Category Archives: Environmentalism & Animal Rights

UPDATE II: ‘Dead Birds Flying’: Help Steve Boyes Help The Cape Parrot

Environmentalism & Animal Rights, Ethics, Individualism Vs. Collectivism, Intelligence, Pseudoscience, South-Africa, The Zeitgeist

Birds in flight are the very symbol of liberty. Yet what do people do to the most sentient, socially and intellectually evolved among them? We cage them and maim them by clipping their wing feathers.

And what a heart has Dr. Steve Boyes!

He has dedicated himself to reversing the destruction humans have wrought on the Cape Parrot. What a heroic commitment he and his team (including Cape communicator Rodnick Biljon, who captures the Cape Parrot on film) have pledged to rescuing the Cape Parrot from extinction, brought about by the decimation of the Yellowood forests of the Eastern Cape. (Your host hails from Cape Town.)

The Cape Parrot Project is one of my favored charities. Owned as I am by an Un-Cape Parrot (a genetic relative to the wild Cape Parrot), I’ve had the privilege of experiencing first-hand the intense brilliance of these precious Pois (mine is Poicephalus fuscicollis; the Cape Parrot is Poicephalus robustus). We rescued Oscar-Wood from a cage in a store, where he had languished for 4 years, plucking his feathers down to the pink skin beneath. This, after having been sold into the trade by a well-known breeder in Hawaii.

LOOK at him then (2009):

Another heartbreaking image (2009):

Here Oscar-Wood is today (2012), fully flighted, nesting in a bag of tortillas. This state of relative well-being has come about only because I work from home and am able to give him the attention and freedom he requires to thrive. And still he plucks; once acquired, this neurotic habit is hard to eliminate.

Oscar-Wood has a facility with … wood (all parrots require wood, preferably from a tree, in the wild):

WARNING. Do not try the above at home. By all means, rescue an abandoned and abused parrot, but do not fuel the wicked pet parrot trade, which everywhere and always involves breeding mills, inhumane by definition. As to wild-life traffickingg … words fail.

Those who’ve bothered to get to know a parrot in flight, if hobbled horribly by the walls of a house (the Cape, for example, can fly hundreds of kilometers in a day), know this: Out of a cage, free to be adorable and impossible as only hookbills are—parrots are so much smarter than any of the domesticated animals (and than some of your neighbors).

Even showmen such as parrot whisperer Clint Carvalho attests that the larger parrots are “twenty times smarter than dogs.” I’m not sure how Carvalho quantifies his findings, but these sound about right.

Know a politician with this magic macaw’s problem-solving skills? Tan’s Japanese admirers are enthralled. As well they should be. Watch Tan solve an impossible magic-cube like puzzle:

What’s positive about Carvalho is that, unlike your average avian dabbler, he has realized that parrots acquire rudimentary language (often greater than those acquired by the bumper crops of illiterates US public schools produce) through conditioning and cognition, just as kids do.

The cognitive capacities of the parrot, however, match his emotional needs.

Unlike dogs and cats, birds are wild animals, ill-suited to captivity. Moreover, they’re flock animals who wither without the physical proximity of a feathered family with which they fly, forage, communicate and mate, often for life.

The trade is fueled by consumer demand.

Being slaves to authority and convention, the mass of humanity doesn’t much like or appreciate the independent-minded individuals among them. Imagine the fate of a creature as smart, as independent-minded and as individualistic as the parrot?

Consider the cruelty of excluding parrots from assorted public-awareness campaigns. Funds are invariably solicited for and awareness raised over the airwaves about abused and needy dogs and cats. Not so for parrots. Despite their popularity as pets and their prevalence in American homes, natural disasters come and go without any mention of the plight of the Psittacine victims.

Coveted. “Consumed.” Discarded.

That is the fate of parrots bred for the pet trade. Break the cycle. Adopt a neglected and abused animal from a shelter. Support your community based shelters.

AND donate to save the Cape Parrot.

