Globalizing the Intifada

By William T. Hathaway

M. Gandhi: Apostle of nonviolence, but only up to a point.

The invaders have surrounded and attacked us, conquered here and there, and built their bases in our lands. So we attack the invaders where we can, determined to retake our lands and drive them out. We would prefer not to be warriors. We would rather raise our children in the ways of kindness. But for our children to have a future, we must now be warriors. So be it.

Non-violent opposition is important but not sufficient. To be effective in this war, it must be coupled with armed struggle. Both Gandhi and militant rebels were required to convince the British to free India. Both Martin Luther King and Malcolm X were required to convince the US congress to end racial segregation. Gandhi himself recognized the need for self-defence when he wrote:

(Source: The Mind of Mahatma Gandhi, cited in the Gandhian Institute, http://www.mkgandhi.org/nonviolence/phil8.htm. Thanks to Nahida Izzat for finding the quotes.)

To defend even the little we have left, we must fight. Given the power of the capitalists and the intensity of their violence, we must battle them as guerrillas, striking their weak points then disappearing to recoup and strike again. Most of their weak points are now outside of Palestine, Iraq and Afghanistan and outside of their headquarter countries. That is most of the world, where their representatives roam freely on their missions of domination.

We have to convince our allies in these outlying areas to do more. This war is going to reach them sooner or later. Better for them now, before the enemy forces are concentrated in their countries. If the West conquers Palestine, Iraq and Afghanistan and controls their resources, they may become too strong to stop. Now is a crucial time in the war. We need to expand it into a global Intifada.

Since most resistance groups are infiltrated with their agents and their torture makes keeping secrets impossible, our deeds must be known by only the necessary few. We can act individually, anonymously, lone wolves striking targets of opportunity then telling no one. Whenever possible we must survive to continue the struggle. Suicide attacks should be a last resort. We are needed here more than in heaven.

We don’t need to win big battles. We just need to persist until the capitalists realize that continuing the war will cost them more than their potential profits. Then support for Israel will evaporate like spilled water in the Negev. The Israelis know this, which is why so many of them are already applying for foreign passports. The exodus is beginning.

We must fight on to real victory, not to some feeble compromise that gives us a few crumbs for surrendering. The history of anti-imperialist struggles in Ireland, India, South Africa and most recently Egypt shows that ending our resistance too soon can bring disaster. Revolutionary momentum is very hard to rebuild once it stops. To achieve real peace, our struggle must continue until we end the invasion and occupation and thus eliminate the structural violence inherent in them. This structural violence is generating the physical violence. Without justice, peace is impossible.

Gandhi’s “path of least violence.”

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http://media.trineday.com/radicalpeace. His first book, A World of Hurt, won a Rinehart Foundation Award for its portrayal of the psychological roots of war: the emotional blockage and need for patriarchal approval that draw men to the military.He is also the author of Summer Snow, the story of an American warrior in Central Asia who falls in love with a Sufi Muslim and learns from her an alternative to the military mentality. Chapters are available at www.peacewriter.org.

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Hillary: Fleeting idealism, lifetime opportunism.

By Fred Branfman

A symbolic moment periodically illuminates both the true nature of U.S. foreign policy and how even once-idealistic youth become what they once opposed when executing it. Such a moment will occur on Wednesday as Hillary Clinton becomes the first U.S. Secretary of State in 57 years to visit Laos, where the U.S. has refused to clean up the 80 million unexploded bombs it left behind, bombs which have murdered or maimed over 20,000 innocent rice-farmers and children since the bombing ended in 1973 and continue to kill until today.

Secretary Clinton’s visit to Laos is part of the administration’s new attempt to contain China, and will focus on “the Lower Mekong Initiative and ASEAN integration efforts” according to State’s press release. The young Hillary Clinton, an admirer of the New Left and activist for the poor, criticized a heartless U.S. foreign policy which plays power politics while shamelessly neglecting urgent humanitarian needs like protecting innocent civilians around the world from being blown up by U.S. cluster bombs. Today, rather than signing the U.N. treaty banning them, she fights to weaken it, ignoring the screams of the victims from the aftermath of U.S. bombing. As a youth she regarded her predecessor Henry Kissinger’s bombing of Cambodia as “criminal” and “immoral.” Today, supporting similarly illegal and inhuman U.S. bombing and assassination around the globe, she follows in his footsteps.

