Author: mateckek

Suda the Amazing Elephant!

November 7, 2014 / mateckek / 6 Comments

Suda the Painting Elephant in a Thailand Zoo

This is a short montage of an elephant show in a zoo in Thailand. The first part of the video is of elephants lined up and “jamming out” to music while playing harmonicas. The music is up beat and cheery as the audience awww and cheers on the elephants. They are nodding their heads up and down and the men in the background are standing around the elephants with cattle prods or sticks of some kind, clearly this implies that this is not a natural behavior, the elephants have been trained to “enjoy” this music.

The next part of the video is a zoom in of another part of the elephant show. The music becomes very relaxing and there is a close-up of an elephant painting. The elephant, Suda, is holding the brush in her trunk. There are many videos of elephants painting on youtube and while trainers claim it is a way for the elephants to practice and demonstrate the adeptness of their trunks, generally this is also not a natural behavior.

The elephant also paints a picture of an elephant reaching for tree leaves and while this is meant to show self-awareness, it is important to the viewer to remember that this is a learned trick. It has been taught to the elephants by their trainers as an effort to entertain the crowd and gain publicity for their business. However, if one wanted to view this in a less cynical manner an argument could be made that the elephant is merely demonstrating it’s intelligence and ability to use it’s trunk. It can be viewed as a way of educating the public about the intelligence of the animal. The camera then pans over to the crowd who applauds Suda and gets up to take pictures on the other side of a railing, clearly the audience is showing

Suda is even taught to write her own name again demonstrating self awareness. But is she actually aware that this is her name and this is what she looks like? Is she expressing herself through painting? Or is she merely doing a trick taught to her to amuse the public?

Finally, there is a clip of an elephant, presumably Suda, “playing with a soccer ball.” In this clip you see the trainers fully and that they are standing with Suda as she kicks the soccer ball very far. Then as the crowd applauds, presumably Suda is given another command and she throws the ball behind her and kicks it with her back foot. Again an argument can be made that this could be an excursive for Suda, so she keeps up her agility and this is just a playful trick that she enjoys doing. However these tricks that she has been taught do demonstrate her intelligence they are not natural behaviors that an elephant would do and clearly she has been trained them through a technique of “punishment and reward” based on her performance.

Malamud author of Zoo Spectatorship argues that zoo spectatorship, like as what had happened with Suda, is not for the animal but for the humans. He even discusses how zoos express human propensity for imperialism.

Human control over zoo animals celebrates an imperial relation toward the realm of nature and its subordination to our whims. But in the long term, a human society that expresses its relationship to the natural world via the institution of zoos risks foundering amid our imperious ecological ethos (Malamud 228).

What he is saying is that human propensity for control over other beings has led to the popularity of zoos, we enjoy and are entertained by our ability to control other animals. In the case of this video, elephant painting itself, playing music, and kicking a soccer ball, we delight in the fact that we have been able to pass on our knowledge on another animal and are able to control it for our entertainment. This is a very common practice among zoos, where they claim to be educating the public about the animal when in reality they are teaching animals human behavior which is not natural to the animal. Some may argue that this deepens our relationship with the animal. I have to agree with Malamud however, while I did enjoy watching an elephant paint a self portrait, I also understand that this wasn’t the elephant expressing itself through a creative medium it was a learned behavior that is not natural to the animal and was only preformed after training Suda through a means of punishment and reward. Another way of expressing our control over animals.

Post #2

October 16, 2014 / mateckek / 0 Comments

Sea World Seal Show

When I was younger my favorite place was the aquarium at the boardwalk near me. I had my birthday there every year until I was 8 because I loved the animals. In particular, my favorite was a seal, named Lucille, who had been blinded in an accident with a boat and had been rescued. She was trained to do tricks, which according to the aquarium staff, were rehabilitation exercises. She was my favorite.

This image of the seal reminds me of Lucille and her tricks. It is taken from a Sea World seal show and depicts a seal balancing on its flippers while balancing a soccer ball on its nose. The seals are trained by rewarding them with food after they preform a task correctly. While it appears that the seal enjoys doing the tricks, after reading Berger’s essay I look at this differently because as humans, how do we know that the seal is experiencing pleasure in performing. This isn’t a behavior that they exhibit in the wild so are we forcing the seal to learn tricks solely for our amusement, or is there an advantage to these zoo shows.

I think this example is what Berger refers to as “humans viewing animals as toys for our amusement”. After reading Berger’s essay, I can understand his opinion on animals in captivity, especially as they grew in popularity with children, animals have almost become like toys, instead of just our companions. It is very common to teach domesticated pets, like dogs, obedient behavior and while it does not seem to bother a domesticated animal, is it fair to train wild animals to do tricks as well in zoo performances?

On page 23, Berger states, “A zoo is a place where as many species and varieties of animal as possible are collected in order that they can be seen, observed, studied.” He is stating here that we are viewing animals as things that we can collect and categorize and analyze as though they weren’t living, creatures. He goes on to discuss how captivity makes it possible for humans to view animals like they would view art in a gallery. I think this is a fair statement however, I disagree with his generalization that zoos are not useful. While I agree that zoos aren’t always the best solution and agree that they really can emphasize human control over animals, I think they help us learn and understand animals we can’t normally interact with. Because humans are able to get up close and interact with animals (like tigers, elephants, polar bears etc.) safely, we are able to make relationships with animals that, if we never got to develop this relationship with them, we wouldn’t appreciate them and would see them as vicious and dangerous to us.

