Team Lioness: Women rangers protecting Africa’s wildlife | IFAW

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Celebrating strength and frontline heroes this World Ranger Day

 
The inspirational story of eight brave women who shattered their glass ceiling to protect wildlife. Team Lioness was created by the International Fund for Animal Welfare (IFAW) as an all-women wildlife ranger unit in Kenya. When COVID-19 sidelined many state-run ranger units, Team Lioness was one of the only active groups. They were left as the first line of defense to stop poachers and the killing of elephants, lions, giraffes, cheetahs and other wildlife on their traditional Massai land bordering Amboseli National Park. They are the first women in their families to secure employment and pioneers of women's empowerment, creating new opportunities and possibilities for the women in their tribe. ➡ Subscribe: https://bit.ly/IFAWSubscribe Follow IFAW on social: YouTube: https://bit.ly/IFAWYouTube Facebook: https://bit.ly/IFAWFacebook Instagram: https://bit.ly/IFAWInstagram

It takes an individual of immense character to be an IFAW Wildlife Ranger. These brave men and women protect wildlife from the front lines while simultaneously bridging gender gaps, establishing generationally sustainable revenue streams and creating systems to save critical populations. This upcoming World Ranger Day, we celebrate and support the incredible strength of rangers across the globe who work every day to protect animals and the wild places they call home. As we celebrate this special day on July 31st, we ask you to show support by sharing how you're #RangerStrongFor wildlife and the individuals who put everything on the line to protect animals.

Will you be #RangerStrongfor Team Lioness? See the women-rangers in action as they break glass ceilings and help protect iconic wildlife in Kenya. 

Team Lioness is one of Kenya’s first all-women wildlife ranger units. As Community Wildlife Rangers (CWR), the women help protect nearly 150,000 acres of traditional Masaai community lands that encompass Amboseli National Park in Kenya. Poaching is the cause of three out of every five African elephant deaths. The obstacles they’re up against are complex and demand immediate action. Wildlife rangers possess the mental fortitude to dismantle criminal networks using sophisticated technologies and counterterrorism tactics to harness, analyze and distribute information about poaching hotspots.  

COVID-19 brought new challenges to IFAW's Wildlife Rangers. As essential workers, the rangers were quarantined and separated from their families during these challenging times. The drop in tourism has led to limited resources, causing many areas to see an increase in poaching and illegal activity. Our rangers continue to be the first line of defense in the field, playing a critical role in the protection of Africa's most iconic wildlife.

Are you #RangerStrongFor wildlife? Take our quiz and test your animal knowledge

Wildlife rangers are selected based on their integrity, mental strength and physical strength. The job requires great intelligence to predict and prevent a poacher's next strike, and determination to meet all physical demands. At a moment’s notice, a call could come in about a poaching cell encroaching into a protected park. Ranger teams deploy immediately, oftentimes remaining away from their camp for days while tracking and dismantling poaching rings. 

When IFAW realized ordinary approaches to stopping elephant poachers weren’t working, we tried something new. We connected people who had never worked together before. Now, IFAW Wildlife Rangers work in concert with military intelligence officers, local residents and law enforcement, forming a rapid response network: tenBoma. The network is named after an East African saying that a community becomes safer when ten houses come together to look out for each other. Since its inception, we have seen an increase of 1,700 more elephants in Kenya’s Tsavo Conservation Area.  

IFAW Wildlife Rangers are frontline heroes dedicated to saving iconic species. This World Ranger Day, join IFAW as we celebrate their strength. Follow the #RangerStrongFor hashtag across social for ways you can participate.

Addendum
Meet eight Maasai rangers -- the first women in their families to get jobs -- fighting poaching around Kenya's Amboseli National Park
 
Packing her bags to go home for the first time in over four months, Maasai ranger Purity Lakara -- who patrols lands in Kenya's Amboseli National Park, known for its free-roaming elephants and views of Mount Kilimanjaro -- is overjoyed to be seeing her family for the first time since the Covid-19 pandemic was declared.

"I missed eating together, playing and hanging around with my baby girl, fetching water for my mum -- even helping my brothers herding cattle. I have missed everything that we usually do while I'm at home," she says.
Lakara, 23, is one of eight women -- the first in their families to secure employment -- who make up Team Lioness, a unit within the Olugului Community Wildlife Rangers (OCWR).
The rangers patrol the Olugului/Olarashi Group Ranch (OOGR), a 580-square-mile horseshoe of community-owned land that almost encircles Amboseli National Park, a safari destination 134 miles southeast of Nairobi.

Children run to welcome Purity Amleset Lakara, a member of the all-female IFAW-supported Team Lioness on her arrival at her home village in Meshenani, Amboseli, in Kenya. Paolo Torchio/IFAW


 
When Kenya closed its regional and international borders and the tourism industry and livestock markets on which the community depends disappeared, OCWR canceled all leave and asked its rangers, including Team Lioness, to stay at their posts indefinitely to protect wildlife from desperate poachers. Now that the country is cautiously yet optimistically opening and safari visitors are returning, the rangers are finally able to return to their villages, two by two.
 
