Segen

Lincoln was a truly great politician and president–with qualities of decency and morality–kindness, sensitivity, compassion, honesty, and empathy. After recently reading Doris Kearns Goodwin’s Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln, I recognized that Lincoln’s morality included a duty to animals. I think he believed in animal rights.

Let me share an excerpt of Goodwin’s book:

“The melancholy stamped on Lincoln’s nature derived in large part from an acute sensitivity to the pains and injustices he perceived in the world. He was uncommonly tenderhearted. He once stopped and tracked back half a mile to rescue a pig caught in a mire—not because he loved the pig, recollected a friend, ‘just to take a pain out of his own mind.’ When his schoolmates tortured turtles by placing hot coals on their backs to see the wriggle, he told them ‘it was wrong.’ He refused to hunt animals, which ran counter to frontier mores,” (103-104).

In a political speech, Lincoln later compared tortured turtles wriggling out of their shells to crooked politicians wriggling out of their skin. Lincoln’s diet also gave me a hunch to his possible vegetarian and animal rights viewpoint; he ate bread, jam, usually one egg, and coffee and stayed away from meat. He was thin for a reason! In arson on the White House horse stables, six horses died. President Lincoln was in tears over the horses’ deaths (603). Lincoln also got a kick out of humanizing animals: Lincoln’s son Tad had a pet turkey and Lincoln asked his son whether or not his turkey intended to vote. Tad replied that his turkey was “not of age”. Lincoln dearly loved the quick-witted answer and recounted the story to others for days (664).

I also found quotes online from Lincoln that confirmed my suspicions that Lincoln believed in animal rights:

“I care not for a man’s religion whose dog or cat is not the better for it…I am in favor of animal rights as well as human rights. That is the way of a whole human being.”

“I could not have slept to-night if I had left that helpless little creature to perish on the ground. (reply to friends who chided him for delaying them by stopping to return a fledgling to its nest.)”

Lincoln’s animal rights beliefs were probably founded from the same principles he applied to civil rights. Blacks were tortured and treated like animals when enslaved. If it was conceivable that blacks suffer, feel pain, and deserve rights, then it is conceivable that animals suffer, feel pain, and should have rights, as well. In the US, we now recognize blacks not as animals, but as humans, as citizens—with rights in this country. Can this also be extrapolated to animals?

Lincoln was a man ahead of his time in many regards. Was he on to something?

(Other famous vegetarians: Einstein, Aristotle, Darwin, Kant, Thoreau, Tolstoy, Da Vinci, Plato, Socrates, Rosa Parks, Corretta Scott King, Susan B. Anthony, van Gogh, Voltaire, Edison, Emerson, Henry Ford, Gandhi, Steve Jobs, Kafka, Martin Luther, Newton, Pythagorus, Rousseau, Upton Sinclair, Mark Twain, Kellog, and possibly Franklin, Jefferson, and Paine.)

Raising animals for food generates 18% more greenhouse gases than all the cars and trucks in the world combined, according to a report by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization. Aside from atmospheric impacts, animal farming is also linked with land, water, and biodiversity degradation.

According to a UN press release, “When emissions from land use and land use change are included, the livestock sector accounts for 9 percent of CO2 deriving from human-related activities, but produces a much larger share of even more harmful greenhouse gases. It generates 65 percent of human-related nitrous oxide, which has 296 times the Global Warming Potential (GWP) of CO2. Most of this comes from manure. And it accounts for respectively 37 percent of all human-induced methane (23 times as warming as CO2), which is largely produced by the digestive system of ruminants, and 64 percent of ammonia, which contributes significantly to acid rain.”

Animal farming contributes to water contamination—with pollutants such as animal waste, antibiotics, hormones, chemicals, fertilizers, and pesticides entering the water sources. Animal farming is also leading to soil erosion and desertification through improper grazing.

Not only is the land where animals graze an issue, but the land used to grow animal feed is also an issue. According to Michigan State University Professor Bruce Dale, “We grow animal feed, not human food in the United States,” “We could feed the country’s population with 25 million acres of cropland, and we currently have 500 million acres. Most of our agricultural land is being used to grow animal feed.”

In 1900 just over 10% of the total grain grown worldwide was fed to animals; by 1950 this figure had risen to over 20%; by the late 1990s it stood at around 45%. Over 60% of US grain is fed to livestock.

Think how those millions of acres of crop-land products could be used to feed other humans in the world, and not animals. The UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) estimates that around 840 million people are undernourished. That’s about 14% of the human population. On average, around 25,000 people die every day from hunger-related causes.

In terms of protein efficiency, humans would be better off eating the protein-rich grains that animals eat, rather eating the animal—which requires energy, food, water, and other resources to “make” protein. (Think veggie burgers vs. beef patties). The prospect for a more protein-efficient use of the land looks bleak, however. Global meat production is projected to more than double from 229 million tons in 1999/2001 to 465 million tons in 2050, while milk output is set to climb from 580 to 1043 million tons.

Men’s Health editor-in-chief David Zinczenko has a new book out—Eat This, Not That!

