• Skip to main content
  • Skip to secondary menu
  • Skip to primary sidebar
Exterminating Angel Press

Exterminating Angel Press

Creative Solutions for Practical Idealists.

  • Home.
  • Our Books.
  • About Us.
    • What EAP’s About.
    • Why Exterminating Angel?
    • Becoming Part of the EAP Community.
    • EAP’s Poetry Editor Speaks!
    • Contributors.
    • EAP Press.
  • EAP: The Magazine.
    • EAP: The Magazine Archive
  • Tod Blog.
  • Jam Today.
  • Contact Us.
  • Cart.

Our Modern Crusades for Animal Favorites.

September 30, 2016 by Exangel

by Brian Griffith.

Across the modern world, outrage against people who kill the wrong animals is on the rise. For example, when the Dalit (or untouchable) students of India’s Osmania University served beef biryani at a recent social event, about 100 radicals for cow reverence from a right-wing Hindu group, the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parisad (ABVP), tried to storm the gathering. After police stopped them, the protesters set fire to two cars and got into a stone-throwing, tear-gas canister-lobbing street fight. A Dalit festival organizer named B. Sudarshan said that the students were fighting for the “freedom to eat” what they liked. But Mr. Ramakrishna of the ABVP accused, “Today they are asking for beef, tomorrow they will want alcohol.”

Naturally, when people get emotional about their sacred animals, they sometimes have a hard time distinguishing between the beasts’ attackers and defenders. Many Hindus were completely outraged when Dwijendra Narayah Jah published The Myth of the Holy Cow in 2002. Narayah Jah was actually protesting that cruelty to cows is common, but religious extremists took it as a war on faith rather than a criticism of hypocrisy. Right-wing religious nationalists issued death threats. Caving in to popular pressure, the Indian government banned the book, and large groups gathered for public book burnings.

Apparently, the public demand for Hindu holy law is on the rise. On March 2, 2015, Maharashtra State enacted a ban on killing cows, selling their meat, or even possessing “contraband” beef. The police made their first arrests on March 25. Responding to a tip in Malegaon district, officers seized 150 pounds of suspected cow flesh, as three butchers disappeared down the alleyways. For all those who wish to impose legal bans on eating whichever animals they most respect, the chief minister of India’s Haryana State, Manohar Lal Khattar, gave the following justification for theocracy in matters of food:

Muslims can continue to live in this country, but they will have to give up eating beef. The cow is an article of faith here … freedom of one person is only to the extent that it is not hurting another person … Eating beef hurts the sentiments of another community, even constitutionally you cannot do this. The constitution says you cannot do something that offends me, I cannot do something that offends you … They can be Muslim even after they stop eating beef, can’t they? It is written nowhere that Muslims have to eat beef …

However, most modern crusades for animal favorites are fought in terms of economic warfare. And though our campaigns against killing the wrong animals are often matters of protecting endangered species, they are also matters of conflicting tastes. So, back in the 1980s, European activists including Brigitte Bardot and Paul McCartney helped secure boycotts to punish Canada for its seal hunts. Backed by rising public demand, the Greenpeace ship Sea Shepherd tried to disrupt the seal hunt, but was rammed and cornered by the Canadian Coast Guard, which charged the crew with “violating seal protection regulations.” To inform the divided public, Briton Busch’s 1985 book The War Against the Seals chronicled centuries of human atrocities against seal kind. Janice Henke’s Seal Wars! countered with an attack on the self-serving elite conservationists who would deprive the poor but noble folk of Newfoundland from their means of making a living. The Anglican bishop of the Canadian Arctic explained that Inuit seal hunters “can’t understand why people in southern climes who kill millions of animals for their tables and for their shoes are attacking the only economic means they have to stay off welfare.” The Inuit just did not seem to realize that seals are way cuter than cows or chickens.

As seal fur dropped from fashion over much of the world, more kinds of fur or hide fell under a moral cloud. Fur farmers raising nutria in Louisiana went broke, and hunting nutria for fur declined, so the populations of nutria vastly increased. Macy’s in New York terminated sales of Chinese “faux furˮ jackets, which were reportedly made from raccoon dogs. Advocacy groups convinced Macy’s that it was wrong to sell fur from any type of dog, and more importantly, that much of this imported fur actually did come from our beloved domestic cats and dogs. The protesters claimed that fur traders in China were killing around two million cats and dogs a year. The cat fur was labeled “katzenfelle,” “rabbit,” “goyangi,” or “mountain cat.” The dog fur was termed “Asian jackal,” “groupee,” “loup d’Asie,” and “corsac.” In this great unlabeling, one community’s fair game was revealed as somebody else’s sacred cow. Of course it was hypocrisy. We still regarded only some animals as sacred.