When Lakara arrived in Meshenani on July 29, she was met by neighbors and family members who escorted her to her home, singing and clapping as she cradled her 2-year-old daughter.

Purity Amleset Lakara is escorted home by her eldest brother Maantoi Lakara and other members of her family. Paolo Torchio/IFAW

 
"My mother said that she was very happy right now because I'm back. She say that they have been longing for this day, so they are all here near me, enjoying and celebrating again," says Lakara, who is the sole breadwinner for her 11-member family.
Genesis of Team Lioness
Team Lioness was established by the global nonprofit International Fund for Animal Welfare (IFAW) in early 2019 after Maasai community leader Kiruyan Katamboi, affectionately referred to as Mama Esther, challenged the organization to employ women from the community as rangers.

A typical day for Team Lioness might begin at 5 a.m. with a run and breakfast, followed by a briefing and morning patrol, which typically takes four hours. Paolo Torchio/IFAW

 
Because Maasai communities are patriarchal, women are excluded from leadership and decision making and the community ranger unit that patrols the Group Ranch was exclusively male.
Christopher Kiarie, IFAW program operations and grants manager, says that while IFAW was enthusiastic about the suggestion, men in the OCWR and wider community were skeptical that women were up to the job. The community lands are vast, almost half the size of the state of Rhode Island, and a typical OCWR patrol can cover 12 miles of difficult terrain on foot, often in poor conditions.

Unlike the Kenya Wildlife Service, which patrols the Amboseli National Park, the OCWR are unarmed, so have to rely on skill when dealing with dangerous animals or violent people and call KWS for back-up if they think a situation might turn nasty.

Even the women nominated for Team Lioness, one by each of the community's eight clans, had their doubts.
"Before I was thinking like I would not make it," admits ranger Sharon Nankinyi. "But after we were training, then we became very strong ladies. We proved to the community that what a man can do, a woman can do better."
Grueling work
Under normal conditions, Team Lioness rangers typically work three weeks on, when they rotate around the OCWR's six camps and mobile unit, and one week off.

A typical day might begin at 5 a.m. with a run and breakfast, followed by a briefing and morning patrol, which typically takes four hours. Depending on their daily assignments, the rangers might spend the afternoon on base, ready to respond to an emergency call before a debrief of the day's activities.

Other than occupying separate sleeping and bathing quarters, they do exactly the same job as their 68 male colleagues and are assigned patrols in co-ed groups of varying sizes.

Community ranger Eunice Mantei Nkapaiya sits with her colleagues in their camp. The women were away from their families for months while they worked the bush. Will Swanson/IFAW

 
They note the locations and activities of wildlife, talk with members of the local community to learn of any suspicious or problematic activity, and pitch in whenever help is needed -- perhaps getting a stuck baby elephant out of a muddy waterhole or locating children who have roamed too far from the village.
While two-thirds of the men in the ranger unit are illiterate, the members of Team Lioness are educated to the equivalent of a high school diploma and excel at writing the reports essential to IFAW's "tenBoma" approach to wildlife security, in which the organization partners with other NGOs and ranger teams, community members and Interpol to combine actionable local intelligence and data analysis.

OCWR's Director of Operations Patrick Papatiti says as he observed the team working to persuade community members from hunting lions or hyenas that killed livestock, he could see that the male rangers, selected because they ranked among the community's best warriors, have changed their attitudes working with women.

"I can without a doubt see [the men] now take them as colleagues," he says.

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The danger of being a ranger
Working as a wildlife ranger anywhere in the world is a tough, dangerous gig.

Every year, the International Ranger Federation and Thin Green Line Foundation mark World Ranger Day on July 31 by publishing a roll of honor commemorating the rangers and staff in similar roles known to have died on duty over the past 12 months.

Of the 138 deaths recorded on this year's roll, almost a third were homicides. Alongside natural causes, drownings, wildlife attacks and motor vehicle accidents, their 2020 roll featured a new cause-of-death category: Covid-19, to which five of the rangers listed had succumbed.

The pandemic has only made Team Lioness' job harder.

 

Wildlife rangers keep their distance from local herders while interviewing them for information. Will Swanson/IFAW

 
Huge losses in tourism revenue -- Kiarie says that Amboseli National Park's revenues declined more than 90% -- forced government-funded agencies in the region to cut back on patrols.
Because the OCWR's funding via IFAW is donation-based and not affected in the same way, the community rangers stepped up operations to fill the gap. During a week when the risk of poaching was deemed particularly high, Team Lioness scaled up from its typical one or two patrols to three patrols a day, collectively covering more than 35 miles on foot.

Social distancing measures have made it hard for rangers to meet with community members to gather intelligence about potential poaching activity or resolve issues. Communication is already hard to maintain on community lands because of poor cell reception, a problem compounded by wet weather during this time of year.

When camp solar panels can't generate power, the rangers have to turn their phones off to conserve battery, further minimizing opportunities to receive timely tips on poaching activity -- something even more pressing now when many people have sold much of their livestock and hardships are more keenly felt.

"Since Corona started, there's bushmeat poaching because now people are jobless. [They] end up killing gazelle, killing giraffes, so that [they] can feed their children," says ranger Nankinyi.

