3214. 300 March for Animal Rights in Santa Rosa, California

Editor's note: On Saturday, March 30, Direct Action Everywhere (DxE), a grassroots network of animal rights activists, held a rally and march for animal rights in downtown Santa Rosa. About 300 attended (see the video clip of a portion of the march below). What follows is largely taken from DxE's Facebook page its activities.  

Through open rescue, demonstration, and disruption, DxX hopes to create a world where every animal is safe, happy and free. Since 2014, whistleblowers and investigators of DxE have been documenting the conditions inside animal agriculture facilities in Sonoma County. In every instance, investigators have found criminal animal cruelty including violations of California Penal Code Section (CPC) 597 (which prohibits subjecting any animals to unnecessary suffering) and Proposition 2 (which prohibits intensive confinement of egg-laying hens).

The footage taken inside these farms shows baby chicks who are so sick and injured they cannot stand to reach food and water, hens who are trapped in wire cages for their entire lives, and birds who are cannibalizing each other due to stress and confinement. 

Investigators also found many dead animals inside barns, some of whom were in such advanced stages of decomposition that necropsies could not even be performed. Veterinarian reports confirm these findings and indicate that there are animals on these farms that are too sick and injured to stand or walk, have necrotic wounds, and are starving.

This information has been brought to key stakeholders including the District Attorney Jill Ravitch, the Sheriff’s Office, Sonoma County Animal Services, the California Attorney General, and the California Department of Food and Agriculture. In all instances, the whistleblowers have been either ignored or met with inaction. There has been no accountability for the corporations and farms engaged in criminal animal cruelty; instead, more than 75 activists have been prosecuted for investigating the farms. The County has made a concerted effort to take down DxE leadership, charging 6 Organizers, including 4 of the 5 members of the elected Core team, with seven felonies each. 

Despite repression, more and more activists are speaking up and taking action for animals. They are demanding that government officials commit to investigating animal abusing facilities and ending the prosecution of nonviolent whistleblowers.

Below, please find a speech given by Samantha Eachus at the rally.  

Kamran Nayeri

*     *     *

By Samantha Eachus, March 30, 2019

I’m a Sonoma County resident. I was born here, and I grew up on the homestead of my grandfather’s dairy farm. Before I began kindergarten I would go with him into the fields he had sold to other farmers and pet the cows and horses. He taught me to watch the weather and to be careful around animals. I rode horses here for 20 years, and I competed in national competitions around the west coast. I spent more time riding up and down Roblar and Blank than I probably ever did in school. I love animals, and I love this place. I have a map of the county tattooed on my forearm, and I got it done right down the street at Faith. But I am also a citizen of the world. I know that everyone feels for their home what I do for mine. I cannot put my love of this place and my past above the simple survival and self-determination of others. That is why I wrote this and why I march for the animals.

There is no separating the evolution of animal liberation from the necessary work of environmental restoration. Respecting the migratory butterfly that pollinates the native wildflower means abstaining from the labor of honeybees that outcompete the endangered pollinators and refusing the grass-fed beef that tramples them. Respecting cows and chickens means respecting the Tule Elk and the Least Tern. Considering liberation and safety for both means protecting the areas where they can live, and not exploiting either for profit. Continuing animal agriculture is the leading cause of species extinction, ocean dead zones, water pollution, and habitat destruction. Eating some animals is killing all the others.

Climate catastrophe is real and it is being caused by the practices that take place here - the production and consumption of animal products. A common counter to this obvious fact is that we, Sonoma County, feed the world, and I’m not arguing with you. We do feed the world - the first world. The products that are made here, from the meat and cheese to the eggs and honey, these products are not being sent to aid starving villages of humans. They aren’t being handed out to the houseless even here. They are sold, for massive profits, to jaded elitists and delusional yuppies. History doesn’t look back fondly on the people who pump the brakes of progress. Absolutely no one is going to nominate Sonny Perdue (Trump’s USDA pick) for a Nobel peace prize. But a truant vegan teenager just got nominated for one this month. Denying, even skirting the line of acceptance of man-made climate catastrophe embarrasses us all. Is it not shameful to us, to take such a vast amount of the world for pleasing the upper crust of a deplorable culture? Is it not made that much worse by considering we don’t need to breed or kill animals for food at all?

Every day another adorable video of a chicken playing piano or a pig painting goes viral. Every day, the same individuals end up plastic-wrapped in innumerable ways. Every day our own reasoning for eating some and loving others is rapidly unwinding. Studying the cognition of animals has led us to re-evaluate our own understanding of intelligence. To see fear, to recognize immobility from illness, to understand each animal as an individual with a past and a future takes nothing from the world. It takes nothing from me. But ignoring these realities strips animals of their own flesh denies their own future, and destroys their own earth.

