Some Fantastic Place: Essays on Non-humans and Yahoomans

By Randy Shields

Stories about animals and the people who help them: a successful community effort to protect migrating toads, the 1983 protests that ignited the modern day animal rights movement, a kitten rescued from the middle of a busy road, a visit to a factory pig farm. There are also tributes to animal rights philosopher Prof. Tom Regan, singer/pianist/composer (and animal activist) Laura Nyro and Sen. George McGovern whose 1977 Senate Select Committee on Nutrition and Human Needs put plant-based eating on the political map.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Apr 6, 2021
• ISBN: 9781667174884

Book preview

Burns

Chapter One

Mobilization for Animals

Madison, April 24, 1983

In the beginning, there were strangers. One by one we picked them up in Columbus, Springfield, Dayton, Indianapolis... going to Madison, Wisconsin to protest the infliction of pain to elicit information -- the torture and superstitious non-science of animal experiments.

Driving and driving past the gray of Gary and Chicago, the world in delicious color again in Wisconsin. Driving and driving past over around through inconjunct perpendicular parallel to road kills slaughterhouses farms labs shelters pounds puppy mills -- I never knew how much killing this country can comfortably contain.

The next day the assembly site is incredibly bright, four thousand hearts heat up and beat as one, thumbs up from people sitting in window sills where archangel Gabriel blows out Shock the monkey tonight! Organizers pass out strips of black cloth, armbands to symbolize the killings in the lab, cops everywhere, supposed bomb threats, someone corporeally in charge says via bullhorn to form four lines to march down the street, everybody up front dressed in black.

Empowerment is not knowing anybody, not being anybody, but knowing instantly that this is what you were made for and going to the front. Screams from the back relay up to us: We’re five blocks long -- pass it on!... We’re ten blocks long!... Now the lines are fourteen blocks long, four thousand strong chanting shouting marching clapping drumming. CBS NBC ABC churn away... yes, we’re coming out.

We stop for a moment before turning the final corner to the lab. Several of us volunteer to be coffin carriers, not realizing that we’ll get to see everything: that today is the birth of the animal rights movement and the thousands of faces who pass will go back to the hinterlands and build it fast, up from nothing. We turn the corner. More cops cameras security guards. And two wooden coffins in the street near the primate lab door.

The isolated pasts of thousands light up the day. I see my own little wildfire: the kinder-veterinarian bringing home stray cats and injured birds, the flaming arguments with adult hunters, then one day while our cat was dying we heard the receptionist say the reason our vets were away: a hunting trip in Montana.

Two lines now, two by two they go by, silent but for crying, and drop the armbands in the coffins. On and on they come, it seems like everyone in the whole world is turning that corner -- young old radical conservative, some walking dogs (with black armbands on their paws), people on crutches and in wheelchairs (sign: Mankind?), the deaf, the disabled, people sobbing. America, we’re showing you something you rarely see: what’s good in you: justice here, mercy there, all the daring revolutionary pushes and pulls into a better world. On and on the armbands float down. People with cancer (sign: Don’t Do It In My Name), signs speaking for animals around the globe, this is the Mobe, the Mobilization for Animals -- today protests in Melbourne Wellington Brussels Oslo Paris Manchester London Geneva Munich Boston Cape Town Atlanta Barcelona Heidelberg Stockholm Davis Marseilles The Hague Edinburgh and others, on and on like they’ll never stop. Now I realize what I want out of life: this passion, this rightness, this thing I can live or die with and get behind 100%, give it to me, pour it in me because I am opening up.

Everyone passes. We pick up the coffin: unbelievably, profoundly heavy these little black armbands, this weight of death -- no one calculated the heaviness or considered that we might not be able to lift it.

Far behind, out of sight from the last of the straggling marchers, we carry the coffins through almost deserted streets. Feeling lighter, I could keep walking and walking right out of this world. I imagine we’ve entered a new land of veganism and no hunting, trapping or vivisection, as if all our animal-saving and animal-dying lives were a dream and this was the real world, the good world… Walking and walking on a sunny Sunday in Madison, Wisconsin... What’s that music? Drums -- you always hear the drums first. I don’t know the song but we follow the music to the commons area on campus. Wow! Jesus! We’re entering a triumphant city of teeming dreaming laughing feasting chatting napping laying embracing dancing human beings. We carry the coffins up on stage as the band plays then lose ourselves among four thousand friends. Everything real and imagined, everything I ever doubted the existence of, everything inside me blows out in inexhaustible fire in a billion directions. I am at home everywhere.