Depending on their daily assignments, the rangers might spend the afternoon on base, ready to respond to an emergency call before a debrief of the day's activities. Paolo Torchio/IFAW

 
After receiving a tip from the local community in April, the OCWR dispatched a patrol -- which included three members of Team Lioness -- and discovered that four men had killed a giraffe the day prior, roasted the meat and left what they couldn't eat to collect later. The rangers called on KWS for support and set an ambush. When the men returned, they were arrested.
"It's very bad when the same people that you are working with [in the community], telling them the importance of wild animals, and you find them killing those wild animals," says Ruth Sikeita, one of the rangers on the scene.

Papatiti says that while bushmeat poaching incidents have increased over time, the killing of elephants for ivory has declined. He estimates that between three to five elephants were poached on community lands annually from when the OCWR was established in 2010 until IFAW began to support the unit in 2018, when only one elephant was lost. No more elephants have been killed on the Group Ranch since.

"I attribute the success to dedication from rangers and how we built a very good relationship with the community, which is our source of intel," explains Papatiti.

Related content

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Impact of Covid-19
The members of Team Lioness also have more familiar worries associated with Covid-19.


Being a ranger is a challenging job, but the rangers say the forced separation from their families has been the worst part. Paolo Torchio/IFAW

According to Johns Hopkins University, as of Sept 4, there were 34,884 confirmed cases of Covid-19 throughout Kenya, and 584 related deaths.
The WHO didn't respond to requests for case counts in Amboseli, but Papatiti believes 17 cases and five deaths have been reported there, although he has no data specific to the community ranch.

IFAW provides masks, gloves and hand sanitizer to protect rangers rotating to their home villages against contracting Covid-19. If any of the rangers feel unwell, OCWR has arranged for staff from a nearby hospital to test them at the base.

Now that Kenya is slowly opening up -- interregional travel was permitted from July and international air travel resumed on August 1 -- local people have concerns that the increased movement of people, especially those from outside Kenya, carries risk.

"We are seeing on the TV, hearing that Europe and the US are the countries most affected, so we have that fear they will bring the disease here," says Ruth Sikeita.

There are other pandemic-related shifts, too. Because the schools have been closed for so long, children will likely fall out of the education system as they try to find ways to support their family. Young women who doubt the pandemic will end may get married earlier.

"It is very sad. We need the ladies to get the education so that they can join us in Team Lioness," says Nankinyi.
On a personal level, the rangers say the forced separation from their families has been the worst part.
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A changing community

After four months in the field Ruth Sekeita Losiaik a member of the IFAW-supported Team Lioness, was reunited with her two-year-old son Bonham Shirim. Paolo Torchio/IFAW

 
Back in her village, reunited with her two children, Ruth Sikeita comments on how her 8-year-old daughter Priscilla has grown taller and her son Bonham, 3, is talking more. She's grateful to her mother-in-law, who is supportive of wildlife protection initiatives, for caring for her children while she was working.
"They are very healthy, you can now see," she says, lightly pinching her son's arm. "They're very clean. So I thank her, and to the whole community."

Team Lioness' success has not only changed perceptions around the OCWR but is influencing attitudes to gender roles in the community.

"Before, we were not allowed to speak to the men around, we are not allowed to speak to our fathers in the table, to share or to to eat supper or breakfast all together," says Nankinyi.

"We were just thinking like we are nothing to the community, we are just fit for fetching water, giving birth. But now we've broken the taboo that we can work with the men."

Looking forward to a post-pandemic world, the members of Team Lioness want to continue to develop their skills and knowledge, and impact on the community. Christopher Kiarie says that IFAW will work with telecommunication companies and the local government to improve coverage across community lands and will soon deploy a radio system secured for the rangers with assistance from the EU.

"Once the radio equipment is operationalized, communication amongst the community rangers will be boosted in a big way," he says.

Every member of Team Lioness wants to see more women join their ranks.

"In the community there are more ladies who are admiring this job, so I'm sure that if that opportunity comes out, there are more ladies will be coming here for an interview. It will be even more numbers than what is expected," says Purity Lakara, adding that she wants to see the number of female rangers equal or exceed the number of men.
Papatiti is also eager to recruit more women.

"The number will be determined by the availability of funds. When I am given a green light I will kick start the process," he says. 

Thank you for visiting our animal defence section. Before leaving, please join us in a moment of compassion and reflection.

The wheels of business and human food compulsions are implacable and totally lacking in compassion. This is a downed cow, badly hurt, but still being dragged to slaughter. Click on this image to fully appreciate this horror repeated millions of times every day around the world. With plentiful non-animal meat substitutes that fool the palate, there is no longer reason for this senseless suffering. Meat consumption is a serious ecoanimal crime. The tyranny of the palate must be broken. Please consider changing your habits in this regard.

 

ALL CAPTIONS AND PULL QUOTES BY THE EDITORS, NOT THE AUTHORS.

