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Alan speaks in a very symbolic and esoteric manner in some parts of his books. Although they can be read anthroposophically, passages speaking of Atlantis, archangels, gods, etc. do not need to be taken literarily to be meaningful. The more you read, the more you will realize he uses many different religions to express ideas in a symbolic manner and not in a religious manner. His writings are not religious. In some places his writings are meant to refer to religious events in a historical way. In some places he is using religious figures (from Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, Paganism, Ancient Roman and Greek Religions, etc.) in a symbolic manner. However, at no point is he promoting a specific religion or speaking from a religious point of view.
I have kept the writing as close to one-hundred percent original so you will also find that he speaks of Australia often and some spelling or manners of speaking may be cultural. Any words I have changed are presented like this: <word>.
Also keep in mind that these books are written by a Waldorf teacher with decades of experience who also studied with a Steiner student himself, so he speaks to an audience that is dedicating their lives to the Waldorf method without exception.
Because of this, all of his views are not reflected in the Earthschooling curriculum and not all of them may be ones you want to embrace or are able to use. In all of Alan Whitehead’s writings the opinions are his own and may not align with Earthschooling or Waldorf Books. In some cases, we will be updating some of these chapters in the future with additional and/or updated information.
Ultimately, however, as I read through these passages I find I can distill wisdom from even those paragraphs that do not resonate with me.
We invite you to read with an open mind and heart and with eagerness to learn and discuss…
OCTOBER 4
World Animal Day
How proud we are in the West when we allude to our high level of moral advancement, one of the main areas being that of animal welfare. This progress is celebrated on October 4 each year with World Animal Day; shared with the feast day of Saint Francis of Assisi, the archetypal animal lover; hence patron saint of animals. One legend has it that the good friar, while praying outdoors, attracted a pair of nesting birds to his clasped hands. Rather than disturb them, he remained on his knees in prayer, without moving, for the several weeks it took for the happy avians to fledge their young. He also famously tamed the much-feared wolf of Gubbio. However, our moral progress would seem to be relative, especially if one compares the acts and compassionate values of Saint Francis some half a millennium ago with, say, the horrors of Australia’s live animal export ·trade today.
The movement for an official recognition of animal rights was born in England in the early 19th century. Here, conditions for our fellow travelers in evolution were appalling, as one account describes the village market scene, with, aptly, a focus on cattle: “Calves would be packed into carts with their legs tied, and later, with straps round their mouths, would be bled to death… Cattle, on their way to slaughter, were driven with blows to their deaths, and on the way often had their eyes poked out.”
Haven’t we seen this ‘scenario recently in Indonesia, where this exact treatment was meted out to benighted Australian cattle by heartless Muslim slaughter men? Not much change in two centuries, then. The first legislative action on behalf of sentient creatures occurred nearly two centuries ago, in 1821. Here one Richard Martin, an Irish Member of Parliament, tabled a bill to protect “any horse, ox, heifer, steer, sheep or other cattle”.
Despite derision and setbacks from his hard-hearted peers (in the literal sense!) his Ill Treatment of Cattle Act was passed the following year. It was the first legislation in history for the protection of animals.
If that wasn’t enough good karma by the good Lord, he helped initiate, over the next two years, the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals.
In 1835, Princess Victoria gave the Society widespread respectability when she became its patron, later permitting it to be prefixed with the all-important “Royal”, which exists to this day as the RSPCA. In the same year protection for domestic animals was further strengthened, for example, by the banning of cock fighting and bull baiting. Some Asian nations, especially Indonesia, might have a long, hard look at this humane cultural leap forward – so many years ago. Men may have fired the first shot in the battle for animal rights, but in so many ways it was women, like Victoria, who carried the campaign forward – women’s and animal rights having a curious synchronicity.
The mother of the Salvation Army, Catherine Booth, was one of these; launching a vituperative attack on animal field “sports”, such as fox hunting; or as Oscar Wilde put it, “the unspeakable in pursuit of the uneatable”. Florence Nightingale (lovely name for an animal rights advocate) attacked the suffering of animals in medical practices, especially the torture of calves in the production of vaccines. This led to a harsh spotlight on vivisection (“to cut”), with its legion examples of atrocities committed in the name of science. These horrors included burnings, freezings, flagellations, blood clotting, toxic ingestion, hammering to death – many, if not most, sans anesthetic!
Not that the Catholic Church at the time was any help, declaring that there was no problem with this systemic bastardry due to animals having no soul, therefore no rights – men! Again, a woman took up the cudgels, yet again English: Francis Power Cobbe worked tirelessly towards the tabling of a Bill in the House of Lords in 1875 to regulate the practice of vivisection – alas, it was never passed; a compromise being the Cruelty to Animals Act in 1876.