I will not accept the mild condolences of humane or local. I will not accept an apology for what we continue to do to the earth and all its creatures. I will accept action. I will accept allies and I will accept responsibility for creating change the innocent souls of animals need us to make. Together we have an incredible power to change the way the world works, and individually we have the power to change how we work for the world. Respect for animal life and individuality is inseparable from respecting the order and peace of the environment. Re-evaluating our position as restorationists is only the first step in freeing animals, the planet, and ourselves.

3076. Anthropomorphism and the Need for Respectful Engagement

By Alice Oven, Alice Oven Blog, November 11, 2018

Many of you will have been as disgusted as I was by the recent news story in which American TV presenter Larysa Switlyk, dressed in camouflage, shot and killed a wild goat in Scotland. Posing next to the dead animal with a beaming smile, Switlyk posted on social media “Beautiful wild goat here on the Island of Islay in Scotland. Such a fun hunt!!” Glorifying hunting in this way is obviously far more problematic than simply being “very unBritish”, as the Scottish Country Sports Tourism Group put it on BBC Radio 4’s Points of View. However, the listener’s comment that really got my goat was that we were all getting too ‘worked up’ because “people have a habit of humanising animals; they forget they’re just a food source”. Wild animals like these goats are not “just” a food source; they are sentient, autonomous beings with emotional ties, the capacity to feel pain and joy, and families that are left behind when their lives are pointlessly taken from them by idiots like Switlyk.

Why are we so terrified of humanising animals? ‘Anthropomorphise’, from the Greek for ‘human form’,  was originally used to describe ‘human-like’ actions of the ancient gods and later extended to talk about human-like animal actions. Psychological or emotional anthropomorphism means ascribing a human-like mind and emotions to animals, and has long been controversial. In his brilliant bookMousy Cats and Sheepish Coyotes John Shivik describes how anthropomorphising in animal science in the eighties was a cardinal sin: “under the thinking of the gatekeepers of my field, admitting that animals have human characteristics was the gateway drug to the opiate of subjectivity and scientific ruin”[1]. Yet humans, after all, are also animals. We share a huge amount in common with other species, especially other mammals: we make family bonds, we raise and nurture infants. We take pleasure in food, sex, exercise, social connections, play. We feel pain, boredom, frustration, anger, even jealousy. There are going to be shared experiences; as Fredrik Karlsson points out, “Even if human beings constitute a unique species, each specific trait may be shared with some or all other animals”[2]. We now know that animals suffer, but to understand that reaction in an animal we must make an analogy from our own experiences of suffering.

Recently, one of my editors told me “When referring to animals I encourage authors to use ‘animals who’ rather than ‘animals that’ – attention to language is important for a book about ethics”. It’s important everywhere, because discussing animals as if they are objects rather than individuals — somethings rather than somebodies — allows humans to treat them in ways that would be inconceivable to treat another human animal. We fall into the trap, like the BBC Radio 4 caller, of seeing animals as ‘just’ a food source, as tools or resources put on this earth for us, to use how we like. We call cows, pigs, chickens ‘food’ or ‘farm animals’, as if being raised for food is part of their inherent nature; not so: they are ‘farmed animals’. Farming is something we do to them. Being farmed is not part of the animal’s natural behaviour or characteristics, and the use of terminology like ‘farm’ or ‘food’ animals is a symptom of “the kind of society that treats animals as disposable and that views our implicit commitments to them as revocable for convenience”[3].

On the flipside, the very human idea of ‘loving’ animals can be equally problematic, the word love tied to our own stake in the relationship with the animal. Switlyk might “love” beautiful goats, but she has zero respect for them or for their right to live out their lives without her interference. Similarly, how many self-proclaimed animal lovers do you know who eat cheap meat and use cosmetics tested on mice and rabbits? A much more valuable ideal is to ‘respect’ animals.  Acknowledging our responsibilities to animals, rather than redefining them according to their relationship to us, is essential if we are to view animal welfare as important outside of how it affects humans.

Humans are very confused when it comes to how we relate to other animals. We see this in the age-old dilemma around animal testing: in asserting that ‘animal models’ (another limiting and possessive term) are appropriate to reliably validate drugs and procedures intended to be used on humans, we are obviously humanising the animals used. But at the same time, we’re morally dehumanising and devaluing them, as it would be ethically unacceptable to conduct invasive tests on fellow human beings. The irony is that the closer the animal to a human (monkeys, for instance), the more useful the results but the more ethically problematic the research. Animal research sets up a situation where the animal is equated to a human in physiological and biological functioning but dehumanised in all the ways that matter: most obviously, his or her basic right not to suffer or be killed.

