Joy – with her toys in Zurich

The One Language Project European Edition is now in progress! Today’s adventures started in Zurich, Switzerland – one of the most beautiful cities I have ever visited. My goal was to find a few farmers to interview over the next few days about their cows, and I was working on a few leads thankfully prepared for me by a local landscape architect who will be traveling with me to the countryside on Friday.

My first stop was the Landes museum which was conveniently hosting an exhibit called Animali – animals used to inspire the imagination throughout the ages. The exhibit focused on the mythology of animals and the way humans have woven human longings, characteristics and physiology with other animals to create the unicorn, the griffin, the dragon, the satyr and mermaids. The video installation was the most compelling, with five large screens seamlessly projecting across the entire side wall of the exhibit with German-sounding mysterious electronica underlying the slow undulations of the various animals against timelapse clouds, milky waters and tree-filled glens. All desaturated colors and focusing on the animals that had become hybrids over the past centuries – the lion, the eagle, the deer, the stag, the snake, the horse.

exhibit photo

To watch the video about the exhibit http://www.art-tv.ch/9849-0-Landesmuseum-Zuerich-Animali.html

After coming out of my near hypnosis from the video installation, I retrieved my precious bag of camera equipment at security and went back to my mission. Cows! En route, I decided to add a couple of dog portraits and their stories, since they all fall under the One Language Project, and how could I resist?

Joy’s story was told to me by her owner Ursula, who runs a beautiful boutique in the old part of Zurich. Here is what she told me:

I got her as a puppy eleven years ago from a farm. She was a mix. She is absolutely crazy about men. She goes to them as if she is in heat. Children love her and she loves them. What touches me most about her is her sensitivity. I could put glasses on the floor and she would carefully walk around them. She’s very careful with everybody, especially babies. You know, she’s a Pisces; she feels a lot. I like that she is still playful, even at eleven years old. She has her toys and they help when she rides in the car. She’s so easygoing. It won’t be easy when she goes.

Joy’s Squirrel

Joy, eleven years old

I strolled along the cobblestone streets in the sun, admiring the beauty of the storefronts and the beauty of a walking city without cars everywhere. I love the cafe culture of people being accessible, sitting still, talking, enjoying the view, the sound of birds instead of cars.

I looked down a long street towards the sun-filled waterfront and saw a black dog lying in the middle of the street. I wandered down and started talking to the owner about her dog. This is what she told me about Santos:

Santos is 4 years old and I’ve had him since he was 8 weeks. He is the third black labrador I’ve had. He’s not castrated and isn’t in the slight bit aggressive. No troubles with anyone. He loves children, especially when they are running and playing. Every day we go in the forest for walks. We have our places.

Reblogged from One Language Project: Stories which show our kinship with other species:

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The One Language Project European Edition is now in progress! Today's adventures started in Zurich, Switzerland - one of the most beautiful cities I have ever visited. My goal was to find a few farmers to interview over the next few days about their cows, and I was working on a few leads thankfully prepared for me by a local landscape architect who will be traveling with me to the countryside on Friday.

Read more… 513 more words

As I get ready for my trip to Europe, I think how Jesse would climb into my suitcase when I was getting ready for a trip. He would lumber over and climb in and look at me. He wanted me to take me with him.

Jesse was so present. Always. He was never checking his cell phone, ipad, he was never looking away as if thinking of someone or something else. He was steady and only vocal with rich, loud purrs, which started to be less frequent as his heart disease progressed.

I used to talk about him as a feline tractor, his purrs were so loud.

His big beautiful heart just grew to be too big for his body.

He didn’t need witty repartee or active conversation. He seemed fairly content to roll on his back and hold my smelly socks in his paws like a river otter does with a mussel. He came to met me at the door without fail until he could no longer walk without too much pain or exertion.

Jesse loved to eat. Until a year ago he finished every bit of his food as if it was his last meal. He relished it licking his lips and sometime grunting with sheer pleasure. When I let him outside in the yard, he would amble towards the catmint and lie on top of the tender green leaves as if smothering them with his vast orange and white body was somehow symbiotically important. The catmint is flourishing now, so it must have been true. Jesse had very clear expressions and when he really wanted something he could look at me with eyes that seemed so wide that they reminded me of the Disney cartoon eyes jiggling with intention.

