The Secret Shame of Butterflies

Bow and I are terrestrial beings. As such, we breathe air, drink water, and take in nutrients from dead plants and dead animals. We breathe, we eat, we sleep, we exercise and express ourselves, sometimes loudly and sometimes softly, and we get rid of waste. We are not angels. We don't walk on air or take our nourishment without harming another living soul. But we are also not hypocrites.

Bow is not fooled by the Butterfly

Our dogs are the same. They play together. They eat. They defecate, And they are so innocent and alive and natural that they feel no shame concerning any of these functions.

And yes, I do have dogs. I own them. And they own me. And that's nothing to be ashamed of, either.

We eat. We breathe. We exploit nature for nutrients. And we give back a waste product, which in turn can be someone else's food. Everybody does that, right? It's nothing to boast about, but also nothing to be ashamed of.

And then there are the butterflies. They flit in and out of our lives, beautiful, resplendent beings, and we tend to put them on a pedestal, as if they alone did nothing awkward in order to gain their livelihood.  The black swallowtail flew right past me to land on a yellow bidens flower, but when I drew closer it flitted away.

This is how we like to think of butterflies -- as beautiful and independent, incorruptible and feeding on nectar and drew drops and moonbeams. But butterflies have feet of clay, too, not unlike spiders.

 The spider has an ugly reputation, because it captures and feeds on other insects.

But did you know that butterflies are not the innocent vegans we sometimes take them to be? One day, I saw a Common Buckeye sitting on something on my private road. From a distance, I could not tell what it was.

But as I drew closer, I could clearly see that the Buckeye had been perched on a dead frog. It rains every day, sometimes almost flooding the road, but as soon as the rain retreats, then we get sunshine, and things dry up very fast. Earthworms are not the only victims in this rapid change of environment, and sometimes frogs wash out of local ponds and end up drying to death on our road. Then the butterflies come out and feast on dead flesh.

You can't really blame the Common Buckeye for what it does for a living. As it gets older, later on in the butterfly season, it loses its ability to fly long distances, and sometimes you can just see it walking along down the road, looking for carrion.

There is no shame in eating what is available when it is available, unless, of course, you have been pretending to be something you are not. The coquettish orange-spotted purple in our backyard gives itself airs, as if it were far above us, and as if we were far beneath it. But we are on to it. Yesterday, we caught it on film eating dung!

The Orange-spotted Purple Caught in the Act

There it was in all its glory, and I, not wanting to disturb it, let the dogs into the house, so that the orange-spotted purple and I would have the backyard all to ourselves. Bow, in the outer pen, was the only other witness. So absorbed was the butterfly in what it was doing that it let me creep up on it and film its every move. But Bow was not fooled! You can hear him displaying at the butterfly in the background.

The butterfly had been boastful and imperious before, suggesting that it was low and base of me to take time out of my research to try to earn a living by getting paid for my time. The butterfly had acted as if it never stooped so low as to be motivated by money or nutrients. It was above all that. It only did things for art and beauty and science and the good of all mankind.  Don't you believe it!

People who utilize nonprofits to make a living hide their profit motive, But the motive is still there. And in odd, unguarded moments, they slip up and let you see what they are really like.

At a meeting of the Global Federation of Animal Sanctuaries (GFAS), the nonprofit's executive director, Kellie Heckman,  stated:

Most of us came into the animal welfare business, you know,  for one reason: It's because we love money. 

Then she realized she had slipped up, and she put her hand to her mouth and made an inarticulate shameful noise. Believe me, that is the one moment of truth in the entire video. Later, that part was edited out for public consumption, in the same way that dung could be edited out of my beautiful portraits of the orange-spotted purple butterfly. I was almost complicit in doing that, because I felt maybe my readers do not really want to know the truth about butterflies. But I decided to be brave.

The butterfly has been preaching to me that I should not ask for payment for my time and Bow's or for money to feed my dogs or to make repairs to my research facility or to put food on the table for my family, which includes Bow and my daughter, and the dogs and the birds who depend on us. The butterfly has accused me of selling out when I do things for a living, such as write for certain papers "which as everybody know, is worse the serving in a shop or scaring of the crows."

But I do good work when I write for the Libertarian Papers. I expose, for instance, how nonprofits are being used by the powerful and the wealthy.

http://thelibertarianrepublic.com/clinton-charity-begins-home/

I do good work for all of us, when I write about what the Federal government has been doing to break up the family.

http://libertybuzz.us/story/gary-johnson-will-supports-fathers-rights/2016/08/17/808/

I do good work in covering the FDA's attempts to corner the market on pain relievers.

http://thelibertarianrepublic.com/fda-seizes-kratom-dea-says-relieves-pain/

I am not a sell out because I want to be paid for my time, and because I don't pretend that I don't like money. Money is not the root of all evil. People pretending not to want money while they line their pockets at other people's expense are the problem.