In a less disturbing but equally extreme way, look at the way we treat our pet dogs. On the one hand, we dress them up in human outfits, feed them ‘Pawsecco’ and discuss their canine “girlfriends” (just me?) but on the other we insist that they are still fierce, carnivorous ‘mini wolves’, a stereotype as inaccurate as the idea that they’re human babies.  Dogs were domesticated and tamed over 15,000 years ago; their genetics have evolved so that they can adapt easily to human companionship and even digest the starches in a plant-based diet. Dogs are no longer aggressive predators and nor are they tiny humans. They are dogs and we need to make it our job to understand what that means, rather than projecting our own ideal onto them.

In this way, a real danger in humanising animals is undervaluing or misrepresenting their nonhuman qualities and thus undermining their autonomy. There have been instances where anthropomorphism has been used strategically to encourage the public engage with an animal’s plight: the death of Cecil the lion led to public outrage partly because he was “a majestic, well-studied animal with an English nickname”[4]. By using anthropomorphism to emphasise animals’ personalities, scientists can bridge the ‘otherness’ dividing them from humans, essential to convince people to care about animals. But when anthropomorphism is ‘anthropocentric’, it risks misrepresenting animals and their cognitive abilities and then it can be hugely limiting. Switlyk calls her hunting target “beautiful”, but she is ascribing a value based on qualities that she esteems rather than anything to do with the goat’s essential nature. Being “beautiful” was utterly meaningless to that goat: Switlyk was simply referring to how he would look, dead, in her photo.

When we use inaccurate human terminology to describe animals, we do them a disservice: it’s only by recognising and valuing what philosopher Bernie Rollin famously describes as the animal’s telos that we can truly respect him or her. Telosrefers to the essential biological and psychological nature of an animal: the specific behaviours, characteristics and instincts that are natural to him or her (the ‘pigness’ of a pig, or the ‘cowness’ of a cow). They don’t experience human joy, they experience pig joy, or cow joy. I love this line by Karlsson: “A peculiar fact about the way we speak about animals is that we often have specific terms for their feet, but not for their happiness or anger… why would we believe that equine happiness would not also contain particular content that would merit a specific term?”[5] We often assume animals experience the world exactly as we do and when we humanise them in this way, we don’t attempt to understand them better or we do them an injustice by not meeting their needs. Animals might be stuck on a planet dominated by humans, but they each perceive and build their own worlds.

In her book Seeing Species: Re-presentations of Animals in Media & Popular Culture, Debra Merskin shows how we are constantly making one-dimensional judgements about other animals, such as all wolves are evil; polar bears are cuddly; all pit bull dogs are vicious; and these reductionist portrayals dangerously impact both animal lives and ours. This sort of communication, she says, usually has nothing to do with real animals but is entirely about humans. ‘Aggression’ is an example: when a protective dog owner pulls their animal away from a supposedly ‘aggressive’ dog, they might be depriving the dogs of a valuable play or learning opportunity. Labelling a dog ‘aggressive’ can also justify poor welfare, from electric shock collars to abandonment and euthanasia.

Lucy Cooke, in The Unexpected Truth About Animals, shows how we ‘reduce’ wild animals too: pandas, for instance, are not cute and hapless but tough, sexually potent survivors in a diminishing habitat. Cooke points out that “The image of the pathetic panda—a benign, bungling creature who needs human help to survive—is a very modern myth, conjured more from human desires than from biological facts.”[6] The captive panda population has more than doubled since 2005 and zoos have created ‘cartoon’ pandas which justify their removal from the wild into ‘protective’ cages. Their big foreheads, low set eyes and humanlike way of sitting and eating trigger our nurturing instinct and we treat them like human babies. In doing so, we do them a huge disservice. It’s the powerful muscles in the panda’s cheeks that give him a “lovable big round head”, the strength of their bite somewhere between that of a lion and a jaguar. Also, because of the problems in breeding pandas in captivity, people assume that they are impotent, sexless creatures; but a dominant male in the wild can have sex over 40 times in a single afternoon. The semen of the giant panda contains 10 to 100 times more sperm than a human male. By ‘humanising’ and infantilising these powerful, virile animals, we’re perpetuating a myth that the only way they can survive is in human captivity – actually, we’d be better off letting them get on with their own lives by protecting their natural habitats.

After reading Cooke’s book, I couldn’t stop seeing examples of people reducing other animals using our specifically human terminology, normally for an agenda that has no benefit for those animals. The article below is from the April 2018 newsletter from respected science publication The New Scientist, yet the language used anthropomorphises raccoons (so-called ‘pest animals’) in a way that is designed to engender fear: the raccoons walk zombie-like on their hind legs and “to make matters worse” they aren’t afraid of humans. These raccoons are simply sick, the article goes on to say, but we shouldn’t worry because the disease can’t be spread to humans. There is a notable lack of sympathy for the raccoons plight here, with humans and their companion animals being the main cause of concern. There is no suggestion that we should try to help, or even pity, these suffering animals, who have been transformed into a very human horror story.