Writes Dr. Boyes:

Most people know about the popular African Grey parrots of central and western Africa, but very few people know about Africa’s most endangered parrot, South Africa’s Cape parrot. Today, there could be as few as 800 Cape parrots remaining in the wild and they are considered Critically Endangered due to continued habitat loss, poor nesting success due to lack of nest cavities, a severe Psittacine Beak and Feather Disease epidemic, historical persecution as a crop pest, and illegal capture for the wild-caught bird trade. If Africa was to lose this “green and gold” ambassador of some of our last-remaining Afromontane forest patches, it would be a sign of very bad times to come… We would have lost one of the last Afromontane endemics clinging onto these forests through their own ingenuity and collective intelligence. Intensive logging in their forest habitat, persecution (e.g. being shot or caught in nets and clubbed to death), nest poaching and mist-netting adults for the wild-caught bird trade, and very little or no conservation intervention, has left the Cape Parrot in ruins with an aging populations in declining physical condition. We need to intervene now and stimulate positive change for Cape parrots in the wild

UPDATE (3/25): Following the Facebook thread.

JP: Point taken, but parrot are picky about friends and partners. The chances of a friendship being struck up are greater when the other parrot is of the same species. Personally, I recommend against taking on two parrots. That’s much like planning for one toddler and learning that you’ll be giving birth to twins. It’s never easier. Better that you be a good parront to one parrot than shortchange both and yourself. Of course, if you do not work, or your work is not too demanding (because parrots are), have a large enough house and homestead (maybe even place for an outdoor aviary)—by all means. Caring for parrots under the right conditions is rewarding. There is nothing like the love of a parrot, once earned.

Baby is currently doing lapse from his cage to kitchen cupboard (or what’s left of it; our kitchen has not been renovated and we’re delaying that job until we can think of how to parrot proof Sean’s planned maple-wood cabinetry).

Oscar-Wood is also talking up a storm. Singing his musical repertoire; knocking, and then demanding, “Hello, hello”; asking if I’m going, “Bye-bye-bye?” and if he’s been a “bad bird?” He’s also doing his raspy chest cough, because he knows the sound worries me. Should I dare to attempt to bathe him (parrots bath themselves pretty thoroughly), it’s an indignant, “Hey, hey!” Tell me that’s not a very decent attempt to communicate.

Northeast Sliding Into Third-World Status? Blame Anti-Energy Policies

Energy, Environmentalism & Animal Rights, Regulation, Technology

“Former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani says Hurricane Sandy shows why the U.S. needs to improve its energy infrastructure.”

“The issue that needs to be raised [and won’t],” says Giuliani, who knows a thing or two about the New York locality, is, “we don’t have the modern energy infrastructure that we should have. We’re operating at the brink. Every day during hot days I’d worry about the possibility of a blackout. I built 10 new generators in NY City to try and address the problem. but had I tried to build a big generator, the environmentalists would have blocked it. We don’t build nuclear power-plants, we don’t expand transmission lines, we don’t put in modern generators. Anytime you try, it’s a 10-15 year process of litigation. We have to modernize our infrastructure, otherwise, we’re living on the brink. Something goes wrong and it’s 10, 5, 4 days to come back.”

“The opposition to [modernizing] projects, especially in the northeast, is systemic. You have to undergo 10-15 years of litigation to put in a new pipeline”

[SNIP]

Washington State is outside the orbits of power, so you hear nothing much about our annual battles with nature and regulation. But as “Dispatch from Third-World Washington State” detailed, early this year, we endure devastating power failures almost annually. The main problem in our state are regulations that prevent the maintenance of a tree-free grid and power lines.

Mayor GIULIANI repeated these important points on the Kudlow Report, implicating Obama’s policies of,

“absolutely just say[in] no to any form of expansion of energy, which is the reason why we’re having such a tough time recovering. … this aging infrastructure that we have. Well, we haven’t rebuilt it, not because we don’t have the money to do it, we haven’t rebuilt it because all these groups oppose every single thing you want to do. If you want to build a new generator, they oppose that. If you want to build new transmission lines, they oppose that. God forbid you should build a new nuclear power plant. Oh, my God, oh.”

KUDLOW: But that’s what Bloomy is saying. I don’t mean to cut. That’s what Bloomy is saying. When he goes down this road of global warming and he also mentioned, Rudy, cap and trade. He is saying we’re going to put limits on the volume of energy, all energy, including, you know, the new fracking energy for natural gas. This is an era of limits. It’s anti-growth. And New York City doesn’t need anti-growth policies and neither does the rest of the country.

