The animals regret that human beings have so little compassion and consciousness that they cruelly slaughter animals in the pursuit of profits.

The following excerpts from the goveg.com website of PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals) give an illustration of the depth of human cruelty involved in the commercial slaughtering of animals in the United States.

"In nature, pigs live for 15 years, but pigs on factory farms are sent to slaughter after just six months of life. To get the terrified pigs onto the transport trucks bound for the slaughterhouse, workers may beat them on their sensitive noses and backs or stick electric-prods in their rectums. Crammed into 18-wheelers, pigs struggle to get air and are usually given on food or water for the entire journey (often hundreds of miles). A former pig transporter told PETA that pigs are "packed in so tight, their guts actually pop out their buts - a little softball of guts actually comes out." Pigs suffer from temperature extremes and are forced to inhale ammonia fumes and diesel exhaust."

"A typical slaughterhouse kills up to 1,100 pigs every hour. The sheer number of animals killed makes it impossible for them to be given humane, painless deaths. Because of improper stunning, many pigs are alive when they reach the scalding-water bath, which is intended to soften their skin and remove their hair. The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) documented 14 humane-slaughter violations at one processing plant, where inspectors found hogs who "were walking and squealing after being stunned [with a stun gun] as many as four times."

An industry report explains that "continuous pig squealing is a sing of ... rough handling and excessive use of electric prods." The report found that the pigs at one federally inspected slaughterhouse plant squealed 100 per cent of the time. ..."

"According to one slaughterhouse worker, "There's no way these animals can bleed out in the few minutes it takes to get up the ramp. By the time they hit the scalding tank, they're still fully conscious and squealing. Happens all the time." ..."

The shameway.com web site has passages from the book Slaughterhouse, by investigator Gail Eisnitz.

"The Humane slaughter Act, the only federal law that protects animals raised for food, is rarely, if ever, enforced - the government has taken inspectors off slaughter lines, so the industry is left (largely) to police itself. The result is that slaughterhouse workers routinely beat, scald, skin, and dismember conscious animals; this behaviour has been documented on videotape and in statements from line workers and retired USDA inspectors."

"One slaughterhouse employee explained: "One time the knocking gun was broke all day; they were taking a knife and cutting the back of the cow's neck open while he's still standing up. They would just fall down and be a-shaking. and they stab cows in the but to make 'em move. Break their tails. They beat them so bad. I've drug cows till their bones start breaking, while they were still alive. Bringing them around the corner, and they get stuck in the doorway, just pull them till their hide be ripped, till the blood just drop on the steel and concrete. Breaking their legs pulling them in. And the cow is crying with its tongue stuck out. They pull him till his neck just pop." ..."

In the US alone, "...More than 9 billion mammals and birds" are raised and killed on farms or in slaughterhouses each year. The animals regret that this happens at all, and that it happens in ways that involve unbearable suffering and unspeakable abuse.

The animals regret that humans routinely slaughter them as a source of food when there are other ways to feed all the people on the planet without recourse to hunting or farming animals.

An article published in the UK newspaper, The Independent, on 28 April 2005, illustrates the cause for the spokesanimal's concern.

"Fresh from his disputed victory in Zimbabwe's parliamentary elections, President Robert Mugabe has turned his sights on the country's wildlife reserves in a bid to feed thousands of malnourished villagers.

Zimbabwe's national parks have been ordered to work with rural district councils to begin the wholesale slaughter of big game. National park rangers said they had already shot 10 elephants in the past week. The meat was barbecued at festivities to mark 25 years of independence. Four of the animals were reportedly shot in view of tourists near Lake Kariba, the largest man-made lake in Africa and a major wildlife haven.

Five years after ordering white-owned farms to be confiscated, the Mugabe regime has turned a country once known as the breadbasket of Africa into a famished land. An estimated 4 million rural poor suffer from food shortages. ...

Farmers have relied on their own livestock in the past three years of famine, induced by the land seizures. Their plight has worsened since the government stopped international donors from distributing food aid in a move by Mr Mugabe to take charge of the process himself and punish those who did not support him.

Parks officials say many peasants living close to the reserves have already been venturing inside to hunt and kill animals with snares. But they said the impact of snare hunting by the villagers was limited compared to what would happen if armed national park rangers were allowed to enter conservation areas to secure meat to feed millions of hungry farmers."

The animals regret that many humans are so lacking in consciousness and so unaware of the sanctity of all life that they enjoy hunting and killing animals in the name of sport and recreation.

The same article by The Independent newspaper, on the slaughter of animals in Zimbabwe for food, also included the following report.

"The wildlife [for food] directive is a major blow to efforts by conservationists to rehabilitate a wildlife sector devastated by Mr Mugabe's confiscation policy. The chaotic farm invasions saw party militants storming into conservation areas - private and state-owned - to slaughter animals. Unscrupulous South African hunters also joined in the looting, paying hefty kickbacks to politicians to go into conservation areas and shoot lions, leopards and cheetahs for trophies."

The animals regret that humans hunt them down and kill them simply to obtain body parts for supposed medicinal purposes or for their alleged qualities as aphrodisiacs.

An article from the National Wildlife Federation [US] describes the trade in tiger parts. Similar trafficking applies to rhinos and other animals.

"Almost every part of the tiger is said to have a property that can cure or abate one illness or another. For example, tradition holds that tiger fat can stop vomiting and tiger tail can cure various skin diseases. Tiger nose can be used for epilepsy; tiger whiskers, for a toothache; tiger penis, as an aphrodisiac; and tiger feces, for boils and piles. The most valued part of the tiger, however, is the humerus (the upper bone of the front legs). This bone is ground up and made into a plaster or balm or soaked in wine and used to treat human bone ailments such as rheumatism.

There is increased demand because Asian populations have significantly increased. Asian people are the primary consumers of these traditional medicines that are putting so much pressure on tigers in the wild. As Asian populations have risen, their per capita disposable income has also increased dramatically, allowing individuals to buy more products. Lastly, there has been a general resurgence of interest in traditional Asian medicines, very likely in response to the ever-growing Westernising influences that many people feel pervade their culture in today's world. Asian populations in Canada, the United States and western Europe are also big consumers of these products."

A news report in April 2005 highlights the seriousness of the threat to the survival of tigers in the wild.

"One of India's most prestigious national parks has been emptied of tigers by poachers, prompting international wildlife conservation experts to order an emergency census of the country's tiger population.

All 18 tigers in the Sariska Tiger Reserve in Rahasthan were taken between July and December last year.

The scandal has led to allegations of government corruption and negligence over the tiger's protection.

Officially there were 3,624 wild tigers in india - about 60 per cent of the total world population - but many respected conservationists say the number is almost certainly much lower. ... A 1972 census showed that there were just 1,827 tigers left in India (down from an estimated 40,000 in 1800) but, thanks to the creation of 27 special game reserves under the Project Tiger banner, the number doubled to 4,000 by 1989.

The success was short-lived. Since the early 1990s numbers have started to fall alarmingly as poor management and corrupt practices have taken hold."

The animals regret that humans use large numbers of them in cruel and terrifying experiments, in the name of scientific advancement.

The following excerpts of a news story in World Science on a 2004 study into animal reactions to even the most "harmless" laboratory experiments indicates why a spokesanimal might have very grave concerns.

"The most harmless-seeming lab experiments spark panic in the creatures going through them, according to a new report. But supporters of animal medical research, who say the work saves lives, questioned the findings.

The report, based on a review of past scientific studies, claims that mice, rabbits, rats, beagles, geese, and other animals all show measurable levels of stress in response to routine laboratory procedures.

These procedures, including blood draws and use of stomach tubes, are "terrifying" for animals, according to a press release announcing the findings. The statement was issued by the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine, a Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit group.

Jonathan Balcombe, a research consultant for the group, authored the report finding that physiological stress levels go up among animals undergoing experiments.

Even simple contact with laboratory workers is scary for animals, said Balcombe. "There is no such thing as a humane animal experiment," he said in the statement. "Fear or panic ensues when the animal is touched or stuck with a needle."

A mouse who is picked up and briefly held experiences several physiological reactions, according to the group: As stress-response hormones flood the bloodstream, the mouse exhibits a racing pulse and a spike in blood pressure. These symptoms can persist for up to an hour after each event.  Immune response is also affected.

"In rats and mice, the growth of tumors is strongly influenced by how much the animals are handled," the group's statement said.

Supporters of medical research that uses animals said they don't have much faith in Balcombe's study.  "I would be very skeptical of anything that comes out of Balcombe's group, since it is also on record as being anti-vivisection," said Barbara Davies, communications director for RDS, a British organisation of scientists who support medical research [using animals].

Barbara Rich, a spokeswoman for Americans for Medical Progress, and Alexandria, Virginia-based group, echoed that.  "It may be that they came to the conclusion before they did the study." she warned.  "Balcombe's group is closely allied with the radical animal-rights group People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals," she added."

But a spokesanimal might take a very different view of the work being done by PETA and ethologists like Jonathan Balcombe. It might say they are right and the scientific researchers are wrong.

The following images show some of the victims of cruel animal experiments that PETA has gone to bat for, thankfully with considerable success.  The research contacts for animals in these cases were definitely not "harmless".

The animals regret that humankind continues to destroy their natural habitats leaving them nowhere to live on this planet.

Indonesia is a country that the spokesanimal might well single out as an example of dishonest and unethical destruction of natural habitats. The following excerpts from articles covering this violation of animal and human rights provide glimpses of the carnage going on there.

"Ten thousand years ago, orangutans were found throughout Southeast Asia ranging all the way into southern China. Their populations probably numbered in the hundreds of thousands. Today, however, the few orangutans left live in the tropical rainforests of Borneo and Sumatra."

"Indonesia's forests represent 10% of the world's remaining tropical forests with an area of 260 million acres. According to the European League, by 2001 Indonesia had lost 99 million acres of forest ... which is equivalent to the combined size of Germany and the Netherlands. In total, Indonesia has lost 80% of its original forest habitat and continues to lose 6.2 million acres a year.

Indonesia is one of the most species-diverse countries in the world, with 12% of all mammal species, 16% of reptile and amphibian species, and 17% of bird species. Of these , 772 are threatened, giving Indonesia the third highest number of threatened species, falling behind Malaysia and the United States. Of Indonesia's approximately 40 primate species, 20 were found to have lost more than half their original habitat in the last 10 years."

Source: All About Orangutans! www.orangutan.org

"Everyone who sees orangutans in the wild speaks of their uncanny similarities to people. Their eyes and expression are the first thing to disarm you, then the tiny manicured finger nails. It's probably their mischief that confirms how close we are and their soulful expressions that spread guilt all over those of us who are aware of what human beings are doing to destroy these creatures with whom we share 98 percent of the same genes."

"Travelling across the region is like entering Dante's Inferno. The closest to hell on earth that can be imagined - a glorious wild gem of a place, defiled by greed, torched, hacked down and left to rot.

Nobody really knows how many orangutans are left. The horrific fires which spread through Borneo and Sumatra in 1997 and 1998 no doubt killed very many of these creatures. Orangutans are unable to swim and when they reach the river banks they have no escape from the fires. ...

Over the last 20 years about 80 per cent of orangutan habitat has been destroyed. Those of us who watched fascinating television documentaries about the impenetrable forest of Borneo and its incredible head-hunting people and its wildlife have to take stock. It's gone. The indigenous way of life, the orangutans, the extraordinary proboscis monkeys, clouded leopards, langurs, leaf monkeys, gibbons, bears and rhinos. Borneo has very few pockets of such habitat left. This island, the fourth largest on the planet, has been raped by massive industrial logging and mining, fuelled by a greedy world and a local political system which ruthlessly profited only the elite."

Source: Dave Curry writing in AWI Quarterly Fall/Winter 1998/1999; Vol 47/48, No 4/1

"Across Indonesia loggers have struck on a massive scale, destroying vast tracts of rain forest, selling the timber overseas, and turning much of the jungle into farms and palm oil plantations.

Government officials say that Indonesia, a sprawling archipelago of more than 17,000 islands, is losing an expanse of forest nearly the size of Switzerland annually, and with it the habitat of endangered tigers, thinoceroses, orangutans, and elephants. Scientists believe that hundreds of plant and animal species are going extinct each year. At least 75 per cent of the logging is illegal, said Environment Minister Nabiel Makarim, but weak central government, plagued by graft, is powerless to stop it. "If this goes on for seven or eight years," he said, "we won't have any more forest."

Even the country's 376 national parks and conservation areas have fallen victim to the illegal harvest. Nearly every park has been assaulted by chain saws, officials say, some so severely that they are no longer viable as nature preserves."

"Indonesia has some of the world's largest tropical rain forests and ranks with Brazil as home to a great diversity of animal and plant species. But the nation is also renowned for corruption, and timber is one of its most corrupt industries.

Indonesia is wealthy in timber, oil, and minerals but suffered for three decades under Suharto, who enriched his family and friends but did little to develop the country or its people. Since the Asian economic collapse of 1997, Indonesia has struggled to recover.

By the official count, nearly 40 million people are unemployed among a total population of more than 225 million. Some citizens long for a return to the stability of dictatorship, and others advocate a government based on conservative Islam. but many observers believe that for now, graft is what makes the country run.

Most of the illegal logging is carried out by large concerns in cahoots with officials in government and the military.

Officials accept cash to issue permits or look the other way as log-laden trucks rumble down the highways. Despite a ban on the export of raw logs from Indonesia, dozens of ships with timber cargoes sail daily to Malaysia, Singapore, and other Southeast Asian countries with no questions asked. ..."

"Illegal logging is not just a few people with a few chain saws," said Mike Griffiths, who helps manage the Leuser conservation area in northern Sumatra. "It is backed by people with money and power."

"Some of Sumatra's heaviest logging is in the central province of Riau, where huge swathes of forest have been cleared for palm oil plantations. For centuries, people and tigers lived in the area with few conflicts. But as logging accelerated in 1999, tigers began coming into villages looking for food.

Since 2001, tigers have killed at least six people near the coastal town of Dumai and possibly as many as 30, authorities say. Many of the victims were illegal loggers whose deaths were not officially reported. "It seems that tigers attack humans to eat them." said Jusman, head of the Dumai forest police. "Most of the tigers we catch are thin. I think it's because they cannot find their usual food." "

Source: Richard C. Paddock, Los Angeles Times, 22 January 2004.

The animals regret that human governments wage wars that result in injuries, trauma and deaths among animals caught up in such senseless battles. Animals never wage war on one another, only humans do so.

An example of the hubristic attitudes that lead humans to take upon themselves the right to conduct their lethal squabbles without regard for the many creatures that are adversely affected by those conflicts was the destruction of the Jenin refugees camp in the West Bank.

In April, 2002 an invasion by the Israeli Defence Force (IDF) destroyed a large area that was inhabited by refugees and other civilians. Not only were there women children who suffered but there were also many domestic animals and pets that were either killed, maimed and/or rendered homeless when tanks and bulldozers destroyed the area to make it uninhabitable by Palestinian insurgents.

There were persistent allegations of human rights violations by the IDF and of a massacre at Jenin, but the rights and wrongs of the human conflict are not what would provoke the spokesanimal's ire. It would point to the harm done to many of God's creatures that in no way deserved to be overrun by a human conflict. Why, it might ask, did the IDF and the Palestinian insurgents not show any regard whatsoever for the innocent animals in the path of their battle. Why was warfare conducted in a civilian area anyway? Who made that decision and with what right?