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Freedom Trails Take Their Toll in Animal and Human Suffering

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THE STUBBORN CHALLENGE OF ROADKILLS

Patrice Greanville

A wildlife bridge in Banff National Park, in the Canadian Rockies. Overpasses and underpasses, plus other enhancements to the way we build our roads and motor vehicles is the civilised approach to reducing gratuitous animal carnage. Since its inauguration, the casualty rate for many animal species has plummeted. (Photograph: Ross MacDonald/Banff National Park)

THIS ARTICLE IS REPOSTED DUE TO READER REQUEST. THE ORIGINAL VERSION APPEARED IN 1989. THIS IS A SLIGHTLY REVISED AND EXPANDED EDITION.  

AT TYPICAL HIGHWAY SPEEDS,it may be no more than a sudden, blurry impression of red, quickly and thankfully left behind in mind and space--a bump on the road, probably a badly mangled small body you and other drivers strive to avoid--but the jarring occurrence is almost inevitable these days. It's the sight of an animal killed on the road. The American highway devours animals' lives at an astonishing rate--twelve victims a second, up to a million animals a day, perhaps more than 300 million casualties a year. Nobody knows the actual precise figure, but most observers agree it is huge.*

cat-stripedIn magnitude, it's an animal holocaust surpassed only by the hell of factory farming. Indeed, the carnage is so unrelenting that by the time you finish reading this column, more than 6,500 additional animals will have succumbed in the U.S. to lethal encounters with fast-moving vehicles and uncaring or incompetent drivers. Compared to this victimization, human casualties, tragic as they are--50,000 a year--pale into insignificance. For every human fatality, 80,000 animals die on the road. And the slaughter is likely to get worse: Congress has just raised the speed limit on some rural highways, where many animal killings occur, to 65 miIes per hour.

Roadkill figures are very high in the US, but the carnage is global. As the accompanying images illustrate, from North America to Australia, Paraguay, Singapore, India, Africa, Thailand, China and Europe, no country or continent is safe for wildlife in the proximity of roads. 

The road kills a lot of possums; it's one of the most victimized species. (click to expand)

Yet the problem is not only a question of speed limits and irrepressible highway and urban proliferation. Its roots go much deeper, to the cultural and economic origins of the Great American Highway, and our unbroken romance with the private automobile.

Business-minded America has always been a nation in a hurry, impatient with delays and intolerant of any obstacles which might hamper mobility or profit. In no other modern industrial nation has individualism cut so deep or produced more disturbing consequences. Sociologist Philip Slater wasn't too far off the mark when he noted in his book The Pursuit of Loneliness,

"Americans attempt to minimize, circumvent, or deny the interdependence upon which all human societies are based ... We seek a private house, a private means of transportation, a private garden, a private laundry, self-service stores, and do-it-yourself skills of every kind. An enormous technology seems to have set itself the task of making it unnecessary for one human being ever to ask anything of another in the course of going about his daily business ... We seek more and more privacy, and feel more and more alienated and lonely when we get it."

Elephant-train collision in India. This nation is actually notable for its culture of respect and generosity toward most animal species.

Roadkills are symptomatic of humanity's dismal priorities when it comes to animals


For a nation in love with the idea of privacy the automobile was the logical choice, and it seemed an affordable choice, too, at a time when oil was thought inexhaustible and gas-engine pollution was not seen to represent the threat of climate change oblivion.

The final push toward highway proliferation came in the wake of World War 2, when the massive exodus of the new, affluent middle class to suburbs without adequate public transportation triggered an aggressive program of road construction all over the United States. The newly minted Cold War also played a part: An ambitious highway construction program received an added boost from the Eisenhower administration as it made preparations for the rapid deployment of war materials and military units across the US (a concept supposedly pioneered by Hitler, who envisioned the autobahn as a network of roads to complement trains in the deployment of armor units). In the 1950s, no one could foresee the actual consequences of such actions.

squirrel_Roadkill1

A squirrel surprised by one of the million of vehicles imparting impersonal death. (click to expand).

The Search for Solutions--Breaking Loose from Carmania and the Privatizing Urge

The problem of the omnipresent highway is as much a political as a technical one. Without relaxing the mesmerizing influence that runaway individualism and the powerful auto lobby exert on national policy, without an energetic campaign of public education, the chances for real gains are remote or nonexistent.

hyena

Spotted hyena (South Africa). Death respects no animal that gets near the road.

Consider what may have to be done:

A new national mass transit and freight system. Whatever else is done, it's indisputable that a shift back to urban, suburban and interstate railway and bus systems, especially for commuting and freight purposes, would greatly reduce highway congestion, pollution and fatalities. A variety of organizations are now advocating increased federal and state funding for improved public transportation. Whenever possible, animal advocates should support (or suggest) such initiatives.

dpg=large

Yet another victim. (click to expand)

Urban redesign and better utilization of land resources.

In the not-too-distant past most people lived and worked in the same community. Traveling great distances to the workplace on a daily basis was unthinkable. Modem industry gradually broke up the former integration of working and living spaces, but the 21st Century may yet see a return of the "integrated" lifeplace. Because of economic criteria, a higher ethical awareness, and the possibilities afforded by the wholly "computerized environment," (telecommuting and the "digital office"), urban planners are now better positioned to design more efficient housing and more self-contained communities. By reducing human pressure on habitats, housing and industrial design geared to maximizing available space may play a crucial role in helping the environment and the animals.