Another warrior in the anti-vivisection movement was the comely and mystical Anna Kingsford, a gifted doctor – a rarity in itself in Victorian England. In her fiery lecture tours, she even had the temerity to attack that sacred cow, Louis Pasteur, accusing him of obtaining rabies serum by subjecting dogs to terrible and continuous pain.
Mahatma Gandhi also didn’t mince words on this heartbreaking subject: “Vivisection is the blackest of all black crimes that man is at present committing against God and his fair creation.” Because of the activism of such good folk, by the turn of the century the public mood was turning.
This was in favor of animal protection, one landmark legislative threshold being the passing of the Protection of Animals Act of 1911. Yet another woman. Margaret Ford, secretary of the World League Against Vivisection, was the main instigator, in 1928, of October 4 Animal Day. Later, in 1931, this became World Animal Day. Its continuing credo is “to devote thought, speech and action on behalf of all suffering animals”.
Then there is that most bestial of modem practices, factory fanning. The movement to ban battery hens, and the sustained suffering of hosts of other animals, like pigs, veal calves and even ducks, had its champion in another woman, English MP, Dr Shirley Summerskill. When the government Codes of Practice for the keeping of livestock was introduced in 1969, she caustically commented that they “represent the lowest, and not the highest standards. The government is yielding to economic pressures.” And they still are not only in England, but right throughout the so called “civilized” world.
The good doctor’s efforts led naturally to our own highly effective female animal activist, Lyn White. This dedicated animal cruelty campaigner continues, at great personal cost, to expose, among other atrocities, this country’s shameful animal export trade. If ever there was a worthy recipient of Australian of the Year, it is this fearless and compassionate woman.
Perhaps Emmanuel Kant best encapsulated the true spirit of animal welfare when he asserted: “We can judge the heart of a man (or a nation) by its treatment of animals. “It’s a shame if one’s earliest memory is a sad one. Mine was, happily, one of my fondest. This was when I was, in 1944, three years of age.
My father, an avid birdwatcher (if not an ornithologist), took me with him to buy what he subsequently called his ‘bible”, Neville Cayley’s What Bird is That? This later led, as mentioned in an earlier chapter, to birdwatching trips to south-west Sydney on his little BSA motorbike – more fond memories; especially of seeing my first white-fronted chat perched on an old fence post!
By about five years of age, I could name more Australian birds than most adults. The greatest gift my parents in general, and my father in particular, bestowed upon me was an abiding love of nature – quite a rarity in the philistine mid-20th century.
This was a time when the flickering candle of compassion could barely be seen in the blanket of gloom of animal indifference at best, cruelty at worst. From then things could only look up; well, some things, at least.
Today most Australian native birds enjoy a blanket of legal protection, a not insignificant candle of progress. The following observations, from a personal perspective, attempt to chart the path of increasing animal rights awareness over the seven decades from the 1940s to the 2000s.
But first, back to the 19th century where it all stated, for my family anyway, to my nature-loving grandmother.
Conservationists today think that they’re the first, as the saying goes, to smell new-mown hay; but the seeds of today’s increasingly healthy tree of nature awareness were planted, not a couple of decades ago – or a generation even – but, in my family’s case, way back in the 1890s.
My grandmother, a product of sphincteric Victoriana in every other sense, was an ardent ‘nature lover’, as the term was rather quaintly applied in days of yore. The feisty lady could make today’s animal libbers blush for lack of commitment in her defense of sentient life.
For instance, people whom she suspected of mistreating animals, like the local butcher who blatantly stocked horse meat for human consumption, were all ‘brutes’ to my grandma. This from a woman whose father was a professional koala shooter!
Perhaps her repugnance for cruelty grew from this shameful antecedence. Even to the most hard-hearted, hunting koalas for fur today would be an anathema. In fact, koala corridors have to be included in many new developments.
So, the protection of the cute and cuddly at least has today become a candle bright.
Her son, my father, extended even further a deep love of nature. The callous attitude to animal-cruelty in the early decades of the 20th century somehow failed to corrupt him.
Oh, how I loved those walks in the bush as a child, peering through an old camera lens magnifying glass into the golden sanctuary of some tiny ground orchid. This was one only Dad’s loving, ever alert eye could find.
Or he would fix a hand-mirror to a stick to allow me to peep into a bird’s nest, to gasp in delight at the speckled treasure within. “Don’t touch the nest, son, some birds abandon it if you do.” he would caution. This in an age when most of my mates had a birds’ egg collection! Many rare birds were actually less common than today because of this odious practice; these include the swamp pheasant, flame-backed wren, and crested hawk.
Today, only the ‘professional’ and the perverse violate the sanctity of the nest; yet another flickering candle of progress. Our holidays were spent in, among other wild places, that bastion of nature-consciousness, Binna Burra in the Lamington National Park in Southern Queensland. Since the 1940s these areas of near total protection for all wildlife have Spread exponentially.