So what’s the solution? Is there a ‘good’ way to humanise animals that helps us better understand them, as opposed to projecting our own misconceptions onto them? This is where critical anthropomorphism comes in, coined by Gordon Burghardt in the eighties. Critical anthropomorphism takes into account the animal’s species-specific characteristics and behaviour: his or her telos. When a human observer ‘critically’ humanises an nonhuman animal, she bases her inferences about that animal on her scientific knowledge of the species, the physical context they’re both in, and the animal’s ecological and evolutionary history. As Jonathan Balcombe states, anthropomorphizing is not a sin “so long as we make reasonable assumptions backed by good science”[7].

Humanising is to some extent unavoidable when talking about animals; we only have human language after all, and we’re always coming from a human perspective. Laurel Braitman, who has been studying animal mental illness, points out that “It’s not like you can take your human brain out of your head, and out it in a jar, and then use it to think about another animal thinking. We will always be one animal wondering about the emotional experience of another animal”[8]. But our aim should always be to go beyond humanising our nonhuman cousins by learning as much as we can about the unique ways animals think and act. Biologist George Schaller shows how we undermine our own learning when we refuse to attempt to engage with animals on their own level:

“You’re dealing with individual beings who have their own feelings, desires and fears. To understand them is very difficult and you cannot do it unless you try to have some emotional contact and intuition. Some scientists will say they are wholly objective, but I think that’s impossible. Laboratory scientists wasted years putting rats in mazes to show they were learning. They never got close enough to a rat to realise that they were not going by sight and learning, they were following the scent trails of previous rats. By overlooking this simple fact they wasted years of science”[9]

The Dalai Lama famously stated that “Perhaps the most important point is to ensure that science never becomes divorced from the basic human feeling of empathy with our fellow beings”. Obviously empathy is important (and it might have helped those sick raccoons) but it can also be limiting, shutting off those sensations and needs that animals do not share with us. Instead we must stay vigilant in remembering that animals have their own agenda outside of our human concerns and that agenda must be respected. As Paul Waldau put it so succinctly at the Vienna Summit on Animal Welfare this year: “The aim is towards respectful engagement with animals on their terms.”[10] Animals are not failed or substandard humans; they are their own selves and this does not make them better or worse than us. Certainly in Switlyk’s victorious photograph, the question of which individual is the ‘substandard’ moral entity is up for debate.

[1] Shivik, J. (2017). Mousy Cats and Sheepish Coyotes: The Science of Animal Personalities, Beacon Press: 9.

[2] Karlsson, F. (2012). Critical anthropomorphism and animal ethics. Journal of Agricultural & Environmental Ethics, 25, 707-720.

[3] Rollin, B. (2014). The “unwanted horse”— a modest proposal. The Canadian Veterinary Journal, 55, 1234.

[4] Kerr, M. (2018). Can storytelling save wildlife? National Geographic [Online]. Available from: https://blog.nationalgeographic.org/2018/04/04/can-storytelling-save-wildlife/

[5] Karlsson, F. (2012). As above.

[6] Cooke, L. (2018). The un-cuddly truth about pandas. The Wall Street Journal.

[7] Balcombe, J. (2009). Animal pleasure and its moral significance. Applied Animal Behaviour Science, 118, 208-216.

[8] Braitman, L. (2014). Depressed dogs, cats with OCD: what animal madness means for us humans. TED Talk [Online]. Available from: https://www.ted.com/talks/laurel_braitman_depressed_dogs_cats_with_ocd_what_animal_madness_means_for_us_humans

[9] Schaller, G. (2007). Feral and free. In: Bond, M. (ed.) New Scientist.

[10] Waldau, P. (2018) Humans and other animals – an essential connection? Making the case for a holistic approach.  International Animal Welfare Summit IAWS 2018, April 24, Vienna, Austria.

3009. On the Labor of Non-Human Animals

By Dinesh Wasiwel, Progress in Political Economy, August 28, 2018

Chicken Harvestor: Automation of chicken slaughter. 

The place of animals in relation to left movements has been highly uncertain. On one hand, there has been at least some historical ambivalence from the organised left around animal welfare as essentially a bourgeois pursuit, something that was reflected in Marx’s brief comments on the issue in Capital, Vol.1 (also on this see Gunderson 2011). There has also been a deeper problem in how the left has conceptualised animals within capitalism, particularly the question of whether animals labour, and how this is understood. Again, this problem has some fundamental roots within Marx’s philosophy: it is well known that the 1844 Manuscripts very clearly articulate a supposed fundamental difference between how humans and animals labour, attributing a capacity for conscious creative work only to humans.

