Tiger King’s Critics: Tigers Are Not Objects To Be Used for Monetary Gain

April 04, 2020

“I hope that people don’t walk away thinking that petting and taking selfies with tigers or other wild animals is a great thing to do. A rule of thumb: If a venue offers hands-on contact — tiger-cub petting or anything else — there is some kind of abuse involved. It’s important to understand the real cost of that tiger selfie for the animals involved.”

— Sharon Guynup, National Geographic webcast, April 3

Tiger King is addictive, absurd — and unsettling. It has been available on Netflix for little more than two weeks now, but right from the outset it lit up social media forums in a way few pop-culture talking points have done in this Year of the Pandemic, and with so many people sequestered at home during shelter-at-home orders or social distancing when in public, it was probably inevitable that Tiger King would reach a wider audience than it normally would have.

It’s just as inevitable that initial interest would be followed by a backlash, and this time the backlash is severe.

It’s not just animal-rights activists who are incensed over the way the wildly popular pseudo-documentary series downplayed the mistreatment of captive tigers — tiger cubs force-bred for roadside attractions across the southern US, before being put down when they become too big to handle and too expensive to feed, sometimes as young as four months.

Investigative journalism pieces in National Geographic (Dec. 2019) and other credible news sources exposed the seedy underbelly of the multi-million dollar big-cat breeding industry long before Tiger King caused a pop-cultural sensation and made counter-culture stars out of a motley crew of back-country southern hicks with loose morals and a collective “If-it-pays-it-stays” attitude toward the breeding of big cats for petting zoos and, at USD $5,000 a cub, “private collections.”

As TV, Tiger King is a train wreck, and the producers know there’s nothing like a good train wreck to sell an audience on a reality-TV program.

Animal-rights activists are rightly annoyed, though, that the issues confronting the big-cat breeding trade are reduced to a minute-long — if that — caption crawl at the end of a seven-episode, seven-hour TV drama. For example, viewers learn that there are more tigers in captivity across the US today (5,000-10,000) than there are in the wild throughout the entire world (4,000, and that’s probably an optimistic estimate).

True, Tiger King has opened the eyes of many casual viewers into the seedy world of roadside animal attractions than otherwise might have known about it, or cared. That counts for something. It’s a defence Tiger King’s makers have used, and I alluded to it myself, in a review I wrote for the website TVWorthWatching. Activists of all stripes, regardless of cause, often place too much credit on the value of preaching to the converted. They can’t or won’t accept that a cause, no matter how worthy, will alienate the dispassionate observer if it’s accompanied by sanctimonious hectoring from the pulpit.

In that sense, Tiger King was — and is — the perfect show at the perfect time: adrenaline television shot through with bizarre, over-the-top characters who say and do outrageous things, all to entertain an audience anxious to take their minds off the news of day, desperate for some kind of diversion.

It’s hard to imagine, though, that anyone who watches Tiger King all the way through will have a yearning for more. Few viewers will choose to do extra research into what’s really going on, behind the scenes and hidden from view, at tiger parks and petting zoos. And that’s where the truth-telling comes in.

Just this past week, it was revealed that the self-styled “Tiger King” in the series, nicknamed Joe Exotic (his real name, Joseph Allen Schreibvogel, doesn’t have quite the same ring), has been placed in quarantine for exposure to the coronavirus SARS-Cov-2, aka COVID. He’s currently serving a 22-year prison term in Texas for animal abuse charges and for his role in a murder-for-hire scheme. (Don’t ask; all that is revealed in the Netflix program.)

Anyone familiar with Tiger King could be forgiven for thinking this was a twist invented for their inevitable sequel series, just another reveal in a reality-TV series that made a sport out of outrageous revelations.

And they’d be right.

Joe Exotic does not have coronavirus. The truth, it turns out, is more prosaic: An inmate in the same jail where Joe Exotic was being held tested positive for COVID-19, and Joe Exotic was among several prisoners placed in a precautionary 14-day quarantine. As of writing this, Joe Exotic has not tested positive for coronavirus, as initially reported in the Daily Mirror, among other news sources.

