2.

I loved the the country, the green, how slow life is, how easy it is to drive, how much space there is to prance around in my parents’ yard, how there are barns to explore if I want to, how you can smell the grass, how police and farmers always wave to you when you pass them on the road, how there are no jack hammers outside your window in the morning, and how I know all the streets and back roads and even how I know people at the grocery store even if I don’t really want to talk to them, introvert that I am.

I loved visiting my parents and being and adult and it being okay to extrapolate myself from family dynamics that you can’t extrapolate yourself from when you are 17.

I like how I can have a bon fire in the back yard and make smoores if the mood strikes.

I love how each tree is a tree I climbed, or how the barns are hideouts we made and adventures we had searching for secret passage ways and evidence of a crime we could solve (like Nancy Drew). Each back road all with their names that only seemed strange once college friends visited and told me so (Hogpath or Schnorf-Jones or Otterbein-Ithica or Dull Rd.) is a story, or a memory, or a home I used to visit of a childhood friend, or where so-and-so lived who married so-and-so.

All the memories are not good. But they are mine and taken together they are the first 17 years of my life. Corn stalks, and woods, and barns, and school mates, and religion and all of it. They are rich and dark and funny and sad and happy and complex. Like our lives.

I love the religious signs and radio stations, in a weird sort of way. I forgot how much more religious Ohio is than Massachusetts. I have documented some of them for you (along with other lovely pictures). My dream would be to make a book documenting this sort of thing, except that several of them have already been written/photographed.

*

This is an awesome looking coffee house in Arcanum (population 2,000). You know coffeehouses are main stream when Arcanum gets one.

Except, my friends, this isn’t Starbucks. No cute little signs about the drink special here. Right down to business.

This is a very special cup of homemade lemonade where you not only get the lemonade, but a Bible verse, too.

This is my parents back yard.

And this is their house from the back yard.

And this is the hole in the wall where the raccoons broke in through the attic, down into the walls and into the extra room upstairs. There are some legendary stories involving raccoons in our attic, a hand gun, my dad, an attacking Mama raccoon, and eight year old Elizabeth, but that, I shall save for another post.

This is The Scripture Supply Shop in Sylvania, Ohio, where, apparently, you can get whatever scripture supplies you need. Try getting that in Massachusetts!

But they are not keeping their signs adequately updated. “Accept Christ Now, Tomorrow May be Oo La.”

On the way home from Sylvania, United States Plastics tells us:

Shortly thereafter, we are reminded:

This is Sugar Boy. He graciously allows my parents to live with him and feed him and attend to his every whim.

This is his trusty sidekick Sebastian.

Their sister Priscilla did not want her picture taken until she looses a few pounds. She currently weighs 18 pounds.

This is Pablo, our foster kitten. Just before we left for Ohio, we lost his brother Logan and sister Maria – the first two kittens we have ever lost. Very hard. Especially for Wolfgang who doesn’t really believe in any sort of kitten afterlife. They were just too young to be away from their Mama (who apparently abandoned them, or was unable to attend to them for some reason) and they just couldn’t pull through. We almost lost Pablo, but he is doing quiet well now.

He is considering taking up blogging about his near-death experience and being abandoned by his mom. Either a blog or a memoir. He isn’t quite sure yet. Since he is only six weeks old, he figures he has a little time to decide.

That’s all from Ohio. And Somerville. For now.

Resources for Sharing Information and Sparking Discussion About Vegetarian Issues With Your Congregation

A Unitarian Universalist for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (UFETA) member, Charlie Talbert, shared this with the UFETA list the other day and I thought it was really well done and could be quite helpful for those that are interested. Please feel free to share with others.

Thanks for raising the vegetarian issue to your group. I’m happy to suggest some resources. Many who want to raise this topic in their congregation find that people often want to avoid the topic, which is unfortunate.

I was telling someone at GA last year about a workshop I had just attended at GA, with Doug Muder presenting. He’s a favorite Unitarian Universalist writer of mine. He made an analogy between effective advocacy and Captain Cook’s strategy for greeting island cultures that he discovered in the 1700s. Some of his crew would leave items of interest on the beach and row back out to their sailing ship. Afterwards the island inhabitants would cautiously approach the beach and investigate what the Europeans had offered them. They might then similarly leave items they considered valuable on the beach and retreat, giving the Europeans an opportunity to row back in and have a look. This careful, non-threatening approach facilitated communication and mutual understanding between these groups where who were wide apart in traditions, culture, and language.

As you probably know, some Unitarian Universalist congregations have experienced some controversy over the idea of banning meat in the congregation all together. I believe it’s ineffective to try to ban animal products at congregational functions. The suffering inherent in animal agriculture is too entrenched, too accepted by even Unitarian Universalists – who have a heritage of questioning traditions that institutionalize cruelty – to be challenged so directly.

