Constrained Choice and Owning the Wilderness

Bow can choose whether he wants an apple or some yogurt.

He can choose whether to stay inside or go out.

He can choose to exercise or to rest.

But these are all constrained choices, and he can't, for instance, choose to move to Africa tomorrow. Then again, neither can I.  My choices are constrained, too, though, admittedly, not as much.

Bow can no more change his place of residence by mere choice, than I can go live next door instead of here, without consulting the neighbors about it, or emigrate to a different country without getting permission from the local authorities.  We are all very constrained about where we are allowed to go.

Many people would like to come live here, but they can't.  Many others may want to leave this area, but they don't know how. Not without a job or a place to live or some friends or someone to support them.

People sometimes feel trapped. They may want to go live someplace else, but they can't, unless the people who are in charge of someplace else agree, and even then, they would have to live by rules set down by the people in charge there. Most Americans who are out of work do not even consider working abroad. The natural emigration out of difficult economic circumstances is thwarted by borders -- real and psychological. When there is a famine in one country, people tend to go someplace else where there is no famine, but sometimes the life that they find there is not good.

Sometimes people become enslaved, because they don't know any other way to live. Involuntary servitude happens when choices are so constrained that in order to live, you have to do another person's bidding. whether you like it or not.

Bow is not a slave, because he does not have to work for a living at all, and can choose what he does, albeit from a limited menu of choices. He is not supporting me. I am supporting him. He does not serve me; I serve him. I serve him all day long, meeting his  basic needs, so much so that I can't really leave or go someplace else until he goes to sleep each night, unless I have a sitter.

But wouldn't it be better if Bow were free, free to live in his natural habitat? Yes, much in the same way that it would be good if I could go live free in my natural habitat. But my natural habitat has been destroyed, and his is in the process of being destroyed. So we are refugees, in a way, both of us.

In this article from the New York Times, George Monibot addresses the great loss that most humans have suffered by the ecological changes that humanity has wrought.

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/19/opinion/our-ecological-boredom.html

While part of this lament resonates for me, another aspect of the article is very annoying. Like most people who are allowed to publish articles in the New York Times, Monibot is a left-winger. So he gets in a few jabs at an unconstrained economy before proceeding with his paean to primitive living.

We fetishize the freedom of business from state control; the freedom not to pay taxes; the freedom to carry guns and speak our minds and worship whom we will. But despite, in some cases because of, this respect for particular freedoms, every day the scope of our lives appears to contract.

We most certainly are not free to conduct our business any way we want, and where did he get this freedom not to pay taxes? I don't know of anyone who has such a freedom, whether the taxes are on income, purchased items or on the real estate and personal property that we already own, but must keep paying taxes on every year in order to be allowed to continue to own them. And yes, this taxation has a great deal to do with the constraints on our choice to live a more primitive life.

Property taxes are kept high so that land will be maximally exploited. Small farms have ceded to large, corporate agriculture not because the small farmers did not want to hold onto their family farms, but because regulation of food production, taxes on income and on land ownership and other government created pressures, including inheritance taxes that apply to the family farm when one generation ends and another takes over, have over the past hundred years pretty much eliminated the majority of privately held farming operations. Now many people who want to farm have to do it on the weekend, as a hobby, while they work in  a big city all week long.

Monibot is actually aware of this, and he has a plan for what to do with the abandoned family farm:

Across many rich nations, especially the United States, global competition is causing the abandonment of farming on less fertile land. Rather than trying to tame and hold back the encroaching wilds, I believe we should help to accelerate the process of reclamation, removing redundant roads and fences, helping to re-establish missing species, such as wolves and cougars and bears, building bridges between recovering habitats to create continental-scale wildlife corridors, such as those promoted by the Rewilding Institute.

I have not heard of this Rewilding Institute, but it sounds sinister. Mind you, I am allowing my own land to go wild just by not tending to it.

I don't need an institute to help me do that. My fences are crumbling on their own, my woods are being reclaimed without planting.  I just need to be left alone. In the wild corridors that Monibot envisions, will humans be allowed? Will they be allowed to hunt for a living and to become hunter-gatherers again? Or will government thugs keep these wild corridors wild by keeping everyone out? Will it be a paradise no one is allowed to enter, much less live in?

The wonderful thing about a wild existence is that you are allowed to pick all the flowers, hunt all the wildlife, eat all you can eat at a buffet served by nature, with only your strength to prevent others from encroaching on your own little eden. I wish I could give that to Bow, but how can I, when I can't even win this for myself? Taxation and regulation are a big part of the reason why.

All around the world, primates are being deported from their natural habitats and sent to sanctuaries and zoos, just as aboriginal people are moved to reservations.  Even macaques in Gibraltar get shipped off to places like Scotland, when doing what comes naturally bothers the people in charge.

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/oct/11/gibraltar-barbary-macaques-deported-scottish-safari-park-blair-drummond

The same people who believe in universal healthcare and high taxation of asset ownership  -- who think children should not be allowed to inherit the property that parents leave behind -- are the people who decry the loss of nature. Can't they see that it's their own policies that lead to this?

If real wealth is the ability to control vast expanses of nature, then aboriginal tribes wherever they are found are the richest people on earth. But they are also a small elite: less than the one percent. And yet most of the people who hate the wealthy don't think that less than one percent should be allowed to own wealth that, if exploited to the fullest, could feed billions of people. The policy articulated by James Monroe  in his presidential address  is the policy that most liberals support against the wealthy.

The hunter state can exist only in the vast uncultivated desert. It yields to the more dense and compact form and greater force of civilized population; and of right it ought to yield, for the earth was given to mankind to support the greatest number of which it is capable, and no tribe or people have a right to withhold from the wants of others more than is necessary for their own support and comfort.