A number of scholars have made admirable attempts to both challenge Marx’s anthropocentricism and imagine animals as labouring subjects, including Ted Benton, Donna Haraway,  Jocelyne Porcher and Kendra Coulter. I believe much of this work is in sympathy with recent green scholarship which has attempted to understand the relations between capitalism and nonhuman natures, such as the recent work of Jason W. Moore.

What strikes me as curious in surveying the small but growing work on animals, labour and their relation to capital, is the lack of analysis of the specific value-role of animals, not merely as commodities but as producers of value (i.e. labourers). I should say that I am less interested in the question “Do animals labour?” From my view this question misses something fundamental. The point of Marx’s analysis is to understand the value-role of labour within the context of capitalism. In other words, the important question is “What is the value of animal labour power?” Indeed, as Brian Whitener has recently pointed out, there is a need for a developed “animal labour theory of value”.

In my recent article in South Atlantic Quarterly I attempt precisely this sort of analysis of how animals might function as producers of value. While it may be tempting to begin this analysis by examining animals who are deployed within production as instruments of traction – such as the continued use of draught animals within small hold farming globally – my object of analysis is the much more complicated problem of human utilisation of animals for food.

It may be disorienting to imagine food animals as labourers. For example, how might we conceptualise a chicken kept in a small cage, intensively fed, and ultimately destined to be slaughtered for food, as a “worker”? However, recent theoretical developments in conceptualising labour offer some useful tools for thinking about this problem. Scholars such as Melinda Cooper and Les Beldo have theorised the body and its metabolism as sources of surplus. In addition, feminist labour theorists have explored how a work on one’s own body within reproductive labour functions within circuits of capital: for example Amrita Pande’s analysis of commercial surrogacy.

Building on this work, my argument is that we can understand the labour of food animals by comprehending the unique way capital positions these animals as neither just a raw commodity to be worked on, nor as purely a source of labour, but as a combination of both. That is, a combination of constant and variable capital. Understanding animals as this hybrid allows us to gain a fuller picture of what these animals mean to capitalism: they are a special  raw material that circulates (that enters production as one commodity and leaves as another) and can be relied upon to labour upon themselves through their own metabolic processes and thus produce value within production processes.

Thinking about animals as a hybrid of constant and variable capital gives us some useful insights into the lives of animals within capitalist production.  At least one promising aspect of this analysis is that it allows us to re-narrate the transformations in industrial agriculture that we have seen in the twentieth-century and beyond from the standpoint of both human and animal labour. The implications for human labour of the arrival of the factory farm are reasonably clear from the standpoint of Marx’s theory. Intensification of production and the increasing deployment of automated processes, aim at displacing human labour – that is increasing relative surplus value by reducing human labour time. But this story of the arrival of the factory farm requires more nuance if we are understand animals as labourers. While the industrialisation of animal agriculture aimed at a relative reduction in human labour time, it simultaneously expanded animal labour on a massive scale, since then an explosion in the production of animal products was necessary (on this expansion, see Weis). In this way, labour time was reoriented between species – human labour time is reduced, animal labour increases as animal products massively expand.

However the same drives towards expanding surplus value, whether in an absolute or relative sense, informed the transformation of animal labour that has been seen over the last century. Recently Raj Patel and Jason W. Moore have pointed out the specific history of poultry in industrial agriculture, and the success of producers in using selective breeding to reducing growing time and increase bird weight. We could understand these developments in industrial agriculture as driven by the need to reduce human labour time in production or reduce the costs of food for human workers (that reduces the cost of the means of human labour reproduction). However, a focus on animal labour shows us that capital seeks to seize all labour (human and non human) and increase its relative efficiency. For human labour this has often meant the deployment of technologies to reduce labour time, sometimes completely replacing human labour with automated processes. But the dynamics are different for animals as their labour is essential since they are also the product. They cannot be replaced. Instead, lives have been shortened in order to reduce the costs of animal labour and selective breeding has been used to increase the meat that can be yielded. The animal that used to be slaughtered at 12 weeks old now can be slaughtered at 6 weeks, and now weighs more than it ever did before, producing more meat for consumption.

A particular interest for me is trying to understand how animals as labourers resist and exert agency, and how this in turn shapes what production processes looks like. The expansion of constant capital, including machines, in intensive agriculture has displaced many human workers. However, it has created a different relationship between technologies and animals within agriculture. This is because human labour in animal agriculture was often about dominating and coercing animals to make them work (think of stockmen and stockwomen, whip in hand, herding cattle). New technologies which replaced humans would need to take over this specific coercive role. Thus the drive to improve the efficiency of human labour has informed attempts to create replacement technologies that must coerce animals and must deal with animal resistance. An example of such a technology is the chicken harvesting machine, which aims to “save” human workers (often highly exploited and precarious workers) the job of trying to catch chickens before they are sent to slaughter. This work is usually dangerous, since chickens do not want to be caught (see Quandt et al). The “harvesting machines” which are replacing human labour are designed to confront and deal with animal resistance to being caught. In a sense this tells us something about the unique structural position of animals under capitalism – they produce under conditions of domination, and efficiencies in production will aim not necessarily to replace them, but instead to more effectively counter their resistance in order to make them more productive.