Another example that might be raised by the spokesanimal is the terrible, long-lasting horror inflicted on civilian and animal populations by the use of depleted uranium munitions by the forces of the Coalition of the Willing (CoW) in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Despite the prolific assurances that smart weapons would minimise civilian casualties and deaths, the CoW forces used DU in their projectiles and bombs. Even if all the strikes hit only Taliban forces, DU kills indiscriminately, invisibly, for centuries. It poisons water and makes land unusable in a region where arable soil is precious. During their assault on Afghanistan CoW forces bombed the Kajaki dam, which supplies water to over 1 million people. With their land and water poisoned by DU and NDU, the population faces the options of either leaving the localities they have inhabited for generations, or staying on in perilous circumstances.

Commanders of the invading CoW forces quickly encountered a scarcity of targets in Afghanistan. All they found to strike were collections of mud huts. Yet, more than 22,000 weapons were dropped on the Afghanistan countryside. These ranged from cruise missiles to heavy fuel-air bombs and satellite guided J-dams. Despite the fact that 60 percent of the ordinance dropped was precision guided, it is believed that, "One in four bombs and missiles dropped by the US on Afghanistan may have missed its target" (The Guardian, April 10, 2002).

In areas where Taliban fighters were bombed around the clock, there were many reports of locals finding the Taliban dead, with no visible injuries except blood flowing from their mouths. Such internal bleeding is consistent with the use of chemical or NDU weapons. The following phenomenon is said to have been witnessed by numbers of people entering bombed areas,

• "We were amazed to see birds sitting quietly on [tree] branches, but when we shook the tree the birds fell down and we saw blood coming out of their mouths. Then we climbed the trees to see those that were still stuck on tree branches, all of them had bled from their mouths. Two of the birds appeared to be partly melted into the branches."

The Uranium Medical Research Centre (UMRC) subsequently tested the urine of people from Jala Abad and found the highest level of uranium ever recorded in a population. Concentrations were 400% to 2,000% higher than normal baselines.

The Pentagon continues to maintain that DU does not pose a threat to civilians or its own troops - and they seem not to care about the animals. The US government is steadfastly refusing to clean up the DU residues in Iraq and Afghanistan. However, US assertions about the "safety" of their DU weapons are not borne out by field experience of humans and animals.

The spokesanimal might well ask by what right the Pentagon poisoned large areas of the Middle East in its "War On Terror". Two wrongs do not make a right. No matter who was responsible for the controlled demolition of the WTC towers in New York on 911, slaughtering innocent civilians and their animals halfway across the world can never be a justifiable response.

The animals regret that human legislatures pass laws regarding animals without regard to their natural rights. The animals contend that, in nature, humans and animals have equal rights and that humans are in error when they place their own rights above those of other creatures.

Increasingly, governments around the world are addressing the originally man-made problem of feral animals by enacting legislation allowing them to be hunted for a fee.

The animals regret this trend. A spokesanimal might well contend that the most serious 'feral' species involved in causing harm to the environment, and the eventual destruction of the productive capacity of the whole planet, is two legged. The spokesanimal might also observe that this human species is so obsessed with its own importance in the scheme of things that it believes that it can act as the equal of God; deciding which animals shall live and which shall die. The proof of this assertion, the spokesanimal might argue, is there for all to see in the feral animal eradication programs and laws of numerous human governments.

For example, the New South Wales (NSW) state government in Australia has recently established The Game Council of NSW and empowered this body to issue licences for the hunting, and extermination by other means, of feral or stray animals on public and private land.

Here are a selection of reports about this latest initiative of the NSW government.

• "Hunting feral animals on public land will be legal from next year.
  This follows a decision by the NSW government to open up almost 200 sites to licensed shooters. ...

  Thirty sites have so far been identified and another 150 areas are under assessment. A booking system will be used to prevent hunters from dominating any particular area. ...

  Feral animals that can be hunted include cats, dogs, pigs, rabbits, foxes and deer. ...

  Council chairman Robert Borsak said licensed hunters could play a valuable role in controlling feral animals, particularly in stopping pests moving onto agricultural land."

  ..... The Sunday Telegraph, Sydney, September 25, 2005.

• "The NSW government tabled a new Game Bill last November and plans to push it through the NSW Assembly in February. This is the most retrograde piece of legislation, in animal welfare terms, ever to have been tabled in Australia. If it goes through, hunters will police themselves and thousands more animals will suffer a more horrible death than they would otherwise have suffered.

  Key Issues

  • The Bill will hinder agreed national plans to abate any threat which introduced wild animals may pose to native wildlife. All agreed plans of this type dismiss recreational shooting as having any value in abating these threats and stress the importance of systematic and strategic approaches which recreational hunting can only hinder.

  • The Bill allows hunting with dogs on public land. This is likely to increase the feral dog population in NSW - dogs who will then, themselves, become legitimate targets for "hunters". Hunters' dogs are the main source of feral dogs in Australia since there are not many other domestic dogs who have the ability to survive in the wild.

  Cruelty to game animals will be lawful!

  The Bill will legalise extraordinary levels of animal cruelty. Hunting with bows and arrows, clubs, knives, dogs, wire snares or any other means (other than poison) will be permitted. It will be virtually impossible to use the NSW Prevention of Cruelty to Animals Act (POCTA) to prohibit or prosecute for any act of cruelty which hunters consider to be a normal part of hunting because POCTA provides built-in defences for acts of cruelty that are part and parcel of a lawful activity. Hunters will make their own rules and will police and sit in judgement on themselves. ...

  Game animals will include abandoned and mislocated animals. Under the bill, wild-living "pest" animals will be included as game animals. This means that straying or lost dogs and cats, as well as pigs, goats, rabbits and foxes, will be available for recreational shooting. ...

  The Bill will reintroduce recreational duck shooting on public land in NSW, along with other hunting of native game species. When this was previously legal in NSW (it was abolished in 1995), recreational shooters were supposed to kill only game species, yet thousands of protected, endangered and otherwise non-game birds were shot every year, including black swans, freckled ducks, magpie geese, coots, grebes, cormorants, heron, ibis, owls, hawks, galahs and magpies."

  ..... The New Bush Telegraph, www.shoalhaven.net.au/nbt90/pg8.html

• "A Game (hunting) Bill, currently in the NSW Parliament, will give vast powers, opportunities and land over to recreational hunters. A Game council, consisting primarily of hunters, will promote and regulate hunting - a clear conflict of interest!

  The Game Bill:

  • Creates the Game Council of NSW which is comprised of a majority of hunters in charge of issuing licences, exemption from licences, writing the rules, monitoring, inspecting all hunting and recommending public lands to be given over for hunting.

  • Endorses animal cruelty by stating that any methods, instruments or animals can be used by hunters to stalk, corner, capture and kill "game". There is no offence for cruelty to an animal under the Act and no opportunity to monitor, regulate or even rescue injured animals from hunting grounds. Animal welfare has no voice on the Game Council.

  • Reintroduces "duck" (waterfowl) hunting and disables any opportunity for rescues or independent monitoring of such activity.

  • Allows public land to be secretly declared available for hunting including local council owned land, Crown Land, State Forests and other public lands. The only land (so far) not available for hunting is national park, but National Party, Farmer's Association and hunter lobbying is seeking to change this.

  • Undermines and weakens other Acts - such as the Rural Lands Protection Act, the Forestry Act, the prevention of Cruelty to Animals Act and the National Parks and Wildlife Act by removing licensing, control, monitoring or prosecution powers from those agencies and putting them into the hands of hunters.

  • Is NOT about pest management - rather it would help exacerbate pest problems - through the declaration of many species as "game" - [thus creating} a vested interest in keeping pests.

  • Does not consider the environmental damage caused by hunters on public land (and private) bushland - through the introduction of pest species, entry to the land with vehicles, dogs, pest dispersal etc.

  • Will alienate families and bushwalkers from areas they enjoy, as hunting is introduced.

    Source: Total Environment Centre.

    ..... World Association for the Voice of Animals, www,wava.org.au/news-Apr02.html

A similar situation is unfolding in the state of Wisconsin, U.S.A. The following excerpt describes legislative moves to introduce the hunting of feral cats.

• "Wisconsin residents support a plan to legalise wild cat hunting, according to voting results released Tuesday [April 12, 2005].

  At meetings across the state Monday night, residents in 72 counties were asked whether free-roaming cats should be listed as an unprotected species. If so listed, the cats - including any domestic cat that isn't under the owner's direct control or any cat without a collar - could be hunted.

  A total of 6,830 voted yes and 5,201 voted no, according to results released by the Department of Natural Resources."

  "The prospect of feral cat hunting has more hurdles to clear - and faces the considerable opposition of a number of national rights groups. The Humane Society of the united States called the proposal cruel and archaic."

  ..... Associated Press, April 14, 2005.

  The spokesanimal might hold that the humans in 72 counties of Wisconsin don't have the right to decide whether other members of the animal kingdom should be hunted down and killed or not. By conducting a poll the authorities of the state of Wisconsin implicitly assumed that such a right exists, when in fact it does not.

The animals regret that when one of more humans commit atrocities, such as rape or murder, they are labelled 'animals'. This practice is a gross misrepresentation of the nature of the various members of the animal kingdom.

In human society political correctness has become an epidemic. It is presently considered a heinous act to typecast particular racial groups as being dishonest or in other ways more inclined to criminality than the average white, middle class citizen of western descent. Yet, a wide range of repulsive human behaviours and crimes are routinely associated with the biological grouping known as animals (of which we humans are members, however much we might choose to ignore this fact).

When particular humans commit pack rape, steal old people's life savings, bash defenceless pensioners, and the like, they are often labeled as "animals" by the media and the populace at large. The spokesanimal might well equate such typecasting with the very worst forms of racial slurs and hate campaigns.

Animals are not child molesters, pack rapists, granny bashers, or unscrupulous swindlers. Animals are God's creatures, and proud of it!

The animals regret the culling of particular animal species under the guise of 'land management' or 'environmental protection'. The animals contend that by taking such actions human governments are assuming god-like powers over the natural order - a capacity they have not earned and do not merit

If we take Australia as an example it's clear that the two legged ferals from Europe that 'colonised' this country, some two centuries ago, began the process of environmental degradation that created today's land management problems. Indigenous inhabitants of Australia had succeeded in preserving its fragile environment and the natural balance of its ecosystems for some sixty thousand years. But now the great forests are gone, the clean streams are choked and dry, and the soil is poisoned by salt from below the ground and pesticides form the sky above - sprayed relentlessly by aircraft servicing large-scale agribusinesses and struggling family farms alike.

Because non-farm animals compete with livestock for feed and often consume or trample crops commercial interests want them culled. Even environmentalists often believe that it is in the interests of 'land management' to reduce the numbers of various animal species. It is not just introduced animals such as water buffalo and horses that are slaughtered, but natural species such as the kangaroo as well. These iconic animals, that have pride of place in the Australian Coat of Arms, are also farmed for their meat and fur.

A spokesanimal might contend that human governments and environmental movements should be prepared to invest in restoring the Australian landscape to its original carrying capacity, rather than killing off animals that can't presently exist in balance with extensive, and ultimately unsustainable, agricultural operations. It would certainly argue that humans, particularly those descendants of the original despoilers of the land, have no right to kill thousands upon thousands of animals for economic or environmental reasons.

Culling kangaroos and other animals in Australia to save the environment is based on the false notion that it can achieve that aim. Western farmers have not demonstrated, in the whole two centuries of their activities in Australia, that they have the knowledge and capacity, or the will, to manage the land in a truly sustainable manner. Animal lives should not be taken by culling programs intended to enable western agricultural models to continue for a little longer, until they ultimately fail. The spokesanimal could argue not only that such killing is immoral but also that it is bound, in the end, to prove futile. Western farming methods from the northern hemisphere are simply not sustainable in arid and semi-arid Australia. The kangaroos on the Australian coat of arms are dying in vain.

The animals regret the fur trade and its associated fashions based on fur. While the slaughter of any animals for their fur is totally unconscionable the cruel trade in the pelts of companion animals such as dogs and cats is thoroughly abhorrent. It plumbs the greatest depths of human depravity and sinfulness.

Starting in 1997, joint undercover operations by the Humane Society of the Unites States, Humane Society International, and the independent German journalist Manfred Karremann, have documented an odious trade in fur and skins of dogs and cats.

The following excerpts from their report "What is that they're wearing?" give us chilling insights into the extremely cruel treatment of these normally companion animals. The farming and slaughter of animals such as mink and sable is deplorable enough, even when it is assumed to be carried out using high standards of 'husbandry' and painless methods of killing. But dogs and cats have shared our hearths and lived alongside us for thousands of years. There is a deep element of betrayal involved in their abandonment to the fates described below.

"Investigators estimate the annual death toll to be more than 2 million dogs and cats. And for what? For full-length and short coats and jackets. Fur-trimmed garments. Hats. Gloves. Decorative accessories. Even toy stuffed animals. All made from the fur of dogs and cats. dogs and cats no different from our pets, cruelly killed to make products sold to unwary consumers who generally have no way to know what they're buying. ..."

"Documentation from this investigation, including many hours of videotape footage and hundreds of photographs, shows that the methods of housing, transporting, and slaughtering dogs and cats may be unparalleled in their cruelty."

"There have been sporadic reports of dogs and cats being killed for their fur in a number of countries, including Mongolia, Korea, Australia, and the United Kingdom. This investigation focused on China - a country believed to be a major source of dog and cat fur, as well as representative of the trade in those pelts - where we were able to develop leads and connections to provide us with undercover access.

Investigators visited state-run "animal by-products" companies in Beijing and in the provinces of Hebei, Heilongjiang and Henan to uncover detailed information on the manufacture and trade of dog and cat fur. China also has a thriving business in dog meat: cat meat is reportedly eaten only in Canton. ..."

"Investigators visited one dog farm several hours north of the city of Harbin. They documented live dogs in an unheated room in the bitter cold, surrounded by the bodies of dead dogs hanging from hooks. Some of the live dogs were destined to be sold and eaten in Harbin, their fur sold to the fur trade. The dogs were packed into sacks and transported by motor vehicle to a slaughterhouse - a journey of several hours. ...

At one restaurant the investigator watched as a dog was taken out of a sack. The others were left in the sack on the icy ground. (As each dog was taken out and killed, the others could hear its screams and cries.) According to the investigator, the first dog he saw reacted as any dog would as he was taken out into the light - he showed his trust by wagging his tail.

The wagging stopped when the butcher tied the dog up short with a metal wire so the dog could hardly move. The dog began to panic and tried to escape. But the butcher lifted the dog's left hind leg and stabbed him in the groin area. Blood began to pour. The dog howled in pain and struggled more. With every move, the wire cut into the dog's neck. After a couple of minutes the butcher began to skin the dog.

As horrifying as this scene was, it got worse. An investigator reported that he saw dogs being butchered who were still conscious as the skinning began, and investigators videotaped a German shepherd blinking his eye as he was being skinned."