 When you speak out against the one percent, remember this address by President Monroe and who the one percent are and always have been.

Olives and Rocks

The cat has been seen to be consorting with the neighbor's dogs. She was away for a while, after killing a giant cream-colored rat and leaving the corpse under my tulip tree. After that, she disappeared for a while, only to reappear when I was giving guests a tour of the orchard. She emerged from the neighbor's field, and with her came the neighbors' dog, Cowboy, and the two seem to be on very good terms. I think when she is not over on our front porch, the cat is hanging out with the neighbor's dogs. This gives me hope that maybe she is actually owned by the neighbors, and they are the ones who are feeding her and seeing to her medical needs.

Ownership of animals can be a very fluid concept out here in the country, in that a cat may feel that it owns more than one family. Coming from the city, we expect a kind of pet "monogamy", where every pet is owned by exactly one household, and every household is the sole owner of every pet. But we had a similar situation once with our dog Teyman. Before I had my eight foot fence built for the backyard, Teyman was free to come and go. We thought she was our dog, and we had her vaccinated and put a collar on her and fed her and played with her,  but she often went over to the neighbors' house and begged for food, got admitted inside, and sat on the couch with them watching TV and being petted and fondled. They even had a name for her: they called her Tiny!

At the time, because I had some pretty rigid notions about pet ownership, this upset me a little. Whose dog was she, really? Mine or theirs? But I had both Israeli and Taiwanese people here who chided me for my seeming jealousy. One of them said: "Can't you just be happy that the neighbors are so kind to your dog? They are feeding her treats and showing her affection. Don't you want her to be happy?"

I asked: "Well, if your husband were going over to the neighbor lady's house, and she was feeding him and meeting all his other needs, would you be happy that the neighbor lady was helping to keep your husband satisfied?"

To this I got a really weird response. "Dogs aren't husbands. That is completely different!" But it really isn't. The question is, in both cases, can you own another living being? And if you can, then does your ownership come before the desires of the being you own?

My friend from Taiwan told me that where she comes from, you do not own your cats and dogs. You share them with the entire community. You love them, but you let them come and go as they please.

Now, Teyman continued to visit the neighbors. and to hunt in the fields for rabbits, and to bring home parts of cows that she had gotten from goodness knows where, until the day our eight foot fence in the backyard was complete. And after that, her roaming days were over.

And you know what? I did feel a little guilty about that. But she never came home all scratched up from a fight anymore, and she had more security. So there are two sides to every coin.

That's what I meant when I talked about the cat having its freedom. Someone I know was upset because I implied that owned cats had less freedom. But it's true. More security means less freedom, whether you are a dog or a cat or a human.

Animal rights activists, like human rights activists, have strong opinions about all of this, and they tend to censure individuals for the restriction of the freedom of an animal and for providing less than a perfect environment. Here is what they have been saying recently about some of my colleagues:

http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/science/2014/08/koko_kanzi_and_ape_language_research_criticism_of_working_conditions_and.html

If you own an animal, and you take full responsibility for every moment of its day, then your resources and their limitations will dictate the situation under which the animal lives. If you don't own an animal, and it is free to roam, then nobody can be responsible for what ultimately happens to it. The same is true of all animals, even humans. We should spend less time criticizing each other for not having the perfect, infinite environment for those we are responsible for and not giving them the perfect diet, whatever that may be. The irony is that the same criticism and worse could be leveled at sanctuaries and zoos, but for some reason, they are not.

When my guests were over, I shared some Israeli olives with them, that my mother had brought from her trip. And later I shared the olives with my daughter, and then with Bow.

Olives are a high fat food. Bow does not get them often, but he is familiar with them, because he has been having olives all his life, whenever we had them. Each chimpanzee owner has his own nutritional theories of what is good for a chimp to eat. I have noticed that some of the same weight issues that humans have are shared by their chimpanzee companions. If the humans are trim, their chimps seem to be, too. We tend to eat a wide variety of less processed food, and it works for us.

I once had volunteers who were eager for a more professional diet for Bow. "Monkey chow" sounded good to them. "What is in monkey chow?" I asked. They had no idea.

I have two dogs at present confined to my back yard. They have less freedom than the neighbor dogs who come onto my land sometimes. But they seem to find ways to keep themselves entertained. For Brownie, playing with rocks is very entertaining.

For Leo, it is his friendship with Brownie that adds the most meaning to his life.

Even  though Brownie is often fixated more on his rock than on his companion, Leo manages to engage him and bring out the playful. social side of the chocolate lab.

There is more than one way to conceptualize every possible relationship between living beings. Those of us who have been exposed to more than one culture understand that sometimes dogs and cats are owned and are happy being owned; and sometimes they are not owned, and are happy being free. There is more than one way to relate to a dog or a cat or a chimp. The problem with people who want to dictate to others is that their view is so normative, that often they can't see the possibilities.

It's not bad to own a dog or a cat or a chimp exclusively. But it is also not bad that under a different set of circumstances that dog or cat or chimp might actually be free and not owned at all. What is wrong is to institute rigid rules that have to apply to everyone in the same way. The circumstances dictate what relationship is best. I keep Bow to myself, because I recognize that at the moment, in our current society, he would not be safe if I allowed him to roam. But I still remember the story the breeders told me about the chimp they had who  broke into the neighbors' house and sat in their kitchen eating cherry pie filling, until the neighbors called his owners to come and get him. No police, no shooting, no violence.

The degree of freedom that is allowed depends on the norms of the society we live in. Right now, my daughter does not get to roam the streets in the same way I did at her age. It's sad, but it's a commentary on the times.  At least I know Bow is safe when I say good night each evening. He can't visit the neighbors and raid their pantry while I am asleep, but given the times we live in, he has a pretty good life.

Bow close to bedtime