We’re living in a world where seeing is no longer believing, and it’s hard to know who to trust, where news sources are concerned. (Useful tip: The fact-checking website Snopes.com does a good job separating fact from fiction in the rumour mill that passes for news these days.)

The issues facing force-bred tiger cubs remain, however. As Sharon Guynup, the investigative journalist who first reported the story for National Geographic, wrote this week in the Washington Post, Tiger King is not a documentary. There’s a lot viewers don’t see. Expert voices are notably absent. “And the big losers are the tigers.”

If there’s any moral to be taken from the whole sorry Tiger King saga, that’s the one that matters most.

Ruminations On Gabriel García Márquez and Love in the Time of COVID-19

March 31, 2020

“He was awakened by sadness. Not the sadness he had felt that morning when he stood before the corpse of his friend, but the invisible cloud that would saturate his soul after his siesta and which he interpreted as divine notification that he was living his final afternoons.”

— Gabriel García Márquez, Love in the Time of Cholera (1985)

“Until then Dr. Juvenal Urbino and his family had conceived of death as a misfortune that befell others, other people’s fathers and mothers, other people’s brothers and sisters and husbands and wives, but not theirs. They were people whose lives were slow, who did not see themselves growing old, or falling sick, or dying, but disappeared little by little in their own time, turning into memories, mist from other days, until they were absorbed into oblivion.”

The Nobel Prize winning writer Gabriel García Márquez saw cholera as a metaphor in his 1985 classic novel Love in the Time of Cholera. Marquez depicted cholera as an affliction, much like love — psychological, moral and political, an affliction that affected virtually everyone it touched, regardless of class or social standing. The ill-fated character of Dr. Juvenal Urbino, an idealistic physician devoted to science and dedicated to the eradication of the literal disease cholera, trusts in modernity, order and following life’s laws, even as he’s revealed later to be unfaithful to his young wife. He dies one day in old age, suffering a bad fall after reaching into a mango tree to retrieve his pet parrot.

And now we have el amor en los tiempos del Covid, when more and more people are reduced to reading books — imagine! — while in imposed self-isolation and social distancing.

On Facebook and in other social media forums, asked to name a book worth reading in these troubled times, it’s remarkable how often Love in the Time of Cholera comes up. A character in the Marquez novel equates love with a metaphorical plague; the term cholera translates in Spanish as cólera, a concept that also denotes passion, anger and repressed ire.

Books are subjective. No two people

are likely to read a book the same way; it’s not in their nature.

There are certain passages, though, passages that transcend the novel’s sense of time and place, that speak universal truths in the age of COVID-19.

“He was still too young to know that the heart’s memory eliminates the bad and magnifies the good, and that thanks to this artifice me manage to endure the burden of the past.”

Marquez died in Mexico City in 2014 at age 87, on April 17, six years ago virtually to the day. His health had been in decline since he was first diagnosed with lymphatic cancer in 1999; though he recovered thanks to aggressive chemotherapy, he was found to be suffering from dementia in 2012.

His writing in Love in the Time of Cholera speaks to these times in myriad ways.

“Together they had overcome the daily incomprehension, the instantaneous hatred, the reciprocal nastiness, and fabulous flashes of glory in the conjugal conspiracy. It was time when they both loved each other best, without hurry or excess, when both were most conscious of and grateful for their incredible victories over adversity. Life would still present them with other moral trials, of course, but that no longer mattered: they were on the other shore.”

It was almost as though he were leaving behind a letter to be opened at a later date, after his death, when he wrote, “Take advantage of it now, while you are young, and suffer all you can, because these things don’t last your whole life.”

One gets the feeling that had Marquez been forced to self-isolate in the time of COVID-19, he would have done just fine.

COVID-19 and a Greening Planet: Where the Hot Zone Meets the Green Zone

March 25, 2020

“We have long exceeded our limits; it is time to try something new.”