Millions of Lao children have grown up believing it normal to live in a hellscape where one can suddenly lose a limb, eyes or life by stepping on an unseen cluster bomb, and where it is common to meet whole families made destitute because a father died in an explosion while searching for food, or seeking scrap metal to make a few dollars, to feed his subsistence-level family. No people on earth have been so tormented by U.S. warmaking for so long — 48 years and counting. U.S. leaders, who dropped more cluster bombs in Laos than have been used in the rest of the world put together, first bombed Laos for nine years from 1964-’73, destroying everything they owned and causing an estimated 30,000 civilian casualties. Then, from 1973 until today the unexploded ordinance (UXO) has not only killed and wounded so many more. It has deprived them of land they badly need to feed their children and caused them to live in constant fear of sudden death.

From 1969-’71, I interviewed refugees from the bombing in Laos who told me that cluster bombs, which U.S. airmen then called “antipersonnel” bombs, were the weapon they most feared. They reported that thousands had been dropped on their villages, and that most of the victims were children, women and grandparents. Lao and Vietnamese communist soldiers moved through the thick forests of northern Laos, and were largely undetectable from the air.

I brought back an antipersonnel bomb to the U.S. in February 1971. Although the communists knew all about these weapons, the information was kept secret from the American people and Congress. It was only by interviewing  U.S. military personnel that I learned how these bombs could not destroy buildings or tanks but were designed to maim not kill human beings in the hopes of tying up others to care for them; how steel pellets were replaced by flechettes meant to tear more flesh if one tried to remove them than they had entering the body; U.S. Airforce personnel at Udorn Airforce Base in Thailand had told me they comprised 80% of the bombs dropped on Laos. I also learned that each “pineapple” bomblet like mine contained 250 steel pellets, and that one aircraft sortie dropped 1,000 bomblets, spewing out 250,000 pellets over an area the size of four football fields.

I also learned how they had been originally designed to take out massed troops but, given the difficulty of detecting enemy troops in Laos, U.S. leaders had instead consciously used them, in the words of a 1970 U.S. Senate Refugee Subcommittee report, “to destroy the physical and social infrastructure of Pathet Lao areas. The bombing has taken and is taking a heavy toll among civilians.” My antipersonnel bomb became to me in those years a tangible symbol of U.S. leaders’ indifference to innocent human life.

At Present Rates It Will Take 1,000 Years For Laos To Be Bomb-Free

The U.S. has cleaned up only 0.28% of the Lao land it contaminated over the past 37 years, as it has spent only one tenth of one percent on cluster bomb cleanup of what it spent on bombing Laos ($61 million vs. $70 billion in current dollars). This year’s appropriation of $10 million to save living human beings may also be compared to the $105 million the U.S. spends annually looking for the bone fragments of long-dead U.S. pilots.

Mike Boddington, a former advisor to the Lao Agency in charge of bomb cleanup and founder of the COPE center that helps bomb victims, calculates that at the present rate  — given 8 million bomb-contaminated hectares and an annual U.S. and international expenditure of $15-20 million — it  will take over 1,000 years for Laos to be decontaminated, at a cost of $20 billion.  

He also believes, as a rough estimate, that it will take 25 years at the present rate just to clear “high priority” areas in and around existing villages, about 2.5% of the total  bomb-contaminated land. “Now that we have the cluster munitions ban, international eyes are focused on Laos. But the pace of clearance is snail-like, and assistance for victims is tiny,” he says.