Mayor GIULIANI: Well, the reason for the difficulty in recovering right now is that we are always at the breaking point on energy. … I knew this when I was the mayor. I built 10 new generators as a result of that. I really pushed to do it by the New York Power Authority. Where–and this is not just true of New York, it’s true of all throughout America. We operate at the limit. Now some of that is economics because it costs money to buy that excess energy, but some of it is also that excess energy doesn’t exist because we haven’t built a new nuclear power plant in 30 years. … We haven’t expanded transmission lines, we haven’t modernized. And a lot of that is because–I would call them not the environmentalists, the extreme environmentalists who oppose it and just block it completely. …”

UPDATE II: Dispatch from Third-World Washington State

Environmentalism & Animal Rights, Government, Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim, Private Property, Regulation, Socialism, The State

Today, once again, the lights went out in my neighborhood, just as I was preparing to file my weekly column and meet my deadline. The outage was protracted, so the generator needed to be rolled out and powered up. Those of you who’re fortunate enough to be able to remain in the dark about generators—that was me back in South Africa, ironically—should know this: Until such time when you wire up your home (as one ought to do in Third World WA), there are lots of things to do, not least of them lugging extension cords upstairs and unpacking heaters again.

Down the hill, the crew from Puget Sound Energy was visible as the men worked to pry electricity cables from the thicket of trees and branches. As I said before, the grid and power lines suffered mostly tree damage. In this part of the world, the trees are everywhere intertwined with the cable. Why? Why isn’t a wide, tree-free swath maintained around these vital structures? Why are trees not chopped back, in the name of civilization and the sanctity of property, pets and human life?

Here’s why—in all likelihood—we suffer the same severity of damage, year-in and year-out, when snow, ice and wind arrive: the self-defeating dementia of tree fetishists and “Watermelon” legislators — green on the outside; red on the inside.

For one, your property is not your own. You are prohibited from felling unsafe trees. Each request must be backed by a letter from an arborist and a hefty shakedown “baksheesh,” exacted by the goons at the municipality. Such regulation is probably responsible for loss of life, as most people cannot afford to pay the hundreds charged for a permit to chop down an unstable tree on their nominally owned property.

Again, the “Watermelon” worldview creates more havoc than it prevents, and results in loss of life and livelihoods. For instance, because of wood fires, the usually pristine air in our part of the world resembled, at one stage, the air above the shanty town of Soweto. The resources and energy spent–and the lives lost–because of this mess are many times the cost or worth of a few thousand trees.

Alas, one look at Puget Sound Energy’s Facebook Page tells you that the average customer is unquestioning in his supine gratitude to the utility for merely wiring him up again—some after a week. He or she thinks like subjects, not customers.

As long as I’ve lived in WA, PSE has been ill-prepared for our weather. And unless it is beavering away behind the scenes, the utility has been, seemingly, unwilling to lobby the gang of greens in Olympia on behalf of its long-suffering customers; lobby to let it, PSE, maintain a tree-free grid. Puget Sound Energy should petition the gangsters in the Capital on behalf of its customers, who, due to regulation, are catapulted back to the Dark Ages almost every other winter.

And yes, privatization and private property rights that allow all the above would be just swell.

UPDATE I: Welcome to new reader Orin Blomberg. Here on BAB, we all huddle around the epistolary fires of freedom.

UPDATE II: We all love and respect the natural world. Let us look after it as private property owners. Any resources that fall to state control suffer the tragedy of the common. As was explained in this article:

Regulation is always the culmination of agreements between the regulated and the regulators, to the detriment of those left out of the political loop. The state and its corporate donors will invariably come to a consensus as to what constitutes reasonable damages to them, not to the aggrieved. Thus regulation always works to the advantage of the offenders. …
The root of environmental despoliation is the tragedy of the commons, i.e., the absence of property rights in the resource. One of my favorite running routes wends along miles of lakeside property, all privately owned, and ever so pristine. Where visitors dirty the trail that cleaves to the majestic homes; fastidious owners are quick to pick up after them.
In the absence of private ownership in the means of production, government-controlled resources go to seed. There is simply no one with strong enough a stake in the landmass or waterway to police it before disaster strikes. …
Entrusted with the management and regulation of assets you don’t own, have no stake in; on behalf of millions of people you don’t know , only pretend to care about, are unaccountable to, and who have no real recourse against your mismanagement—how long before your performance plummets?

