Animal Husbandry versus Liberty

Bow enjoying oatmeal made with fresh whole milk

Bow is fit and trim, even though he eats a wide variety of foods. He has plenty of access to fruit, including apples, bananas, strawberries and grapes regularly, and occasionally pears, persimmons, pomegranates, avocado, kiwi, guava, locquat and any other exotic fruit we can get our hands on. But he is not exclusively a frugivore. He eats salad with ranch dressing, eggplant fried in oil or bacon fat, raw tomatoes, fried onions, boiled cauliflower and boiled brussels sprouts, and asparagus, baked potatoes and yams, plus other vegetables that occasionally appear on the menu. But Bow is not a vegetarian. He also likes baked chicken, roast beef, pork chops, Big Macs, chicken nuggets and any other meat dish that he can get his hands on. And Bow has milk with his cereal and in his oatmeal and black sesame porridge, as well as whipped cream with his strawberries and sour cream with his baked potatoes. No, he's not lactose intolerant, and he is not a vegan, and he is not kosher; he has a nice appreciation for many different kinds of food, including oriental dishes like hummus and tahini and Chinese pot stickers and rice. Like me, Bow is an omnivore. He enjoys food, and he has routines and rituals, but he is not stuck in a gastronomic rut. He feels free to explore new foods.

And like me and my daughter, Bow is not overweight. He has a well-defined waistline and is built like the cartoon character, Li'l Abner.

Notice Bow's well-defined waistline

What I have noticed is that when they cross-foster, most people end up with great apes whose weight issues are a little like their own. It is usually because we tend to feed our nonhuman apes the same sorts of things that we eat, and also our attitude toward food is similar. It's a cultural issue.

When Sword Met Bow

Cross-fostered chimpanzees get a lot of their attitude and approach to life from the family they grow up  in or the persons who raise them. For instance, a chimpanzee raised Catholic will take on Catholic ritual, crossing himself and praying before meals. A chimpanzee raised by a Buddhist will often display Buddhist attitudes and behaviors, even to the the point of  looking like the Buddha.

This Statue of the Buddha is an Image of Happiness and Contentment

Is it bad to look so happy and content that you no longer have a visible waistline? It depends very much on the culture you come from, how this is regarded. People are too quick to judge.

What if I told you that a certain great ape, deprived of the company of the humans that he loved, has lost a prodigious amount of weight and is now looking healthy and fit? Let's say he had before been so round about the middle that he was beginning to resemble a statue of the Buddha, but now he is fit and trim and his coat is glossy, and he runs around with his fellow apes outdoors, a perfect specimen of natural health and fitness. Is this good or bad? An improvement or an infringement?

It really depends entirely on your point of view.  But to put this in perspective, let me tell you a part of the story of my latest novel, Our Lady of Kaifeng: Courtyard of the Happy Way.

When the Red Cross sent the Swiss Consul to visit the internees at the Weihsien Internment Camp for Enemy Aliens run by the Japanese in Shandong Province, China, he had similar improvements in the health of the inmates to report.

Excerpt from Our Lady of Kaifeng: Courtyard of the Happy Way

When people are placed in an internment camp or a sanctuary, good animal husbandry demands that they be given at least the minimal number of calories per day to live on, but not much more. If these people, when they were free, were accustomed to eating a great deal more than was good for them, then the resultant weight loss can lead to improvement in their overall health. In the same way, lack of access to alcohol and drugs can cause an improvement in the health of those of the internees who were addicts before they entered the camp. The camp has the same effect on the overall health of the inmates that a drug rehab center or a spa can have. But that does not mean that the lack of choice imposed on the inmates is brought about by humanitarian means or that it is in any way humane.

Celebrating Easter

Since both my kids are too old for an Easter egg hunt, I went to that old standby this morning: the chocolate bunny. She got one wrapped in pink foil, and his was wrapped in blue.

Instead of making Bow search for hidden eggs, his enrichment activity was unwrapping the bunny, which can be frustrating to a full grown human adult.

Bow is very smart, and, while he used his mouth to unwrap the foil, he did not chew on any part of it. It came out perfectly formed.

He discarded the foil entirely intact and proceeded to eat the chocolate with dainty appreciation.

Bow eats chocolate very slowly.

This was a solid chocolate bunny, not one of those hollow models you sometimes see. It was manufactured by Zachary Confections of Frankfort, Indiana.

You can see how carefully Bow unwrapped the bunny

Having chocolate bunnies for Easter is a tradition in my family of origin since 1970.

I don't remember ever having been on an Easter egg hunt as a small child. I think we went straight from Israel's passover to chocolate bunnies for the whole family as a celebration in the United States. For a fictional account of the culture shock, you can read my short story, The Punky-Wunkies. It's in two parts, and here is the second one: Punky Wunkies, Part Two. 

My mother says that when she was growing up, foil wrappers from chocolates were saved by the children in her town as valuable and traded with others, to see who would have the most complete collection. It's a shame that today most people just throw away the wrappers, no matter how beautiful they are. Abundance breeds contempt.

You may be wondering how I could allow Bow to eat something quite so bad for him as a chocolate bunny. Here are the nutritional facts about this treat:

It's really not as bad as you would think. On the plus side, there are 16 grams of fat. On the minus side, there are 34 grams of carbohydrates. (Protein is negligible.) That makes it seem as if there are more than twice as many units of carbohydrates as of fat, which would be bad for purposes of preventing obesity. However, there are more than twice as many calories in fat as in carbohydrates, so when all is said and done, it's nearly an equal distribution: 136 calories from carbohydrates and 144 calories from fat. This is not a low carb food, but it's not high carb, either. Not like fruit!

Compare this to the nutritional content of an average raw apple:

http://nutritiondata.self.com/facts/fruits-and-fruit-juices/1809/2

The apple has only two calories from fat in it, as compared to 63 calories from carbs, so it is a high carb food. Of those carbs, only twelve are from dietary fiber. So the leaves 51 calories of carbs that are actually going to be used as fuel. The apple is less filling than the chocolate, contains fewer calories, but almost all of those calories are carbs.  When Bow eats several apples to get full during the day, he will actually end up with more carbs than he would have if he were on a diet of chocolate bunnies. Since carbs are easier to digest, they will more readily store as fat, if he does not burn them off immediately.

Fortunately for Bow, he does not have an obesity problem. He has a high metabolism and does burn off all those carbs from fruit every day. And I don't give him chocolate except for special occasions. But you can see that it's not as harmful as you might suppose, compared to his daily fare of apples, grapes and bananas.

I have seen chimpanzees at the zoo who probably never got chocolate even  once in their life and eat a high carb diet approved by the experts, and they are obese!

We try to balance nutrition with fun here, and Bow is doing just fine.