Sec. Hillary Clinton will likely visit the 7-acre site of the new U.S. Embassy complex for which ground was broken on May 18, which will “provide embassy employees with a state-of-the-art workspace.” The U.S. will spend $109 million on the complex, eleven times more than the token $10 million it will spend on cluster bomb cleanup this year. This $10 million will clear 4,000 hectares, 1/2000 of Laos’s bomb-contaminated land.   

When I interviewed the Lao government head of UXO cleanup on the Plain of Jars in northern Laos in 2008 he stated that if he had 10 times more money he could clean up 10 times more land. If U.S. leaders were to spend $100 million on UXO cleanup rather than a new U.S. embassy they do not need — the present embassy was big and safe enough to conduct a major war in Laos in the far more dangerous 1960s, and there are now but a handful of U.S. embassy officials in Laos – they could thus help 10 times as many people and decontaminate 10 times as much land.

The Human Impact Of Cluster Bombs

The human impact of the unexploded bombs was dramatically revealed on the third day of the First Meeting of States Parties to ban cluster bombs held in the Lao capital of Vientiane in November 2010. Those of us attending the conference were shocked to our core when the English-language Vientiane Times published a front-page story and photo of the naked corpse of 10-year old Pui, who been killed the day before:

“A 10-year girl was killed and her sister injured on Wednesday by a cluster bomb that exploded in Thasala village … Ms. Pui was returning home from school, and picked up an unexploded bomb (which) exploded and caused serious injuries and extreme loss of blood and she died. (Her sister) Ms. Paeng (had) injuries to her knees, body and neck. She said that after the explosion she heard her sister coughing up blood and held her until help arrived.

 “Lao people continue to live in fear of UXO three decades after the Indochina war ended. Last month Mr. Ladone of Nhuanthong village in Xieng Khouang province, was injured when a UXO device exploded as he lit a fire in his backyard to warm himself. Mr. Ladone was blinded by the explosion.”

The human impacts include not only actual people killed, blinded and deprived of limbs, but the millions of Lao who are forced to live in fear as they walk to school, light a fire or pick bamboo shoots to feed their families. And countless numbers of these subsistence-level rice farmers are denied safe access to land they need to farm in order to survive. “About 37 percent of the country’s surface is contaminated with UXO, preventing people from using agricultural land and making many areas uninhabitable,” the newspaper also noted.  

Secretary Clinton’s State Department does acknowledge the problem. At an April 22, 2010 hearing, 29 years to the day after former U.S. Ambassador William Sullivan lied to Congress by denying that the U.S. was bombing civilian targets in Laos, State Department official Scot Marciel declared that:

“During the Vietnam War, over 2.5 million tons of U.S. munitions were dropped on Laos. This is more than was dropped on Germany and Japan combined in the Second World War. On a per capita basis, Laos is the most heavily bombed country in history. Up to 30 percent of the bombs dropped over Laos failed to detonate. The UN Development Program has reported that ‘UXO/mine action is the absolute pre-condition for the socio-economic development of Lao PDR’ and that because of UXO `economic opportunities in tourism, hydroelectric power, mining, forestry and many other areas of activity considered main engines of growth for the Lao PDR are restricted, complicated and made more expensive.’”

Marciel also acknowledged the human consequences of UXO:

“The explosive remnants of war continue to impede development and cause (close) to 300 (casualties) per year … At the level of individual victims, of course, the consequences of death or maiming are catastrophic for entire families.”

 But despite admitting the U.S. has caused “catastrophic consequences for entire families,” the Department of State has basically ignored them. It for many years provided only $3-5 million annually for bomb cleanup, and only recently increased it to a still woefully inadequate $10 million due to the work of the public interest group Legacies of War.

U.S. leaders are prone to lecture others on their need to exercise “personal responsibility.” There may be no more shameful example of their own irresponsibility than their failing to take responsibility for the deadly mess they have left behind in Laos.

Secretary Clinton Pushing To Weaken the Cluster Bomb Treaty

The State Department’s refusal to adequately fund cluster bomb cleanup in Laos is but part of Secretary Clinton’s failures on the issue.