"Cats fare no better than dogs in China. At a thriving fur market 300 miles to the north of the city of Jinan, in the province of Hebei, investigators located cat breeding farms and a factory that processes cats into furs. According to people at the fur market and factory, the cats are killed by hanging. Or they may be hung from a wire while water is poured down their throats through a hose until they drown. Then a slit is made in the cat's stomach, the skin is opened, and the fur is pulled over the cat's head. The furriers say that the cats may still be alive while they are being skinned. What's important to the skinners is that the cat's skin is preserved as much as possible in one piece to optimise its usefulness.

Factory workers sort cat furs by colour. Investigators were told that more than 100,000 cat furs were in storage at that one factory alone."

"One Chinese company told investigators that it had 50,000 cat skins and 50,000 dog skins in stock.

At one German auction alone, 10,000 Korean dog fur pelts were available.

One shipment from a Chinese company to the Czech Republic, reportedly for the Czech army, contained 5,329 kilograms (11,924 pounds) of "house cat skin jackets + plates," representing the slaughter of 40,000 to 50,000 cats."

"Investigators learned that many companies and individuals involved in the trade of cat and dog fur use ambiguous terms and mislabelling to disguise the true identity of their products.

Complicating the labeling issue even more, 1998 amendments to the U.S. Fur Products Labeling Act exempt from labeling requirements all fur products costing less than $150 - a price range into which most fur-trimmed garments and accessories fall."

Under a heading of 'The Price of Suffering' the report instances the values put on the lives of cats and dogs by the fur trade.

"At one Chinese factory, one cat skin cost $0.50; at another, $2.09; in Beijing, $2.15."

"At a German auction, one Korean dog fur ( [Code for] German shepherd) was $9."

"At one Chinese company dealing in "animal by-products," a fur "plate" of 6 to 8 gray or orange cat pelts may be purchased for $21. Two plates make a short jacket. Three plates make up a coat. That's 12 to 16 cats who suffer and die for each jacket. Cat head plates are also available at this factory - 36 cat heads per plate, at a price of $15."

Under a heading of 'Conclusions' the report says:

"We are a nation of pet owners. There are an estimated 53 million owned dogs and 59 million owned cats in the United States. Few if any pet owners would knowingly subject their own beloved pets to the horror and pain suffered by dogs and cats caught up in the fur trade. Yet can anyone be sure that the pair of fur-lined gloves or the fur-trimmed jacket in department store isn't made - literally - from the misery of companion animals just like ours? The truth is, we can't."

"The bottom line is that buying any fur product serves to support the fur industry as a whole and sends the message that fur is desirable instead of deadly.

Any demand for fur ensures that somewhere an animal is suffering and dying to fill that demand - maybe, in some cold dark corner of the Earth, an animal just like your own pet."

The animals regret that more humans don't heed and act on this obvious truth. We should not buy or use fur products of any type.

The animals regret that many of their number are imprisoned in zoos and intensive farms in conditions that cause unrelenting stress and suffering.

The animals don't roam free on farms anymore. Even those that are not being raised for slaughter, like laying hens, are imprisoned in sheds and condemned to cruel conditions and unrelenting stress. This is where most eggs come from and, given the high levels hormones released into the laying hen's bloodstreams by stress, the produce can't be good for us.

The images from the intensive farming of laying hens are not pretty.

Here are some excerpts about hens and the egg industry, from the Vegan Society's website (The link is: www.vegansociety.com).

"Today's laying hen or domestic fowl is descended from the Red Junglefowl (Gallus gallus) of Asia. This wild ancestor inhabits tropical and subtropical forest edges and during its distinct breeding season lays 5-6 eggs in a clutch before incubating for 18-20 days (del Hoyo et al. 1994). compare this with modern breeds of domestic hen, which lay over 300 eggs in a year. ...

Despite centuries of domestication, laying hens retain the natural behaviours shown by their wild ancestors. This 'ancestral memory' of the birds' natural way of life has been carried down the generations so that hens retain the need to carry out behaviours such as building a nest, perching, pecking and scratching at the ground, dust-bathing, etc (Dawkins, 1993). For the majority of the world's egg-laying hens, the farming system renders it impossible to perform most of these natural behaviours."

"The world laying hen population is currently estimated at 4,700 million.

Worldwide, some 70-80% of laying hens are housed in battery cages."

"Up to 90,000 caged hens can be crammed into one windowless shed. The cages in Europe are stacked between 4 and 9 cages high. Japan is said to have the world's highest battery cage unit, with cages stacked 18 tiers high."

"There is clear scientific evidence that hens suffer in battery cages. Common sense also tells us that to keep a healthy hen in a barren wire cage, with less space than an ordinary sheet of typing paper, is bound to cause suffering. These conditions prevent the hens performing their natural behaviours and cause their bodies to degenerate through lack of exercise."

"Battery hens suffer Caged Layer Osteoporosis (CLO), or brittle bones. Reasearch has shown that 35% of premature deaths in cages are due to CLO, a slow death from paralysis and starvation at the back of the cage."

"Confined to the cage, the hen is unable to forage by scratching and pecking at the ground. Under natural conditions a large proportion of a hen's day would be spent looking for food. Denied this simple activity, the hen's claws can grow long or twisted and be torn off. They can even grow around the wire mesh of the sloping cage floor. the slope itself [designed to cause eggs to run down into the collection tray] puts painful pressure on the hen's toes, causing damage to the bird's feet."

"The average hen lays about 300 eggs a year. Some reach 330 eggs a year. That's nearly one a day. This compares with the laying of 5-6 eggs per brood during the breeding season of the hen's wild ancestors. The modern drive toward ever-greater egg production puts strain on the bird's physiological system. Is it any wonder that hens all too often suffer osteoporosis and malignant tumours?"

"Most egg-laying hens in the UK are sent for slaughter after a year of egg production. This can be a traumatic experience for hens as they are caught and bundled into crates before being transported by lorry to the slaughterhouse. ...

On average 29% of battery hens arriving at the slaughterhouse are reported to have at least one freshly-broken bone. Removing the birds from the crates and hanging them upside down on the shackle to await slaughter increases the proportion of hens with broken bones to 45% (Gregory and Wilkins, 1989; Gregory, 1994). [Broken bones are extremely painful, particularly for already debilitated birds.]

'Spent' hens can be worth as little as two pence per bird. After slaughter their carcasses will be used in chicken soups, pastes, pet food, etc."

"For every hen hatched there is a cock chick that is killed almost immediately after struggling from the egg. modern selective breeding techniques have resulted in distinct strains of chicken for egg laying and meat production. This breed specialisation has gone so far that birds of the laying strain do not make good meat birds. As male birds of the laying strain do not lay eggs and will not produce meat efficiently, they are killed when a day old.

Official advice is to kill the chicks before they are 72 hours old using carbon dioxide(CO²) gas. Where small numbers of chicks are involved, neck dislocation is also advised. (MAFF, 1987). Another often-used method is a mechanical 'homogeniser', which minces the chicks alive. About 30 million chicks a year are killed in Britain alone."

Besides the cruelty, there are other adverse effects associated with egg production.

"Hens laying eggs don't produce food, they waste it! It takes 3 kilos of grain as chicken feed to produce one kilo of eggs. This is because the conversion of crops by farm animals into food is grossly inefficient. And is is not only food, such as grain, which could be fed directly to humans, that is wasted. Each battery egg takes about 180 litres of water to produce. Compare this with the human use of water in developing countries. In India, for example, the poorest people use an average of only 10 litres of water each per day (O'Brien, 1998)."

"Ammonia gas escaping into the atmosphere is a serious pollutant linked to acid rain. Studies of farm animal housing have shown that egg farms have one of the highest farm emission rates of ammonia gas. Laying-hen houses in the UK and other European countries have also been found to have levels of ammonia and inhalable dust close to or over the regulated limits for continuous exposure for animals or for 8-hour occupational exposure for stockpersons (Turner, 1999)>

The intensive farming of eggs depends on a plentiful supply of affordable feed, which is usually grown intensively using chemical fertilisers and pesticides. Intensive farming practices have been linked to severe declines in farmland wildlife such as birds."

Much the same cruelty and inefficiencies characterise the other forms of intensive farming of animals, such as cattle and pigs. The spokesanimal could surely list the many horrors inflicted on 'dumb animals' in those industries. The animals deeply regret the intensive farms that cause such terrible suffering for so little reason.

The animals regret that certain scientific theories and some interpretations of religious scriptures deny that animals are conscious sentient creatures with emotions and feelings that are essentially similar to those of humans.

We will further examine consciousness, or self-awareness as it is often termed, following the list of regrets that the animals have about our treatment of them. Here, it is important to note that the prevailing argument that animals are 'dumb' creatures, that are not self-aware in the same way that humans are, is at the very core of their mistreatment and exploitation.

The animal husbandry, medical research, pharmacology, entertainment, agricultural, logging, mining, restaurant and hospitality, and various other industries that exploit them or destroy their habitats do so on the basis that animals are, somehow, lesser creatures than we are. The dominant idea that is pushed by advocates of animal exploitation is that animals are resources to be exploited for the benefit of human beings. Animals behaviours are said to be driven by their genetics and instincts - they are thus denied the respect and rights due to conscious beings. Supposedly, this notion that animals lack self-awareness somehow justifies the truly vile treatment that is meted out to so many animal inhabitants of this planet.

However, a spokesanimal would be sure to take issue with industry claims that animals are there to be exploited because they're only 'dumb' creatures. Resolving the issue of self-awareness in the animal's favour is vital to halting their suffering and exploitation.

This is not difficult to do, for the animals are their own best ambassadors and they collectively provide a rich set of examples of their intellectual versatility and communicative ability. Amimals repeatedly demonstrate their capacity for unconditional love of their own kind and, when they are treated right, a similar love of their human companions. A few excerpts that illustrate these animal characteristics, that are so like our own, are set out below.

"Frequent trumpeting and shrill cries echoed until midnight Thursday as a herd of wild Asiatic elephants trooped together to mourn seven pachyderms mowed down by a speeding train in Assam.

"It was a sight to be seen [rather] than told. About a hundred elephants were circling the seven pachyderms that lay dead near the railway tracks, with tears rolling down the eyes of the herd." said Khagen Sangmai, a top official of the Digboi police station in eastern Assam."

Six elephants, two adults and four calves, were sliced into pieces almost instantly, while another calf succumbed to injuries later in the night.

Sangmai, accompanied by a police patrol, was among the first to arrive at the accident site Thursday night.

"No sooner the accident took place than a herd of about 100 elephants came from nowhere and were behaving like human beings mourning the deaths of dear ones." said Rantu Das, another official.

"The way they were crying over the deaths, it brought tears to the eyes of the policemen and villagers."

Police and forest guards took at least six hours to chase the mourning herd of elephants [away] before clearing the tracks and lifting the derailed engines with cranes."<

... Indo-Asian News Service, 16 November, 2001.

"A 34-year-old BC woman who spent more than eight hours in the cold waters of the Strait of Georgia Wednesday has been released from hospital.

She fell overboard while her two sailing companions were asleep, [and] drifted in 18-degree water for more than eight hours without a life jacket.

She was found 24 kilometers away by another sailboat not involved in a search that was underway.

The woman, who was wearing pants and a fleece sweater, fell overboard at about 4:30 a.m. and was rescued around 12:30 p.m. She told doctors she was comforted by a seal that stayed close to her while she was treading water in the Strait of Georgia."

... CBC News, 31 July, 2005.

"Around the world, many people rescue small creatures like hedgehogs and injured birds. But never before has this goodwill extended to one of the most dangerous animals on earth.

When a baby hippopotamus was washed up on the bank of a river on their farm, Elsa and Tony Joubert decided they couldn't leave her to her fate.

The 16kg youngster, who had been orphaned after floods had separated her from her mother, was at dire risk of being eaten by crocodiles or starving to death.

So Mrs Joubert, a primary school teacher, carried the helpless creature up to the couple's South African farm house and bottle fed her. ...

Hippos are one of Africa's most formidable creatures: they kill more people than lions, rhinos and crocodiles.

Yet despite the beast's ferocious reputation, the Jouberts have thrown caution to the wind and spent the past three years raising Jessica, the world's only tame hippo."

Jessica, who now weighs 600kg, spends her days grazing the front lawn of the Joubert's 400ha farm.

She is free to swim off and join the wild hippos who regularly pay her visits, but she remains faithful to the Joubert's. She sleeps on the couple's verandah on a mattress at night, and wakes up at 6am for her dog biscuits bowl of wheat bran and coffee.

She never leaves the Joubert's side - even turning a key in a locked door to get into the house, where she watches television with them at night.

And when Jessica fancies a swim in the river, Mrs Joubert accompanies her down to the bank and swims on Jessica's back, arms around her neck.

Mrs Joubarb, 49, says:"Jessica is an amazing creature. She never leaves our side and is so tame."

She's not dangerous at all. When I swim with her in the river, she's so gentle she lets me ride on her back and we swim together.

Jessica's best friends are the Joubert's three dogs, who fight for a share of the biscuits.

Mr Joubert, 54, says: "She plays in the garden with them, and they keep the birds from bothering her: every time one flies near her, the dogs snap it away with their jaws."

He says: "No one has ever tamed a hippo before."

"She is amazingly gentle. Our friend's eight-year-old daughter slipped in the water recently and Jessica swam over to her and nudged her back on to the bank."

"We never realised just how intelligent hippos are." .."

... from an article by Lucy Laing, in The Sunday Telegraph (Sydney, Australia) 10 April, 2005.

There are many more examples that capture the realities of animal's sentience and, beyond that, their capacities for intuitive and even reflective thought processes. One problem is that most of the vast collection of instances and experiences that speak for animal self-awareness exist outside institutionalised science. Even is something is true or real it is not accepted scientifically until it can be measured as a phenomenon and replicated experimentally. There's nothing terribly wrong with that principle, however the second problem with the recognition of self-awareness in animals is that grant-funded science does not support research into the subject. It's as if mainstream science has made up its mind about animal's lack of measurable consciousness and psychic powers. It is simply going to insist that animals are driven by instincts and evolutionary genetics, and leave it at that.

Needless to say, the animals regret such stick-in-the-mud attitudes.

There are, of course, some scientists who do experiment and write in the field of animal consciousness and, no doubt, the animals applaud their work.

Dr Lyall Watson is a bona fide scientist, with a doctorate, and degrees in geology, botany, zoology and anthropology. He is also a prolific author, and TV producer and presenter for the BBC. He grew up in Africa, had a pet warthog, and learned to read from a bird book. While he has written extensively on the subject of animals and their powers, Lyall Watson puts their case simply.

Commenting about his latest book The Whole Hog he says: "It is indeed difficult to demonstrate true awareness or consciousness in other species [than pigs], but it is becoming more difficult to deny the possibility of animals having minds and using mental experience in the practice of their behaviour." ... damn right it is!

Dr Rupert Sheldrake is also a qualified scientist and author of some 24 books, many of which deal with animal consciousness and psychic powers. Here is a question and answer excerpt from an interview he gave to Caludette Vaughan.

Q. "Non-human animals are often victims of amoral human indignities. We cannot talk to them as we can with human beings, yet we do communicate frequently with them on mental and emotional levels. Are animals equal with humans in relation to telepathic capabilities? I.e. some have the gift, in others it remains dormant."