Members of UFETA regularly share what’s going on in their congregations on this issue, and exchange information and ideas. Perhaps some members of your fellowship would be interested in joining the listserve. UFETA’s website is at http://www25.uua.org/ufeta/. Instructions for joining the listserve are at http://lists.uua.org/mailman/listinfo/ufeta

Advocacy can take two approaches that can be summed up by two words: unnecessary suffering.

It’s the “suffering” part that sometimes makes people squeamish. That’s why much of our denominational advocacy focuses on the “unnecessary” part – that shows a vegetarian diet can be tasty, satisfying, and healthy. We have presented “Cooking With The Compassionate Cooks” at my congregation here in Kenosha and one close by in Racine.

This DVD is upbeat, entertaining and full of information about nutrition, basic ingredients, and delicious but simple recipes. We have prepared some of the dishes demonstrated in the DVD and served them afterwards. We have also displayed the ingredients (e.g. tofu, seitan, tempeh) with information about where they can be obtained in our community.

The founder of Compassionate Cooks began her cooking classes at First Unitarian in Oakland when she was a member there. She is now well known in vegetarian cooking circles and has appeared on the Cooking Channel. You can see more information about her and her DVD at http://www.compassionatecooks.com/ .

Vegetarian food can be not only tasty and satisfying, it can be much healthier than a diet with animal products. People are increasingly accepting this, but the protein and other nutrient myths are still out there. No group I’m aware of challenges these myths more authoritatively than the Physicians Committee For Responsible Medicine. Their website offers a lot of useful nutritional information that can be downloaded or purchased for sharing with others www.pcrm.org/.

But showing the pleasures and health benefits of a vegetarian diet is not enough to persuade some people to consider their food choices. They like to eat animal products. They’re tolerant of those who don’t, but they don’t what to be “told what to do.” To them, this is a “freedom” issue, and freedom is fundamental to Unitarian Universalism. In my opinion, it’s an admirable “live and let live” ethic that – in this case – humans want to apply selectively: to themselves but not to other animals.

The moral issue is a sensitive one, but I believe it’s a legitimate one for religion to consider. In my observation, it’s usually the more conservative people who object to it the most, which is why Matthew Scully’s writings are so important.

Scully is a political conservative and former senior speechwriter for President Bush. His 2002 book, Dominion – The Power of Man, The Suffering of Animals, and the Call to Mercy, has influenced many people, including me. You can get an idea of his considerable writing abilities from his 2005 cover story “Fear Factories: The Case for Compassionate Conservatism – for Animals” for Patrick Buchanan’s magazine, The American Conservative. www.matthewscully.com/fear_factories.htm. Our UFETA chapter has made this article available at our church. The word “conservative” can spark some curiosity in a UU congregation!

Our UFETA and Green Sanctuary chapters have also displayed this pamphlet www.veganoutreach.org/cc.pdf on their table. It has drawn attention particularly among our congregation’s younger members. Vegan Outreach is a primarily volunteer organization that hands out over a million of its pamphlets every year at colleges and high schools, primarily in the U.S. Its posters were used in the two-page advocacy ads that UFETA sponsored in the UU World in May 2006 and May 2007. (This May the UU World will have a statement signed by 40 or so Unitarian Universalist ministers and seminarians.) We also make available PETA’s Vegetarian Starter Kit, which offers a concise overview of the issues and some very appealing pictures of veg food.

I would also recommend the DVD Peaceable Kingdom. It has influenced a number of people in our congregation, including our minister and her partner, who went from vegetarian to vegan after seeing it. It’s produced by Tribe of Heart www.tribeofheart.org/, and its other film, The Witness, is also outstanding. You can see a trailer for the yet to be released newest version of Peaceable Kingdom at www.tribeofheart.org/tohhtml/pk3previewhome.htm. Tribe of Heart is not distributing the older versions any longer.

If your fellowship has Christian members, then I would recommend materials from the Christian Vegetarian Association www.all-creatures.org/cva/ . Its DVD “Honoring God’s Creation” is wonderful. It includes Fr. John Dear, a board member of the CVA who coincidentally will be speaking at GA in Ft. Lauderdale on Jesus and the question of peace.

Many Unitarian Universalist congregations provide lay led services. If yours does, then members in your fellowship may want to use the opportunity to provide a sermon. Some of these are available at the UFETA website under the “Resources” tab.

As you may know, one of two Study Action Issues that the GA is currently considering for 2008-2011 is “Ethical Eating: Food and Environmental Justice”. If it is selected as an SAI, this would present an excellent opportunity for discussion in your fellowship. You can find more information about it at www.uua.org/socialjustice/issuesprocess/currentissues/55648.shtml

Thanks for taking the time to raise this very important issue in your congregation.

-By Charlie Talbert, May 2008