Highlights of bad foods:

• Worst Fast Food Meal: McDonald’s Chicken Selects Premium Breast Strips with creamy ranch sauce. Chicken sounds healthy, but not at 830 calories.
• Worst Drink: Jamba Juice Chocolate Moo’d Power Smoothie. With 166 grams of sugar, you could have had eight servings of Ben & Jerry’s.
• Worst Supermarket Meal: Pepperidge Farm Roasted Chicken Pot Pie. It packs 64 grams of fat.
• Worst “Healthy” Burger: Ruby Tuesday Bella Turkey Burger. With 1,145 calories, not a very healthy choice.
• Worst Airport Snack: Cinnabon Classic Cinnamon Roll. Packed with 813 hot gooey calories and 5 grams of trans fats.
• Worst Kids’ Meal: Macaroni Grill Double Macaroni ‘n Cheese. With 62 fat grams, it’s the equivalent of 1.5 full boxes of Kraft Mac ‘n Cheese.
• Worst Salad: On the Border Grande Taco Salad with Taco Beef. A salad with 102 grams of fat and 2,410 mg of sodium.
• Worst Dessert: Chili’s Chocolate Chip Paradise Pie with Vanilla Ice Cream. At 1,600 calories, it’s like eating the caloric equivalent of three Big Macs.

What makes me sick is the lack of food information on fast-foods and restaurant foods. Even foods you can buy in the store with nutrition labels, I would wager than a majority of Americans do not know how to read nutrition labels. I applaud the federal government for requiring labels, but what good do the labels do if the general consumer cannot understand the information? The nutrition label system is like giving consumers access to prescriptions drugs and saying “here’s the information on the drugs…you decide what to do now.” Where is the doctor in that equation? For food, where does the nutritionist fit in our lives? It is obvious that the current method of “put the information out there and let the people decide on their own diets” is not getting America any healthier–and it costs not only the individuals themselves–but American taxpayers, too ($117 Billion total cost of obesity in 2000). There needs to be a new approach to America’s nutrition–perhaps–nutrition education campaigns? Requirements of fatty, sodium-ridden, empty-calorie foods to carry a warning label? I don’t know–what do you think? One start is to begin educating yourself on nutrition.

The 2003-2004 National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey estimate 66 percent of U.S. adults are either overweight or obese and the Department of Health and Human Services notes that approximately 300,000 deaths each year in the United States may be attributable to obesity. To put that in perspective, 400,000 Americans die from cigarette smoking each year.

Check out the terrifying trends in obesity from 1985 to 2006 watching this interactive map.

Nicholas Kristoff of the New York Times wrote an article discussing the broader reality of prostitution–for most–it is a waking nightmare.

Article: “The Pimp’s Slaves”

Some highlights from the article:

“Sometimes I meet a girl who says, ‘I have a really good pimp — he beats me only with an open hand,’ said Rachel Lloyd, a former prostitute who runs a program for underage prostitutes in NYC.”

“Pimps crush runaway girls with a mix of violence and affection, degradation and gifts, and then require absolute obedience to a rigid code: the girl cannot look the pimp in the eye, call him by his name, or keep any cash.”

“Every evening she must earn a quota of money before she can sleep. She may be required to tattoo the pimp’s name on her thigh. “

“Last year she [Ms. Llyod] worked with 250 teenage girls who had been prostituted, and not one of them ever merited an Amber alert.”

“With prostitution as with narcotics, no legal model has worked perfectly. I’ve argued that the approach with the best record is the Swedish model — decriminalizing the sale of sex, while making it an offense to pimp or to buy sex.”

I was once subjected to the song “A boy named Sue” by Johnny Cash after making the mistake of riding in Billy Joe Mills’ van; for those of you who know Billy…perhaps the debris, litter, and rotting food should have been an indicator for me not to enter the vehicle. The song is about a boy whose mean-spirited father named him “Sue” and the strife the boy suffered in his life because of the name.

But what’s really in a name? Did the boy named “Sue” really have name-related problems in his life? According to a NYT article today, the boy named “Sue” shouldn’t have had a problem in life because of his name. The NYT author argues that names *generally* do not have a bearing on a person’s success or failure in life. Previous studies showed that children with unusual names did more poorly in school and were more emotionally disturbed than their common-named peers. This conclusion was debunked recently when studies that controlled for race and ethnicity showed that children with uncommon names performed as well as their peers. The poor test scores and the emotional disturbances were more likely related to poverty or less-educated parents whose poor-parenting skills would allow them to select odd names such as “Ima Pigg” or “Lotta Beer” for their children…

While reading the NYT article, I was reminded of the baby-name laws in Germany. Germans must name their children a name that clearly identifies the child’s gender—feminine names for girls and masculine names for boys. The name must also not be offensive, derogatory, or cause the child harm in any way. There are also a set of names that are banned, such as Hitler and Osama (as in, Osama bin Laden). Sweden and Denmark have similar legislation. France passed a naming-conventional law in the 1800s that restricted parents to names on a pre-approved list; that law was rescinded in 1993. In 2007, however, Venezuela proposed a bill that would limit parents to a list of 100 government-approved names when naming their children. I am not sure if this Venezuelan bill passed.

In light of this information indicating that names have no bearing on a child’s success, I wonder if these name-laws are pointless–or if there is some value in the naming-conventions. I know I certainly would have a problem being named “Satan” or some other equally “creative” word, but I wonder if “Segen” (meaning “Blessing”) would have made the government-cut…