A. "I think many animals are more sensitive telepathically than human beings, especially modern western human beings. But of course in the animal world there are probably great differences not only between species but also between individuals. Animals only seem to be telepathic with people when they form bonds with them, as many dogs do with their owners. Such bonds also occur with cats, parrots, horses and other domestic animals. But even among dogs there's a wide range in sensitivity. In our surveys, we've found that about 50% of dog owners say their animals are telepathic with them. And some people who've kept a series of dogs are convinced that some are much more sensitive than others."

The animals regret that many of them are exhibited and exploited in circuses and other places of human amusement, and that some are pitted against each other in 'sporting' fights to the death for the entertainment of compassionless humans.

Note that it is exploitation and cruelty that the animals regret. It is not all animal acts and exhibitions that are hurtful. Indeed, animals often enjoy performing with their human guardians in various acts, many horses enjoy racing, dogs enjoy work in the show ring, and so on.

It is the enslavement of their kind for the purpose of entertaining humans that the animals regret. It is wrong for humans to enslave other humans and it is just as wrong for humans to enslave animals.

Nevertheless, many people argue that humans have the right to do what they wish with animals while the animals themselves have no rights whatsoever. An example of this sort of logic, from The Objectivist Centre website, is as follows.

"Another factor in desperate need of resolution in today's culture is the issue of "animal rights" itself. Animals do not have rights. The entire concept of rights is an invention of man's rational faculty, a moral concept that denotes the requisite conditions under which human beings must be allowed to live, if they wish to do so, according to their nature. In order for this to take place it is often necessary that men and women use animals, like other resources around them, to accomplish their ends. This can be for food, clothing, and yes, even entertainment."

Unfortunately, this reasoning is typical of the Taker mindset that has come to dominate western, materialist society. It seems logical but it proceeds from the false assumption that humans have the right to do whatever they like with the 'resources' of this planet. Such thinking leads to blood sports like cockfighting - for nothing more than the satisfaction of the spectators who gather to applaud and gamble on the cruel contests between cock birds reared specifically for the purpose of dying in the fighting pit.

An excerpt from the U.S. website of In Defence of Animals describes what happens in cockfighting.

"Cockfighting is an organised fight between two roosters who are placed in a pit to fight each other. The roosters have been trained to severely injure and/or kill one another. These birds, which are raised for the purpose of fighting, are tormented to make them aggressive. They are also given various legal and illegal drugs such as strychnine, caffine, amphetamines, and epinephrine to make them more aggressive, increase their endurance and clot the blood that will flow during the fight.

The natural spurs of the roosters are sawed off and replaced by razor sharp steel blades or curved instruments called gaffs which measure from one to three inches long. During the fight, from which neither rooster can escape, the birds peck and maim one another with their beaks and weapons. The long, sharp gaffs stab deep into the flesh often requiring handlers to physically pull the animals apart."

"Although they have been bred to fight, the animals often become tired, incapable and suffer severe injuries. The fight only ends when one rooster is dead or is too weak to fight. The loser then gets thrown in the trash, sometimes while still alive. For the winner, there is no guarantee that he will survive his injuries and [he] often ends up with the same fate as the losing bird.

Cockfights are held before an arena of cheering spectators who often wager large sums of money on the outcome of the contest. Children are often present at the fights, leading to concern that they are being desensitised to the suffering of others and they are being encouraged to use violence.

Although these birds in a flock will often fight to establish a "pecking order", these battles rarely result in injury. Wild roosters conduct ritual showdowns that, as with wolves and many other animals, substitute for and deflect from actual physical combat. Only birds that have been bred and provoked to fight will inflict the serious injuries seen in cockfighting. ..."

Although cockfighting is illegal in the U.S. it still goes on there, and in many other countries as well. This sorry 'sport' reflects the Taker ethos expressed on the Objectivist Centre website - that animals don't have any rights and humans are therefore entitled to use them for entertainment, as they see fit. A spokesanimal would be sure to deplore such thinking.

The animals regret that humans often interfere in their natural breeding to produce offspring that have characteristics that might please humans but are frequently unfortunate for the animals concerned.

The following excerpts from the website of messybeast.com deal mainly with the breeding of cats with abnormal 'traits' or deformities, but similar effects of selective breeding are seen in many other species.

"Throughout the ages, humans have been fascinated by anything that is visibly different. This is well illustrated by the vast array of modern breeds of dogs, rabbits, guinea pigs etc many of which were bred for looks rather than function. ...

If domestic cats were bred for their functionality, only those which were proven hunters of vermin would be selected for controlled breeding. However, domestic cats are selectively bred as pets. Breeders seek to improve them according to aesthetic criteria while not adversely affecting health or temperament. However, human curiosity has often led breeders to look for novelties or curiosities which might not be viable in a natural environment. These are viable in a commercial environment.

This is not to say that cat breeders are purely financially motivated. Most seek to improve upon the traits of existing breeds, for example to develop a better coat in Persian cats, to expand the colour range of another breed, to eliminate the incidence of heredity illness in a breed etc. Some seek to perfect a body type - if the short nose of a persian is desirable, then extreme flat faces are even more desirable as the ultimate expression of short-nosedness."

"According to naturalist/biologist Roger Tabor in his text "The Rise of The Cat" (1991)
"When selection was made for showing purposes, genetic disasters occurred. In cat breeds, physical mutations that were previously allowed to perish are now being developed merely for the sake of difference. Not all are harmful, but some are achieved at considerable cost to the cat." ..."

"Twisty Cats, for those who have not seen the web-wide publicity and protest, have a condition called radial hypoplasia or a more extreme form, radial aplasia. The long bone of the leg is vestigial or absent and the wrists and paws appear to be attached close to the shoulder. In extreme cases, the cat has a flipper-like paw attached to the shoulder. The paws themselves may be deformed, absent or vestigial. The deformity causes locomotory problems for the cats which must either hop on their back legs like kangaroos or use their almost useless front flippers to hobble along. The foot and/or claws may also be deformed, causing further discomfort. The deformity has been likened to that caused by thalidomide in humans. So far nothing is known about whether the cats have internal abnormalities as well. ..."

The animals also deeply regret that race horses are bred with long, light legs that provide speed but are easily broken on hard tracks; that pigs are bred to have large litters and mature quickly, that guard dogs are bred for aggression, and that turkeys are bred with such heavily fleshed breasts that they are unable to mate naturally and must be propagated by means of artificial insemination, - and so on, and so on, and so on. The list of selective breeding regrets is long.

The animals regret that they are routinely desexed and ,more latterly, cloned at the whim of humans without any consideration of their intrinsic rights or their welfare.

Unfortunately, the Animal Rights movement, world wide, often advocates and supports the desexing of animals. The following excerpt from the website of the Animal Rights and Rescue Group (ARRG), in Australia, illustrates this attitude.

"The group also gives support and advice to the public regarding all companion animal issues. Where breaches of the Cruelty to Animals Act occur ARRG refers [these] to the local RSPCA Inspector or the police and supports and assists where possible to ensure that appropriate action is taken.

Animals are cared for in the homes of foster carers, as we have no shelter, and fed through the generosity of public food donations, as well as our supporters, Uncle Bens and Meat E Vite.

We are very lucky to have a handful of wonderful veterinary surgeons, who assist the group by providing low cost desexing, an issue we see as paramount to helping reduce the numbers of unwanted pets."

Another group, within Animals Australia, lists its goals and successes as follows:

"Main Functions: Desexing, lobbying on animal issues.

Goals of Organisation: To decrease the number of unwanted animals in our community, and to raise the level of responsibility to all animals. ...

Successes/Achievements: At least 1,500 animals desexed per year. "

In both instances, the goal of reducing the number of unwanted pets is valid but the means - desexing all abandoned or 'surplus' pets - is patently immoral.

Why is desexing unwanted animals immoral? Well, consider a human example.
Suppose that during the past few years the Australian Department of Immigration and Multicultural Affairs (DIMA) had not only imprisoned unwanted refugees and asylum seekers (i.e. boat people) in its various detention centres (thus incurring the ire of the United Nations Human Rights Commission for serious human rights violations), but had also annually reported to parliament its success in desexing 1,500 of them!

There would clearly have been a global outcry that even the thick-skinned Ozfeds could not have ignored or survived. It should be the same with animals. If desexing is not an acceptable moral solution to the desire of DIMA to decrease the number of unwanted people in Australia, then it is not an acceptable solution to the desire of animal rights groups and governments to decrease the number of unwanted pets in our society.

A far better way of reducing the number of unwanted pets in Australia and elsewhere is to increase the number of people who want them.

Australia already has high levels of pets in its 7.5 million households, and some 64% have companion animals of one sort or another. But there is still plenty of scope to absorb more companion animals. There were 4 million dogs and 2.5 million cats in 2002, together with around 9 million birds, 12 million fish, and 2 million other species. However, according to the PetNet web site, of those Australian households that do not have any pets, 53% say they would like to do so in the future. At the same time around half a million unwanted dogs and cats are being killed in Australian animal 'shelters' and pounds each year. Perhaps as many again die unknown deaths on the street and roads or go feral.

Commercial pet breeders are supplying the pet shop trade with additional animals while there are many other animals being 'put down' because they are not wanted. Yet, not only is there considerable additional want for companion animals there is also a very real need. This is because of the great benefits that human households can derive from animal companionship. The health benefits attributed to Australia's pets (that must also apply elsewhere in the world) are known to be these:

• "People who own pets typically visit the doctor less often and use less medication."

• "Pet owners, on average, have lower cholesterol levels and lower blood pressure."

• "Pet owners recover more quickly from illness and surgery."

• "Pet owners deal better with stressful situations."

• "Pet owners are less likely to report feeling lonely."

  Also,

• "91% of pet owners report feeling 'very close' to their pet, reinforcing that pets are an integral member of the family unit, however constituted."

There is undoubtedly the capacity to absorb animals that are now unwanted and also gain considerable health, economic and social benefits at the same time. The notion that animals that have not been desexed will necessarily breed uncontrollably in human households is false. It has always been practical to control such activities when the females come into heat, and it remains so. If, on the other hand, a litter is desired the surplus progeny could be readily homed through pet needs centres, where animals are not sold, but instead, the cost of their brief accommodation is covered by sponsorship arrangements with major commercial manufacturers of pet foods. The intensive puppy farms are then cut out of the loop and everybody else should be happy, including the animals. This is the type of outcome that animal rights groups should be aiming for, not the mass desexing of unwanted pets with no social, emotional, health or economic advantages to our society.

Pet levels in households can be increased substantially with consequent gains in human well being. Having more than a single dog, a single cat and a bird of two does not cost too much more for households in developed economies, but the advantages are considerable. I personally know of a vet nurse who lives with nine animals. She is one of the happiest, most together people one could ever meet. She does not do drugs, she does not get ill, she is always smiling, I have never seen her depressed. While this person has foregone some material possessions to afford the care of her animals she is emotionally richer for having done so. The signs that her levels of consciousness and spirituality are higher than they could otherwise be are there to see, and this is all due to her many animal companions.

When it comes to the issue of cloning pets most animal rights campaigners and ethicists are in broad agreement about the undesirability of commercial laboratories offering to produce exact replicas of deeply loved cats (and other animals in due course). Speaking about the U.S. context and the cloning of a cat by a California company the director of research and investigations at People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, Mary Beth Sweetland, said:

"It defies logic to think that somebody can feel right about paying $50,000 for a cat when 17 million dogs and cats are killed in shelters and pounds every year.  That money could be put towards the support of innumerable homeless animals if these people truly care about animals."

The question of course is whether the bereaved humans were in love with the physical body and features of their cat or with its inner personality and soul. My guess is that when 91 per cent of Australian pet owners report that they feel "very close" to their pet it is not the colour and markings of the animal's fur that they are relating to but the being inside it all. Labs that offer clones cannot presently deliver the latter, only an animal with flesh, bone and fur that closely resembles the departed pet. Science does not yet know what life is, let alone how to retrieve a soul from the afterlife and install it in a new body - if that could ever be possible. So Ms Sweetland is right, cloning animals for sentimental reasons is a complete waste of money and laboratory facilities.

When the issue is the cloning of commercial livestock the answer is the same, but for different reasons. Rather than being a waste of money because it is impossible to recreate the sentimental attachment that existed with the departed pet, the commercial cloning of animals for slaughter and human consumption is wrong for the same reasons that the husbandry and slaughter of naturally raised animals is wrong. Not only do we do not have the right to treat animals that way, we are simply not designed to consume meat, we are classic herbivores. Our teeth are shaped for chewing grains not rending flesh, and our alimentary tract is designed to slowly break down vegetable matter rather than quickly pass flesh and bones through the sort of short, straight gut that is characteristic of carnivores. Cats are carnivores, dogs are omnivorous, and we humans are designed to be herbivores.

After the great cataclysm twelve thousand years ago it was necessary for humans to eat flesh in order to survive as a species. We soon gave up cannibalism and no longer killed and ate our own kind but we continued to kill and eat animals. With the advent of farming and animal husbandry we bred and raised animals specifically for our tables - but we were never meant to do so. Fragmentary as it is, the knowledge passed down to us about the Golden Age before the Great Flood is clear that humans once lived in harmony with all animals and did not hunt or kill them for food.

The core argument against cloning livestock is that it perpetuates and reinforces practices and industries that we should really have abandoned at the time that we stopped killing and eating each other - thousands of years ago when we once again became 'civilized', after The Fall.

There are other arguments for and against cloning in humans but, here, we have only been considering the regrets of the non-human animals about the use of this new technology on them. There are definite grounds for their concerns as neither the cloning of pets nor the cloning of livestock can be defended on a logical or ethical basis. We should stop both practices, but significant profits are at stake and vested interests are involved. So we should expect a struggle before the animals are safe.

The animals regret that some humans continue to sacrifice them for religious reasons; to appease or honour God.  As God's creatures the animals declare that God doesn't ever require them to be sacrificed and is never pleased or appeased by ritual slaughter.

In this article there is not the scope to identify and analyse all the arguments that have been used since The Fall to justify religious sacrifices, both animal and human. Those readers who wish to review the basics of sacrifice should look up the subject on the Wikipedia web site (the link is http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animal_sacrifice).

Here, I want to examine important differences between pure spirituality and present day religions, for it was pure spirituality that governed the actions of humankind during the Golden Age. Legends, myths, and other sources tell us that there were no sacrifices in those times before the great cataclysm - indeed no killing of any kind.

In his recent book Watermark the scholar Joseph Christy-Vitale describes his understanding of the trauma that befell the Earth 12,000 years ago and why it was that men had need to kill in order to survive, and to sacrifice both humans and animals to gods that they had then learned to fear.

• "Our ancient ancestors, more than 12,000 years ago, lived in a world where night and day were of equal length, the climate was uniformly temperate , and plant and animal life was abundant.  According to the myths, they lived in a world society founded on reverence for all life, a Golden Age."

• "... many skills are attributed to our ancestors who lived during this age. They spoke a single world language, had the ability to communicate with animals, and were, for the most part, vegetarians living in harmony with all things. In addition, they were luminous, long-lived, and wise."