So the next time a butterfly or a nonprofit tells you that it is above earthly concerns, don't you fall for that. Even butterflies need to eat. And they will stop at nothing to get what they want.

Beekeepers and Bee Breeders.

Who is your master, little bee?

The truth is that there is still a lot that I don't know about bees, even though there seems to be no shortage of them on my property. Some of the bees are honey bees, while many belong to other varieties. But even in the case of the honey bees, I don't know where they live or whether they are free or "owned". And I certainly don't know how they reproduce or manage to survive our harsh winters.

The idea of owning bees may seem kind of silly. They are insects. They fly around freely. There are no collars on them or identification tags. How could you possibly complain that a bee is trespassing on your property and ask for restitution from the owner? By the same token, how would you go about filing a claim if you thought a bee belonging to you was stolen? Do the bees know who owns them? Oxen and asses do know who owns them, according to Biblical scripture (Isaiah 1:3). But bees?

However, not only are there beekeepers and bee owners, there are also bee breeders and bee sellers. If for instance, 30% of a beekeeper's colony dies of the dreaded "colony collapse disorder", that does not mean that next season that beekeeper will have 30% fewer bees to begin with. Not at all. He can simply order new bees -- in a kit -- from his friendly local bee breeder, and next year he will have exactly the number of bees that he wants to have. No more, no fewer.

I did not think of this myself. I read it here:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonkblog/wp/2015/07/23/call-off-the-bee-pocalypse-u-s-honeybee-colonies-hit-a-20-year-high/

I actually did know about the bee kits, because a friend of mine orders them most years. Although recently she skipped a year, and that must have greatly reduced the bee population in her neighborhood.

If you read the most popular news items about bees, they never mention this. They don't talk about bee breeders, and how all of us are counting on them to supply beekeepers with extra bees, to make up for the bees they lose to the vagaries of nature.

They do talk about how we need bees as pollinators, so that even if we don't like honey and could not care less if there were no honey left to eat, we should care if we like peaches and nectarines and apples and pears. No bees, no fruit, they tell us. The earth will be a desolate place, and the only thing left to eat will be hamburgers and bean burritos.

Here's what they don't tell us: if we keep importing honey from abroad, our local beekeepers will stop ordering pre-packaged bees from the bee breeders, and then the local fruit growers will have to find some other way to pollinate. This will not result in no fruit. It may, however, result in much more expensive fruit. Because all the bees will be overseas, working for the local beekeepers who are making a living from selling honey to us.

Everything in life is interconnected, including ecology and economy. An animal has no chance of survival in this overpopulated world unless humans cultivate it, breed it and keep its kind going. That's why if you want bees, you go to bee breeders. No breeders, no bees.

The same thing is true for chimpanzees. If you want there to be chimpanzees on earth in the future, then you have to be nice to chimp owners and chimp breeders. Chimp breeders make a living from chimp owners. Do away with ownership of chimpanzees, and there will be no breeders. No breeders means no chimps. There is no other way for them to have any chance at all to survive as a species. So if you are a real conservationist, you have to fight for the right to own chimpanzees.

Understanding the Denotation of Words

One of the steps in trying to have communication with another person who has a different bias is to go back to basics when we use words. By this, I mean using the words for their denotation and not their connotation.

Depending on who we are, and how we look at things, certain words can easily trigger negative or positive connotations based on our values, belief system and our personal situation. Take the word "cage". It has gotten a bad rap, so lots of people use the word "enclosure" and then everything is perfectly okay. I don't like this kind of game with words, and I think that it causes a lot of misunderstandings. A cage can be bad, if you are trying to get out, and it keeps you from things that you want. A cage can be good, if it protects you from danger: hence a diving cage, to keep divers safe from sharks. Even the whole question of who is on the inside or the outside of a cage or fence is largely determined by perspective. Do our borders keep aliens out or do they keep us in? It depends on the situation. It depends on where people want to go.

 If you are happy in your cage, then a cage is good. If you are sad, then it is bad. It's all in the mind of the beholder.

But when we start to call cages that we like "enclosures", and cages that we don't like "cages", then communicating with somebody else who has a different perspective becomes more difficult. Their values are built into the words, and they can't seem to step outside their bias.