Moreover, in case newcomers to this site doubt this writer’s commitment to the humane treatment and welfare of animals, please read posts like “Who Own the Food Chain,” “A Halibut’s Heart In A Harpy’s Hand,” as well as the many other articles under the “Environmentalism and Animal Rights” categories.

Another Storm in a Tea Cup, Apparently

Energy, Environmentalism & Animal Rights, Government, Ilana Mercer, Media, Private Property, Regulation

This blog title replicates one written in 12.19.06. The repetitiveness reflects the lack of change in the media status of the people of the “provinces.” Thanks for asking, Robert, we are okay, having weathered a major ice storm that hit the Pacific Northwest. But we were without power for close to three days.

FoxNew reported only yesterday that “250,000 electric customers around Seattle, Tacoma and Olympia were without power Friday because of a winter storm that coated much of Washington state in ice, swelled Oregon rivers and brought the expectation of more flooding in both states with warmer temperatures and rain.”

Scratch that: Power went out on Thursday morning. By nighttime, the temperature inside my home had plunged to 52 degrees. Even though we have a generator (purchased after the 2006, first “Storm in a Tea Cup”), we were caught with practically no fuel, having listened—and heeded—the weather reports. No warnings were issued. If anything, our weather experts predicted a big thaw come Thursday.

However, cold air and an arctic north wind saw temperatures drop into the 20s across much of the region. Fluffy snow (20cm, at least), on which I had jogged happily a day before, was soon covered in a thick sheet of ice. All through the night we listened as clumps of the stuff fell from the giant ceder trees onto the house. Fortunately we had had the trees windsailed, so they seemed stable, but the weight of the ice saw big branches snap off like twigs.

We had been thinking of having a few trees felled, for safety. But, as you know, your property is not your own, and each such consideration demands a letter from an arborist and a hefty shakedown “baksheesh,” paid to the local goons at the municipality. Such regulation is probably responsible for loss of life.

Indeed, sadly, a falling tree killed an unknown neighbor, RIP: “The tree fell on a person backing an all-terrain vehicle out of a shed this morning near Issaquah, said King County said King County sheriff’s Sgt. Cindi West.”

This post reflects upon the stasis among the statists and media sycophants. And since any oscillation in the form of a learning curve is absent from the system called the state, local and federal, I will repeat the questions I posed after the 2006 storm in the Pacific Northwest:

Utilities are only nominally private and are heavily regulated. How have regulations affected their response times and, most crucially, the maintenance of the power grid?

The grid and power lines suffered mostly tree damage. In this part of the world, the trees everywhere are intertwined with the cable. Why? Why isn’t a wide tree-free swath maintained around these vital structures? Why are trees not chopped back?

I suspect the explanation lies in the self-defeating dementia of tree fetishists, and “Watermelon” legislation — green on the outside; red on the inside. However, as usual, the “Watermelon” worldview creates more havoc than it prevents. Because of wood fires, the usually pristine air in our part of the world resembles the air above the shanty town of Soweto. The resources and energy spent–and the lives lost–because of this mess are many times the cost or worth of a few thousand trees.

On a less personal note, this week’s WND column was an especially hot one, but there is no point in posting it to the blog now. I will, rather, post the column once it goes up on RT. My “paleolibertarian” column now features on the Russia Today broadcaster’s website. I ask all my BAB readers to “Recommend/Like” the RT column, each week, and retweet it. RT deserves your support for its support and interest in ideas other banal minds won’t touch, don’t you think?

And on a funny note: It was a struggle to keep our African parrots warm, but they settled into the routine. When T. Cup awoke this morning to warm, normal house temperatures and light levels, he demanded happily, in his old cute voice: “yummy-yummy.” And then he quickly comforted himself, “It’s coming, it’s coming.”

A recent image of T. Cup and his “mommy” is on the gallery. To view TC, wait for the page to upload all the images.