These magical rambles enlightened my young soul with a deep respect – no, more than that, a sense of veneration, even, for the sanctity of the natural world. Though, being the son and grandson of nature lovers sadly had a somewhat isolating effect.
I would protest if my early 1950s friends went out shooting birds or did execrable things to cicadas – or if they justified their kangaroo-shooting fathers as – ” … controlling the population.” It could be seen as another mark of progress that the infamous air rifle is now an historic relic. Almost all freckle-faced Aussie boys in the 1950s owned a BB gun – and used it often. The budget weapon of choice was the shang-eye, or catapult.
Most of today’s children, wouldn’t even know how to make one, let alone be killingly proficient with one. Unlike my friends, the animals I bagged were already dead; hence my bedroom became a natural history museum, festooned with old bird and wasp nests, snake skins, skulls, and other natural detritus.
I’m happy to report that the next generation, my own children, were even more passionate in their defense of the defenseless. My 9-year-old daughter in the nature awakening 1970s would upbraid fishermen (they were always men) for mistreating their victims. How I remember her scream of anguish as one of these so-called ‘sportsmen’ bashed an octopus against a rock to render it lifeless.
My son would have me stop the car to rescue a beetle from our birdbath – a far cry from the cicada molesting of yore! I was so concerned about my offspring backsliding into the pitiless mindset of the status quo, that I became the founder of a school where sanctity of life was the first principle. Hence the school was an uncompromising kill-free zone. I quote from its Code of Principles: “Sanctity of Life”. The school must be an uncompromising sanctuary… Each time we kill or hunt an animal we nip a bud of sensitivity and compassion from the children’s souls, hardening them.” Even in the high school there was a proscription on the heart-hardening practice of vivisection of any animal. Happily, this concern for animal welfare has, over the subsequent forty years, penetrated many if not most Australian schools, leading in no small way to an elevation of compassion consciousness in the wider community. And a century on from my beloved grandmother’s day? A 5th generation of nature lovers has arrived to take the reins. My grandsons have been taught by their parents, my children, to both love and protect the living world.
How happy their great-great-grandmother would be to see how her abiding compassion for fur, fin and feather has been passed down – even unto the 5th · generation. No, conservation consciousness wasn’t discovered a decade ago, some people have been smelling new-mown hay for a lot longer than that.
In terms of the newsworthy, which story attracts more column inches in Australia’s press? The ·footballer’s strained Achilles tendon? Or the imminent extinction of a rare bird, like, for example, the orange-bellied parrot; one that, until recently, has thrived on this continent for millennia? The former, of course. Sadly, there are only about 35 of the exquisite, orange-bellied parrots left in the wild.
Why these particular birds have suffered more than other parrots, such as the omnipresent sulfur-crested cockatoo, is not clear. Though researchers have noted that the orange-bellied seems to suffer more head trauma than many other parrots. This is not from flying into trees and the like, but from collisions with foreign, man-made objects, like power lines, and the giant whirling blades of wind generators. The birds’ legion environmental threats will not change, but their all-important habitat reclamation, and even expansion, will assist in their survival.
But will this alone be in time to save this brave little avian, which migrates each winter across the tempest of Bass Strait to breed? Probably not.
However, the captive breeding program of the orange-bellied parrot in three states, Victoria, South Australia, and Tasmania, is certainly a step in the right direction.
This is yet another case of nature-under-siege, where both the problem and the solution are at the hands of man. At least the vital breeding enterprise rates an Oscar in the Compassion Academy Awards. What a contrast to the prevailing community ethic of earlier decades; when it was acceptable for hunters to plunder, for instance, Australia’s (then) limitless wetlands (then called swamps) at breeding season.
These ruthless incursions were in search of the coveted snow-white plumed egret feathers. The beautiful plumes were then sold to milliners to create spectacular hats for Melbourne Cup day, and the like. As the later animal-rights adage for the fur trade has it, they looked better on the bird.
The breeding season might have been the best period for the harvesting of the filament feathers but was the worst possible time to kill the birds, as the loss of one or both parents led to the certain death of the nestlings.
Then there was the erstwhile massive flock pigeon slaughter of our rainforests; today these criminals have to resort to silencers. And don’t get me started on mutton-birding!
Thankfully, change was in the air. The 1960s saw a stirring of communal conscience in regard to nature in general, and Australia’s wonderfully varied bird species in particular. This in time led to the legislated protection of the egrets, pigeons, and shearwaters; and, as noted earlier, most other native birds not regarded as pests.
In this decade of protest and progress, a new aesthetic penetrated even the halls of learning and academia, with protection rather than exploitation of nature enriching curriculum content in our schools and colleges – and even our homes.
So today it is not barefoot bush boys threatening endangered birds, but habitat destruction, spread of urban areas, sea bird by-catch, increasing intensity of bushfires, and pollution, the worst being domestic, agricultural, and other poisons.
