deardeer

About Dear Deer

Dear Reader,

Why, you may ask, are you reading someone else's letters? Who is writing them, and why? What would a deer want with mail?

Ever since I was very small, I was taught the golden rule: I should do unto others as I would have them do unto me. Even if other people simply can't follow the golden rule (babies, coma victims) or can but choose not to follow it (bullies at the playground, and their older counterparts), it doesn't give me any excuse not to.

Then I started to realize that the golden rule applies to animals, too. Sure, they can't follow it, but neither can babies, right? And no matter how hard I've tried to find something that separates animals from humans that makes it okay to treat them the way we do, I can not find one thing. And so, giving them — all of them, from bees to fish to chickens to rabbits to pigs to deer to tigers to whales — the benefit of the doubt, I do unto them as I would have them do unto me.

So: Imagine for a moment that you are a deer. You sit down at a computer and out of idle curiosity, type your own species into Google. The results are millions of pages devoted to your slaughter. Photos of you, bloody, eyes rolled back, head held up for the camera by smiling men and women and children, grasping your antlers. Guides on where to find you, how best to kill you, concentrated efforts to kill you off as you stumble starving through the forests in the winter, cut off from grazing lands by the latest highway or housing development. Accounts of long trips taken and hours spent waiting and stalking and hiding for a final payoff: shooting you and taking your body, or maybe losing track of you as you run, wounded, into the trees, to die later, pressed up against a tree trunk to stop the bleeding. Brochures advertising educational experiences and beautiful views of you in zoos. Recipes advising how best to cut your flesh, preserve your corpse, eat your body. Services offering to breed you with bigger antlers for a better trophy, to let you out of a cage at just the right time for a perfect shot, to carve your body open and mount your head on a wall. Accounts of spiritual enlightenment reached while killing you. Defenses of your slaughter, invoking the name of God.

How does it feel to see these images and read this text? Does it hurt? Are you afraid? Are you crying, shocked, mourning, angry? Do you feel alone or helpless? What does this feel like, realizing that this is what the human species thinks about you, that this is what they have to say about you? How does it feel, knowing that you can do nothing to stop this?

We, humans, are an exceptional species, for only we are capable of following the golden rule. But we arbitrarily apply it only to one species, our own — much as racists arbitrarily apply it only to their own race, or sexists only to their own sex. If we are going to abandon speciesism as we have (hopefully) abandoned racism and sexism, we have to ask ourselves: If we were deer, would we want humans to treat us like this?

These letters are not for deer, but for you and me. Deer can not use computers and they can not read. Even a dying deer with a bullet in her heart can not understand the enormity of what has been done and is being done to her species. Deer have no way to protect themselves, to band together and cry out for justice, to hide their children and their boyfriends and girlfriends and their parents and their friends and keep them safe. Will you do anything for them? What will you do?

Yours,
A

A first letter

Dear Deer,

It occurs to me that those people with the greatest appreciation for you are those who also like to hunt and kill you. Paintings of you have a kind of kitschy paint-by-numbers feel, and seem inextricably associated with guns, heavy dark-stained furniture, beer can collections and bright orange trucker caps. You deserve more.

Hipsters hang your picture, alongside "ironic" inflated copies of hunting trophies. Again, you deserve more.

I write today to tell you that I love you -- not in some "in killing you I save you from starvation and attain a higher spirituality" kind of way, and not in a "it's funny because it's backwoods, let's drink PBR" sort of way, but because you are strong, resilient, and still dignified in the face of such derision.

I know you have a life of your own, with your own concerns, motivations and objectives, and I apologize for my species' relentless insistence that you fulfill our fantasies of what you are. You are not a symbol or a commodity, I know this. I wish certain others would come to see this as well. Perhaps this letter, written more for our eyes than yours I'll admit, will help in some small way. I wish you all the best, dear deer.

Regards,
A

When we met

Dear Deer,

You remind me of rabbits. I've always had this feeling about rabbits, that humans think of them as floppy, squishy-soft things; once I held a rabbit and she kicked off my chest, hard, and ran. I was nearly winded by her. Inside her (you could feel it when you even touched your hand to her fur) were tightly-wound muscles and sinews, power and strength belied by the cuteness of her fluffy fur and tiny pink-lined ears. We humans do that -- try to negate the deadly serious dignity and fortitude of creatures, by calling them cute, making jokes, turning them into cartoon characters and stuffed toys. But inside each softly furred or feathered body is a bloody heart and a fiercely independent mind and soul, isn't there? Inside you, and inside rabbits, and inside everyone else.