  Note that the above passages are based on extensive analysis of myths and legends from all over the world. The conditions described were not dreamt up by Joseph Christy-Vitale, but painstakingly drawn together from numerous sources. They are substantiated by the geological record around the world and recent discoveries in the sciences, including those of human language, and of present-day human communication with dolphins, apes, chimpanzees, and parrots.

• "Two basic flood myths exist. The first and most destructive is the mountain-topping flood. Many of these begin with a war in heaven, followed by a worldwide conflagration, fire and ice raining down from the sky, appalling storms that made hurricanes look like gentle spring showers, cataclysmic uphevals of land and sea, and a flood, in many instances boiling hot, roaring over Earth. They conclude with a time of such severe cold that rivers and lakes freeze and do not thaw in summer.

  The second type of flood myth is one that swells up from the sea. A number of these floods follow a period of intense cold, and all describe how portions of the world sink below the rising waters. Humans and animals are sent fleeing in all directions. These floods are generally found alone in myths, unaccompanied by other disasters. ..."

• At first there was a great sense of loss and foreboding. "... The survivors found deep wounds inflicted on their Earth. They knew they would never again see forests at dawn flowing to the horizon like a wave on the water, rolling plains of grass and golden grain, blooming gardens wet with gentle rain, the laughter and the smiles of family and friends, or a life without fear. Never again would they see immense herds of wooly rhino, mastodon, and camel, the sky filled with birds, or hear the joyful first trumpeting of young mammoths in the spring. It was all gone forever."

• "For survivors ... , severe emotional shock produced deep psychic numbing, depression and anxiety, and denial that in some cases disappeared into amnesia. Episodes of rage and abuse likely erupted, as well as flashback experiences, insomnia, suicide, and survivor's guilt. Children were particularly vulnerable, revealing signs of damage ranging from apathy to aggression. The newborn entering the scarred world ... received childrearing grounded in fear and uncertainty, rather than the reverence and security once found in the world before the catastrophe. "

• "Is it possible for something that occurred so long ago to still affect us today? Yes.  ..., societies and civilizations have continuously retraumatised themselves through child-rearing methods, education, social custom, racism, religion, war, predatory economic policies leading to inequity and poverty, and a separation from nature resulting in the destruction of Earth's environment.

  It is also known that damaging and unbalanced behaviours can become addictive to individuals and cultures, causing secondary addictions through futile attempts to satisfy needs that current belief systems cannot explain or address. Addictions to power, greed, consumerism, sex, drugs, violence, and abusive behaviour are common today in individuals and whole cultures. ... When trauma is passed down from generation to generation you have a recipe for a cultural disease that can become deeply institutionalised within a civilization."

  [ Humanity reached its present crisis by just such a path. Our 'fall' from the high levels of consciousness and spirituality of the Golden Age left us prey to the lethal memes of takerism.]

• "The inability of the original survivors to understand and accept what happened to them and to pass this healing down through the generations left their descendants unprepared and ill-equipped to deal with what lay ahead. Without a guiding force humanity was cast adrift. The most catastrophic fork in the road was the loss of the spiritual connection. The Pygmies of Central Africa believe that this separation from God was the worst disaster to befall our species. In worldwide myth it is called The Fall.

  The Fall is the separation of all those after the disaster from those before it. It is the disorientation of being cast out of paradise, losing communion with the spirit, and the pain of not understanding why. To the survivor's descendants, the science behind the "why" was obscured or lost, the peace and plenty before ... were just stories. Whatever explanations were given they were not enough. Like a small child believing it is he or she who is the cause of the parent's divorce, mankind assumed the role of the guilty party. What exactly we did to deserve such punishment varies with the priorities and imagination of the storyteller, religion, or culture. But generally we became wicked and sinful. We fell."

These rather extensive excerpts from Watermark capture the loss of pure spirituality that occurred after the great cataclysm, and provide a basis for the guilt and fear that led to ritual sacrifices to appease the various deities that humans worshiped in those early times.

Another valuable perspective on the differences between pure spirituality and the evolution of religious practices is found in Power Versus Force by Dr David R. Hawkins. This book, which has been published in 17 languages, describes the results of David Hawkins' research into the determination and quantification of consciousness levels using kinesiology (the study of muscles and their movement) in testing the reaction of subjects to questions framed to elicit true responses that were independent of the views of the individuals involved. In effect, Hawkins has tapped into and mapped the collective consciousness - a feat of great significance and one that I will return to in discussing theories of animal consciousness.

For the moment, here is what he writes about spirituality and religious practices.

• "It is a common error to identify spirituality with religion. We have noted that the United States Constitution, the Bill of Rights and the Declaration of Independence clearly differentiate between the spiritual and the religious. Government is forbidden to establish any religion, lest it impair the freedom of the people; yet these same documents presume that government's authority derives from spiritual principles.

  In fact, the founders of the world's great religions would be shocked at the profoundly unspiritual deeds wrought in their names throughout history, much that would make a heathen shudder. Force always distorts truth for its own self-serving purposes. Over time, the spiritual principles upon which religions are based become distorted for expedient ends such as power, money, and other worldliness. Whereas the spiritual is tolerant, religiosity is commonly intolerant. The former leads to peace, the latter to strife, bloodshed and pious criminality. There remains, however, buried within every religion, the spiritual foundation from which it originated. Like religions, entire cultures are weakened when the principles upon which they are based are obscured or contaminated by false interpretation.

It is interpretation that seems to be the problem for the animals. Today, there are many people who interpret religious texts (including the Quran and the Bible) to justify their ritual sacrifice. If one takes the Bible, for example, it is completely true that there are many passages that deal with God's approval of animal sacrifices. For instance:

Genesis 4:2: ... And Abel was a keeper of sheep but Cain was a tiller of the ground.
3:And in the process of time it came to pass, that Cain brought of the fruit of the ground an offering unto the LORD.
4:And Abel, he also brought of the firstlings of his flock and of the fat thereof. And the LORD had respect for Abel and to his offering:

Theologians and scholars, however, distinguish between different levels of laws. From this layered perspective it is clear that the primary laws, as embodied in the Ten Commandments, constitute a pure form of God's guidance, whereas the secondary laws are adaptations to suit the wavering capacity of His followers of those days to obey the more stringent set of commandments. The Secondary laws, which include provisions for animal sacrifices, were intended to teach lessons to those who had sinned and establish mechanisms for atonement. Some excerpts form a UK web site that discusses animal sacrifices make this point.

"A covenant is a formal agreement between two parties. In the old covenant Yahweh made a formal agreement with the nation of Israel that He would be their God and they would be His people. As a man would take a wife, Yahweh took Israel to be His very own. In the old covenant Yahweh's primary laws, The Ten Commandments, were written on tablets of stone and the people of Israel agreed to obey them. Unfortunately Israel broke her part of the agreement. Israel committed spiritual adultery with pagan gods and grievously sinned. Having sinned, Yahweh's secondary laws, involving animal sacrifices, cleansing, pardon and reconciliation came into effect. If forgiveness was not sought via this prescribed route then other secondary laws (penal laws) would be applied.

1. Primary laws
These include Yahweh's moral commandments which will abide for all time. (For example Deut.6:5,Exodus 20:1-17)

2. Secondary laws
:These laws only come into effect when Yahweh's moral commandments are violated. They include for example:

• The sacrificial system - if pardon was requested

• The penal system - if pardon was not requested."

Seen in this light animal sacrifices were simply an object lesson to followers who could not keep to the strict letter of The Ten Commandments. But the latter were always the true underlying laws of conduct in man's relationship with God.

Of course the practice of animal sacrifices did not originate with Yahweh, it is pre-biblical and goes back to the great cataclysm and the need to placate the cruel gods that were thought to have wrought such terrible destruction on the world. The point to note is that interpretations of the Bible that seek to justify animal sacrifices to this day are drawn from lower level laws that are always overridden by The Ten Commandments.

The Buddha was against animal sacrifice but at the time he lived the practice was common in the Vedic temples. The following excerpts from the Buddhist Channel website express the philosophy of the Buddha to the animal sacrifices occurring in the society of his day.

"Many times in his discourses the Buddha speaks of four kinds of persons - those who

(1) torture themselves,
(2) torture others,
(3) torture both self and others and
(4) who do not torture themselves or others.

The first are the strict ascetics and the second the butchers, trappers, fishers and robbers. It is however the third group that is of special interest in our context. It includes kings and powerful priests who, on such occasions as the opening of a public building, hold a great ritual, ""with the sacrifice of many cattle, goats and rams, with wood cutting and grass-strewing and with much bullying and hustling of servants and slaves, working in fear of chastisement."

The Buddha does not approve of the conduct of these three classes. It is the last kind, who do not torture themselves or others, that he admires and they are none other than those who follow a compassionate ethic such as the one the Buddha himself advocated."

"A particularly touching discourse of the Buddha on animal sacrifice comes in one of the most ancient Buddhist texts, the Sutta Nipata. Here in a discourse on the ethical conduct fit for a Brahmin (Brahmana-dhammika Sutta), the Buddha speaks respectfully of ancient Brahmins who spurned the taking of life and never allowed their religious rites to be tainted by the killing of animals. But corruption set in and they started the practice of animal sacrifice. When the knife was laid on the neck of cattle, the gods themselves cried out in horror of that crime of ingratitude and insensitivity perpetrated on an animal that was to humans such a faithful worker, such a sustainer of life."

"... It is this very sympathy with the suffering of animals and other sentient beings that is the core of Buddhist compassion or loving kindness (metta). Says a verse in the Dhammapada, the most popular of Buddhist texts:

"All fear the rod
Of death are all scared.
(Understanding others) from one's own example,
One should neither kill nor cause to kill."

In the very next verse much the same is said with this addition:

"For all is life dear ".

Here in simple terms is the 'philosophy' behind the Buddhist ethic of Ahimsa: other living beings are like us; we should treat them the way we want to be treated ourselves. ..."

The animals regret that many governments allow cruel practices to continue despite the fact that they are well known and well publicised.

Three examples are enough to indicate the paucity of compassion and moral values found in the now time-worn institution of government. There are many social and economic reasons why a new level of civilization that rises from the wreckage of industrial capitalism will throw off all allegiances to national and federal governments, and go on its way free or such encumbrances. But above all else will be the revulsion of ordinary people at the insular and callous disregard that modern governments have increasingly shown for the rights of both humans and animals under their care.

The examples that follow are typical of the way in which governments ignore their responsibility to ensure that standards of civilized behaviour and kindness are maintained in the societies they rule over. The Spanish government has failed to abolish the cruel entertainment of bullfighting, as have the governments of Portugal, Mexico, Peru, Colombia, Venezuela and Equador. The Chinese government has looked the other way and allowed unspeakable treatment of Moon Bears that are milked for their bile. And the French government has failed to put a stop to the use of live dogs and kittens as shark bait on Reunion island, their dependency in the Indian Ocean. Bullfighting also takes place in parts of France.

Bullfighting:
That this should remain a national spectator sport in so many countries speaks volumes about the politicians and government officials of these nations. It says that these people lack the moral fibre to change something that truly needs changing. If there is too much opposition and too many economic consequences to ban bullfighting outright (Spain has 400 arenas), then they should initially make in bloodless, as it is in California.

One of the most poignant descriptions of the cruel and cowardly entertainment of bullfighting is contained in an account by Steve Hindi, the president of Showing Animals Respect and Kindness (SHARK). On the www.sharkonline.com web site he documents the case of a young black bull he calls Bright Eyes.

Here are some excerpts and images. If they move you please visit the SHARK site and give Steve some support.

"People call them fighting bulls, but I saw no fight in this beautiful young black bull as he stood with three companions in a pen in Mexico City, Mexico. The expression on his face reminded me of one of my kitties, "Prince Paka", when I pet him on his nose; something he enjoys immensely. Like Paka, this young bull was quiet and relaxed, friendly and nonthreatening.

He stood out from his companions with down turned horns that gave him the disarming appearance of a puppy dog with big floppy ears. But what really made this youngster stand out was his unique eyes, shiny and inquisitive. He watched me and came a little closer as I stood right by the wall that divided us.

You are "Bright Eyes", I told him. He seemed to like the name. People yelled at me in Spanish to get away from him because he was dangerous. "Peligroso", they said. I wondered what the Spanish word for "ridiculous" was."

"A short time later, a group of men chased Bright Eyes and his companions into individual isolation stalls. I was amazed that these "fighting bulls" never tried to attack the men who were harassing them. The bulls ran from the men, doing everything possible to avoid them.

For many hours, Bright Eyes and the other bulls were deprived of light, food, water and the company of his herd, causing him to become confused, terrified and physically and mentally weakened. As each bull's time came to go to the bullring, he was first harpooned to further wound and cripple him even before entering the bullring."

"Now in the bullring and being stabbed by spears and harpoons, a terrified Bright Eyes gasps for breath and cries out in pain and fear during his torture."

"Bullfights do not pit one brave man against one ferocious bull. Instead, a gang of thugs mobs an animal who is wounded, crippled and debilitated before he ever enters the bullring. In this picture [not shown] alone there are five thugs demonstrating their "bravery" against one crippled and dying Bright Eyes.

Mobbed by a gang of cowards, confused and terrified beyond words, repeatedly stabbed with spears, harpoons and a sword, exhausted and dying from his wounds and blood loss and unable to continue any further, Bright Eyes lowers in an act of complete submission."

"A pitiless thug walks up to the completely helpless Bright Eyes with a dagger. The thug went on to stab Bright Eyes in the back of his neck, slashing back and forth to sever the young bull's spinal cord.

The now paralysed but still alive and conscious Bright Eyes can only gasp, blink and move his mouth as his torture continues. In an act of contempt, the killers always wipe the knife off on their victim.

A thug cuts the ears off the still conscious Bright Eyes as trophies."

"Bright Eyes is left to convulse. [then] The still living Bright Eyes is dragged out [ of the arena] to be butchered alive."

As noted above, many governments allow this cruelty to go on. The animals regret such inaction on the part of the so-called 'leaders' of those human societies. The animals know that not only is bullfighting harmful to the bulls it is also harmful to the people who participate and who watch the 'spectacle'. The effect of witnessing such barbarism from a young age can only be detrimental to their minds and souls.

Bile Farms:
Jill Robinson is a remarkable person. This softly spoken Englishwoman has demonstrated an iron will to overcome all obstacles in saving animals and to changing community attitudes about their rights and importance. In 1993 she was confronted with a truly daunting task when she entered a bile farm in China to see what conditions were like for the black bears imprisoned there.

This image shows what she found, and the following quotes describe her personal encounter with one of the Moon Bears.

"i had an instinct I was going to find something unpleasant when I visited a bear bile (used in Chinese medicine) farm in China in 1993. In the basement, I discovered a number of moon bears (Asiatic black bears) in tiny cages. They had appalling wounds and rusting metal catheters implanted in their abdomens through which the bile was being extracted.

I felt something touch my shoulder. It was a female bear with her paw stretched through the bars of her cage. I then did something that was, in retrospect, really stupid - she could have ripped off my arm. I took her paw. She didn't hurt me, she just squeezed my fingers. I saw the terror and pain in her eyes and realised she was trying to give me a message. She wanted me to help her."

Jill subsequently discovered that the bile being drawn from the bears for Chinese medicine is completely replaceable by cheaper herbs and synthetics. There is absolutely no need or justification for bile farms.