In regard to the last, perhaps it was the American natural scientist, Rachel Carson’s, ground-breaking book, Silent Spring, which ignited this new empathy awakening, published as it was in 1962. Few could read it without suffering a cocktail of guilt and anger. My own response at the time was to bury my few bottles and boxes of domestic poisons under the new sea wall at Manly – one into which the concrete was to be poured that day! Naturally, the goodhearted Ms. Carson was vilified in extremis for her so-called attack on industry, and that perennial chestnut of so many defending the indefensible, “jobs”.
Of course, over time she was vindicated, with many of her targeted toxins being black-listed – top of the list being DDT. How many threatened bird species world-wide were saved from the abyss by Rachel Carson, and those who were inspired to action by her seminal work, we will never know. Tragically this great woman died just two years after publication; long before she could see the results of her toil.
So, there are quite a few good-news stories among the bad; one example being the wedge-tailed eagle. This iconic bird was brought back from the brink in the last half century. On the illusion that these top-of-the-food-chain predators decimated new-born lambs, farmers routinely shot them, and callously strung them along their barbed-wire fences. Again, in many cases, this left the young to perish in the nest. Today the eagles’ role in ridding the land of vermin, particularly rabbits and disease-bearing carrion, is well known, with eagles being shot only by environmental vandals and other irresponsibles. We also know that the great birds’ impact on lambing numbers is negligible.
So, bouquets to all those who are fighting the good fight to help many species recover from mankind’s predations, whether the self-effacing wires, the volunteers who take in and care for injured native birds and animals, or the many wildlife protection agencies, both government and private. And not least the good people conducting the breeding program for the orange-bellied parrot, assuring that the gorgeous little bird will continue to brave its twice-a-year Bass Strait buffeting. Perhaps a special bouquet should be reserved for Australia’s children, even boys, who, encouraged by a new age of informed and compassionate teachers and parents, gaze in wonderment at our precious avian heritage.
I’ll bet not many can identify a white-fronted chat, though. I have only been hunting once in my life. I was 14 and went out with a mate to shoot rabbits.
I shot at one some distance away; but when I got to the spot, there was nothing – I must have missed, as usual. In passing that way on our return, I checked a nearby burrow. There I found my victim within stiff and glassy-eyed. I felt a contradictory blend of triumph and sadness; however, it was the latter emotion which stained my adolescent cheeks with tears that night as I lay in bed agonizing over the pain I’d caused and wondering about abandoned bunny kittens. This was my personal Port Arthur ~ an enlightenment through grief.
No such remorse stains the cheeks of that perfidious populace, the duck shooters, as, like demented Yosemite Sams, they blast away at our embattled’ waterfowl each autumn. Maybe it’s a ducks-in-shooting-gallery neurosis that drives men (yes, again mostly men) to thrill to the kill; to dispatch to avian heaven as many possible birds of as many possible kinds, in the shortest possible time.
Media reports tell us that there are, once again, less ducks this year. Falling numbers are always ascribed to natural phenomena, like drought – or heavy rain …? The ubiquitous El Nino is a new and popular entry into this catalogue of blame. That which is strenuously denied is the blinding logic that killing ducks actually decreases their numbers.
We are also told that there are thankfully also falling numbers of shooters year by year. As these are weather-immune, this gratifying statistic is sheeted home to John Howard’s meritorious and sustained attack on gun ownership back in 1996. But maybe – just maybe – the heart-rending reality of the carnage that shooting visits on wild creatures is beginning to dawn. Those guilty of, if not actually pulling the trigger, but collusion in this annual slaughter are our law-makers. One is beggared by how they can permit this barbaric ‘sport’, this 19th century anachronism, to endure. We live in a curiously ambiguous society: it is perfectly conceivable that both legislators and shooters would halt traffic to allow a mother duck and her string of ducklings to cross a busy road. However, these same people contribute to the feathered road-runners’ violent demise six months later.
“We’re not criminals – we’re sportsmen!” protest the shooters at their pro-gun rallies.
Criminals? Legally, perhaps not. But morally? Who has the high moral ground in those distressing television pictures; those shooting the ducks out of the sky? Or the heroes risking their green necks to retrieve the broken birds from the water? Who will be seen as the good and bad guys when future more enlightened generations reflect on Australia’s sad wildlife impoverishment? The hunting argument is the last redoubt of those who parrot that fatuous American slogan, “The mark of a free people is their right to bear arms.”
They even cite indigenous hunter-gatherers as examples of the nobility of the kill. Blasting away with a double-barrel shotgun is far removed from, say, the stealth and skill required. of Aboriginal food providers.
These canny folk silently enter the lily-dappled lagoon, breathing through a reed. In one swift, sure movement, the quarry is pulled under the water and its neck broken. So successful is this method that the lucky ducks swimming nearby don’t even notice. Beautiful the ducks may be, but no one said they were smart!
