One Red Hot Country Mama!

I just saw the movie Sharkwater last night (as you can see from my new header ), a beautifully-filmed underwater documentary about the dwindling shark population. Because sharks are feared predators, they don’t insight a compassionate response from conservationists and their funders. People would rather save cuter animals such as panda bears and seals. But, the threat of shark bites is largely exaggerated and it tiny (100 deaths a year out of millions of swimmers) in comparison to the threat of human-created deaths such as illegal drugs and traffic accidents.

Meanwhile, the shark population has diminished by 90% (according to the movie) and it continues to be threatened. The main threat is "shark finning". Shark Fins are an ingredient in the decadent shark fin soup, found in upscale Asian and fusion restaurants. Now, I have had this soup, and the fin does not add much taste – it is more the presentation, texture and the decadence of having such a delicacy. After seeing hunters in the movie cut off the shark fins, then throwing the rest of the shark away into the ocean, I will definitely never eat it again! You can also find shark cartilage in health food stores – it is believed to help joint-pain.

But, those things are not necessities. It is not like people are dying without shark products, but here we are putting our ocean eco-system at risk in order to get them. So, one thing I am doing is writing a letter to the Canadian Prime Minister encouraging him to ban the importation of shark fins to this country.

To: pm@pm.gc.ca <Prime Minister Stephen Harper>

Subject: Shark Fin Importation – Please Ban

Dear Prime Minister Harper,

I am writing to ask you to stop the importation of shark fins, which are not a necessity, into Canada. I recently saw the movie Sharkwater, made by Canadian film maker Rob Stewart. In the movie, he explains that some of earth’s most ancient creatures, older than the dinosaurs, are now threatened – with the population of them diminished by 90%. One of the biggest threats to the population is hunters getting their fins. The main demand for the fins is for the delicacy shark fin soup, found in high-end Asian and fusion cuisine. You can also find shark cartilage supplements in health-food stores.

As you can see, these demands are non-necessities… yet we are threatening the ecological balance of our oceans by pushing its top predator into extinction. So, I think that this is an excellent argument to stop the importation of shark fins into this country. I think Canada making this decision would have a positive impact, since we have a large Asian population here. I think that heightened awareness in this country would make waves back to China, Taiwan and other countries which drive the demand for shark fins.

Also, Stewart is a Canadian film maker and the film has our flag all over it. Banning the importation of shark fins into this country would be a strong endorsement of his cause. People often accuse Canadians of not standing up enough for what we believe in. Now here is our chance.

Respectfully,

Stefanie Sigurdson

As most of us know, Google is participating in internet censorship in mainland China by returning censored results for banned keywords (examples are Tiananmen Square and the Dali Lama). I like Google, especially since as an internet marketer they contribute to my livelihood. But when they started supporting censorship, I started thinking of them very differently. I am surprised that they are considered media darlings… when they do something like this.

Isaac Mao, a blogger from Shanghai, wrote a great open letter to the Google founders, asking them to live up to their motto "Don’t be Evil" – you can find it here.

Many users here were disappointed when they found Google.cn filtered many keywords. The compromise remarks by you in Davos made us more frustrated. Seems you are adopting self-censorship which hurts those loyal users a lot which also devalue your motto of "non-evil".

You may think that this is no big deal, since it is just a free web tool but a lot of important things begin as a result of an internet search. I found my most recent job as a search, found where to do my MBA and found my apartment. It is also a place where I will find information on belief systems, politics and my areas of interest (psychology, feminism, restaurant reviews etc.). Search is becoming more and more important in our lives, and for many of us (almost 80% of Canadians and 65% of Americans based on the last Media Metrix report I saw), the arbiter of that search is Google. When they are censoring their results, it shapes people’s experience in a real way. Good for Isaac, for posting this… and especially for posting it with his blogger tool . 

  I was at the gym on Sunday watching the screens while running and sweating and CBC veteran reporter Joe Schlesinger was on talking about elephants. Through the reduction in their natural habitat by expanding human settlement and increased poaching, elephants are becoming more violent, some suffering from Elephant Breakdown, a kind of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD).

The show went to the Elephant Sanctuary in Tennessee (with the very cool URL of www.elephants.com) a 2,700 acre sanctuary dedicated to caring for old, sick and needy elephants. There are currently 19 living there. Some of the elephants have killed humans, a crime that would usually be punishable by death, but the sanctuary accepts elephants as the social, emotional animals that they are, with long memories and ability to recover from their stress through therapy.

A New York Times Magazine article posted on their site by Charles Siebert writes thoroughly on the subject:

All across Africa, India and parts of Southeast Asia, from within and around whatever patches and corridors of their natural habitat remain, elephants have been striking out, destroying villages and crops, attacking and killing human beings. In fact, these attacks have become so commonplace that a whole new statistical category, known as Human-Elephant Conflict, or H.E.C., was created by elephant researchers in the mid-1990’s to monitor the problem.

Even in India, where elephants were considered a deity, a headline of a newspaper warns “To Avoid Confrontation, Don’t Worship Elephants.”  Why is this happening?

Elephants, when left to their own devices, are profoundly social creatures. A herd of them is, in essence, one incomprehensibly massive elephant: a somewhat loosely bound and yet intricately interconnected, tensile organism. Young elephants are raised within an extended, multitiered network of doting female caregivers that includes the birth mother, grandmothers, aunts and friends. These relations are maintained over a life span as long as 70 years.

Why is the network weakening?

This fabric of elephant society, Bradshaw and her colleagues concluded, had effectively been frayed by years of habitat loss and poaching, along with systematic culling by government agencies to control elephant numbers and translocations of herds to different habitats.

What happens when they lose that network?

The elephants of decimated herds, especially orphans who’ve watched the death of their parents and elders from poaching and culling, exhibit behavior typically associated with post-traumatic stress disorder and other trauma-related disorders in humans: abnormal startle response, unpredictable asocial behavior, inattentive mothering and hyperaggression. Studies of the various assaults on the rhinos in South Africa, meanwhile, have determined that the perpetrators were in all cases adolescent males that had witnessed their families being shot down in cullings.

Wow. It is hard to ignore the similarities between elephant society and human society – animal researchers strive to avoid anthropomorphism in order to stay objective, but I can see how it is hard to resist. After the show ended, I had that feeling of helplessness and discouragement that comes from watching a show like that in Toronto, where there is extremely little I can do any time soon to help. I had a stressful day to worry about at work and I have bills to pay. Now I am also worried about the human race causing an animal crisis… I am only 1 in 6 billion…

I got off of the treadmill and went to lift some weights and started thinking more about elephants. The Bronx Zoo in New York City is no longer holding elephants in captivity because of the harm that it causes them. Awareness is good. The woman who founded the Elephant Sanctuary used to manage elephants for entertainment and now she has dedicated her life to providing awareness about the elephant crisis. That is an inspiration. I choose to replace that helpless and worried feeling with compassion. And one day, who knows, maybe I can do something.

We are got our first snow today in Toronto after record-breaking warm weather so far this winter. With global warming, it is interesting how many elevator conversations, telephone small talk and professional lunch-time chats are turning into big debates about world pollution, what we can do as a society, if the science behind global warming is sound and whether or not the warming of the earth is "God’s will" (this actually happened in my friend’s elevator).  Talk about the weather is no longer a good refuge for those who want to keep the conversation "lite."

These recent warm days have taken on a sinister feel. Being in Canada with a warm January is like the unnatural feeling of being at a night-time baseball diamond when all of the lights are on. It feels like it is day… which is cool, but it is night – so the effectiveness of the unnatural light doing the work of the sun is eerie.

Welcome to the snow! I hope you stay a while!