I'm sorry to talk so much about rabbits instead of about you. I've never gotten to know you personally. The closest we've come to knowing each other is when I fed you, as a child, in a park. You were captive, and furtive, and did not come near the fence. And once I ate a piece of you. A friend had hunted you down and killed you with his father. He told me it had been a beautiful experience, a connection with nature and with you. I believed him and ate. I felt sick with guilt and confusion afterward, for a long time.

Best,
A

Allies

Dear Deer,

Every movement has the oppressed and the oppressor, and the allies. Sometimes the oppressed are so oppressed they can barely cry out in their own defense, but they're there to give interviews, make statements, write memoirs, etc. Meanwhile the allies need to have respect for the oppressed, allowing them the space to form their own struggle if possible. Once in college, some of us activists who were all white talked about how to best be an ally to anti-racist activists of color. Do you go and form your own group and work in tandem? Do you join up with groups that already exist and try to transcend race? Do you say, "how can I help?" and just offer your time and labor in as respectful a manner as possible? Do you instead focus on yourself, working on your own internalized issues and serving as an example to your community? How can someone who's part of the oppressing group, even if only in appearance, be an effective ally without watering down the movement or disempowering the people for whom the movement exists?

What's particularly difficult and strange about the fight for animal rights is that the allies are the movement. You can't stand up for yourself. We have to do it for you, or you'll be destroyed. I mean no insult. Your innocence, your lack of understanding and inability to see the greatness of this horror humanity is bringing upon all of you is an incredible mercy. No human race could take so much sorrow and so much cruelty as you all take every day; they would break down, insane, or lash out in horrified revolt, no matter how suicidal.

(This is why I feel so bad for apes, who must understand on some level what is happening. I am so sorry for the apes. I shudder to even think of the dolphins, octopi, pigs and whales; we know you're all smart. What must you think of everything that's happening? The whales in particular -- I hope for your sake you're using all of that brain for wonderful things outside of our understanding and on a different plane, that you can't understand in any coherent way what we're doing to you all. If you can understand what we're doing, I am so sorry for you. I imagine you floating in the huge ocean, alone and unable to stop all the blood from flowing, with all your huge fins and mass, unable to make us stop, and I am so sorry. I wish you could, I wish you could come out of the ocean and terrify us into submission, into stopping everything. But maybe you're safe, floating in happy, uncomprehending peace. I hope.)

But yes: We're your inefficient, self-serving, timid allies, and your only hope. We're weak and we have our own priorities. Like white allies, so many of us are at heart outsiders, with our own agendas, nursing our own egos and wounds, wishing we were better people and trying in some small way to make amends for past transgressions and present embarrassments. We are part of the problem, trying to turn things around to become part of the solution, and sometimes failing, sometimes succeeding, stumbling and losing sight of your goals along the way.

How can I make room for your struggle if you can't struggle at all? If I take a week off from fighting for your rights, will you care? (You're not fighting at all.) How can I make sure the fight concerns you and your needs, instead of focussing again and again on the intricacies of my life as an ally and what I do and don't do, say and don't say, my role in your fight? Because it is your fight. I may fight it for you, but you are the one in charge. Each small, weak, struggling and suffering one of you is my commander, your cries a red flag of revolution spurring me on to fight harder, to die on the battlefield if need be!

Or not. Like any ally, will I be there through thick and thin, in fair weather and in storm, or just when it's convenient for me? This is the ally's downfall. So few allies are willing to die for the cause of another's freedom. The oppressed can become so crushed that death in pursuit of freedom is a glad sacrifice; martyrs arise. How few social movements, how few revolutions, have been built on the backs of allies. We can walk alongside you in parades and rallies, but when bullets start raining down, we fall by the wayside. We have other things to do, our families and friends and selves to think of.

And here, every pig and every calf, every chicken and every rat, every elephant and every deer is a martyr we don't even recognize, and maybe not even a martyr, because none of you understand the enormity of your own deaths. None of you goes out shouting (in English, or Swahili, or Korean, or ASL, or Hindi) "I die in pursuit of liberty!" Yours is a martyrdom without consent, without acknowledgment, and without understanding. And we're too cowardly to die alongside you, or to self-immolate, saying, "I die in pursuit of liberty for all creatures, great and small!"

Aren't we? I am sorry.

Love,
A

Winter

Dear Deer,

When I was a little kid, I read a book about a boy who appeared in the forest one day. He ran like a deer, light and fast. He wore clothes that looked like leather but that were fabric, strong and nearly untearable. He was horrified, stricken, when he realized what people were eating, and wouldn't touch things that came from animals. One day he ran away, back into the woods, in the cold clean air, and he vanished.