The broad Australian community has progressed, per favor of the pain of Port Arthur, to the point where most people oppose most gun ownership. By extension it can be assumed that most people are offended by the hunting of our precious wildlife in general, and duck shooting in particular.
How much more elevating it is to marvel at the aqua flash of a teal’s wing as it whistles over the wetlands or watch its bobbing tail upended in search of waterweed, than wade through its bloodstained feathers in the water. Now from a tree change to a sea change.
I watched appalled as the 12-year-old boy casually pulled the legs and nippers off a beautiful sand crab he had just caught. “Why are you doing that?” I asked through gritted teeth. “Bait,” he replied without feeling.
That’s the heart, so to speak, of the over-fishing scandal. It is not economics, not sustainable resources – not “jobs” even – but a lack of compassion for the suffering, and even worse, extinction, of our besieged sea creatures.
That is what generates the heat in the debate.
“They’re just thugs!” one tuna boat captain fumed about the dispersal, with inflatables, by activists of his intended tuna catch. Well, history might judge differently. The real “thugs” will be found to be those who heartlessly and stupidly bankrupt our oceans. Stupid?
Along the famous Newfoundland Banks, vast populations of cod have almost vanished. One trawler skipper was asked why he was setting off to catch one of the last-known schools of the species. “Because if I don’t catch ’em, someone else will,” he replied. The history of modem .Western humanity’s agonizingly slow awakening to the suffering of our fellow sentient beings places us on a rung of the compassion ladder far above, say, that of the ancient world.
Vestiges still remain of those heartless former times with Spanish bullfighting – still legal – and dog and cock fighting: today not so. Our ancestors gradually moved from the moral miasma of cruelty for cruelty’s sake, to cruelty for sport – the hunting ethos. In this Australia is bad, but not as bad as the United States.
Not such a big difference perhaps, but at least justified by the expediency of feeding oneself; fox hunting, excepted. Until recently there has been a clear line drawn in the sand defining where compassion begins and ends; a literal line, drawn by the ocean itself.
This is the high-water mark. Since the turn of the century, there has been increasing compassion for animals, manifest in the creation of national parks, species protection and cruelty-to-animals legislation. We in the West have at last realized that the vocation of, say, my sadly regretted koala-shooting great-grandfather, is not the honorable way of earning a living.
Even though it was once thought to be. Most Australian terrestrial vertebrates have blanket protection by the law, but in the water, well, it’s still mostly a case of anything goes. Though warm-blooded sea creatures, such as seals, dolphins and whales have, since the 1960s, been afforded some protection. Also, today’s whale watch industry far surpasses in prosperity that of its harpooning predecessor.
However, with fishing it’s still business as usual. Trawlers returning to port with their ever-declining fruits of the sea confront precious little public outcry.
It seems that the new-found compassion is fine for cuddly, land-based animals – but not for fish.
This attitude is what makes it doubly hard for the Rainbow Warriors to garner public support. The fact is that they are at the front line of probably the most vital war in our history, in our evolution even.
The myth still pervades that “fish don’t feel pain like we do”. All scientific and, more importantly, experiential evidence refutes this. Fish not only suffer from the wounding of being caught and cut, but also from slow suffocation and dehydration.
“A thousand people in Port Lincoln will lose their jobs!” the captain above further fulminated. Well, if the current tuna decline continues, this prediction will be realized anyway. How much more intelligent if, through incrementally reduced harvests, the present industry was to metamorphose into –
“Port Lincoln bluefin tuna sport fishing capital of the world.” There would be smaller boats, but more of them, catching less fish – true sustainability – but supporting a lot more people in the tourist industry. Hopefully the generation beyond that would be “Port Lincoln, bluefin tuna-watch capital of the world.”!
I leaned against the fence overlooking Byron Bay’s Main Beach on a soft, warm dove-grey afternoon. Many hundreds of people were milling around on the sand below; their intention being to make a huge, human 2-dimensional sculpture of a humpback whale.
“That chaotic mob of terminal individualists will never do it.” I muttered, looking away to a cloud-crowned Mt Warning in the distance. My scorn must have been a silent trigger, as just a few minutes later, there it was, a gigantic – and surprisingly accurate whale; one which comprised a multitude of smiling, waving cetaceaephiles. What a power these gentle leviathans of the deep have for focusing the un-focusable.
A wave of warmth surged through me as I watched this combination of compassion and artistry; all to serve the morally high purpose of banning whaling – hopefully absolutely; and proclaiming the whole Antarctic region, from 40 degrees latitude south, as a world whale sanctuary.
Another miracle of this gathering was that it was all organized by an 18-year-old local girl, Olive Andrews; a mere stripling who had just left school.
