Attached is the complete manuscript to the groundbreaking anthology I co-edited and introduced, Igniting a Revolution: Voices in Defense of the Earth (AK Press: 2006). Read and disseminate widely. Hardcopies are available here.

Attached is the complete manuscript to the groundbreaking anthology I co-edited and introduced, Igniting a Revolution: Voices in Defense of the Earth (AK Press: 2006). Read and disseminate widely. Hardcopies are available here.
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“China is the main buyer of ivory in the world,” said Dr Esmond Martin, a conservationist and researcher who has spent decades tracking the movement of illegal ivory around the world. He has recently returned from Nigeria, where he conducted a visual survey of ivory on sale in the city of Lagos. His findings are startling.Dr Martin and his colleagues counted more than 14,000 items of worked and raw ivory in one location, the Lekki Market in Lagos.
The last survey, conducted at the same market in 2002, counted about 4,000 items, representing a three-fold increase in a decade.
“Clearly it is the most detailed and comprehensive demographic analysis undertaken for any elephant population, and perhaps any wildlife population, at least in Africa,” says Norman Owen-Smith, an ecologist at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa. It provides a base “for modeling the potential impacts of increased poaching” on other African elephant populations, which are also suffering from illegal killing.
Studies elsewhere in Africa show that families which lose large numbers of matriarchs do much less successfully in later life. They have a low survival rate. In the time of drought, for example, the really smart and experienced matriarchs may take their families to a completely different place, only because they’re experienced. Maybe they remember their mothers took them to a place like that when they were young. That means sometimes that they have to take a counterintuitive decision. Like maybe in a really drought-stricken area you’d have to go deeper into the worst area to get through to the other side. That’s actually happened in Tarangire, as reported in a study which showed that the really old matriarchs knew what to do. Young elephants tend to have a higher rate of survival if they have good leadership.
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A rhino farmer is planning to use surveillance drones designed for the US military to combat poachers who are driving the animals towards extinction.
This lecture was given at a former-slaughterhouse of Aprilia, Italy (now a cultural center) on September 6th, 2012. This talk was videotaped by the Veggie Channel and uploaded to their videopage and to You Tube.
Vivisection is fraud; “biomedical research” is sadism masked as “science”; and animal experimentation yields but a surrealist collage of meaningless data to pimp for the true numbers measured in profit and durrencies that float Big Pharma and the global vivisection-industrial complex far above the regulative power of the state and the norms of accountability.
Bullfighting involves a gang of puerile cowards in pink and purple tights playing at being “men.”
Hunters are dickless eunuchs who compensate for cruel shortcomings of nature and a deep inferiority complex by killing innocent animals in a perverse spectacle and rigged game dignified as a “sport.”
And now, for the last two decades or so, an increasing number of intellectually impoverished and morally bereft troglodytes are joining the worst protoplasmic scum of humanity in sordid kinship, in a profane bond of base bloodletting disguised as metaphysics, deep thinking, and spiritual depth.
Assholes posing as artists seek to transcend their inner vacuity through exercising the pathetic human will to power over animals and sublimating their bloodlust into rarified concepts with alleged enlightening effect. For these narcissistic lunatics think that clichéd concepts + acts of torturing and killing animals = profound “art.”
They pretend that the heinous evil of their demented acts is either non-existent (the aesthetic trumps the moral) or is inapplicable to them as artists. These “higher types” arrogate to themselves the authority for a “teleological suspension of the ethical” (Kierkegaard); bound by rules but their own, these mavericks must sail “beyond good and evil” (Nietzsche), as do, but instead of blazing toward endless horizons and blue seas they run aground on sandbars of bodies rising out of a cove of blood. “Animal artists” — these pompous posers, these putrid specimens of feculent humanity — are as insecure, weak, power-hungry, misguided, demented, and fraudulent as their bastard brethren weilding scalpels, swords, and guns.
It is time to call this “work” what it is – utter shit and pernicious crap that reeks of arrogance and ignorance. “Ars Animalis” is the antithesis of anything remotely related to the beautiful rather than the ugly, to the sublime rather than to the sewer.
Apparently, this outrageous stunt below is real; as a sheep’s life might depend on the outcome of a democratic vote, here is one ballot you might want to sign. In my view, the “artists” should be locked into the guillotine and the sheep allowed to ram it until the blade drops on their fat jowels and pernicious heads which wouldl look more appealing in a crimson-colored basket than on their repellent Homo rapiens bodies.
Wait, sorry, that is not democratic, and thus vulgar, barbarian, and uncivilized. So, after voting for the sheep, let’s have a popular assembly and forum on whether the “artists” — Iman Rezai and Rouven Materne — should be allowed to live …. or … (the guillitine is too easy, too weak in impact and dramatic effect) be pushed from the tallest building in the world onto a street-sized canvas, to make the most beautiful painting ever beheld by human eyes.
SB
Thursday, April 26, 2012
On their website, the artists, Iman Rezai and Rouven Materne, ask visitors a single question: “Soll dieses Schaf getötet werden?” (“Should this sheep be killed?”)
“The guillotine is the most compact reflection of our society,” says Materne in the German-only video, adding that the intentionally provocative work is a “criticism of current morality.”
As of this writing, the online poll has 147,473 respondents answering yes and 289,0463 voting no. Voters have the next 21 days to decide the fate of the helpless sheep.
Animal cruelty in art and culture is not new. One could point to a wide array of cultural events connected to the torture of animals. Bullfighting comes to mind, or any of a number of culture-specific rituals throughout history involving the death of animals, even human sacrifice.
More recently, at the Trapholt Art Museum in Kolding, Denmark, in 2003, the artist Marco Evaristti put live goldfish in blenders, inviting visitors to press the “on” button to kill the fish.
This theme, in fact, was an early one on 13.7 Billion Years. On March 14, 2008, just a few days after this blog was launched, the post was about the artist Guillermo Vargas Habacuc, who supposedly captured an abandoned street dog, tied him up in an art gallery and left him there to die of hunger and thirst while visitors watched his slow death.
Is this art?
Should live animals be used in art?
Does Die Guillotine make a point? If so, what is it?
Will the fate of the sheep say something about society?
Add your comments here.
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