— Sandrine Dixson-Declève, Project Syndicate

I saw a harbour seal at the lighthouse just the other morning, near where I live. There were hardly any other people around, no container ships, no tankers, no cruise ships lining up to dump thousands of tourists on the local pier. A city of 2 million people was eerily quiet, and the seal splashed around happily, oblivious to any talk of pandemics and economic lockdowns.

One planet, one world, our world. The greening of Planet Earth — one of the unintended, if entirely predictable, side-effects of the COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic — continues unabated, even as the crisis itself shows no sign of abating. Satellite imaging from NASA and the European Space Agency continues to show pollution on the wane across industrial cities in central China and northern Italy, the areas most affected by the pandemic. And while it will take a lot more than this for the polar ice sheets to recover, early signs are, if not definitive exactly, at least encouraging.

Teenage climate activist Greta Thunberg has self-isolated herself for the past two weeks, living in a borrowed apartment at an undisclosed location with her dad Svante, who’s also showing symptoms, but she’s doing fine, she told her followers early Tuesday on Instagram. Viruses take no prisoners, and they make no exceptions.

The Fridays For Future school protests have migrated online, and though they may not be so visible on the nightly news, the climate kids now have a wider reach — the worldwide web — and they have a captive audience, as more countries impose a total lockdown.

If nothing else, the COVID-19 pandemic has demonstrated that human societies are capable of changing behaviour virtually overnight, even as it threatens millions of lives. Donella Meadows, lead author of the 1972 Club of Rome report The Limits to Growth and its follow-up 20 years later, Beyond the Limits, warned at the time that humanity’s future would be defined not by a single crisis but by many separate-yet-related crises, owing to the innate connectivity of the global village.

It isn’t just that today’s pandemics can be spread around the world in little more than 24 hours, owing to airline travel, but rather the wider view of an ever-growing human population depleting the Earth’s resources faster than they can be restored, coupled with our collective failure to live a sustainable lifestyle. It isn’t just burning through natural resources at an unsustainable rate but the constantly growing amounts of plastics, toxins and industrial waste into the Earth’s atmosphere, into the planet’s ground water and into the world’s oceans. Everything is connected. Climate change, biodiversity loss and economic collapse do not recognize national borders — and viruses do not recognize physical borders.

COVID-19 is being likened to a wake-up call to stop exceeding the planet’s limits, if only because scientists can show how deforestation, habitat destruction and extinction events make pandemics more likely.

Deforestation, to cite just one example, drives wild animals closer to human populations, increasing the likelihood that zoonotic viruses

like SARS-CoV-2 will make the cross-species leap from animals to humans. (The prominent science writer David Quammen wrote an entire book about this, Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic, in 2012.)

Renewable energy — both the idea and the practice — has received a sudden shot in the arm, even as the fossil fuel futures markets have crashed.

As those satellite images show, fewer people chewing up fewer natural resources — including fossil fuels — has already had a noticeable effect on the air we breathe and the way we live.

Some good can still come from COVID-19. China has vowed to impose a temporary ban on the wildlife animal trade, though only time — and transparency — will tell if he ban is more than just temporary.

This is an issue because COVID-19, as with SARS (Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome) before it in 2003, has effectively been traced to China’s so-called “wet markets” – open-air markets where animals are bought live and then slaughtered on the spot for customers. As Project Syndicate’s Peter Singer and Paola Cavalieri reported earlier this month, virtually everyone affected by the virus since December has some link to the Huanan Seafood Wholesale wet market in Wuhan, a city of some 11 million people in China’s Hubei province.

“In tropical and subtropical areas of the planet, wet markets sell live mammals, poultry, fish, and reptiles, crammed together and sharing their breath, their blood, and their excrement,” they noted. “In China’s wet markets, many different animals are sold and killed to be eaten: wolf cubs, snakes, turtles, guinea pigs, rats, otters, badgers, and civets.”

Similar markets exist in many Asian countries, including Japan, Vietnam and the Philippines

“Scientists tell us that keeping different animals in close, prolonged proximity with one another and with people creates an unhealthy environment that is the probable source of the mutation that enabled COVID-19 to infect humans,” Singer and Cavalieri added — though, in truth, we probably didn’t need scientists to tell us that.