In fact, the proceeds of the day were to send the doughty Olive overseas to campaign for an end to all whaling at the meeting of the International Whaling Convention (I.W.C.). This small group, comprising some couple of dozen member nations, were to vote on the fate of the hapless minke whale once again in particular.
And by illegal extension, all other baleen whales that the blood-drenched kill ships happen to encounter. These include the besieged blue whales, largest animal that has ever lived, with only an estimated 700 left from an original population of a quarter of a million. At $1,000,000 a pop for the hunters it’s worth bending the rules! It has been demonstrated that it is impossible to monitor the remote and arcane activities of whaling, the world’s cruelest and most barbaric industry. (It takes ten torturous minutes – minimum! – using explosive harpoon and electrocution to kill even a tiny minke whale – how long for a big blue?) So, with unconscionable vote-buying by the Japanese, the I.M.C continues to permit the ‘scientific’ harvesting of the minke.
As such, this body is universally seen as the corrupt, disingenuous assembly it really is. In fact, the I.M.C should be scrapped – consigned to the dustbin of irrelevancy. These are global issues, not ones that merely concern a handful of whaling or ex-whaling nations. Indeed, much of the membership of the I.M.C. is comprised of countries that have never had the slightest interest in the whaling industry – like St Lucia for goodness sake! St What? They have merely been brought in – and bought – by the perfidious, pernicious Japanese.
As I peered closer, I was proud to see my schoolteacher son on the beach with his joyous group of Class I children as they disappeared under an enormous ‘Save the Whale’ banner. It reminded me of my own humble schoolteacher efforts, when in the mid-1970s, I had my Class 6 pupils compile a large package of poems, drawings and other heart-felt appeals. This was for the cessation of whaling in Western Australia and was sent to Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser. And it worked; the Albany whaling station was closed, to my children’s delight, shortly after. As I wrenched myself back to the present, my emotions surged as I glanced northward and contrasted this scene with one just three decades ago. Then we would have seen a dark, sinister vessel putting out to sea from the whaling station just meters from where we stood.
What a difference in attitude there has been in such a relatively short time. What a consciousness shift, from the brutal greed of the past, to the growing compassion of the present. In the early 1960s, this same crowd would have cheered the whalers home – today they would be … Well, who knows how far the locals, led no doubt by the intrepid Olive, would go to prevent this beautiful beach from being stained with the £lensed offal of these most majestic of creatures? Hopefully Olive added to her packed agenda pressure for the establishment of a World Environment Court; one that can bring to book the legion morally destitute countries, organizations, and individuals tearing our fragile planetary heritage to shreds?
The crowd drifted off as the sun set silver on this wonderful day; while to the east feather-soft, pink-grey cumulus framed the small rock island, Julian Rocks, about half a mile out to sea. To the imaginative eye, of which small children have a plenitude, this grey eminence bore an uncanny resemblance to a whale.
My wife and I wandered down onto the near-deserted beach in the twilight to see the many sand sculptures. How poignant this gallery of mostly sea animals was. The display was replete with whales (of course), turtles, dolphins – even a mermaid.
All these were done by eager, good-hearted children in styles ranging from pre-modernist to pure minimalist. One lovingly-patted masterpiece of a very large but indeterminate whale had, as its blowhole, a single purple beach hibiscus.
How symbolic; the new ecological Flower Power, perhaps? One can only hope that, in spite of the I.W.C’s backsliding re. ‘scientific’ slaughter – which the Japanese deceitfully eviscerated from · the sanctuary agreement – the long-term outlook for the whales, and all the other precious creatures which a marine sanctuary should protect, will be one of safety and flourishing.
The following is a poem on whales I penned to be performed in Eurythmy at a Peace Conference in Mullumbimby in 1987.
OCEAN OF PEACE
The depths and breadths of the human heart
Are oceans of time and space.
Like the South Pacific, blue and mild,
Realm of a loving and beautiful child,
Regent of cosmic grace.
Aphrodite her name, of Onan birth,
Was welcomed with joy to the yearning earth.
Divine foam floated on restless sea,
From spiral triton born was she.
Vulcan wove her a girdle – birds, butterflies free!
Fishes and flowers- and surf!
A ring of fire flamed in the north,
Rivalling northern lights,
But Venus rode a ring of whales,
Cetacean steeds with lofty tails,
Through sunlit seas and southern gales,
From the. ether of the south.
“And God created great whales”
Like the great sperm whale of western seas,
And the lordly, blue where oceans freeze.
And the playful humpback pilgrimage,
Blesses our eastern coast.
Woe to mankind, compassion is shed,
On the altar of greed, the whales lie dead,
Woe to the world, blue waters run red,
The blood in man’s heart turns liquid lead.
Woe to the Spirit, lament on still water,
Whale songs weeping; Ouranus’s daughter
Turns her face from the folly of man.
And love departs from the earth.