Improvements in highway and automobile design. Ideally, all new highways should incorporate animal welfare and habitat-sharing standards as legitimate design questions. A great deal of truly creative research needs to be done in this field, with ethologists providing data on the habits and characteristics of numerous species. The object, of course, would be to deter and interdict random animal access to the roads, while providing safe crossings at adequate intervals. This might prevent the current "fracturing" of animal habitats, while still allowing the animals to cross roads to gather food, find shelter, locate mates, rejoin their offspring or simply get home. Scent deterrents, human-inaudible sounds, electric-eye fencing, overpasses and underpasses ("animal bridges") are some of the possible techniques. The perfect solution is still far off, but the U.S. must join the search for answers, and there are exciting industries waiting to be born. Naturally, all such innovations would have to be incorporated in both new and existing roads.

Koalas, a fragile species, are also subject to high rates of road victimisation.

To complement all the above, the gas-engine vehicle itself might have to be considerably enhanced and probably redesigned. At present there's an acute need for improved nighttime visibility (i.e., non-glare high beams) and for better communications between drivers, especially new signalling devices to warn oncoming traffic when an animal or another emergency is spotted a few hundred feet ahead. In addition, on-board animal deterrence and driver-alert systems based on radar or infrared technologies might provide the crucial edge to avoid most fatal collisions.

Indian road collects the lives of red fox and a langur.

But technical innovations alone can't beat the odds. The US., which of all modem industrial nations has the least stringent licensing requirements for drivers, should be persuaded to institute new, federally-sponsored "driver enhancement" programs to teach all drivers including so-called professionals--the best ways to react under all sorts of weather and animal emergencies. (In this area, television, Internet-borne materials, and regular videotapes could prove invaluable.)

PATRICE GREANVILLE is one of Animals' Agenda website's founding editors. He is National Director of The Voice of Nature Network (VNN), an organisation that in the late 1980s attempted to do something about the roadkills issue.  For further information about this topic, be sure to check the personal website of veteran animal activist Ira Fischer, Kindness and Compassion for Animals. Ira, a longtime colleague and personal friend, is currently working on a new roadkills project, and he welcomes help and suggestions.  

 __________________________

ADDENDUM

A recent study showed that insects, too, are prone to a very high risk of roadkill incidence.[3] Research showed interesting patterns in insect/butterfly road kills in relation to vehicle density. Although the insect population is also at risk, much of the attention goes to bigger, more charismatic animals. Other animals with smaller biomass, like avian species, are also caught in vehicular collisions. The estimates vary greatly (attesting to the fact we need better studies):  350,000 to 27 million birds are estimated to be killed on European roads each year.[4]

Breakdown by species

In 1993, 25 schools throughout New England participated in a roadkill study involving 1,923 animal deaths. By category, the fatalities were:[5]

*The actual figure in 2004 is put between 190 and 250 million casualties each year, still a major assault on domestic animals and wildlife.  Copyright 1987-2005 The Voice of Nature Network, Inc. A 501(c)(3) organization.

Extrapolating these data nationwide, Merritt Clifton, editor of Animal People Newspaper estimated that the following animals are being killed by motor vehicles in the United States annually:[6]

This study may not have considered differences in observability among taxa (i.e. dead raccoons are easier to see than dead frogs[citation needed]), and has not been published in peer-reviewed scientific literature.



Thank you for visiting our animal defence section. Before leaving, please join us in a moment of compassion and reflection.

The wheels of business and human food compulsions are implacable and totally lacking in compassion. This is a downed cow, badly hurt, but still being dragged to slaughter. Click on this image to fully appreciate this horror repeated millions of times every day around the world. With plentiful non-animal meat substitutes that fool the palate, there is no longer reason for this senseless suffering. Meat consumption is a serious ecoanimal crime. The tyranny of the palate must be broken. Please consider changing your habits in this regard.

 

ALL CAPTIONS AND PULL QUOTES BY THE EDITORS, NOT THE AUTHORS.

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Wildlife Takeover: How Animals Reclaimed Chernobyl | Free Documentary Nature

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Help us break the corporate media monopoly before it kills us all. The global oligarchy depends on its disinformation machine to maintain its power. Now the malicious fog of Western propaganda has created an ocean of confusion in which even independent minds can drown. Please push back against this colossal apparatus of deception. Consider a donation today!

Wildlife Takeover: How Animals Reclaimed Chernobyl | Free Documentary Nature

Where humans move out, wildlife moves in… What would happen if the world were suddenly without people – if humans vanished off the face of the earth? How would nature react - and how swiftly? On the edge of Europe, a deserted location reveals the surprising answer. An abandoned village can change in a very short time into a sanctuary for plants, birds and animals. Shy and rare species, some thought to be on the brink of extinction are found in robust good health. This is Chernobyl, deserted by people after the worst nuclear disaster in history and now reclaimed by a remarkable collection of wildlife and the descendents of pets that were left in the city when the people went away. This film unmasks the surprising faces of the new inhabitants. In houses where people once lived and laughed, unexpected wildlife is making itself at home. The adventures of a likeable cast of non-human characters give viewers a rare glimpse into an alternative world. Here wild animals face challenges in an environment totally outside their experience, while once-domestic species must rediscover their wild natures within. Where is this place of abandonment and sanctuary? The location is well known and draws a cloud of uncertainty over the future for these animal characters.
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David Doel and David Pakman file reports on the latest successful prank by a/r activists against big Animal Farming.