In my view asking how animals are positioned within capitalism is useful for thinking about what the left project is and who it represents. A stronger analysis of the structural position of animals within capitalism may elucidate the links between human and non human labour and open up opportunities for a broader understanding of labour struggle that includes recognition of animals and the violence we expose them to. Certainly my hope is that we can produce a politics which challenges the way capital has come to dominate all life, human and non human.

* Thanks owed to Adam Morton for the edits on this piece and the continuing encouragement; the Past & Present Reading Group at the University of Sydney that has provided a wonderful space to think through ideas; and ex-political economy honours student Eliza Littleton, for many chats over the years.

Dinesh Wadiwel is a senior lecturer in human rights and socio-legal studies at the University of Sydney, with a background in social and political theory. He is the author of the monograph The War against Animals (Brill, 2015) and co-editor with Matthew Chrulew of the collection Foucault and Animals (Brill, 2016). Dinesh is co-convener of the Human Animal Research Network (HARN) at the University of Sydney: http://sydney.edu.au/arts/research/harn/

2626. Asia’s Illegal Wildlife Trade Makes Tigers a Farm-to-Table Meal

By Rachel Nuwer, The New York Times, June 5, 2017

Caged tigers in a zoo in Kings Romans casino complex in Laos. Photo: Adam Dean for The New York Times. 

BOKEO PROVINCE, Laos — The tiger paced back and forth in its cage, groaning mournfully. A second big cat slept soundly in the corner, while a third stared blankly at the bars.

Next to this cage was another containing three more tigers, and after that three more cages: a line of small pens, each holding at least one cat. Most likely, none had long to live.

The tigers were property of the Kings Romans Group, which operates a casino here, along with hotels, a shooting range, a cockfighting and bullfighting ring, a Chinatown-themed shopping center, and this shabby zoo.

Ten years ago, the Hong Kong-based company signed a lease with the Laotian government to develop this 12-square-mile plot in northwestern Bokeo Province, just across the Mekong River from Thailand. It’s called the Golden Triangle Special Economic Zone.

Most businesses in the duty-free complex are owned and staffed by Chinese citizens and patronized by a predominantly Chinese clientele. Many are drawn here by the promise of vices not as easily found back home, including products made from exotic animals like tigers.

Conservationists maintain that this zoo is actually a farm raising animals for slaughter, and that it plays a significant role in perpetuating the illegal wildlife trade, swapping tigers with similar operations in Thailand and illegally butchering animals for their bones, meat and parts.

Tigers, bears, snakes and countless other species, many endangered, are held on farms throughout Southeast Asia. Operators illegally capture animals in the wild and then pass them off as captive-bred, or breed the animals on site and illegally sell them into the trade.

These facilities are part of a contraband industry whose profitability by some estimates is surpassed only by the global trade in drugs and arms, and by human trafficking.

Few tourists were present at Kings Romans during a recent visit. The ghost-town feel was reinforced by boarded-up shops, half-finished construction sites and posters advertising events that had long since come and gone.

But restaurants at Kings Romans still offered expensive plates of bear paw, pangolin (an endangered scaly mammal) and sautéed tiger meat, which can be paired with tiger wine, a grain-based concoction in which the cats’ penises, bones or entire skeletons are soaked for months.

When a group of foreigners showed up at the God of Wealth, Kings Romans’ fanciest restaurant, the suspicious proprietor told their translator, “You can eat here, but do not ask for the special jungle menu” — the menu offering wildlife options.

Nevertheless, the staff offered tiger wine for $20 a shot glass, and served a bear’s paw to patrons at a nearby table. In May, a photographer for The New York Times who visited the restaurant was offered plates of tiger meat for $45.

Nearby, half a dozen jewelry and pharmaceutical shops displayed exorbitantly priced tiger teeth and claws, as well as rhino-horn carvings and shavings, elephant skin and ivory.

“The place is just a mess,” said Debbie Banks, of the nonprofit Environmental Investigation Agency in London. “Pretty much anything goes.”

In 2015, Ms. Banks and her colleagues, along with the nonprofit group Education for Nature-Vietnam, reported that meals, medicine and jewelry made from numerous protected species — including tigers, leopards, rhinoceroses, bears and elephants — were openly sold in the special economic zone.

Their documentation spurred the Laotian government to raid some businesses here and to burn a few tiger skins on television. But Ms. Banks said little had changed since that “cosmetic effort.”