During the November 2010 conference in Laos to ban cluster bombs many delegates commented on an obvious fact: while over 100 nations were participating in the conference, the major nation not represented was the country that had dropped the bombs in the first place. In a startling display of pettiness the U.S. embassy had refused to accept the Conference’s invitation to even send an official observer, the new U.S. ambassador had delayed her arrival in Laos until after the conference was ended, and the only official American present was a low-level political officer handing out a one-pager lauding America’s woefully inadequate funding of cluster bomb cleanup.

The U.S. has retained its giant stockpile of cluster munitions, by far the largest in the world, and reserves the right to use them whenever it wishes. It dropped 1.8 million cluster bombs on Iraq, 250,000 on Afghanistan. And in Yemen, the Daily Telegraph reported on June 7, 2010:

“Thirty five women and children were killed by an American cruise missile armed with cluster bombs which struck an alleged al-Qaeda training camp in Yemen, according to a study (by) Amnesty International.”

And then, in November 2011, Secretary Clinton took it a step further. She launched a major lobbying effort to significantly weaken the Cluster Munitions Treaty, as Steve Goose of Human Rights Watch reported:

“The U.S. is touting a much weaker alternative (which) will fail to offer greater protections to civilians. In fact it could lead to an increase in cluster munitions, by providing a specific legal framework for its use. It would allow for continued use, production, trade and stockpiling of many millions of cluster munitions. It includes no obligation to destroy stockpiles.”

In the end the U.S. proposal was defeated, and human rights campaigners hope that the stigma now attached to the use of cluster munitions will prevent the U.S. from using them in the future. But given that the U.S. government has ignored so much of the U.N. Declaration on Human Rights which it has even signed, as Jimmy Carter recently noted, U.S. future use of cluster munitions is still in doubt.

The Picture of Hillary Clinton

The implications of Secretary Clinton fighting not to ban cluster bombs but to increase their use go far beyond the personal. Though by no means a radical, Clinton was a prototypical and praiseworthy member of the “Sixties Generation.” She first came to national attention when, as Wellesley Commencement Speaker in 1969, at the height of the antiwar movement, she declared that “our prevailing, acquisitive, and competitive corporate life is not the way of life for us. We’re searching for more immediate, ecstatic and penetrating modes of living.” She also decried “the hollow men of anger and bitterness, the bountiful ladies of righteous degradation, all must be left to a bygone age.”

She also went out of her way to praise the New Left, the wellspring of the antiwar movement, declaring that “a lot of the New Left hearkens back to a lot of the old virtues.”

She has reported that a 1967 article by SDS leader Carl Oglesby in the Methodist magazine Motive, titled “Containtment or Change,” helped turn her against the war. She campaigned for Eugene McCarthy in 1968 and wrote her senior thesis on Saul Alinsky. She marched on Washington and spent the summer of 1971 working for the leading left-wing law firm in San Francisco, led by former communist Robert Treuhaft, husband of Jessica Mitford, and registered Democratic voters for the 1972 McGovern campaign. She became a mentee of liberal activist Marian Wright Edelman, and an advocate for children’s rights. I spoke at a giant peace rally at Yale University in 1971 which her future husband Bill Clinton helped organize. Mutual friends spoke warmly of her during that period as a decent human being, concerned about the poor and opposed to U.S. warmaking.

It is hard to believe that, even as an earnest college student planning to “work within the system,” she could have imagined that she would one day become a U.S. senator and then Secretary of State who would support an invasion and occupation of Iraq that has killed, wounded or made homeless over 5 million civilians; strongly advocate a surge in Afghanistan that saw General Petraeus triple U.S. airstrikes and import 7,000 U.S. assassins conducting countless night raids; manage a Pakistan policy that has led 125 million Pakistanis to regard the U.S. as their enemy and vastly increased the dangers of nuclear materials falling into terrorist hands; support a new global U.S. assassination policy by drones from the air and 60,000 U.S. assassins on the ground; do virtually nothing to control climate change; support a global U.S. economic policy that impoverishes hundreds of millions of the poor while enriching U.S. companies and local elites; and become a scourge of whistleblowers and proponent of increasing illegal Executive power.