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David Doel and David Pakman file reports on the latest successful prank by a/r activists against big Factory Farming.

Animal rights activist punks Fox News

Animal rights activist Matt Johnson punked Fox Business by posing as the CEO of Smithfield Foods. Hilarity ensues.


And here's the longer version of the interview, worth watching indeed.

https://davidpakman.com/teddy

This post is part of our Orphaned Truths series with leading cultural and political analysts. People you can trust.

The Jimmy Dore Show • Fiorella Isabel — Craig Pasta Jardula (The Convo Couch) • Abby Martin (The Empire Files)
Lee Camp’s Redacted Tonight • Caleb Maupin • Krystal Ball
Max Blumenthal • Ben Norton • Aaron Maté (The Grayzone) • Caitlin Johnstone • Chris Hedges

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The Great Delusion

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Chris Hedges: The Great Delusion
SCHEERPOST

The real lesson we should learn from the rise of a demagogue such as Trump and a pandemic that our for-profit health care industry proved unable to contain is that we are losing control as a nation and as a species.

Eloquent image contributed for ScheerPost by Mr Fish, who followed Robert Scheer and Chris Hedges to their new platform, Scheerpost.


Joe Biden and the systems managers of the deep state and empire are returning to power. Trump and his coterie of buffoons, racists, con artists and Christian fascists are sullenly preparing to leave office. U.S. pharmaceutical corporations are starting to disseminate vaccines to mitigate the globe’s worst outbreak of COVID-19 that has resulted in more than 2,600 deaths per day. America, as Biden says, is back, ready to take its place at the head of the table. In the battle for the soul of America, he assures us, democracy has prevailed. Progress, prosperity, civility and a reassertion of American prestige and power are, we are promised, weeks away. 

But the real lesson we should learn from the rise of a demagogue such as Trump, who received 74 million votes, and a pandemic that our for-profit health care industry proved unable to contain, is that we are losing control as a nation and as a species. Far more dangerous demagogues will arise from the imperial and neoliberal policies the Biden administration will embrace. Far worse pandemics will sweep the globe with higher rates of infections and mortality, an inevitable result of our continued consumption of animals and animal products, and the wanton destruction of the ecosystem on which we and other species depend for life.

“One of the most pathetic aspects of human history,” Reinhold Niebuhr wrote, “is that every civilization expresses itself most pretentiously, compounds its partial and universal values most convincingly, and claims immortality for its finite existence at the very moment when the decay which leads to death has already begun.”

Biden’s appointments are drawn almost exclusively from the circles of the Democratic Party and corporate elite, those responsible for the massive social inequality, trade deals, de-industrialization, militarized police, world’s largest prison system, austerity programs that abolished social programs such as welfare, the revived Cold War with Russia, wholesale government surveillance, endless wars in the Middle East and the disenfranchisement and impoverishment of the working class. The Washington Post writes that “about 80 percent of the White House and agency officials he’s announced have the word ‘Obama’ on their résumé from previous White House or Obama campaign jobs.” Bernie Sanders, apparently rebuffed in his efforts to become secretary of labor in the Biden administration, has expressed frustration with the Biden nominations. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was denied a seat by House Democrats on the House Energy and Commerce Committee because of her support for the Green New Deal. The message of the Biden administration to progressives and left-wing populists is very clear – “Drop dead.”     

The list of new administration officials includes retired General Lloyd J. Austin III who is being nominated to be secretary of defense. Austin is on the board of Raytheon Technologies and a partner at Pine Island Capital, a firm that invests in defense industries and also includes Antony Blinken, Biden’s nominee to be secretary of state.  Blinken, who was deputy national security adviser and deputy secretary of state, is a strong supporter of the apartheid state of Israel.  He was one of the architects of the invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq and a proponent of the overthrow of Muammar Gaddafi in Libya, resulting in yet another failed state in the Middle East.

Janet Yellen, former Federal Reserve chair under Barack Obama, is slated to be Treasury Secretary. Yellen as the chair of Bill Clinton’s Council of Economic Advisors (CEA) and later as a member of the board of the Federal Reserve, backed the repeal of Glass-Steagall, which led to the banking crisis of 2008.  She supported the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). She also lobbied for a new statistical metric intended to lower payments to senior citizens on Social Security.  Yellen backed “quantitative easing” that provided trillions in virtually no-interest loans to Wall Street, loans used to bail out banks and corporations and engage in massive stock buy-backs while the victims of financial fraud were abandoned.

Former Secretary of State John Kerry is to become a special envoy for climate. Kerry championed the massive expansion of domestic oil and gas production, largely through fracking, and, according to Obama’s memoir, worked doggedly to convince those concerned about the climate crisis to “offer up concessions on subsidies for the nuclear power industry and the opening of additional U.S. coastlines to offshore oil drilling.”