When I read it, I didn't understand things. There were other books and films that had similar messages, as if in code, that I didn't decipher for a long time. I know that these stories made an impression on me, though.

Today when I think of freedom, I see the ocean, swelling and breathing; I see the forest, like a warm fur on the hills in winter, cold crisp white snow blanketing the ground; I see animals running and flying and sleeping, untouched by human hands.

It gives me hope to think of you out there, running so quickly, breathing that cold air, moving furtively in the dark spaces under the pines, darting across meadows crisp and dry and waiting for snow.

I think: the world would be better off without us humans, our hard hearts and our cruel hands. Our minds aren't doing you much good, are they? If the earth were cold again, an ice age freezing our cities and pushing us in small and vulnerable numbers to the cooling equator, if we were taken down a notch, maybe that would be enough.

Love,
A

Love

Dear Deer,

When I was a kid, I used to say that I loved animals, but today I have a hard time saying those words. The declaration feels peurile, immature, like something a teenage girl would say, doodling horsies and kittens in her notebook and then going home to eat chicken. The words seem empty and hypocritical, devoid of meaning. I hear "animal lover" and I think: Paris Hilton, with her little dog Tinkerbell sitting in the palm of her manicured hand, wearing something by Gucci.

Today when I say "I love animals," I mean it, fiercely, as one loves family. I love you all, from the downiest, most fragile and put-upon little domestic turkey in a factory farm hatchery, to the few remaining packs of wild wolves roaming the forests. I love cats, despite their cruel games with little birds. I love the glinting fish slicing through the ocean, somehow surviving in the midst of countless nets. I love your incredible variety, your complex languages and lives, your customs and habits.

When I really open myself up to remember where you all are, to try to understand and feel the pain of a chicken in an egg battery, or the sorrow of a cow separated from her calf, I cry; and so I don't think about these things too often. One wants to remember one's family happy, healthy, as pictured in old album photos, an idyllic and selectively remembered past. And so when I remember you, and the other animals, I picture you running away and somehow escaping, or living free and happy, unchased and unmolested.

When I say "I love animals," I mean that I have come to know you a little better. I mean that I see and love and understand your teeth and your claws as well as your soft fur. I mean that I am happy when I see you. It is a grown-up sort of love and I won't let anyone take it for the facile and duplicitous "I love you" that falls so easily from the lips of those that love only with words, and do nothing but hate with their actions. I love you as my brothers and my sisters, and I hide my love for you in my heart.

Love,
A

Skin

Dear Deer,

There is something about your skin. When I was in grade school we went on a school trip to a Native American / Colonial New England craft fair. At one table, I fell in love with a tiny, pale, soft leather bag. I had enough money to buy it and was going to, when the man who made it told me how he got it so soft. It was made from the skin of one of your children — a fawn — and it was specially cured by being rubbed with the fawn's brain matter. I was horrified. I couldn't touch it after that.

On the same table was a pile of tiny pelt-shaped "rugs" cut from the woolly skin of a sheep. I bought one. I thought it was cute, and I loved that it looked like it had come from a tiny little sheep. The man didn't tell me how he cured it, and though it wasn't a conscious decision, I didn't want to know so I didn't ask. I suppose that I thought it couldn't be as bad as what he'd done to the little fawn. When my brother and my friend and I made little shadowbox homes in our bookshelves for our action figures to live in, I rolled out the tiny skin on the floor like a tiny bearskin rug. The little house looked rich and cozy to me with that skin there on the floor, warm and woolly and soft.

Today I can't touch leather without feeling dirty. I do a lot of vegan shoe searching, and am constantly peering at shoes trying to find out what they're made of. Besides labeling, you can tell if something is leather or synthetic in some very concrete ways:

• Look at the cut edge of the material. Leather and suede are dark and rough inside, but synthetics look lighter, and have a foam-like appearance in their cross-section. Faux suede is usually very smooth, and if you scratch it with your nail, it's not affected. Suede is easily scratched: tiny soft fibres will stand up from its surface.
  
• Both leather and faux leather have pores or follicles scattered on their surface, but faux leather's pores are a tiny repeating pattern, while leather's pores are more random and irregularly shaped.
  
• Leather has a peculiar smell to it. Faux leather does not.

When I'm in a shoe store then, I probably look rather odd, peering closely at the shoes, scratching at them, sniffing them. When I discover that what I'm holding came from someone's body, I put it down, and I wipe my hands on my jeans. The evidence of their origin has become horrifying. Those little fibres that come up when you scratch suede are tiny particles of corpse. Follicles show where fur or hair used to be before it was scalded and scraped away. The smell is formaldehyde and other chemicals needed to keep the skin from rotting.