Some truths tend to be self-evident, especially when, as NPR’s Jason Beaubien reported, “Live fish in open tubs splash water all over the floor; the countertops of the stalls are red with blood as fish are gutted and filleted right in front of the customers' eyes; live turtles and crustaceans climb over each other in boxes and melting ice adds to the slush on the floor. There’s lots of water, blood, fish scales, and chicken guts.”

Given all that, it’s harder to believe a deadly virus wouldn’t get loose than it is to believe that one did exactly that.

There is room for hope, though, as Jane Goodall keeps reminding us. Throughout human history, tragedies have often led to important changes.

The evidence is there in front of our very eyes — in the form of satellite images — if only we choose to see it.

©World Health Organization (WHO) - Johns Hopkins.jpg

Coronavirus’ Unintended Side Effect: Smogocalypse Emissions Fall As Virus Spreads

March 20, 2020

“This is the first time I have seen such a dramatic drop-off over such a wide area for a specific event.”

— Dr. Fei Liu, NASA Airbone Science Program

The planet needed to catch a break, and it has caught a break — however temporary that break turns out to be. The COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic and ensuing government edicts in developed countries to ‘social distance’ and ‘self-isolate’ has led to an unexpected side effect. As the normally traffic-clogged streets of Wuhan in China’s Hubei province — and the crowded canals of Venice, for that matter — slow down in the wake of pandemic quarantines, pollution levels have dropped and the brackish water in Venice’s canals has cleared, thanks to the decrease in activity.

Of course, social media being what it is, some reactions have been overheated, with everything from reports of dolphins cavorting in the newly clear canals (not true) to a fanciful tale about a dozen elephants that invaded a village in China’s Yunan province in celebration and drank 30kg of corn wine, getting stinking drunk in the process and passing out in farmers’ fields. (Sadly, also not true.)

Research from a 2016 study, as cited just this past week in National Geographic, shows that our need to share emotional, positive posts on social media during moments of crisis follows the same model as the contagion of pandemics — when fake news goes viral, if you will.

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/2020/03/coronavirus-pandemic-fake-animal-viral-social-media-posts/?cmpid=org=ngp::mc=social::src=facebook::cmp=editorial::add=fb20200320animals-coronavirusfakeanimalnews::rid=&sf231736060=1&fbclid=IwAR1rETPYvfWG3uQeZDIhIq93MkLxDhjw2VzkiGf0-x3uy_XKP5m_bkASI34

That said, there are indications, based on hard science, such as the attached heat imaging satellite captures from NASA that show a marked decrease of pollution in central China over an eight-week period — from Jan. 1, 2020 to Feb. 25, roughly over the course of the coronavirus contagion in Wuhan, the city where the pandemic is said to have started, if not originated exactly. (The jury is still out on that question, and involves everything from bats and flying foxes to pangolins and so-called “wet markets,” meat markets where living animals are sold as delicacies.)

CNN International’s Hong Kong bureau reports that the number of “good quality air days” increased by 20% in February over the same period last year, citing figures provided by China’s Ministry of Ecology and Environment. (Yes, China has an environment ministry.)

China was at the tip of the spear in taking dramatic measures to minimize the spread of the virus — measures that are now being repeated across Europe and North America.

Even as the price of oil has crashed, slowed use of burning fossil fuels such as coal has shown carbon emissions to drop by 25% or more across China, this according to the research NGO Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air.

As China is responsible for 30% of the world’s carbon emissions, that drop is substantial and has had a noticeable effect on the environment, not just locally to Hubei province but across wide swaths of central and southeast Asia.

There is a concern that once the coronavirus threat has passed — if it passes — the world’s efforts will be focused solely on rebooting the economy, which would come at the expense of the environment.

That said, the decline in harmful pollutants comes in direct correlation with government measures requiring more people to work from home, the closure of public facilities and the closure of international borders, which has reduced traffic congestion at the very least.

However brief this period of respite proves to be, it hints at a need to make longer-term changes — more solar power, for example, and less electricity generated by fossil fuels.