Sometimes Jesse would climb his staircase to sit on my lap on the couch and would squeeze my finger with his paw. I would squeeze back and he would squeeze me back again. He didnt’ care how I looked. He loved me no matter what, when I was sick, coughing, when I was lonely and feeling boring, when I was rushing and stressed, and when I came back from a trip. He never made me feel bad for leaving him.

In fact, he welcomed me home and then wanted to lie on my shoes.

He loved his catnip rainbow with an intensity only imaginable for a catnip addict.

He was happy riding in the car, showing great interest in the surroundings and looking calmly out the window.

As a tag team, he and George had it down. George would go outside and bring in the mouse and Jesse would execute it quickly, often scuttling across the floor much faster than seemed possible for his weight.

When I gave him baby food on my finger he would lick it with immeasurable gentleness.

He was always loving rolling from one side to the next and since he could not groom himself below the chest, would start rapidly licking his paw when I would clean him. When I brushed him and voluminous fur would come off in the brush, he would dig into the fur and try to eat it as if it were essential.

He snored.

He purred.

He was so loving.

And so loved.

Miranda

June10, 2013

Some good news finally on the elephant front!

Reblogged from Animal Blawg:

Spencer Lo

Behind the sanitized world of fast-food, everyday grocery shopping and culinary delights—all meant to satiate to our basic pleasures and needs—is an extraordinarily vast realm of brutality as normal and routine as our mealtime habits. I am referring, of course, to the often ignored truth of slaughterhouses: that billions of animals raised and slaughtered every year for food are forced to endure unimaginable suffering.

Read more… 723 more words

design and photos: Miranda Loud

The One Language Project exhibit of my dog portraits with essays by the owners opens officially today at Mass. General Hospital’s Yawkey Clinic as part of the Illuminations program at the hospital. I was told that I could make a few remarks along with the other artists during the reception and, although I think art should speak for itself, I delved for more inspiration into my treasure-trove of Naturestage books on animals, the environment, eco art, poetry and mind shift. The first page I found in David Abram‘s book, Becoming Animal: An Earthly Cosmology, was about our kinship with other species as Darwin had discovered and cultures long before ours knew intrinsically.

I found the passage that I thought would be worth sharing on the next page:

He writes…

Despite all our giddy technological dreams, this vast and inscrutable land–drenched by the rains and parched by the summer sun–remains the ultimate ground, and the final horizon of all our science. It is not primarily a set of mechanisms waiting to be figured out, this breathing land. It is not a stock of resources waiting to be utilized by us, or a storehouse of raw materials waiting to be developed. It is not an object.

It is, rather, the very body of wonder–a shuddering field of intelligence in whose round life we participate. And if, today, this dreaming land has been forgotten behind a clutch of flowing screens that intercept the fascination of our focused eyes–if it has been eclipsed by styles of speaking that deaden our sense, and by machinic modes of activity that stifle the eros between our body and the leafing forests–then it is time to listen, underneath all these words, for the animal stirrings that move within our limbs and our swelling torsos. It is time to unplug our gaze from the humming screen, walking out of the house to blink under the river of stars. There are new stories waiting in the cool grasses and new songs.

To reconnect with our kinship with other species and to find a compassion, humility, eradication of loneliness, and an inspiration for harmony and balance is the goal of this ongoing project of gathering animal portraits and stories of interspecies connection.

I only went out for a walk, and finally concluded to stay out till sundown, for going out, I found, was really going in. 

John Muir

Taken in the Ngorongoro crater, Tanzania (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Tonight I watched the excellent and thought-provoking program featuring journalists Bryan Christy and Aidan Hartley and produced by J.J. Kelley for PBS. As an activist for elephants I was very interested in how the message of elephant poaching would be conveyed to a general audience. Here are some of main points that struck me:

805 of Chinese middle class owns ivory and China does not have a history of valuing the elephant as a live animal. The art of ivory carving has been flourishing in China for over 2,000 years and has become a perverted symbol of Buddhism as many of the elephant tusks are turned into buddhist icons in factories set up by the Chinese government.

The program followed Hartley as he traveled in Africa, mainly in Tanzania, to investigate the ivory trade on the ground with Christy who was stationed in China investigating the demand at the high end ivory shops which often sell pieces worth over one million dollars.