Like the rest of the complex, the Kings Romans zoo was largely deserted save for animals kept in cages. A woman and her young daughter wandered in to look at the bears. Many showed signs of captivity-induced stress, including uncontrolled headbanging. Staff members were nowhere to be found.

Approximately 700 tigers live on farms in Laos. Thousands more are believed to be kept throughout Southeast Asia, and an additional 5,000 to 6,000 are housed in over 200 breeding centers in China. Fewer than 4,000 of the big cats remain in the wild; farmed tigers now far outnumber total wild populations.

At an international conference on the endangered species trade last fall, Laotian government officials acknowledged a growing problem with wildlife farms and committed themselves to closing down the country’s tiger farms. So far, little has changed.

One source who works closely with the government, who asked not to be named for fear of reprisals, said that some Laotian politicians remained deeply involved in the farms and that the country’s forestry department lacked the authority to shut them down.

Representative Ed Royce, Republican of California and chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, has singled out Laos as an international hub for illegal wildlife trafficking, saying in 2015 it was “quite clear officials are profiting.” Laotian government officials did not respond to repeated requests for comment.

Treaty Limits Breeding

According to the Convention on the International Trade in Endangered Species, or Cites, a treaty to which China and all Southeast Asian nations are signers, tigers are to be bred only for conservation — not for their parts, and not on a commercial scale that does not benefit wild tigers.

“Farming tigers for trade confuses consumers and stimulates demand,” said Grace Ge Gabriel, Asia regional director of the International Fund for Animal Welfare. “The increased market demand for tiger parts also fuels poaching of tigers in the wild, because wildlife consumers prefer animals caught in the wild.”

In Laos and several other Asian countries, conservationists have compiled ample evidence that many zoos and farms serve as fronts for commercial breeding.

In 2016, Tiger Temple in Thailand made headlines when monks there were accused of abusing tigers and selling them into the illegal wildlife trade. Eventually, 40 dead cubs were discovered in a freezer, along with pelts and other wildlife products. Temple representatives said that the bodies and parts did not prove wrongdoing.

Thailand has some 1,450 tigers in captivity, the majority of which are kept at popular attractions like Tiger Temple, where tourists pay to take photographs and play with cubs and young adults.

When the tigers reach sexual maturity and can no longer be handled safely, they often disappear, sold on the black market for up to $50,000, according to Karl Ammann, a Kenya-based investigative filmmaker who is making a documentary about the tiger farming industry.

Conservationists also have accused tiger farms in China — two of which are supported by government investment — of illegal activity.

Chinese law permits some tiger skins to be traded legally, although tiger bone has been banned since 1993. But in 2013 Ms. Banks of the Environmental Investigation Agency and her colleagues found that farms were stockpiling tiger bones to make wine and that skins from wild tigers were sold as being from captive-bred tigers.

After inquiries from The Times, Meng Xianlin, executive director-general of the Chinese Cites management authority, declined to be interviewed. Several other Chinese officials did not respond to repeated interview requests.

Past violators often re-enter the wildlife farming business. Construction has already begun on a zoo next door to Tiger Temple. Officials in Vietnam recently granted permission for the wife of Pham Van Tuan, a twice-convicted tiger trafficker, to import 24 tigers from the Czech Republic “for conservation purposes.”

Vuong Tien Manh, deputy director of Vietnam’s Cites management authority, said in an email that Vietnam had seized a number of frozen tigers and tiger bones over the past five years, most of which were suspected to have originated from Laos.

He added that Vietnam’s policies did not permit commercial breeding of tigers, but the country has some 130 tigers in captivity. All tiger farms are strictly monitored, Mr. Manh said, no matter who the owners are.

Bear Bile Collected

Though tigers are the most contentious of Asia’s farmed wildlife, they are by no means the only species caught up in the industry.

An estimated 10,000 bears are legally kept on Chinese farms for their bile, an ingredient in traditional medicine that is collected through a tube permanently implanted in the animals’ gall bladders, or through a hole in their abdomens.

Countless other species — crocodiles, porcupines, pythons, deer and more — are also farmed throughout China and Southeast Asia.

Some proponents, including government officials, believe that such facilities should be legal and encouraged, arguing that they relieve pressure to hunt wild animals by satiating demand with captive-bred animals.

Others say there is no evidence to back this assertion. “I can’t think of any species in Southeast Asia that benefits from commercial captive breeding,” said Chris Shepherd, the Southeast Asia regional director for Traffic, a nonprofit wildlife trade-monitoring group.

Scott Roberton, the director of counter-wildlife trafficking at the Wildlife Conservation Society’s Asia program, added that the risks associated with legalizing trade in farmed tigers and other endangered species are the same as those associated for decades with the ivory trade.

“Legal trade stimulates demand, confuses law enforcement efforts, and opens a huge opportunity for laundering illegal products, which is why ivory markets are now being closed globally,” he said.