I didn't notice these things before, when I was a child. I was so naive that my love for little things made of leather and fur was part of my love for living animals. I loved and cared for rats, rabbits, mice and other small animals. Their fur was their own, and I would never have hurt them. When they died I was heartbroken, and I buried their bodies with love and respect. In the woods and in the garden I carefully avoided stepping on small animals and insects. On sidewalks, I would move them to the grass so they wouldn't be hurt by other people walking. I loved my stuffed animals, carved animals and other animal toys. Fur and leather were part of animals and so they were part of what I loved.

Fur and leather were luxuries. Their smell and their feel was richness and comfort. Now I see that I liked them not because I didn't realize they came from animals, only liking their softness and warmth, but because they reminded me of animals — because they were, in a way, an animal tamed. That tiny sheepskin was funny and cute to me because it looked like it had come from a tiny sheep; a sheep that was mine, ownable, not alive and not needing any care, not eating my houseplants and shitting on my floor. Our furs and our leather are cleaner, quieter, more controllable objectifications of animals, which just happen to be taken from animals themselves. When we wear them, we're disguising ourselves, putting on the animal qualities that we like and trying to make them our own.

What does it mean when someone loves someone else, and to show it gives her the soft skin of someone who was murdered by genital electrocution to avoid damaging her fur? What does it mean when someone wears beautiful shoes to show off her legs, shoes made from the skin of someone who was never allowed to run or walk or fall in love or feel the sun on her face? What does it mean when someone binds someone else that they love, with consent, with bonds made from the skin of someone who was mutilated and murdered without any regard for his consent or even his basic well-being?

The mind boggles. I don't understand how we can do these things and not see our hypocrisy, our perversion and our cruelty. I want to gather up all the furs and all the furs in the world, and bury them under the ground. I want to wash my hands of the smell and the feel of it, the crime we've perpetrated on you.

A

Nature

Dear Deer,

I'm re-reading Player Piano by Kurt Vonnegut, about the emptiness of human existence when work is taken over by machines. This weekend I'm feeling my existence is a bit empty too, as I find myself with nothing but blogging, posting photos on Flickr, and other online time-wasting to fill the hours. When I really think about it, there aren't many things that I do that produce real results in the real world. (Is there a difference in quality, somehow, between potatoes dug out of the earth, and websites? Making one is arguably more satisfying in a real-world, I-can-hold-it-in-my-hands sort of way, I think.)

And meanwhile, my cat housemates are laying around lazily, and I can't help but wonder if they're horribly bored. Sure, they might be sleepily content, happy to do nothing, but then again, they might be insanely bored, tired of doing nothing. No matter how much they play with any number of toys, they never get a meal as a result. No matter how many times they catch sight of something new and interesting while watching from our windows, they can't go explore it, smell it, fight with it, play with it. Human industry has made them as bored as I am, or vastly more bored, since at least I can fill my hours with various entertainments and meetings and tasks to be accomplished.

You, dear deer, must be more happy. You must be more fulfilled. Aren't you? There may be occasional desperation as you flee a predator or go hungry in the winter, but overall, is your life more satisfying? Does the life-long struggle for food and companionship and the health of your children give you purpose and meaning and satisfaction? Do you experience wonderment, wandering through beautiful glades you've never before seen? Or anticipation, coming over a hill overlooking deep, damp meadows of lush grass?

I can't help but think you never have to bother yourself with the Big Questions that plague us humans. I can't imagine a deer despairing over a general lack of direction, or a lack of self-confidence in her skills and awkwardness in her personal relationships, or pondering why she should try so hard with such oddly anti-climactic results.

A friend of mine once derided the film Waking Life for both being comprised of and inspiring philosophical musing. Why wonder and try to figure things out, he asked, when one could simply read the right books and acquire Meaning through the work of others? I remember finding that profoundly depressing, and yet I felt silly for being so excited by the ideas in the film, the draw of the metaphysical unknown.

Today I think of that musing as an end in itself, not simply an inefficient means. These searches give meaning, they make life lush. You wander the forests, living in the moment. Many of us humans have the forests figured out, and have to wander our brains, figuring those out instead. I try to have the confidence that our cat housemates have enough to think about (and enough toys to play with) to keep them occupied, but I worry that they're as bored as the humans in Player Piano, "sweating out Judgment Day."

Or maybe I'm just being paternalistic and culturally imperialist, assuming this and that about you and cats, dear deer. Maybe you're all just fine, and no one's bored; maybe you're all struggling day-in, day-out, with intense problem-solving. Or maybe you're all Zen masters, enjoying the Now. But I can't help but envy you, relatively unhindered by humans trying to improve upon nature.