“And, when they had platted a crown of thorns,
they put it upon his head.”
As the triton of Venus was· scavenged,
From every coral reef,
The crown of thorns descended,
In the night, just like a thief,
A parody lurks beneath the sea,
It’s big, it’s black, it’s strong.
It plumbs the abyss, just like the whales,
But sings a sinister song.
Instead of love in its deep-sea soul,
It’s tuned to man-made stars,
A Venus violation machine,
It’s an atomic submarine,
Decoding dark secrets from Mars.
It penetrates her sanctuary deep,
Rending her hymen of love, hope and peace.
When whales strand on sinking sands,
In sacrificial love,
We gaze in their eyes, they feel our hands,
Warm waves of grace ‘tween ocean and land,
A baptism of fire from above,
And the Spirit descends like a dove.
Bearers of Venus, the whales swim free,
Giant grails of heavenly grace.
When cosmic intelligence flows into man,
With open minds and hearts, we can
Redeem the violent past,
Turn war to peace at last.
Whale watchers cheer and play,
When beholding Venus’s steeds,
Then silently whisper a prayer to the day
That the harpoon is sleeping beyond the bay,
Along with the shame it breeds,
The Book of Life is open now,
The sword again becomes the plough,
Where dwelleth love there liveth hope,
For sightless is the periscope.
Conflict is ephemeral,
Again, her gown of emerald,
Reflects the beauty of the stars.
“Be watchful, and strengthen the things that remain,
That are ready to die.”
So, from animals in peril in the wild, to the long-suffering, oft’ brutalized, domestic.
From the joy of What Bird is That? as a four-year-old, to an unprecedented descent into grief for the plight of animals in my seventieth year.
This occurred on Monday May 30, 2011, following the screening of the Four Comers progr.gn on animal sadism. Being unable to sleep that night, I rose and emailed every federal politician expressing my outrage. I also sent a letter to the editor to all major dailies in Australia demanding the immediate banning of live animal exports.
I also later cancelled my subscription to a magazine which, in the editor’s comment, became an apologist for the cattle industry. When speaking to him on the phone, he just didn’t get it, regarding brutality to highly evolved sentient beings as a “minor issue in the big picture”.
“We can judge the. heart of a man (or a nation) by the way he treats his animals” said 19th Century German philosopher, Emmanuel Kant. If the conditions of animal cruelty in Indonesia’s infamous slaughterhouses are a guide, then Kant would judge the people involved, and the whole country, harshly indeed. As he would Australia, being an accomplice in this travesty. He would of course have had, like the hundreds of thousands of other shocked Australians, to endure the ordeal of watching the Four Corners program.
Here, the most extreme examples of brutality were proudly revealed by the laconic slaughter men to the visiting cameras, and their courageous reporter, Sarah Ferguson, and her Gold Walklie winning team. Much of the sickening footage was, however, earlier shot by animal rights activist, former policewoman – and latter-day saint! – Lyn White. Proudly? And why not?
These so-called devout Muslims wielding whips, boots, hoses, fingers (to eye gouge), sharp prods, and finally, almost mercifully, blunt knives for throat slitting, had absolutely no stirrings of sympathy regarding the pain suffered by their trembling, terror-paralyzed charges.
In fact, most so-called ‘sacred’ scriptures have little to say about animal cruelty. Though there are exceptions. Buddhist teachings (and Rudolf Steiner) assure those with a thirst for justice in the world that the pain inflicted on dumb animals will be suffered, in Kamaloca (as in “Karma”), by the perpetrators to many degrees of intensity. Even the Bible is· resoundingly silent on the subject of animal welfare, with the exception of several references in the Apocrypha. One of these describes Jesus admonishing a man for beating his donkey.
If Buddhism is correct, then the psychopaths routinely visiting suffering on cattle in Indonesia, and other countries; are going to have a very hard time of it in the afterlife. One hopes so, anyway. Then so are their unconscionable accomplices, the gallery of industry rogues featured on the Four Comers program who, with callous indifference, ship the cattle to these hell holes. Then there are the politicians who commit Australian tax dollars to subsidize this disgraceful practice.
One after the other, these expressed, at best, a pinch of mild concern mixed into a toxic broth of justification. At worst, they lied through their public relations teeth.
One extraordinary justification by an industry spokesman for the cruelty was that there had been real progress in the treatment of cattle in Indonesia.
After all, they had been working on the problem for the last eighteen years. What must conditions have been like for these long-suffering beasts before that!?
But there is one good thing that emerged from the program. From the heartfelt outrage that raced like a wildfire across the country on that Monday night, Australians seemed not to be suffering as much compassion fatigue as earlier thought.
On any poll, with the usual exceptions of those with vested interests, most people want the exporting of livestock for slaughter banned, especially to Muslim countries.