At the time of the NASA study, China was the country most seriously affected by coronavirus, since surpassed — in deaths, anyway — by Italy. At the time there were nearly 3,000 deaths across 56 countries. As of writing, there have been 10,500 deaths based on 260,000 cases, 160,000 active and 100,500 closed. The clock is ticking. Business as usual is no longer all that.

https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/

https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-51944780

“Guardian of the Flooded Village” ©Czech Environmental Partnership Foundation-Marek Olbrzymek

‘Guardian of the Flooded Village’ Named Tree of the Year

March 18, 2020

“A few minutes ago every tree was excited, bowing to the roaring storm, waving, swirling, tossing their branches in glorious enthusiasm, like worship. But though to the outer ear these trees are now silent, their songs never cease.”

— John Muir

They evoke feelings of peacefulness and contemplation, they feed the ground and nurture the soul, they’re part of the earth, and are made from earth. Trees represent life, and they sustain life, and so “Tree of the Year” is no idle label. This year’s winner, dubbed “The Guardian of the Flooded Village,” has stood for 350 years on a rocky bluff overlooking the inundated Czech village of Chudobin, where locals in the area insist it stands to this day as a sentinel, warding off evil spirits, a symbol of both resilience and resistance.

The Guardian of the Flooded Village won by public acclimation over a shortlist that included another guardian tree, this one in Romania, witch trees in the Netherlands and Ireland, and a contemplative old oak in Liverpool’s Calderstone Park. Nearly 300,00 votes were cast overall.

The Guardian of the Flooded Village is a Scots pine, pinus sylvestris, in the Czech Republic’s Vysočina Region.

It’s rooted to a rocky headland created by the Vir dam, and has managed to cling to life ever since.

According to local legend — the rural Czech equivalent, perhaps, of urban legend — a devil sat under the tree at night, playing a mournful tune on a violin. Scientists — those killjoys — say the sound was more likely strong winds blowing through the valley, though since construction of the dam, there hasn’t been much left of the valley for the wind to blow through.

Medieval superstition and the supernatural play a featured role in how many of this year’s finalists have been perceived over time. A Dutch beech, fagus sylvatica, aka “The Witch Tree,” in Bladel, North Brabant in the Netherlands, was a runner-up in the final vote; its sinister branches and roots that appear unable to grow into the ground are said to be the final resting place of “Black Kate,” a widely feared female bandit who led an infamous gang of robbers and smugglers in medieval times.

“Witch Tree” ©SBNL Natuurfonds-Rob Visser

Black Kate was said to have witch-like powers, which would not have endeared her to clerics in the Dutch Reformed Church, founded in 1571 at the outset of the Protestant Reformation. Black Kate’s legend lives on to this day, embodied in the form of this twisty, gnarly shaped tree.

The Allerton Oak in Liverpool’s park was named England’s tree of the year just this past autumn; it placed seventh in the continental competition. The Allerton Oak once marked a place of jurisprudence:,Judges would meet in medieval times to hold trials, in the shade of the old oak, instead of a more traditional courthouse.

A large crack in the tree is said to date from the 1864 when a ship packed to the rafters with gunpowder exploded in the nearby Mersey River. Sound from the explosion carried some 30 miles, and countless windows were shattered. Christmas cards with leaves from the Allerton oak were sent to soldiers from Liverpool during the Great War, to remind them of home.

Each tree keeps its own history, of course; it’s just that some histories are more illustrious than others. The original tree of life casts its shadow far and wide.

These are febrile, and fragile, times, of course, and so this year’s ceremony was marked via teleconferenced video, instead of the traditional ceremony in Brussels, thanks to the COVID19 coronavirus outbreak. The competition, sponsored in part by the Environmental Partnership Foundation, is intended to recognize and celebrate the emotional connection people feel with trees, while at the same time drawing attention to the threats posed to trees from man-made actions such as the destruction of ancient, old-growth forests, the looming effects of the climate crisis — and the construction of hydroelectric dams that wash away entire woodlands.

Character is like a tree and reputation like a shadow, Abraham Lincoln once said. The shadow is what we think of it; the tree is the real thing.