“There just isn’t the capacity within these countries to manage a legal trade in a watertight way,” Dr. Roberton said.

“Laundering” of animals as farmed that were actually caught in the wild is a frequent practice. In Chengdu, China, one-third of 285 bears rescued from bile farms and now living at a rehabilitation center run by Animals Asia, a nonprofit group, are missing limbs, a sign that they were caught in the wild by snares.

In 2002, Vietnam faced a similar dilemma when it made bear farming and bile sales illegal. Fifteen years later, around 1,200 bears still live with their original owners.

Many are kept in horrific conditions — in cages scarcely larger than their bodies, suffering from rampant disease and lacking adequate food and water — and their bile continues to be collected illegally.

Animals Asia runs a rehabilitation center near Hanoi that houses 160 bears rescued from the trade, but the center has permission to keep only 200 animals. Even if that cap were eliminated, however, the group lacks the funds and space to care for all of Vietnam’s remaining captive bears.

“Obviously, we can’t do this all ourselves,” said Tuan Bendixsen, Animals Asia’s Vietnam director. “The government must take responsibility for their wildlife.”

As Laos ponders how to responsibly close its tiger farms, China is moving in the opposite direction. Since 1992, it has been petitioning Cites to permit trade in farmed tiger products.

When Chinese representatives lobbied for this change once again at the most recent Cites meeting, the proposal was turned down.

Conservationists believe that international pressure may be crucial to persuading Asian governments to close tiger, bear and other wildlife farms, but that strategy’s effectiveness is compromised by an awkward fact: An estimated 5,000 tigers are held in backyards, petting zoos and even truck stops across the United States.

While those animals are predominantly kept as pets, they compromise negotiations with other countries on this issue, said Leigh Henry, a senior policy adviser at the World Wildlife Fund.

“When fingers are pointed at China about their tiger farms, they tend to point the finger back at the U.S. and say, ‘They have as many tigers as we have, why are you not criticizing them?’” she said.

“The priority is closing the tiger farms in Asia,” Ms. Henry said, “but the U.S. needs to set a strong standard, and that starts with cleaning up the situation in our own backyard.”

2620. Blood Center to Pay Towards Care for Chimpanzees It Used For Hepatitis B Research

By James Gorman, The New York Times, May 30, 2017

Chimpanzees once used in blood center research is a sanctuary in Liberia. Photo: Zoom Dosso/Agence France-Presse--Getty Images

Two years after the New York Blood Center set off a storm of protest from animal welfare advocates by withdrawing support for a colony of chimpanzees used for biomedical research, the organization has joined with the Humane Society of the United States to guarantee their future care, pledging $6 million.

In a joint announcement on Tuesday, the two groups said the blood center would donate the money to the Humane Society, which will assume responsibility for the lifetime care of the chimps. In captivity, chimps can live 50 to 60 years.

In the statement, Dr. Christopher D. Hillyer, head of the blood center, said he was “pleased that we have found a capable organization to take care of the chimpanzees for their lifetime.” He said the agreement would allow the blood center to concentrate on ensuring the blood supply.

The donation amounts to roughly half the estimated cost of caring for the animals on their island sanctuary in Liberia, said Wayne Pacelle, the head of the Humane Society of the United States. Mr. Pacelle said he was delighted that the two groups had “found a path forward.”

Until now, that path had been hard to find.

Beginning in the 1970s, the blood center used the chimps for research on a hepatitis B vaccine, which ended in 2006. The animals were owned by the government of Liberia.

The center supported the chimps until the spring of 2015, when it cut off funds. Officials said negotiations with the Liberian government had not been productive.

At the time, Victoria O’Neill, a spokeswoman for the blood center, said that the organization “never had any obligation for care for the chimps, contractual or otherwise.”

Primatologists and animal welfare advocates reacted with outrage.

“I have studied great apes for 20 years in all contexts across the globe — labs, zoos, sanctuaries, the wild,” Brian Hare, an anthropologist and primatologist at Duke University, wrote in an email at the time. “Never, ever have I seen anything even remotely as disgusting as this.”

Protests were held at the blood center’s headquarters in New York. The Humane Society began supporting the chimps and pressuring the blood center to take on some of the financial burden.

The Humane Society and the blood center have been negotiating off and on for the last few years. The Humane Society gained the help of Bill Richardson, a former governor of New Mexico, and other prominent people in talking to the blood center, which Mr. Pacelle said had been “incredibly resistant.”

He described the agreement as “a real turnaround for the blood center” and said “the sensible voices within their organization prevailed.”

“We’re very pleased,” Mr. Pacelle added.

Robert Purvis, a spokesman for the blood center, said reaching an agreement was a complicated process. “The blood center has been looking for an organization to take on the care of the chimpanzees for the last 10 years,” he said.

Fortunately, he said, “Nobody gave up.”