The following excerpts are from the web site of the animal welfare organisation that Jill Robinson had earlier founded to help dogs and cats in Asia, particularly in Hong Kong where she lived. They summarise what happened as a result of Jill's visit to the bile farm.

"Jill began tireless work in China, resolutely building relationships and negotiating with government departments to bring an end to this cruel practice.

The hard work paid off! In July 2000, Animals Asia signed a landmark agreement with the Chinese authorities to rescue 500 suffering Moon Bears in Sichuan Province, to work towards the future elimination of bear farming in China and to promote the herbal alternatives to bear bile. This historic agreement was the first accord between the Chinese Government and any outside animal welfare organisation."

"Since October 2000, over 40 bear farms have been closed by the Government and over 184 bears [now 194] released into the care of Animals Asia at our Moon Bear Rescue Centre in Sichuan. The bears arrive in the most shocking condition - bone thin, desperately ill and terrified, but with tender loving care and intensive veterinary attention the vast majority of them recover!

The rehabilitation of the bears takes many months. Sadly, they cannot be released into the wild, many are defenceless and disabled, bred in captivity or snared in the wild as cubs and do not have the necessary survival skills. Thus Animals Asia is constructing a permanent sanctuary, in the midst of a beautiful bamboo forest where these bears can live their lives free of pain and fear. The sanctuary and its accompanying Education Village are keystones to our work of change through education. Already our China Bear Rescue is advancing the concept of animal welfare within China on a grand scale."

Jill Robinson says:

"Being a softly spoken woman has its advantages. The Chinese government was obviously very upset when its embassies were flooded with protests after I sent pictures of the bears around the world. But they weren't threatened by me and I was able to work towards building a relationship and ending bear-bile farming. ...

We're totally funded by donations but [the charity] seems to be capturing people's hearts. Maybe it's something to do with people loving their teddy bears when they were children."

Although this is a positive instance of a determined individual mobilising support and doing good things for suffering animals, there are still many bears in bile farms. And there are many other cruel practices in China that can't be justified on any grounds whatsoever. What Jill Robinson is doing is a great inspiration to all of us, but it does not absolve the government of China from its record of inaction on animal welfare. The animals regret the inaction that the Chinese government has shown over the years, and the fact that animal welfare organisations like Animals Asia are still predominantly funded by donations from around the world, rather than directly by the government.

The Moon Bear pictured in the above graphic with Jill Robinson is actually much larger than her. He has responded well to loving care, and at the Sichuan sanctuary they call him 'Jasper Sweetie'. Click the image to see him better. He's a really beautiful animal and we can all be glad he's safe now.

Live Shark Bait:
Reunion island is a dependency of France. But it is a long way from Paris and violations of French laws on animal welfare are not always policed or enforced there. It took the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society to focus the attention of the world on a cruel practice that had been allowed to continue under the noses of the French authorities. The following excerpts are from the web site www.seashepherd.org.

"On August 18th [2005], Sea Shepherd Conservation Society posted a reward for the arrest on La Reunion island of anyone responsible for using live dogs or cats as bait for sharks.

To utilise puppies and kittens as live shark bait has been a "tradition" on La Reunion, and despite it being a violation of French law, the practice has continued without violators being arrested.

Sea Shepherd provided some motivation with a reward of € 1,000 for the first arrest and conviction of any person caught using live dogs or cats as bait.

This week the first violator was charged as a result of an effort by police to investigate the practice. The man will appear in court on September 30th. If convicted Sea Shepherd will pay the arresting officer the reward of € 1,000. Sea Shepherd will pay € 200 to the arresting officer for every successful conviction thereafter."

"The story in the London Sun can be found in the September 30th, 2005, edition at: www.thesun.co.uk/article/0,,2-2005450292,00.html"

The animals appreciate the efforts of the folk at Sea Shepherd but regret that it should be necessary for external animal welfare agencies to offer rewards for government officials to enforce existing laws against cruelty to animals.

The animals regret that certain scientific theories and some interpretations of religious scriptures deny that animals are conscious sentient creatures with emotions and feelings that are essentially similar to those of humans.

This point has been discussed earlier, however, before closing this partial list of animal regrets, it is appropriate to explore consciousness further (insofar as that is possible with our present knowledge).

A clear understanding and a high awareness of consciousness can go a long way towards establishing the inherent right of animals to be treated compassionately, and never ever harmed.

Science And Consciousness:
Despite numerous arguments that appear to be based on a knowledge of what consciousness is, and which often proceed to 'prove' that animals aren't conscious, the truth is that nobody can fully explain consciousness. However, there are ways of tapping into consciousness (which is a different thing to knowing exactly what it is.) Both spiritual and scientific practitioners who do this tend to believe that animal consciousness is a reality. This is important since, if they are right, the notion that animals can be mistreated because they aren't conscious beings must be dispelled.

If animals are conscious, animals have rights equal to those of humans.

Perhaps the main reason that so-called 'modern' science can't explain consciousness is due to its materialist approach. The people who come closer to working with consciousness and understanding it, invariably do so from a holistic perspective.

Modern science operates on the basis of measurable effects and repeatable experiments. It shuns the metaphysical and the paranormal because it can't reliably dissect, analyse and cause the repetition of the phenomena observed in these fields.

The science of the ancients, on the other hand, is holistic. It seeks to explain our world and the universe beyond in terms of complete, interacting systems. In this approach all phenomena are studied and none are put aside because they seem to defy objective measurement and repeatability.

There is one other fundamental difference between science that dates from the past two hundred years and science that traces back into pre-history. In modern science everything is thought to happen by coincidence; by random chance. Whereas ancient science recognises a divine plan in which nothing ever happens of its own volition, but is always governed by laws that preclude chance. To the extent that evidence of the operation of such laws can be detected and verified, holistic science is the more credible position when arguing about consciousness with scientific reductionists.

Due to space limitations the full debate about consciousness, and whether non-human animals are conscious, can't be detailed here. But the following sections will, hopefully, provide some idea of the facts and points of view involved.

These arguments matter to the animals because human acceptance of their rights to live free and unexploited lives ultimately depends on the recognition that they are, just like us, sentient and conscious beings.

A quote from one of the many sources on the WWW dealing with the question of animal consciousness describes an attitude that a spokesanimal might well object to.

"Evolution shows that human beings evolved from simple organisms, that themselves had their origin in certain organic chemicals. There must, therefore, be some cumulative mechanism that can explain the existence of consciousness in human beings in an evolutionary sense. If we look at the difference between, say, a bacterium and a human being, or a mouse and a human being, the difference when it comes to brains and nervous systems is that the former creatures operate by genetically programmed instinct, whereas human beings have few or no instincts to speak of. In other words, animal organisms are 'lived' according to genetically programmed factors, whereas human beings are forced to actively live their own lives."

While this reasoning is a key plank of the 'scientific' argument for a lack of consciousness in non-human animals it is not by any means proven. The proponents of evolution would like it to 'show' that human beings evolved from simple organisms, however there are plenty of scientists who reject this notion because it is nothing more than supposition. Nobody has conclusively proved that we are directly linked to bacteria that grew out of a chemical 'soup'.

While this is not the place to analyse the often bitter debate between evolutionists and creationists, it is important to understand that in considering whether animals are conscious or not the above reasoning must be ruled out. When asking whether animals are conscious or not we must focus on the nature and characteristics of consciousness - not on where it came from or which creatures might or might not have been endowed with it.

In his book, Animal Minds, Donald R. Griffin provides some useful categorisations of consciousness. Here are several excerpts on modern science's understanding of what consciousness is. While there are some glimmers of hope for the animals there are also some very questionable assumptions about the supposed differences between animal and human consciousness.

"It is important to distinguish between perceptual and reflective consciousness. The former called "primary consciousness" by Farthing (1992), Lloyd (1989), and others, includes all sorts of awareness, whereas the latter is a subset of conscious experiences in which the content is conscious experience itself. Reflective consciousness is thinking, or experiencing feelings, about thoughts or feelings themselves, and it is often held to include self-awareness and to be limited to our species."

"There are several types of scientific evidence that provide promising insights into what life is like for various animals. One category of evidence is the versatility with which many animals adjust their behaviour appropriately when confronted with novel challenges. Animals encounter so many unpredictable challenges under natural conditions that it would be very difficult if not impossible for any combination of genetic instructions and individual experience to specify in advance the entire set of actions that are appropriate. But thinking about alternative actions and selecting one believed to be the best is an efficient way to cope with unexpected dangers and opportunities. In theory such versatility might result from nonconscious information processing in the brain. But conscious thinking may well be the most efficient way for a central nervous system to weigh different possibilities and evaluate their relative advantages.

A second major category of promising evidence about animal thoughts and feelings is their communicative behaviour, ... And a third type of evidence is available from neuropsychology. For what little is known about the neural correlates of conscious, as opposed to nonconscious, thinking does not suggest that there is anything uniquely human about the basic neural structures and functions that give rise to human consciousness. ..."

"The lack of definitive evidence revealing just what neural processes produce consciousness has led Chalmers (1996) to designate the question of how brains produce subjective awareness as the "hard problem". He and others claim that it is such a difficult problem that normal scientific investigation is unable, in principle, to solve it, and that consciousness must be something basically distinct from the rest of the physical universe.

But this view, fortunately, has not seriously interfered with a striking renaissance in the scientific investigation of consciousness. In the 1990s numerous neuroscientists, psychologists, philosophers, and others have taken up active investigation and discussion of consciousness. Even distinguished molecular biologists such as Edelman (1989), Edelman and Tononi (2000), and Crick (1994) have joined the quest. ..."

"Many behavioural scientists such as Shettleworth (1998) and philosophers such as Lloyd (1989) believe that it is likely that animals may sometimes experience perceptual consciousness but that reflective consciousness is a unique human attribute. The latter would be much more difficult to detect in animals, if it does occur. People can tell when they are thinking about their own thoughts, but it has generally seemed impossible for animals to do so, although animal communication may sometimes serve the same basic function. The very difficulty of detecting whether animals experience reflective consciousness [though] should make us cautious about concluding that it is impossible.

Most of the suggestive evidence that will be discussed in this book points toward perceptual rather than reflective consciousness. Those swayed by visceral feeling that some important level of consciousness must be restricted to our species may cling to reflective consciousness as a bastion still defended by many against the increasing evidence that other animals share to a limited extent many of our mental abilities. ..."

Two of the favourable critiques of Animal Minds have this to say about the book and its author.

"The creator of the controversial field of cognitive ethology, Donald R. Griffin has spent more than three decades researching animal cognition. In a completely revised and updated version of his classic, Animal Minds: Beyond Cognition to Consciousness, Griffin ... discusses his own and other's research findings including those of his critics. ..."

"This is the book anyone interested in animal intelligence has been waiting for. Destined to become a classic, it is a brilliant synthesis of our current knowledge about the mental life of other species from the scientist who has contributed more to this subject than anyone else."

Without wishing to lessen the importance of the book and the thinking that Donald R. Griffin has put into it and his long career, (and not damning him with faint praise) it must be realised that all Griffins material comes from the field of reductionist science. This is mainstream science, the world of academic careers funded largely by governments and big business, where the 'truth' of research and theoretical postulates is verified by peer review processes within the system, and seldom subjected to more hostile examination by alternative sages outside the establishment. 

There are, in fact, many bona fide scientists who work outside the mainstream and who tend to be less inhibited and more holistic in their approach to the question of animal consciousness. It is vital that their voices are heard and their work is recognised, for in all fields of knowledge if is becoming clear that the world we inhabit is a very strange place indeed. And the best explanations are often those at the 'weird' end of the spectrum of scientific thought.

We are surrounded by energy fields that we can't see and many of which have only been able to measure and exploit for a century or so. The electromagnetic field and the applications of television and radio are obvious examples.The gravitational field of the Earth is another unseen field that our bodies are specifically designed to operate in. We know about these fields and we utilise them but institutional science still cannot explain them fully.

Despite the fact that science has known since the early 20th century that matter is made up of wave forms and that the 'solid' world we experience is an illusion, mainstream academia continues to treat animal consciousness in 19th century terms. Knowledge has advanced greatly in the past 100 years, but if you are working in the mainstream it is near impossible to get funding to study anything that seems metaphysical of 'mystical'; like thought fields used by animal minds or animal to animal, and animal to human, telepathy.

Rupert Sheldrake

One scientist who does attract funding (albeit it mainly from private donors) for his research on energy fields that we and other animals use in unexplained ways is Dr Rupert Sheldrake. He has already been mentioned briefly above in connection with animal telepathy, now it is time to expand his work and thinking a little more.

There is no doubt that Rupert Sheldrake is a bona fide scientist with many decades of experience and publications (sixty technical papers and nine books) in the fields of molecular biology and animal behaviour. However, unlike many in institutionalised scientific research, he takes a holistic approach and seeks to investigate all phenomena whether they seem readily explainable or not. Not surprisingly, Rupert Sheldrake's conclusions, that are drawn from many years of patient research and inquiry, are startling. Their 'weirdness' does not lessen their validity in any way, for the reality of consciousness, like the reality of the atom, is almost certain to seem bizarre at first exposure.

In the preface of his latest book The Sense of Being Stares At, and other aspects of the Extended Mind, Sheldrake says this:

"In this book I argue that unexplained human abilities such as telepathy, the sense of being stared at and premonition are not paranormal but normal, part of our biological nature. In Dogs That Know When Their Owners Are Coming Home, I showed that these unexplained powers are widely distributed in the animal kingdom. They are exhibited by some of the animals we know best, such as dogs, cats, horses and parrots. Although we ourselves are generally less sensitive, we share these abilities with many other species. We have partly lost or neglected these aspects of our evolutionary heritage.

By investigating these abilities, rather than dismissing them, we will come to understand more about the nature of our minds and invisible connections that link us to each other and to the world around us. In this book I concentrate on unexplained human abilities, but I build on the investigations of animal powers discussed in Dogs That Know When Their owners Are Coming Home."

"This book differs from other accounts of unexplained human abilities in several ways. First, it is grounded in biology and animal behaviour, and treats telepathy and other unexplained abilities as aspects of our biological, animal nature.

Second, some books either bring together compilations of stories or are rigorously experimental, excluding anything that has not been tested in the laboratory. I believe in combining both approaches. This book starts from the natural history of personal experiences, but wherever possible discusses experiments that can shed light on what is happening.

Third, I show that scientific research on unexplained human powers can be done quite simply. In Appendix A, I outline a variety of ways in which readers can take part in this research themselves.

Fourth, although the phenomena I discuss are currently unexplained i do not think that they are inherently inexplicable. I argue throughout the book that the exploration of these abilities could lead to a new understanding of the nature of human and animal minds. Instead of thinking of minds as confined to brains, I suggest they involve extended fields of influence that stretch out far beyond brains and bodies."

"More than 5,000 correspondents have contributed case histories to my databases, based on their own experiences and on their observations of animals. Hundreds of people, including animal trainers, farmers, veterinarians, naturalists, hunters, wildlife photographers, pet owners, surveillance officers, soldiers, detectives, teachers and martial arts practitioners have helped in this research through participating in interviews with me of my research associates. More than 2,000 people have responded to my random household surveys, and a further 2,000 have helped in my research by filling in questionnaires about their own experiences. In addition, more than 20,000 people have participated in experimental tests. ..."