State Journal photo by Joseph W. Jackson III

Originally published 5/29/2009 - counterpunch.org

Chapter Two

Helping Toads Cross the Road to Make Whoopee

For the past two years I’ve been a volunteer for the Roxborough, Pennsylvania Toad DETOUR (Defending Emerging Toads of Upper Roxborough). It’s not the thousands of migrating amphibians who are being detoured, however, it’s that non-native rumbling beast, the car.

I’d like to take you on a brief but epic journey of the toads, their helpers and their antagonists — from the meat eating toad saviors to the Commie vegans (me), to the right wing talk-shit radio host who ridicules the detour, to the local evangelical pastor who believes we should be working on the abortion issue instead of the toad issue, to the five-year-olds filled with wonder and their Dixie cups filled with toadlets, to the little old ladies (and men) in tennis shoes who remain the backbone of the movement to help animals of all kinds, and to the discomforting effect that any kind of street activism seems to have on don’t-make-a-scene, don’t-slow-my-routine Americans who, if living in 1775, might have yelled: Get a life, Paul Revere! And, most importantly, to the power of what can happen when a single person cares a lot even when no one else seems to care at all.

Once upon a time, every spring, the hibernating bufo americanus digs up about a foot through the dirt and emerges into the darkness of the first warm rainy night in March. By the thousands, and from every direction over several weeks, the Roxborough toads begin their journey from backyards, junior league baseball fields, a small cemetery and the woods of the 340-acre Schuylkill Center for Environmental Education, hopping to the highest point in the city, the abandoned (by humans) 30-acre Roxborough reservoir.

Most of the toads hop for over a mile and cross one or two busy roads where they are met with a 20-foot tall stone wall which they travel along for a city block. They then turn right to go up a brick pedestrian ramp another half block or so, crawl under a fence, then down a steep wooded embankment and into the reservoir where they began their lives. About a month after the males fertilize the females’ eggs, the tadpoles develop into tiny fly-sized toadlets and they begin the perilous reverse migration.

photo by Janet Lippincott

Pickerel frogs, in much smaller numbers, also move with the toads during the four to six week migration. When the trilling of the male toads, calling for the females, joins with the croaking frogs and the squawks and chirps of migrating birds, the reservoir becomes another of nature’s great symphonies. An association of free producers — producing joy!

The toad detour began several years ago when Lisa Levinson, a 44-year-old therapist, saw toads getting crushed by cars one night on her way home from work. She stopped traffic and picked up the toads and put them on the other side of the road. Soon someone called the police on this crazy lady in the street. But when the female officer rolled up, instead of taking Levinson in for observation, she blocked off the street with her patrol car so Levinson could continue her work unimpeded.

After another year of unsafe solo renegade operations, Levinson convinced the city of Roxborough to issue a temporary permit to block the two main migration roads for several hours during nights that the toads are on the move. Levinson then organized over 100 volunteers and got the backing of a dozen civic, environmental and neighborhood groups to support the project. The Toad DETOUR was born. The Schuylkill Center recently took over the detour and there is also a documentary film, The Toad Detour, directed by Burgess Coffield.

Although a longtime animal activist, I’m a newbie to amphibian migrations. Turns out that all over the world people are detouring (or dodging) traffic to help toads, frogs and salamanders cross the roads. No claim is made that the Roxborough toads are endangered as a specie, nor that preserving them is going to do some wondrous thing somewhere down the line for the human animal — the toads are being assisted for their own individual sake, protected not from evolution and nature but from one of the more unnatural creations that humans have invented. The volunteers in this unglamorous but highly effective endeavor are not, by and large, vegan animal activists.

The Roxborough detour is the only one I’m aware of that protects migrating toadlets as well as adult toads. The toads don’t make it easy to help as they travel mainly at night and in the rain. So you will see volunteers with flashlights, buckets,