Take the term "concentration camp".  It has a bad connotation for most of us, and rightfully so, but do you know what it really means? I'll tell you what it does not mean: "A bad place run by Nazis." Sometimes when I refer to a facility as a concentration camp, people accuse me of name-calling. But do you know what the literal meaning of a concentration camp is? It is a place where certain groups, to the exclusion of other groups, are concentrated in a given location. Usually, the groups that are singled out for being at that location are forbidden to be anyplace else.  They don't have the right to leave, and they also do not have the right to keep others out. The group affiliation in a concentration camp is usually determined by genetic criteria, ethnicity, place of origin or nationality.

Here are a few examples of concentration camps by this literal, denotative definition:

• internment camps for enemy aliens run by the Japanese during WWII
• internment camps for Americans of Japanese extraction run by the Americans during WWII
• camps run by the Nazis in WWII in which many Jews and other "undesirables" were exterminated
• detention centers for illegal aliens currently being opened in the United States
• chimpanzee sanctuaries in the United States and elsewhere 

The idea behind a concentration camp, and hence its use of the word "concentration", is that individuals of a certain sort, as defined in a certain way, are problematic for those in charge, so they are concentrated in certain locations, and forbidden to be elsewhere. This does not necessarily imply that the individuals so concentrated are going to be treated "inhumanely" or that they are all going to be eventually executed. Many people came home from the Japanese internment camps. Most people made it out safely from the American internment camps of WWII. Right now, many people are assuming that the children in the detention centers are being given asylum, and not that they are going to be treated badly. Many sanctuaries for chimpanzees pride themselves on the humane treatment of the individuals that they house, and they believe they are being given an asylum from bad people who formerly kept them in "cages". The sanctuaries don't use "cages". They use "enclosures". Lots of people can't see past the labels.

Besides it being unfair and unjust to single out certain groups for this treatment, there are other concerns about all concentration camps, just based on the way they concentrate certain  groups in one place. One of the dangers of singling out specific groups for different treatment is that we don't always know what happens to them after they go in behind closed doors. In WWII, red cross representatives were able to make inspections of the various concentration camps. But we know from historical accounts that the things they were allowed to see were very different from what went on day by day. Another danger is that once a certain group is concentrated in a specific place -- even if it is for their "own protection" -- the regime may change, and when somebody else comes to power they may then be treated differently.

For this reason, I don't think it is wise to concentrate all chimpanzees in one of a few locations. It does not work that way in nature, where chimpanzees live in smaller groups of warring tribes, and where the decimation of one group leaves others to survive.

Even if all the people working at the current chimpanzee sanctuaries are nice people, this says nothing about what they are going to be like in the future with changed management. So while I am not immortal and someday Bow will need other people to look after him, I must try to find people younger than myself to take my place. What I do not want to do is to entrust Bow into a concentration camp with changing management and priorities that differ from mine. People my own age or older can guarantee nothing about what will happen to Bow after my death, anymore than I can. I need to train disciples, not give Bow up to my contemporaries, however well meaning.

If I did give him up, it would be back the the breeders, where he could live among his own family of origin. But the breeders are under attack, too, and they are no younger than I am. In fact, they are more senior. I would need to see who replaces them in their own organization and what the priorities of the younger generation are, before I could trust that our goals are sufficiently similar.

Bill Lemmon who ran the Lemmon Farm from which Washoe, Nim and Lucy emerged, was always willing to welcome back the chimpanzees that had been lent out for language experiments. He has a bad reputation and is described as a very scary guy, but in my opinion the worst thing that he ever did was that when he fell upon hard times, he sold out to medical experimenters. If people had been interested in sparing Nim his worst experiences, they should have helped Lemmon with his expenses on the farm. And this is why I react so strongly to the anti-breeder bias in current literature about ape language research. Without local breeders the researchers and the sanctuaries would both be out of luck. There simply would not be any chimpanzees in the United States at all. In fact, I suspect that this is the ultimate goal of the sanctuaries, no matter how humanely they are going about pursuing it. I don't share that goal.

Bow and I spend twelve hours a day in our cages -- or our enclosures -- together, As a result, I am aware of the conditions Bow lives under. If it is too hot or too cold, I know. We eat the same foods, so I know what he is eating, and I know if it's nutritious. We go in and out of the house often, and Bow gets to decide when. This means he has control over his environment. Most importantly of all, Bow gets to decide who is allowed into his space and who is kept out.

The dogs have the whole yard to roam in, but they usually stand right next to the pen, gazing at us longingly, as if the best possible place to be would be inside with us.

Bow has a sense of ownership and control, looking over my shoulder and inspecting everything I do. And I think that each of us prefers the cage we can control to a palatial institution where we are prisoners.

The real difference between a prison and a home is not how big of an enclosure it is, or even whether you can leave it safely, but whether you can decide for yourself who gets to come in.