To Sheldrake, his investigations are simply widening the boundaries of what is known and scientifically accepted. He has come to consider that the phenomena and abilities that he studies are 'normal' and will eventually be accepted as such. In his book he writes as follows.

"As science progresses it continually changes the boundaries of the scientifically 'normal'. Television and mobile phones would have seemed miraculous to an eighteenth-century physicist, knowing nothing of electromagnetic fields. Seeing at a distance or hearing the voices of people far away would have seemed like the work of witches or the delusions of lunatics. Now they are everyday experiences, thanks to television, radio and telephones.

Likewise, hydrogen bombs would have been unthinkable for nineteenth-century physicists. In the age of steam and gunpowder, such devices would have sounded like an apocalyptic fantasy. Lasers would have sounded like mythic swords of light. They only became conceivable for twentieth-century physicists through the scientific revolutions wrought by relativity and quantum theory."

"Materialism as a philosophy keeps evolving as scientific ideas about physical reality change within science. The boundaries of the 'normal' are not fixed but shift according to changes in scientific orthodoxies. In the course of the twentieth century, materialism 'transcended itself' through physics, as the philosopher of science Karl Popper remarked. Matter is no longer the fundamental reality, as it was for old-style materialism. Fields and energy are now more fundamental than matter. The ultimate particles of matter have become vibrations of energy within fields.

The boundaries of scientific 'normality' are shifting again with a dawning recognition of the reality of consciousness. The powers of the mind hitherto ignored by physics, are the new scientific frontier."

Not just Sheldrake, but other thinkers and experimenters as well, are grappling with a fundamental question:

Scientists and non-scientists alike have always assumed that the mind is a property of the brain. Because our brains, and also the brains of nonhuman animals, are in our skulls we believe that is where our minds exist as well. Unfortunately this time-worn model does not help to explain the phenomena that Sheldrake and his research assistants encounter in thousands upon thousands of case studies. But if our minds are not confined within our brains, but exist outside our skulls as energy fields, explanations of observed animal behaviour and reported human experiences become far easier.

Take one of the case histories described in The Sense Of Being Stared At. It relates to a cat that inexplicably knew when its humans were returning from a trip away from their home for an indeterminate time.

"Many cats anticipate the return of their owners, but fewer do so than dogs. This does not mean that cats are less sensitive; they may simply be less interested. Some cats ignore their owner's return when they come home from work or shopping, but are spectacularly successful at anticipating when they are coming back from holidays or long absences, and some know many hours in advance. For instance, a couple from Birmingham left on a sailing trip, planning to be away for several months, but with no idea when they would return. Their neighbour fed their cat. When they came home after about three months,

• ... we found a loaf of bread and a bottle of milk waiting for us in the flat. We were amazed because nobody knew when we were getting back, not even us. When I asked my neighbour how she knew we were coming she said, 'We didn't know, but Thomas did.' 'He never went near the car park at the front of the flats, but that day he sat there looking up the road the whole day. So we knew you were arriving today.' she concluded."

If his mind was confined to his skull, as a property of his physical brain, Thomas the cat could have had no means of sensing when his humans were coming home. But if, as Rupert Sheldrake postulates, the cat's mind could stretch out and 'see' them approaching, while they were still quite far away, Thomas would know to go to the car park and wait for the people he loved. Nobody can deny that he and many other animals have done exactly that, right on cue.

Sheldrake describes his notion of the extended mind and how it combines with our sense organs, such as eyesight, in the following terms.

"Our minds connect us to the world around us, just as they seem to do. This connection, through our sense organs, links us directly to what we perceive. What you see is an image inside your mind. But it is not inside your brain. Your brain is within the confines of your cranium. Your mind is extended in space, and stretches out into the world around you. It reaches out to touch what you see. If you look at a mountain ten miles away, your mind is stretching out ten miles. If you look at a distant star, your mind is extending over literally astronomical distances."

Sheldrake's ideas are fiercely contested by many people, but he rejects criticisms about having relied on anecdotal evidence rather than hard measurements. He writes:

"Courts of law take anecdotal evidence seriously, and people are often convicted or acquitted thanks to it. Some fields of research, for example, medicine, rely heavily on anecdotes, but when the stories are published they literally cease to be anecdotes; they are promoted to the rank of case histories. Such case histories form the essential foundation of experience on which further research can be built. To brush aside what people have actually experienced is not scientific, but unscientific. Science is founded on the empirical method, that is to say on experience and observation. Experiences and observations are the starting point for science, and it is unscientific to disregard or exclude them."

"... Otherwise reasonable people can be surprisingly prejudiced when it comes to phenomena such as telepathy. Although people with these attitudes usually call themselves sceptics, they are not genuine sceptics. They are usually believers in a world-view that excludes psychic phenomena. Some try to deny or debunk any experience that goes against their beliefs. The most zealous behave like vigilantes policing the frontiers of science. The Greek word skepsis, the root of our word sceptic, means enquiry or doubt. It does not mean denial or dogmatism."

Ultimately, Rupert Sheldrake finds that energy field mechanisms and 'mind-reach' beyond the body offer more satisfactory explanations for the many case histories of the human and animal abilities he has studied.

In the conclusion of the book he writes:

"In this book I have suggested that our minds extend beyond our brains. They do so even in the simplest act of perception. Images are where they seem to be. Subjects and objects are not radically separated, with subjects inside heads and objects in the external world. They are interlinked.

Through vision, the external world is brought into the mind through the eyes, and the subjective world of experience is projected outwards into the external world through fields of perception and intention.

Our intentions stretch out into the world around us, and also extend into the future. We are linked to our environment and to each other.

Likewise, our minds pervade our bodies, and our body images are where we experience them, in our bodies not just in our heads.

At first it may seem shocking to take our most direct and immediate experience seriously. We are used to the theory that all our thoughts, images and feelings are in the brain, and not where they seem to be. Most of us picked up this idea by the time we were ten or eleven. Although Francis Crick called this theory the Astonishing hypothesis, it is not usually treated as a testable scientific hypothesis. Within institutional science and medicine, it is generally taken for granted, and most educated people accept it as the 'scientifically correct' view. Yet the mind-equals-brain theory turns out to have very little evidence in its favour. It contradicts immediate experience. And it rules out the possibility of the seventh sense, forcing believers in the brain theory to deny or ignore all the evidence that goes against it.

The idea of the extended mind enables us to take seriously the evidence for the seventh sense in people and in animals. It helps us recognise that the seventh sense is part of our biological nature. And it opens up vast new areas of the natural world for research and exploration. ..."

When you read any of Sheldrake's material you are not left in any doubt that he considers nonhuman animals to be conscious and in many cases more capable of mind-powers. such as telepathy, than most humans. What does he mean by consciousness then? My interpretation, on his behalf, is that he refers to the extent to which an individual (either human or nonhuman) is able to relate to and manipulate natural information fields, in order to know about or to influence other living things.

That might not be exactly how Rupert Sheldrake would put it, but if I am anywhere near his position he sees all animals being capable of both perceptual and reflective consciousness. You will recall from the earlier discussion of reflective consciousness that it involves thinking about one's own thoughts. Read Sheldrake's book to decide for yourself, but to me many of the case studies indicate that nonhuman animals were thinking about not only their own thoughts but those of their human companions as well. While I find the particular categorisations of consciousness used by reductionist science too limiting, I consider that Sheldrake's work goes a long way towards confirming that all animals meet the conditions of both perceptual and reflective consciousness. That being so, it is time for humanity to stop mistreating, killing and eating those other conscious beings we know as nonhuman animals.

Vogt & Sultan

We are living in an era of great knowledge revision, revival, and advancement. There is truly a 2nd Renaissance occurring as you read this freesite. Critical breakthroughs are being made in all fields of knowledge, and new technologies are proliferating as never before. New theoretical frameworks are being built, just as they were during the European Renaissance, five centuries ago.

Not all theories have the same degree of scope. Many attempt to explain quite localised phenomena, while others seek to explain the nature of the universe. The following diagram shows how scientific theories can be considered to fall into one of three domains, or to apply to all of them. When comparing various theories it helps to have this diagram in mind, because not all scientists are theorising at the same level.

In 1687 Sir Isaac Newton published his laws of mechanics and gravitation. These still hold good today provided that the problems are in the first domain of theory, where we are able to observe effects with our senses. Thus, an engineer can design an amusement park ride using Newton's mechanics, or NASA can calculate the trajectories and orbits involved in putting an astronaut on the Moon using the same principles. The theory always holds good in observable, 'drop it on your foot', circumstances.

However, Newton's laws have been found to break down at sub-atomic scales and where high speeds and cosmic scales apply. To address these failings Albert Einstein, together with others such as Max Planck, Niels Bohr, Werner Heisenberg, Erwin Schrödinger, and Paul Dirac developed alternative theories in areas such as relativity and quantum mechanics. These theories operate in the second domain of the diagram, beyond the abilities of our normal senses to observe the phenomena involved. Scientists have used technologies such as cloud chambers, scanning tunnelling microscopes, and radio telescopes to 'see' events in this domain, and 'prove' or 'disprove' their theories.

In both the first and second theory domains it is possible to test hypotheses by observing events that involve material objects. This is not generally the case in the third theory domain. There, the events are of non-material origin. The Russians did considerable scientific research in this domain during the 20th century. In other countries, even today, there has been a reluctance to venture into the non-material, metaphysical, world. Yet, it is there that the whole truth about the universe, and our existence within it, must be sought. Neither of the other two domains can ever yield a complete 'theory of everything' (ToE). Because non-material phenomena are real, albeit impossible to observe and difficult to explain, this domain must be considered fully in formulating any credible 'theory of everything'.

Consciousness can be documented and understood to some extent by through observation and analysis of the patterns of circumstances associated with psychic phenomena in humans and nonhuman animal experiences. Rupert Sheldrake has been working on the problem in that manner. However, consciousness will only be fully explained within a set of complete and integrated postulates that fit within the third theory domain.

It needs to be understood that, with the exception of a few persistent theorists such as Albert Einstein, few scientists have even tried to devise a theory that can encompass all observed phenomena in the universe, both physical and meta-physical. And, to this day, nobody has succeeded in such an endeavour. This makes the work of Vogt and Sultan quite remarkable, and potentially very important.

Douglas Vogt and Gary R. Sultan co-authored their book Reality Revealed in 1977. Their theory of multidimensional reality is squarely in the third domain of the above diagram. While much of their thinking remains untested by institutionalised science to this day, Vogt and Sultan's model seeks to explain all observed phenomena. The authors claim that their theory can explain not only 'normal' events, but also such previously unexplainable happenings such as:

• How 'light' material, such as straw, can be found driven through 'heavy' materials, such as timber and glass, remaining embedded in the latter without shattering it.

• How live animals, such as frogs, have been found entombed in rocks (granite, limestone, etc) in mines and quarries, and have survived for hours or days after being dug out.

• Why there has been a regular cycle of polar reversals, that are readily measurable in the geological strata of our planet.

• The reason why some individuals are able to move objects solely with their minds, without using any physical means (psychokinesis).

• Why all living things, plant and animal, give of auras, and why no two individuals ever have the same aura.

• And so on ...

Several of the key ideas of the Vogt/Sultan model of reality are almost identical to the postulates of Rupert Sheldrake. The model is concerned with information in electromagnetic energy fields, and the core data of our existence; our thoughts, feelings, life experiences and the like, are NOT in our brains, but somewhere else!

Nor is it likely to be a coincidence that their scientific theory that is built around energy waves and potentials results in a model that is strikingly similar to the core models of consciousness and spirituality that underpin both past and present religions on this planet.

The following diagram and explanation of Vogt and Sultan's model is reproduced from Sub-Heading [203] of the 2nd Renaissance freesite. Look there for further explanation. Here, it is the steps of levels of information that are relevant, and which compare closely with various models of consciousness.

The levels are:

1. The storage level for all information in the universe. This is also where the geometric structure of visible matter originates. Vogt and Sultan term this structure the diehold, it transmits information into the second level. Of the first level they say:
   "The first dimension has no length, no width, no depth, and time is truly irrelevant."

2. The transmission of information is by means of magnetic lines of force. The waves are similar to electromagnetic waves, but without the electrical wave component (see the earlier electromagnetic wave diagram). The phase angles of the wave are set by the geometric structure of the diehold.

3. Elements, the basis of perceived matter, are created at this level by modulation of the transmission wave. The frequencies that are unique to each element are governed by the geometric structure of the diehold. There is an eerie similarity between this concept and the way Plichta's Prime Number Cross regulates the structures of the elements. The mechanisms are quite different, but the concepts are similar.

4. Life and intelligence are modulated into existence at this level. The living organisms here are all aware of their environment, whether they be tadpoles or humans. As the potential of a living thing is increased it is able to perceive and understand more of what is around it. Intelligence increases with potential in the diehold. Conventional science does most of its investigation of 'reality' at this level, because there are seemingly tangible objects and organisms that can be measured and observed.

5. There is so much more potential at this level that an intelligent being is able to perceive more information of its surroundings in the diehold than is possible by using the lower senses of sight, smell, touch, and so on. Some psychic abilities can be explained by this level of the model.

   Vogt and Sultan reason that a fifth-level being is able to bend the information that makes up three-dimensional objects, and also change the signal modulation of an object so that its time reference is altered.

   In their model, time is the distance travelled by 'the head device' or 'tape head' across the information of existence. The speed of the 'device' across the information is that of light, 300, 000 km per second. While a sufficiently conscious being can travel anywhere in the universe, past or present, by raising its potential, nothing can travel faster than the 'head device' transmitting its existence. Gravity is the information of an object being directed towards its time and space. Objects with lager domains of information have stronger gravitational fields than those with less information. If these ideas seem strange, it's because they are. However the truth about the nature of the universe is unlikely to be, in any sense, Newtonian. It is sure to be counter-intuitive and unexpected.

   Note that Vogt and Sultan do not suggest that there really is a 'head device' somewhere that is reading all the information that comprises existence. They use the analogy of a tape-head to illustrate the type of principle that could be involved. Just like the 'Big Bang', their idea of how information is organised in the universe is just a theory. Neither of these are, as yet, proven fact. Science does not yet know the real answers, although the opposite impression in often given in lectures and text books.

6. Another leap in potential enables intelligent beings at this level to move objects in time and space.
   

   Various psychokinetic abilities can be explained by this level of the model. Vogt and Sultan say that if an intelligent being at this level has a fish in its possession, it does not just have that fish in a fourth level existence, it has the information contained in the diehold, about what makes up that fish. The sixth level being is then able to reproduce the fish as many times as it wishes.

7. Because it has such a huge amount of potential a planet occupies the seventh level of the model. Vogt and Sultan concede that this seems strange, coming as if does above and beyond a super-intelligent being. However, they insist that this arrangement is logical, and that, in fact, a planet has many frequencies associated with it and it is logical to assume that it perceives a great deal of its existence from the diehold.

