by Karen Davis, Ph.D. Founder & president, United Poultry Concerns Heinrich Himmler, who founded the quasi-military police unit known as the SS [Schutzstaffel]and administered the Nazi death camps, was initially a chicken farmer. According to Charles Patterson in his book Eternal Treblinka: Our Treatment of Animals and the Holocaust, Himmler’s “agricultural studies and experience breeding […]
The Origins & Spread of Domestic Animals in Southwest Asia & Europe
Reviewed by Jim Mason Edited by Sue Colledge, James Conolly, Keith Dobney, Katie Manning, and Stephen Shennan Routledge, 2013, https://www.routledge.com/. 354 pages hardcover, also available in paperback and Kindle formats. This book is an academic work, a collection of recent writings by zooarchologists (or archeozoologists) on the origins of animal domestication in the prehistoric Middle […]
An Unnatural Order: The Roots of Our Destruction of Nature by Jim Mason
Reviewed by Merritt Clifton 193 pages, paperback. $20.00. Lantern Publishing & Media, www.lanternpm.org The slimmed-and-trimmed 2021 edition of An Unnatural Order: The Roots of Our Destruction of Nature, published 28 years after the first edition, is dated only by author Jim Mason’s new introduction, in which he acknowledges the many changes in the world occurring […]
Making a Thanksgiving place for Tofurky
Eventually live turkeys joined the feast. But not at first. Chloe Sorvino, food and drink editor for the business magazine Forbes, marked Thanksgiving 2020 by looking back 40 years to the invention of Tofurky in 1980, by then-nature educator Seth Tibbott. Described as a “turkey alternative,” blending tofu and wheat with a wild rice and […]
The Thanksgiving Turkey as Ritual Scapegoat
in the Carnivalesque Tradition by Karen Davis, PhD, President of United Poultry Concerns Human radical abuse of “food” animals cannot be explained by economic efficiency alone. It is also an outgrowth of attitudes humans have had toward nonhuman animals through the ages, rooted in our resentment at being animals, which we project onto them. In his […]
Are feminists right to resist comparison with the females of other species?
by Karen Davis, PhD., president of United Poultry Concerns A woman employed on a chicken “breeder” farm in Maryland wrote a letter once to the local newspaper berating the defenders of chickens for trying to make her lose her job, threatening her ability to support herself and her daughter. For her, “breeder” hens were “mean” birds who […]