Avril Haines, a former Obama deputy CIA chief, is to become Biden’s director of national intelligence. Haines oversaw Obama’s expanded and murderous drone program overseas and backed Gina Haspel’s nomination to be the head of the CIA, despite Haspels’ direct involvement in the CIA torture program carried out in black sites around the globe. Haines called Haspel “intelligent, compassionate, and fair.” Brian Deese, the executive who was in charge of the “climate portfolio” at BlackRock, which invests heavily in fossil fuels, including coal, and who served as a former Obama economic adviser who advocated austerity measures, has been chosen to run the White House’s economic policy.

Neera Tanden, a former aide to Hillary Clinton, has been picked to be director of the Office of Management and Budget. Tanden, as the head of the Democratic Party’s thinktank, the Center for American Progress, raised millions in dark money from Silicon Valley and Wall Street.  Her donors include Bain Capital, Blackstone, Evercore, Walmart and the defense contractor Northrup Grumman. The United Arab Emirates, a close ally of Saudi Arabia in the war in Yemen, also gave the thinktank between $1.5 million and $3 million. She relentlessly ridicules Sanders and his supporters on cable news and social media. She also proposed a plank in the Democratic platform calling for the bombing Iran. 

The perpetuation of the deeply unpopular wars and onerous neoliberal policies by the Biden administration will be accompanied by a fevered demonization of Russia, most recently blamed for cyber-attacks.  A new Cold War with Russia will be used by the corporate Democrats to discredit domestic and foreign critics and deflect attention from the political stagnation and the corporate pillaging of the country. It will allow MSNBC and The New York Times, which spent two years slogging empty Russiagate conspiracies, to disseminate a daily stream of emotionally charged rumors and shady accusations about Russia.  Cable celebrities such as Rachel Maddow will hyperventilate night after night about Russia while ignoring the corruption of the Biden administration.  The only reason Russia is not blamed for rigging the election in 2020, as opposed to 2016, by the Democratic Party is because Trump was defeated. 

Biden, after his defeat in the Democratic Party Caucus in Nevada by Bernie Sanders, where Sanders got more than twice his vote, immediately played the Russian card, telling CBS News that the “Russians don’t want me to be the nominee, they like Bernie.”  Hillary Clinton started this dirty game when she attacked 2016 Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein as a “Russian asset” and in 2020 leveled the same charge against Rep. Tulsi Gabbard.  The Democrats need an enemy, real or fictious, and Silicon Valley and major manufacturers will not allow them to target China.

More of the same means more disaster. If we want to reclaim our open society and save the ecosystem, we must abolish the corporate stranglehold on global economic and political power. If we want to avert zoonotic diseases such as COVID-19, swine flu, avian flu, bovine spongiform encephalopathy (Mad Cow disease), Ebola, and SARS we must stop consuming animals and their bodily secretions. We must abolish factory farming and adopt a vegan diet.  And we must keep fossil fuels in the ground.

Razing the rainforest for cattle grazing and vast tracts of farmland devoted to growing monocrops to feed animals destined for human consumption are responsible for up to 91 percent of Amazon rainforest destruction since 1970. The loss of forests is one of the single biggest contributors to climate change. Animal agriculture is the leading cause of ocean dead zones. Oceans could be devoid of fish by 2048. Each minute, 7 million pounds of feces are produced by the animals raised for human food in the US alone. The continued destruction of natural habitat, coupled with the vast factory farms which use 80 percent of the antibiotics in the U.S. and incubate drug-resistant pathogens that spread to human populations, presage new forms of the Black Death.

The belief that we can maintain current levels of consumption, especially of animal products, capitalist expansion, imperial wars, a reliance on fossil fuels and abject subservience to unfettered corporate power, which has solidified the worst income inequality in human history, is not a form of hope but suicidal self-delusion. We are not headed under the policies of the Biden administration and the global ruling elite for the broad sunlit uplands of a new and glorious future, but economic misery, vast climate migrations, waves of new and more virulent pandemics, of which COVID-19 is a mild precursor, along with irreversible ecological systems collapse and frightening forms of societal breakdown, authoritarianism and neofascism.         

Global warming is inevitable. It cannot be stopped.  At best, it can be slowed. Over the next 50 years the earth will most likely heat up to levels that will make whole parts of the planet uninhabitable. Tens, perhaps hundreds, of millions of people will be displaced. Millions of species will go extinct. Cities on or near a coast, including New York and London, will be submerged.

Oceans absorb much of the excess CO2 and heat from the atmosphere. This absorption is rapidly warming and acidifying ocean waters, resulting in the deoxygenation of the oceans. Each of the earth’s five known mass extinctions was preceded by at least one part of what climate scientists call the “deadly trio” – warming, acidification and deoxygenation of the oceans. The next mass extinction of sea life is already under way, the first in some 55 million years.

This is not defeatism. It is realism. We appear to have bought four years with Biden’s election, but if we do not use it wisely – and there is nothing in the Biden nominations that offer any encouragement – we are merely reconstructing a shabby Potemkin village that will soon be flattened by the gale-force political and environmental hurricanes that are gathering around us.