Her transformation has become most visible since she has become Secretary of State. Pictures of her today reveal the results of the inner conflicts and compromises between her once-decent ideals and present desire to conduct U.S. foreign policy. You can see in her face the “anger, bitterness and righteous degradation” she once decried. It is a hard face, a face so different from the open-hearted and alive face of her youth as to be almost unrecognizable.

The true lesson behind this “Picture of Hillary Clinton” is not so much about the individuals who wield U.S. foreign policy but the policy itself; not who holds Executive power but what the institution does to those who do.

The indisputable fact is that the U.S. Executive Branch has killed, wounded or made homeless more people not its own citizens in more nations — over 20 million in Indochina and Iraq alone, including millions of civilians* — than any other postwar institution on earth. If evil consists of destroying the lives of the innocent, no institution in our time has committed more evil. And when even once-idealistic people choose to execute its foreign policy — whether Barack Obama, John Kerry or Hillary Clinton — they wind up like the characters in George Orwell’s Animal Farm who, after taking power, behave like those they had overthrown.

Secretary Clinton will no doubt speak fine words during her trip to Laos tomorrow. She is scheduled to make a “feel good” visit to the COPE center, which provides prosthetic limbs to the victims of U.S. cluster bombs, and will likely boast about the $470,000 the U.S. annually contributes to its funding. She will perhaps even be photographed hugging victims of the U.S. violence she once opposed and now perpetuates.

And as she does so the rest of us would do well, before it is too late, to ponder the troubling questions that arose for me as I left a 2008 meeting on the Plain of Jars with a sweet-faced youth who had lost the use of his arm, a devastating blow for a villager who must farm to marry, have children and even survive. If some of the poorest people on earth are not safe from being tormented this way for decades, who among us is safe? If our civilization cannot protect these Lao rice-farmers who pose no threat to anyone, how can it protect any of us? And if U.S. leaders cannot even now act to heal their pain, how can we regard them as legitimate leaders?

* Footnote: For the more than 16 million Indochinese killed, wounded and made refugees, see “Dollars and Deaths,” The Congressional Record, May 14, 1975, p. 14262. For Iraqi casualties, see “5 Million Iraqis Killed, Maimed, Tortured, Displaced,” AlterNet, June 21, 2010. Former U.S. Defense Secretary Robert McNamara estimated that 3.4 million Vietnamese were killed, of whom 221,042 were South Vietnamese troops killed by the communists. The other 3 million plus Vietnamese, including 1-2 million civilians, were thus killed by U.S. firepower, as were most of the Laotians and Cambodians killed during the war. To this must be added the countless more that U.S. leaders have killed around the world.

Fred Branfman is the author of “Voices From the Plain of Jars,” to be republished by the University of Wisconsin Press in the spring of 2013. He can be reached at fredbranfman@aol.com.

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Animals: Partial and full allies in unexpected places

[Crossposted with Freefromharm.org]

 

 Philip Wollen’s shakes the rafters of the auditorium with his 10-minute speech to the St James Ethics Centre and the Wheeler Centre debate in Australia on May 16, 2012. The larger debate consists of six speakers, three that make the case for getting animals off of the menu and three that make the case against it. Wollen is a former VP of Citibank and Australian philanthropist who is known to keep out of the limelight. But he sure rose to the challenge for this debate to deliver a huge performance and a powerful message. Bravo!

Join Philip Wollen and the Kindness Trust on their Facebook page. Watch the full debate with all six speakers.

This is the transcript to the speech:

On behalf of St James Ethics Centre, the Wheeler Centre,
The Melbourne Food and Wine Festival, The Age
The City of Melbourne and the ABC
All of whom have worked together to make this event possible
I would like to welcome
Philip Wollen

((Applause))

King Lear, late at night on the cliffs asks the blind Earl of Gloucester “How do you see the world?”

And the blind man Gloucester replies “I see it feelingly”.