The ultimate religious hypocrisy shown in the program was of people, whose violence to the cattle knew no bounds, turning the animals’ heads to Mecca prior to cutting their throats -very slowly, with up to thirty saws with the blade.
Of course, the West has been, over the ages, guilty of inflicting its own horrendous suffering on animals.
However, there is a light of redemption in the flowering of the humanist-inspired animal rights movement.
Sadly, this new dawn of compassion did not emanate from church teaching, where brutality of animals has never been elevated to the level of actual sin.
Sin? In the wider more enlightened community, animal abuse is actually seen, not as mere sin, but as evil. And money is the dark god behind the decades-long litany of animal agony. Any attempt to contain the shameful practice of live animal export will be met with the usual financial imperative. The first will be, as it always is, the aforementioned _Great Lie – “jobs”. In practice, the various cattlemen and meat exporter associations don’t care about jobs. Merely profit.
The jobs with the most emotive traction are those of indigenous workers, the cattle export trade being centered in northern Australia. In fact, one smarmy television reporter tried to do just that: pit indigenous jobs against extreme animal suffering.
The issue also reared its ugly head on various other programs: with breathtaking sophistry some commentators attempted to create a moral conflict between the suffering of refugees against that of the cattle. This is a worst-case example of comparing apples with pears. The implication here -was that if Australians were so worried about cruelty in the live export trade, why not the plight of boat people? As an evolved ethical society, surely we have the capacity to be concerned about both.
The chambers of the human heart are not compartmentalized to feel compassion only for one or the other; rather this organ of love has the illimitable capacity for sorrow for the world in whatever form suffering, takes. There is, however, one difference between the two issues.
The solution to the refugee problem seems intractable. Most agree that it can only be resolved· after lengthy process and, ideally, with political bipartisanship.
The end of the unnecessary pain and distress of the cattle, however, can be achieved simply with the stroke of a pen, banning all live animals for slaughter exports. And it is just the compassion element which must be the spiritual center of this debate. Not jobs, not profits, but that which makes us most human of all, our ability to empathize with the suffering of another creature.
This is so whether human or animal. This tenderness of soul is alive and well if, as seems likely, many Australians, like your author, in anguish and shame had a sleepless night after watching Four Corners on “Ban Live-Animal Export Day- May 30, 2011”. In seventy years, I have witnessed many changes to animal welfare, worst, some good. Ibis summation attempts to see the environmental goblet half full. After all, conservation consciousness is now happily the default position, politically, educationally, and socially. Here are a few candles in the wind of continuing animal protection.
* Australians’ attitude to our bird life has improved apace; however, habitat destruction and over-development continues to threaten many species. Real progress is in having virtually all of our native birds on a total protection list.
*Hunting of mammals is also on a continuing decline; but again, incidental destruction is increasing, such as feral animal predation, some villains being the cane toad, rabbits, dogs, cats, and foxes. Alas, nothing seems to cauterize the shame of commercial kangaroo killing.
*When I was young the concept of marine parks was unheard of, it was open slather for all sea creatures, including warm-blooded mammals like dugong and turtle. What a joy it is that the demands of the Australian community for sea life protection increases exponentially. However, due to over-fishing, yet again inappropriate development and pollution, many habitats and species are under serious threat.
*Even though I have lived on the coast for most of my life, I had never seen a whale until the beginning of this century. This is because whaling had decimated the migrating populations, especially the humpback, to the mere hundreds. Today there are tens of thousands of these loved cetaceans journeying up and down the east coast twice a ·year. Humpback whaling in Australian waters ceased in the mid-1960s, and that of sperm whales, mainly from Albany, about ten years later. This is a true success story. High risk, high sea enterprises, like Paul Watson’s Sea Shepherd, help assure that this progress remains.
*Many of yesteryear’s most trenchant philistines, farmers, are today’s avid conservationists, providing habitat protection in wetland and forest on their properties for whole communities of animals, many seriously endangered.
*However, not all rural folk are so altruistic. The darkest night of cruelty today is endued not by our wildlife, but by our benighted farm animals. The welfare of cattle, sheep, pigs, horses, hens and other poultry is so often in a parlous state. Many factory farming adherents consider their animals to be mere machines, or at best plants, to suffer whatever conditions to which their masters choose to subject them.
*Finally, Education. Most schools today teach a conservation, animal welfare curriculum of one kind or another, often canceling out the nefarious influence of their parents – then again, often not! The true heroes of the 21st Century are not so much found these days on the sporting field, or even on the battlefield, but, like the many good people mentioned above, out in the field, thanklessly performing their acts of heroism in the often-perilous trenches of animal welfare. Here, for no benefit to themselves, indeed many sufferings considerable personal sacrifice, they have indeed made of themselves the megaphones of the voiceless. Happy World Animal Day.
Susan Whitehead performs the poem, Ocean of Peace in Eurythmy, Mullumbimby, NSW, 1987.
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