One of the lessons I learned from covering wars and revolutions as a foreign correspondent is that the political, economic and cultural systems that are erected by any society are very fragile. The façade of power remains in place, as I saw in Eastern Europe during the 1989 revolutions and later in Yugoslavia, long after terminal rot has consumed the foundations. This façade fools a society into thinking the structures of authority remain solid, impervious to collapse. So, when collapse comes, which should have been long predicted, it appears sudden and incomprehensible. The ensuing chaos is disorienting and frightening. The cognitive dissonance between the perception of power and its rapid dissolution feeds self-delusion.  It creates, as I witnessed in the former Yugoslavia, what anthropologists call crisis cults, as well as bizarre conspiracy theories, fascism and the embrace of inchoate violence to purge society of the demons blamed for the national debacle. Hatred becomes the highest form of patriotism. The vulnerable are scapegoated. Intellectuals, journalists and scientists rooted in a fact-based world are despised. Ruling elites and ruling structures lose all credibility. This collapse is often a portal to a world of nihilism and blood-drenched fantasy. 

After four years of lies, the stoking of racist violence, stunning ineptitude, rampant corruption and an abject failure to cope with a national health crisis, Trump expanded his base by 11 million votes. This should be a huge, flashing red light. Worse, 70 percent of Trump voters, 51 million Americans, believe that “radical Left Democrats” and the deep state rigged the elections through “voter fraud,” including the importation of Venezuelan voting software, illegitimate mail-in ballots and the wholesale destruction of Trump ballots by election officials. One hundred and twenty-six Republican House members joined a lawsuit filed by 18 Republican state attorneys general asking the Supreme Court to overturn Biden’s victory. The vast majority of Republican senators refused to acknowledge the election results following the November vote. Electors from the Electoral College were forced in several states to deliver their votes to state legislatures under armed guard. Some two dozen armed protesters carrying American flags and chanting “Stop the Steal” descended on the home of Democratic Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson. Seven hundred members of the white nationalist group the Proud Boys took over streets in Washington last weekend to protest the alleged theft of the election, leading to more than three dozen arrests, four stabbings, the vandalizing of four Black churches, and Black Lives Matter banners and signs ripped down and burned.

Trump may be gone soon, but he leaves behind a party that is openly authoritarian, dismissive of democratic norms, an enemy to science and fact-based discourse and which attempted a coup d’état. The next time around they won’t be so disorganized and inept.  This hostility to democracy by one of the two ruling parties, supported by millions of Americans, many of whom were betrayed by Biden and the leaders of the Democratic Party, will not dissipate but grow, especially as the hammer of economic dislocation, including the looming evictions of millions of Americans, pummels the country.

The decades-long corporate assault on culture, journalism, education, the arts, universities and critical thinking has left those who speak this truth marginalized and ignored. These Cassandras, locked out of the national debate, are dismissed as unhinged and depressingly apocalyptic. The country is consumed by a mania for hope, which our corporate masters lavishly provide, at the expense of truth. It is this delusional hope that will doom us.

The Austrian writer Stefan Zweig, who with a handful of other writers and artists desperately tried to warn of the suicidal folly of World War I, wrote of what he called “the mental superiority of the defeated.” His anti-war play Jeremiah, based on the Biblical prophet Jeremiah who issued warnings in vain, illustrated that those who face reality, however bitter, are able to endure and rise above it.

“Awaken, doomed city, that thou mayest save thyself,” the prophet cries out in Zweig’s play. “Awaken from your heavy slumbers, heedless ones, lest you be slain in sleep; awaken, for the walls are crumbling, and will crush you; awaken.”

But the warnings from Jeremiah, called “the weeping prophet,” were ignored and ridiculed. He was attacked for demoralizing the people. There were plots against his life.  When the Babylonian army captured Jerusalem, Jeremiah, like Julian Assange, was in prison.

“I was always attracted to showing how any form of power can harden a human being’s heart, how victory can bring mental rigidity to whole nations, and to contrasting that with the emotional force of defeat painfully and terribly ploughing through the soul,” Zweig wrote in his memoir, “The World of Yesterday”. “In the middle of war, while others, celebrating triumph too soon, were proving to one another that victory was inevitable, I was plumbing the depths of the catastrophe and looking for a way to emerge from them.”

We cannot use the word hope if we refuse to face the truth. All hope rooted in self-delusion is fantasy. We must lift the filter from our eyes to see the danger before us. We must heed the warnings of our own prophets. We must destroy the centers of power that lure us and our children, like the Pied Piper of Hamelin, to certain doom. The walls, daily, are closing in around us. The radical evil we face is as real under Trump as it will be under Biden. And if this radical evil is not smashed, then the world ahead will be one of torment and mass death.

[Chris Hedges writes a regular original column for ScheerPost every two weeks. Click here to sign up for email alerts.]

Chris Hedges is a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist who was a foreign correspondent for fifteen years for The New York Times, where he served as the Middle East Bureau Chief and Balkan Bureau Chief for the paper. He previously worked overseas for The Dallas Morning News, The Christian Science Monitor, and NPR. He is the host of the Emmy Award-nominated RT America show On Contact.

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