Shouldn’t we all?

Animals must be off the menu because tonight they are screaming in terror in the slaughterhouse, in crates, and cages. Vile ignoble gulags of despair.
I heard the screams of my dying father as his body was ravaged by the cancer that killed him. And I realised I had heard these screams before.
In the slaughterhouse, eyes stabbed out and tendons slashed, on the cattle ships to the Middle East and the dying mother whale as a Japanese harpoon explodes in her brain as she calls out to her calf.
Their cries were the cries of my father.
I discovered when we suffer, we suffer as equals.
And in their capacity to suffer, a dog is a pig is a bear. . . . . . is a boy.
Meat is the new asbestos – more murderous than tobacco.

CO2, Methane, and Nitrous Oxide from the livestock industry are killing our oceans with acidic, hypoxic Dead Zones.
90% of small fish are ground into pellets to feed livestock.
Vegetarian cows are now the world’s largest ocean predator.
The oceans are dying in our time. By 2048 all our fisheries will be dead. The lungs and the arteries of the earth.
Billions of bouncy little chicks are ground up alive simply because they are male.
Only 100 billion people have ever lived. 7 billion alive today. And we torture and kill 2 billion animals every week.
10,000 entire species are wiped out every year because of the actions of one species.
We are now facing the 6th mass extinction in cosmological history.
If any other organism did this a biologist would call it a virus.
It is a crime against humanity of unimaginable proportions.
The world has changed.
10 years ago Twitter was a bird sound, www was a stuck keyboard, Cloud was in the sky, 4 g was a parking place, Google was a baby burp, Skype was a typo and Al Kider was my plumber.
Victor Hugo said “there is nothing more powerful than an idea whose time has come”.

Animal Rights is now the greatest Social Justice issue since the abolition of slavery.
There are over 600 million vegetarians in the world.
That is bigger than the US, England, France, Germany, Spain, Italy, Canada, Australia combined! If we were one nation we would be bigger than the 27 countries in the European Union!!
Despite this massive footprint, we are still drowned out by the raucous huntin’, shootin’, killin’ cartels who believe that violence is the answer – when it shouldn’t even be a question.
Meat is a killing industry – animals, us and our economies.
Medicare has already bankrupted the US. They will need $8 trillion invested in Treasury bills just to pay the interest. It has precisely zero!!
They could shut every school, army, navy, air force, and Marines, the FBI and CIA – and they still won’t be able to pay for it.
Cornell and Harvard say’s that the optimum amount of meat for a healthy diet is precisely ZERO.
Water is the new oil. Nations will soon be going to war for it.
Underground aquifers that took millions of years to fill are running dry.
It takes 50,000 litres of water to produce one kilo of beef.
1 billion people today are hungry. 20 million people will die from malnutrition. Cutting meat by only 10% will feed 100 million people. Eliminating meat will end starvation forever.

If everyone ate a Western diet, we would need 2 Planet Earths to feed them. We only have one. And she is dying.
Greenhouse gas from livestock is 50% more than transport . . . . . planes, trains, trucks, cars, and ships.
Poor countries sell their grain to the West while their own children starve in their arms. And we feed it to livestock. So we can eat a steak? Am I the only one who sees this as a crime? Every morsel of meat we eat is slapping the tear-stained face of a starving child. When I look into her eyes, should I be silent?
The earth can produce enough for everyone’s need. But not enough for everyone’s greed.
We are facing the perfect storm.
If any nation had developed weapons that could wreak such havoc on the planet, we would launch a pre-emptive military strike and bomb it into the Bronze Age.
But it is not a rogue state. It is an industry.
The good news is we don’t have to bomb it. We can just stop buying it.
George Bush was wrong. The Axis of Evil doesn’t run through Iraq, or Iran or North Korea. It runs through our dining tables. Weapons of Mass Destruction are our knives and forks.