I think zoos have allowed us to better understand animals and save some species from extinction by keeping them in captivity. While it’s not always a wonderful solution it has really helped bring about preservation movements and I believe that they can be critical in preserving our environment. Because we are now able to develop companionship with animals that we never would have before, humans begin to care about what happens to polar bears for example because we can safely look one in the eyes and understand why we should save such a beautiful creature. I don’t however, think that there is a necessity for animal shows. By forcing them to preform tricks and behaviors they would never do in the wild, we are purely using them for entertainment. While we don’t think that these tricks harm the animals, how can we be sure that the animals are finding enjoyment out of this? I think that zoos can be very beneficial to the preservation of the environment, but, after reading Berger’s essay, I believe that the tricks and shows are purely an instance of us using the animals as our toys.

Eat More “Chikin”

October 10, 2014 / mateckek / 0 Comments

Chik-fil-a Billboard

This is a Billboard of two cows writing “Eat Mor Chikin” by Chick-Fil-A. This is part of Chick-Fil-A’s advertising campaign where cows are begging people to “eat more chicken” because burgers are a clear staple of most fast food places and Chick-Fil-A serves chicken exclusively. In this advertisement released by Chick-Fil-A in May of this year, a woman is eating a burger when a cow walks up to her on her park bench and watches her eat the burger, intending to imply the cow is making her feel guilty. The cow then gestures to a sign on a telephone pole that says “Lost Cow” to imply that this cow is looking for her friend and the woman is possibly eating her. While I personally find this joke to be mildly amusing and relatively harmless, if you really think about it, its also quite morbid.

The commercial is clearly anthropomorphizing the cows in order for us to sympathize with them. It’s intended to be humorous but this brings the question as to whether it is entirely ethical to make a joke out of eating chicken and beef. I am curious that if Burger King released a similar video but in place of a cow, they put a chicken, looking for her friend. Would someone feel as guilty about a chicken as they would a cow? Or because we eat both would we not care about either much? As Berger and Foer both discuss, we tend to rank the value of an animal based on their intelligence and whether or not we are “familiarized” with the animal as a companion.

So if we were to watch this commercial, do we make the assumption that the advertisers are using this value system to make us feel bad for the cow and in turn want to eat more chicken? Because clearly the chickens aren’t making a campaign for us to eat more cows. Are they as smart as the cows to start protesting chicken eating? Where are the hens confronting those chowing down on their friends by protesting it with an “Eat mor Cow” campaign? If we were faced with “Battery Cages” or “Broiler Chickens” would we still be willing to go get Chick-Fil-A?

While we accept that this is intended to be a light hearted commercial it’s interesting to me that clearly the advertisers are using what seems to be a commonly understood fact: we don’t like being confronted with what we’re truly eating. The author of Eating Animals, Johnathan Foer, discusses our imbedded guilt in “Eating Animals” in multiple ways, about the processing of meat and all that is wrong with it and why we are so uncomfortable knowing these facts. We all kind of pretend we don’t feel guilty but I’m sure that if we were confronted with a cow watching us while we ate a burger, most people would probably feel at least a small pang of guilt and maybe stop eating it until we eventually crave it again.

Foer writes:

“Perhaps in the back of our minds we already understand, without all the science I’ve discussed, that something terribly wrong is happening. Our sustenance now comes from misery. We know that if someone offers to show us a film on how our meat is produced, it will be a horror film. We perhaps know more than we care to admit, keeping it down in the dark places of our memory– disavowed. When we eat factory-farmed meat we live, literally, on tortured flesh. Increasingly, that tortured flesh is becoming our own (Foer 30) .”

I think this commercial, despite its light-hearted intentions, tugs at us a little deeper. We all recognize that we would feel guilty if a cow confronted us about eating her friend, because perhaps we know the torture that went in to making that delicious burger we’re chomping into. In America, cows aren’t typically viewed as companions but they also are generally viewed as more intelligent than a chicken, even though we still eat them. By anthropomorphizing them however, by having them look for their friends and send humans desperate pleas to not eat them, we begin to sympathize with the animal. The reason the ad-campaign has such mass-appeal is because we’re all chuckling at the fact that, as Foer says above, we all feel at least a little bit guilty about eating animals.

Introductions

September 11, 2014 / mateckek / 0 Comments

I’m not sure why I picked this picture I just like hedgehogs….

My name is Emma. I am a junior and a bio major. I have an older sister who also went to Lafayette and she graduated in 2010. I live in a really small town in New Jersey at the beach. In the summer, I spend all my free time at there and playing tennis. I went to Biotechnology High School and it was very science focused. I didn’t particularly enjoy going there. My parents met at a ski mountain in upstate New York so since before I was born our family has been skiing at Hunter Mountain. I’m involved in a few clubs on campus including the Lafayette Activities Forum, as Director of Marketing and Outreach.

I was a mechanical engineer for two years, however I have since reevaluated my life plan and realized that I am not meant to pursue that career. When I was little I once told my family I wanted to be a flower, then after realizing this dream wasn’t possible, I decided I wanted to be a zoologist, and then a vet. I wanted to be an artist in high school because I was so fed up with science. I wanted a job out of school though so I went to engineering because my physics teacher told me I’d be good at that. I still don’t have a completely clear path that I’m on right now. I think I may want to become a pediatrician someday.

My favorite animal is an elephant so here is a video of a cute little elephant: here

Author: mateckek

Suda the Amazing Elephant!

Post #2

Eat More “Chikin”

Introductions

Recent Posts

Recent Comments

Archives