 

Filed Under: EAP: The Magazine, Fall 2016: Animals Are Us.

Primary Sidebar

Cart.

Check Out Our Magazine.

In This Issue.

  • Who Was Dorothy?
  • Those Evil Spirits.
  • The Screaming Baboon.
  • Her.
  • A Tale of Persistence.
  • A Conversation with Steve Hugh Westenra.
  • Person Number Twelve.
  • Dream Shapes.
  • Cannon Beach.
  • The Muse.
  • Spring.
  • The Greatness that was Greece.
  • 1966, NYC; nothing like it.
  • Sun Shower.
  • The Withering Weight of Being Perceived.
  • Broken Clock.
  • Confession.
  • Francis Coppola’s Apocalypse.
  • Sometimes you die, I mean that people do.
  • True (from “My Life with Dogs”).
  • Fragmentary musings on birds and bees.
  • 12 Baking Essentials to Always Have in Your Poetry.
  • Broad Street.
  • A Death in Alexandria.
  • My Forked Tongue.
  • Swan Lake.
  • Long Division.
  • Singing against the muses.
  • Aphorisms from “What Remains to Be Said”.

In The News.

That cult classic pirate/sci fi mash up GREENBEARD, by Richard James Bentley, is now a rollicking audiobook, available from Audible.com. Narrated and acted by Colby Elliott of Last Word Audio, you’ll be overwhelmed by the riches and hilarity within.

“Captain Sylvestre de Greybagges is your typical seventeenth-century Cambridge-educated lawyer turned Caribbean pirate, as comfortable debating the virtues of William Shakespeare, Isaac Newton, and compound interest as he is wielding a cutlass, needling archrival Henry Morgan, and parsing rum-soaked gossip for his next target. When a pepper monger’s loose tongue lets out a rumor about a fleet loaded with silver, the Captain sets sail only to find himself in a close encounter of a very different kind.

After escaping with his sanity barely intact and his beard transformed an alarming bright green, Greybagges rallies The Ark de Triomphe crew for a revenge-fueled, thrill-a-minute adventure to the ends of the earth and beyond.

This frolicsome tale of skullduggery, jiggery-pokery, and chicanery upon Ye High Seas is brimming with hilarious puns, masterful historical allusions, and nonstop literary hijinks. Including sly references to Thomas Pynchon, Treasure Island, 1940s cinema, and notable historical figures, this mélange of delights will captivate readers with its rollicking adventure, rich descriptions of food and fashion, and learned asides into scientific, philosophical, and colonial history.”

THE SUPERGIRLS is back, revised and updated!

supergirls-take-1

In The News.

Newport Public Library hosted a three part Zoom series on Visionary Fiction, led by Tod.  

And we love them for it, too.

The first discussion was a lively blast. You can watch it here. The second, Looking Back to Look Forward can be seen here.

The third was the best of all. Visions of the Future, with a cast of characters including poets, audiobook artists, historians, Starhawk, and Mary Shelley. Among others. Link is here.

In the News.

SNOTTY SAVES THE DAY is now an audiobook, narrated by Last Word Audio’s mellifluous Colby Elliott. It launched May 10th, but for a limited time, you can listen for free with an Audible trial membership. So what are you waiting for? Start listening to the wonders of how Arcadia was born from the worst section of the worst neighborhood in the worst empire of all the worlds since the universe began.

In The News.

If you love audio books, don’t miss the new release of REPORT TO MEGALOPOLIS, by Tod Davies, narrated by Colby Elliott of Last Word Audio. The tortured Aspern Grayling tries to rise above the truth of his own story, fighting with reality every step of the way, and Colby’s voice is the perfect match for our modern day Dr. Frankenstein.

In The News.

Mike Madrid dishes on Miss Fury to the BBC . . .

Tod on the Importance of Visionary Fiction

Check out this video of “Beyond Utopia: The Importance of Fantasy,” Tod’s recent talk at the tenth World-Ecology Research Network Conference, June 2019, in San Francisco. She covers everything from Wind in the Willows to the work of Kim Stanley Robinson, with a look at The History of Arcadia along the way. As usual, she’s going on about how visionary fiction has an important place in the formation of a world we want and need to have.

Copyright © 2025 · Exterminating Angel Press · Designed by Ashland Websites