So tonight I have 2 Challenges for the opposition:
1. Meat causes a wide range of cancers and heart disease. Will they name one disease caused by a vegetarian diet?
2. I am funding the Earthlings trilogy. If the opposition is so sure of their ground, I challenge them to send the Earthlings DVD to all their colleagues and customers. Go on I DARE YOU.
Animals are not just other species. They are other nations. And we murder them at our peril.

The peace map is drawn on a menu. Peace is not just the absence of war. It is the presence of Justice.
Justice must be blind to race, colour, religion or species. If she is not blind, she will be a weapon of terror. And there is unimaginable terror in those ghastly Guantanamos.
If slaughterhouses had glass walls, we wouldn’t need this debate.
I believe another world is possible.
On a quiet night, I can hear her breathing.
Let’s get the animals off the menu and out of these torture chambers.
Please vote tonight for those who have no voice.
Thank you.
________________________
See below the full debate:

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By Laura Simpson
Written by Stephen West

Zoey in her new digs.

Being the head volunteer at a local animal rescue, I received a phone call from a woman in Montreal, Canada who was communicating with her friend on Facebook about an abandoned dog on the Mexican border. After receiving an approximate location and after investigation, I found that Zoey (a name I gave her), a female American Boxer mix, wasn’t actually abandoned — she was chained up in front of a trailer. Animal Control was monitoring the situation to see if the dog was being fed. After seeing the dog, it was ridiculous to me that Animal Control would be monitoring this situation. The dog was skin and bones, was covered with open sores, and appeared to be deaf and obviously being neglected. The neighbors said she had never been off that chain, ever.

Even her shadow was painful to see.

She’ll never be chained again.

I chose not to wait for Animal Control. They have to go by the law, I don’t. In my point of view, it seems like the laws in abuse cases are there more to protect the pet owner than to protect the animal (and to allow for Animal Control inaction, if desired). Not to mention they would probably euthanize anyway. So whenever I see a situation, I rarely rely on the law to do the right thing.

A Time to Take Action

That night, I decided it was time. However, I got worried at the last minute because I didn’t know how Zoey would react to a stranger approaching her with a flashlight at night. It could be bad. So I didn’t do it.

The next night I went back and didn’t see any lights on in the owner’s trailer so I just walked right up and Zoey was in the doghouse. It was like she had no fight or life in her at all. I had to pull her out by the chain. She was very cooperative. I unhooked the chain and put her on a leash. She walked right away with me. I was worried about her barking but she was completely quiet. It was like she knew she was going to a better place.

Safe at Last and Beginning to Experience Life as a Dog Should

I took her to the vet. Her ear infection was so bad she couldn’t hear. The open sores were the result of being eaten by ants and flies. The whole area where she lived was covered with ants — ants that are big and bite hard.

I kept her for three months until she healed. Someone donated the money to have her chipped, fixed and vaccinated. Everyone at the vet clinic knew her story. While she was there, I got a call from the clinic that someone would like to adopt her. I delivered her the next day. They kept her name. They are a nice family with children and two other dogs, a Chihuahua and a Corgi mix. She has put on a few pounds. I called on Zoey about month after she was in her new home. She’s doing fine with her new family and their two other dogs. The things I miss most about not having her are watching her experience simple things like grass, trees, running in a river and just experiencing normal dog things, knowing she was doing this for the first time.

The neighbors and the woman from Montreal that initiated Zoey’s rescue still thank me today. The neighbors said it was like living next to a concentration camp.

Is There Ever a Time to Break the Law to Save an Animal?

Animal rescuers regularly wrestle with inadequate laws. Most live with the chronic frustration and try to stay within the bounds of their legal rights. Others take matters into their own hands. Is this a black and white issue? Do we have a higher moral responsibility than the law provides? Please share your thoughts in the comment section below and if you have saved an animal in need, and please share your story and photos on The Great Animal Rescue Chase website. Many of the heroes who share on our website are featured right here on Care2.com

Read more: great animal rescue chase, man saves neglected chained dog, vigilante dog rescue

Read more: http://www.care2.com/causes/man-ignores-the-law-to-save-chained-dog.html#ixzz208VFmYUn

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