In 1800 there were 26 million elephants in Africa. The early 1900′s led to a large demand for ivory, not only for piano keys and pool and billiard balls and combs but as a symbol of manliness when wealthy men went on safari and killed an elephant. By 1979 there were only 1.3 million elephants left. By 1989 there were only 600,000.

Richard Leakey convinced Kenya’s president at that time to publicly burn the accumulated ivory which then evaporated the demand. With little killing over ten years the elephants rebounded to 1 million but decisions in 1999 and 2008 with CITES allowed two sales of stockpiled ivory. These sanctioned a legal trade in the tusks and has made a cover for all sales of ivory where sellers can claim that their ivory was legally acquired.

Only 16 percent of the ivory shown in China is legal.

The program spent a short segment detailing the wondrous qualities of elephants – that they mourn their dead, that they have rich social lives and communicate through their feet with subsonic sound. They showed elephants fondling the bones of fallen family members.

The program delved into the corruption with high level diplomats who apparently purchase ivory (Rhino horn and elephant tusks) from traders and take it back to China on diplomatic planes that are above being searched.

One of the most poignant moments was an interview with a man in China who owns a huge collection of ivory sculptures. When asked how he felt about the elephants he replied that he believed that the elephant smiled and gladly gave its tusks in the service of Buddhism. An example of the willful blindness that people have to justify their actions in spite of clear evidence of the cruelty and suffering behind them. Brian Christy looked at the camera and said “The elephants are not smiling.”

Ivory seized in Cameroon

There were some examples of positive efforts which nevertheless can’t withstand the rising demand for ivory and the illegal encroachments with helicopters and machine guns that have decimated elephant populations in other so-called protected areas. Most recently there were over 200 elephants in Cameroon gunned down in one day in 2012 which were in a protected area.

Hartley managed to convince a Tanzanian ambassador to allow cameras in to the largest stockpile of ivory in the world which houses over 50 million dollars worth of ivory. He suggests that Tanzania which is one of the poorest countries in Africa might be willing to burn its stockpile if someone was willing to donate that 50 million to help Tanzanians regain a financial foothold. The tension is ever present as Tanzania has asked for an exception to the ban from CITES which will be voting March 30-14 in Thailand which has been found to be a nexus for the illegal ivory trade.

The solutions

In a climate where both the black market price for ivory and its demand are so high, elephants’ lives are put at risk by the mere prospect of a sanctioned sale of ivory. If the poaching of elephants and ever growing trade in illegal ivory is to be seriously addressed, part of the solution to this complex problem must be a return to the full ban on the sale of ivory established in 1989.

The following is taken from www.bloodyivory.org/stop-the-ivory-trade

Other measures which must be taken with urgency include:

• Address the involvement of international criminal syndicates by means of strong law enforcement at both national and international levels along the full extent of the supply – demand chain. The effectiveness of this measure should be judged not only by ivory seizures and arrests recorded but also by convictions with proportionate penalties and the disruption of the implicated trade networds.
• Close down domestic (national) markets in ivory, to accompany the trade ban instituted by CITES.
• Educate consumers in order to stem the demand for ivory. A survey in China found that almost 70% of the public thought ivory did not come from dead elephants but that it fell out naturally, like teeth.

The alternative to taking the bull by the horns? Some countries continue to report localised extinctions of small vulnerable elephant populations, a number of others edge closer to losing all their remaining elephants and the larger ‘safer’ populations start or continue their own downward spiral.

Read more and sign the petition to stop the ivory trade.

About Naturestage’s Elephant Project

We are seeking producers to help create a series of short films that will be geared for viewing by high school students around the globe that use short true stories about people and elephants to evoke emotional reactions and responses in various art forms. These would then be used by the students to start a dialogue about how to manage other species and to look at human nature as a way to start to solve what is the largest species extinction currently underway, not just for elephants but for myriad other species. The series would be a gateway to looking at ourselves as well as finding solutions that stem from a heart connection. You can read more about it on the naturestage website and at www.theelephantproject.com

Related articles

• WATCH: ‘Battle For The Elephants’ (huffingtonpost.com)
• Battle for the Elephants Episode 4: Massive Ivory Stockpile (newswatch.nationalgeographic.com)