8. The ultimate level is that of a star. Vogt and Sultan explain it thus. "A star is the only thing in the universe that collapses upon itself when it becomes a black hole. When it becomes a black hole, what is happening is that its information is going to the first dimension, or back to the diehold. This process probably occurs when it has evolved so far and collected so much potential that it can pull in unlimited amounts of information from its surroundings in the diehold. This information we would perceive as a gravitational field. When the gravitational field (concentrated information) gets too great, the star can no longer exist in any other dimension but the first dimension."

Human experience is crammed with happenings for which grant-governed science has no plausible explanations. Because very little funding is ever allocated to the investigation of anything that smacks of the supernatural or the paranormal, hardly any progress has been made towards finding scientific explanations of such phenomena. For example the uncanny ability of common companion animals, such as cats, to find their way home through unfamiliar terrain is an ongoing mystery. Cats are not migratory in the way that many birds are. Cats normally spend their whole lives within a quite small territory that surrounds their home. Yet, when cats are removed to a place far away they frequently find their way back. There are innumerable recorded instances of this 'homing' ability of domestic felines, but no explanations as to how they do it.

The cat shown in the photo travelled a distance of some 65 miles to be reunited with her carer. This documented case occurred in La Ribière, France, in 1967. An even longer journey was made by a ginger cat named Skittles. He travelled a distance of 560 km in 140 days after having been lost from an automobile while on holidays in Minnesota, USA, in 2003.

Most people are aware of such events involving cats, dogs and other animals, they know it happens but they don't know how. Conventional explanations focus on such factors as the use of scent (a bit hard from hundreds of kilometres away), navigation by the sun, and similar sensory mechanisms. There is no scientific theory that can fully explain how cats such as Minette and Skittles find their way home with unerring accuracy - except for the Vogt and Sultan theory of Multidimensional Reality. If cats possess fifth level abilities (nobody has done any studies that can rule this in or out), then they could directly perceive information, such as the route home, from the diehold.

This notion does not in any way prove that cats can perceive information by using abilities beyond their lower level senses. The point is that although the explanation derived from the Multidimensional Reality Theory is weird, it cannot be rejected simply because of its weirdness. It is not just solutions to how cats find their way home that are explainable by the use of the Multidimensional Reality. Surprisingly, most other strange events can also be explained by the theory. In fact, Vogt and Sultan devote much of their book to examples that do just that - they explain the unexplainable. Given the scope and consistency of their model, it is worth considering and investigating whether cats and other animals do possess natural abilities that fall within the 5th level of their model (which equates with psychic powers in conventional thinking terms).

Planet of the Apes

Back in 1977 Vogt and Sultan did not expect their book on an alternative model of existence to be widely acclaimed. They understood the 'modern' culture of the 20th century and the nature of our education systems. Here are the first two paragraphs of Vogt and Sultan's book Reality Revealed.

"The number one stumbling block for mankind is that for too long we have been told how we should think, what we should think, or even if we should think at all. In the [1967] motion picture, 'Planet of the Apes' we see man return to a future earth. The apes have evolved and man has devolved. If the viewers of that movie thought that that was the theme of the movie, they missed the most important point. The film was showing how ignorance is institutionalised in politics, in religion, and in higher learning. The elders of the apes knew there was something past the "forbidden zone." They knew there was a more advanced life form on the planet in the past. To keep control of the masses, certain thought processes had to be repressed.

Mankind's institutions have been just as kind to us as apekind's were to them. Only certain kinds of thinking or non-thinking are rewarded in our world. There is no financial reward for thinking creatively. There are financial rewards for thinking "properly". "Properly" is the way you have been taught to accept reality in your learning years. There is, also, social acceptance in doing what is expected of you. Nobody questions what they have learned. They accept it because to do so is the route to getting the sheepskin. In fact, as we will point out, the great masters of western scientific thought didn't question each other's work until it was found that their predecessors' work didn't hold the total answer. The problem with these great thinkers was that they tried to patch together a theory of reality which was based on an awkward and inadequate view of reality. There has been no major rethinking of existence and reality since mankind's recorded history."

Vogt and Sultan's theory might or might not be correct. Perhaps we must await the results of verifying experiments to know how valid their work is. Or, since their ideas involve the metaphysical world, there might be no way of 'proving' their postulates in a quantifiable sense. We can however be sure of one thing, there are now many other researchers and thinkers who have reached similar conclusions to Vogt and Sultan. In 1977 Vogt and Sultan's ideas were dismissed as fanciful. Nobody would believe that the information that we are made of, together with the information about our thoughts, feelings and knowledge could be outside our bodies. Not in our brains, but somewhere else. Together with all the other information about humans, other animals, plants, rocks, rivers, and so on. A vast repository of information that is accessible to those who have the power of higher consciousness.

Some twenty eight years later, things are starting to change. Just as mass publication of printed books stimulated new awareness and new ideas in Europe, and led to the Renaissance, the mass publication of digital media and the global linking of minds through the internet are producing a revolution in thought and our knowledge of consciousness. This is potentially very good news for the animals, for raised levels of human consciousness mean wider understanding of their plight and wider resolve to stop their mistreatment and slaughter.

Right now, the most effective direction for animal rights and animal welfare organisations to take is to actively support trends to neo-tribalism, new spiritualism and heightened powers of consciousness across human society. This means helping to catalyse change and build a new civilization based on abundance and giving. The 2nd Renaissance freesite outlines what is involved in such a transformation. Such a change in our world offers the greatest hope for the animals.

David R. Hawkins

Dr David Hawkins is a well known psychiatrist and physician who devoted some 20 years of research to understanding and mapping levels of consciousness. Despite the fact that institutionalised science does not know what consciousness is, nor how to reliably measure it, Dr Hawkins has been able to define and map what seems to be a form of communal consciousness. Following the terminology used by the Swiss psychologist Carl Jung, he calls it a "database of consciousness".

As the Foreword to Hawkins' book Power Versus Force puts it:

"... The phenomenon seen so commonly in other social animals - whereby a fish swimming at one edge of a school will turn instantaneously when its fellows a quarter of a mile away flee from a predator - pertains in some subconscious way to our species also. there are simply too many documented instances of individuals having intimate acquaintance with information experienced firsthand by remote strangers for us to deny that there are forms of shared knowledge other than those achieved by rational consciousness. Or perhaps, more simply, the same spark of inner subrational wisdom that can discriminate healthy from unhealthy can discriminate true from false."

The last sentence above refers to the science of kinesiology that Dr Hawkins uses in his in-depth studies. Kinesiology is the study of muscles and their movement. In 1975 Hawkins began to study kinesiological responses to truth and falsehood. In doing so he drew on the earlier work of Dr George Goodheart who pioneered what he called applied kinesiology, and also on the subsequent work of Dr John Diamond in behavioural kinesiology.

Dr Goodheart found that while various beneficial or harmless physical substances in, say, nutritional supplements, will cause particular indicator muscles to suddenly increase in strength, harmful substances will cause those muscles to suddenly lose strength. It seems that at a low level, well below conceptual consciousness, the body 'knows' what is good and bad for it. Dr Diamond extended the new discipline of applied kinesiology by his findings that indicator muscles would not only strengthen or weaken in response to stimulation by physical substances, but emotional and intellectual stimuli as well! As stated in Power Versus Force:

"A smile will make you test strong. The statement "I hate you," will make you test weak."

Behavioural kinesiological testing is remarkably quick and simple. It requires only two people, a subject and a tester. The subject stands holding one arm out parallel to the floor with the other by their side, the tester faces the subject and places one hand on their shoulder and the other on the subject's extended arm, just above the wrist. The tester tells the subject to resist the downwards pressure applied to their outstretched arm. At the same time a statement that has a clear 'yes' or 'no' answer, and which deals with present or past truth (but not the future) is spoken. If the statement is true (yes) the subject's arm will remain locked and the tester will not be able to depress it. If the statement is false (no) the subject's arm will suddenly go weak and the tester will be able to easily depress it.

Remarkably, if the subject and tester are suitable, the response to the questions will always be correct, and this will be so regardless of the opinions or knowledge of the subject. If, for example, the statement is, "The 2005 Melbourne Cup winner was Makybe Diva", the subjects arm will remain strong, because the statement is true. But, if any other horse's name is used the subject's arm will go weak, because the statement is false. Not only will the response to the statement "The 2005 Melbourne Cup winner was Makybe Diva" be one hundred per cent repeatable, it will not matter whether the various subjects personally follow horse racing in Australia or know whether the statement is correct or not. Nor will the opinion of any subject colour the results of the test. If the statement is changed to "The present Prime Minister of Australia has kept all of his election promises", it will not matter what the various subjects think about John Howard's record. The muscles of their arms will react to reflect the truth of the statement, regardless of what they believe, and regardless of whether they are Liberal party supporters or detractors. Moreover, the responses will be correct even if the tests are performed with subjects in India, or Mozambique, or anywhere else. The subjects don't have to know whether the statement is true or false, they are simply providing access, via their muscle responses, to a collective 'database of consciousness' which holds the information required to resolve the question of whether any declarative statement about the present or the past is true or false. This process is analogous to Vogt and Sultan's idea of access to the diehold.

Both the subject and tester must be suitable in order for the kineseological testing to work correctly and yield valid responses. Over a period of twenty years David Hawkins was able to determine the levels of human consciousness and express them in a logarithmic (to the base 10) scale from 1 to 1000. Individuals who act as subjects or testers must have consciousness levels that test above 200 on the scale. In an interview documented on the www (at www.kindredspirit.co.uk), Dr Hawkins put it thus.

"To get correct answers both people doing it have to calibrate over 200, which is the level of integrity. They have to have integrity to begin with - which excludes 85% of the population. You might say that those who are devoted to the truth are karmically entitled to discover the truth. Those who are devoted to falsehood have not [ yet ] qualified. The intention behind the question has to have integrity also. It cannot be a self-serving intention."

It is best to refer to the complete Map of Consciousness in Power Versus Force in order to understand the levels if consciousness involved. There you can also read Hawkin's explanations first-hand. The following brief comments and a few excerpts from the book are intended to give some appreciation of the levels, but not a full understanding.

• The nature of the levels of consciousness is prone to misunderstanding, they don't represent subjective ratings by Dr Hawkins or his research assistants, they are experimental 'readings' from attractor fields within the database of information that exists beyond our three-dimensional world.

• The higher the level of consciousness the greater the integrity and compassionate power of the field involved. Basically, the higher levels of consciousness are good for your soul. Just as kinesiological tests differentiate what is good or bad for the physical body (ie, artifical sweeteners are bad, organically grown apples are good), they also indicate which thoughts, feelings and attitudes are good or bad for your soul (ie, revenge is bad, mercy is good).

• "Throughout history all the world's great spiritual disciplines have been concerned with techniques to ascend through these levels of consciousness."

  ...... from Power Versus Force.

• "... As perception itself evolves with one's level of consciousness, it becomes apparent that what the world calls the domain of causes is in fact the domain of effects. By taking responsibility for the consequences of his own perceptions, the observer can transcend the role of victim to an understanding that "nothing out there has power over you". It is not life's events, but how one reacts to them, the attitude one has about them, which determines whether they have a positive or negative effect on one's life, whether they are experienced as opportunity or as stress."

  ...... from Power Versus Force.

  Hawkins is saying that their levels of consciousness will determine how various individuals react to exactly the same event, some at lower levels, will become victims to the event, others at higher levels will transcend it. This is power over oneself.

• "Our study concerned itself with a limited set of parameters of consciousness which we calibrated from one to 1,000. The numbers represent the logarithm (to the base 10) of the power of the respective fields. The entire field of phase consciousness itself is unlimited, going on to infinity. The range from one to 600, representing the domain of the vast majority of human experience, is the primary scope of this study; the levels from 600 to 1,000, the realm of non-ordinary evolution - of enlightenment, sages, and the highest spiritual states - will also be described."

  ...... from Power Versus Force.

• "The critical response point on the scale of consciousness calibrates at about 200, the level associated with Courage. All attitudes, thoughts, feelings and associations below that level of calibration make a person go weak. Attitudes, thoughts, feelings, entities or historical figures which calibrate higher make subjects go strong. This is the balance point between weak and strong attractors, between negative and positive influence."

  ...... from Power Versus Force.

• "At the levels below 200, the primary impetus is survival, although at the very bottom of the scale, the zone of hopelessness and depression, even this motive is lacking. The levels of Fear and Anger are characterised by egocentric impulses arising from this drive for personal survival. At the level of Pride the survival motive may expand to comprehend the survival of others as well. As one crosses the demarcation between negative and positive influence into Courage, the well-being of others becomes increasingly important. By the 500 level, the happiness of others emerges as the essential motivating force. The high 500s are characterised by interest in spiritual awareness for both oneself and others, and by the 600s the good of mankind and the search for enlightenment are the primary goals. From 700 to 1,000 life is dedicated to the salvation of all humanity. "

  ...... from Power Versus Force.

• The logarithmic levels of the Map of Consciousness, and the labels Dr Hawkins uses for each are shown below, for the range 20 to 1,000. The other descriptors used in the Map of Consciousness are not shown. They are God-view, Life-view, Emotion, and Process.

  600 - Peace
  540 - Joy
  500 - Love
  400 - Reason
  350 - Acceptance
  310 - Willingness
  250 - Neutrality
  200 - Courage
  175 - Pride
  150 - Anger
  125 - Desire
  100 - Fear
  75 - Grief
  50 - Apathy
  30 - Guilt
  20 - Shame

• Some example calibrations from Dr Hawkins study are:
  • 85% of humans are below the critical 200 level.

  • Only 0.4% of the world's population are 500 or greater.

  • Both Einstein and Freud are 499.

  • 51% of the population in the United States are above 200.

  • Fortune 500 CEOs are 199, up from 194 quite recently.

  • Mother Teresa is at 700.

  • Om Namaha Shivaya is 630.

  • Huang Po is 980.

  • Christianity at the time of Jesus is 1,000.

• The following passage summarises the distinction that David Hawkins makes between power and force.

  "The Map of Consciousness also casts a new light on the progress of history. A most important distinction for the purposes of this study is that between force and true power. We can, for example, investigate a historical epoch such as the end of British colonialise in India. If we calibrate the position of the British Empire at the time, one of self-interest and exploitation, we find that it was well below the critical level of 200 on the scale of consciousness. The motivation of Mahatma Ghandi (calibrated at 700) was very near the top of the range of normal human consciousness. Ghandi won in this struggle because his position was one of far greater power. The British Empire represented force (calibrated at 175) and when force meets power, force is eventually defeated."

And here's the punchline for those in the animal rights and welfare movement - according to Dr Hawkins studies, animals are conscious beings! Here are some excerpts on this subject.

When asked in an interview where the consciousness of animals calibrated, Dr Hawkins said,

"We just finished calibrating the whole of the animal kingdom, from bacteria through protozoa all the way up to homo sapiens. We found some very interesting things. The minute you get up to the herbivorous grazers, then some of them go over 200. The peaceful grazer shows the emergence of the level of consciousness over 200 in the animal kingdom, whereas 85% of mankind calibrates below 200. ..."

...... From the Kindred Spirit website, (www.kindredspirit.co.uk)

"The family cat is 245, the family dog is 250."

"Broccoli, my new African Grey parrot, calibrated at 365 when I got her. Now she calibrates at 370."

"A songbird's song is 500."

...... From notes on lectures by Dr Hawkins at the Sadona Creative Life Centre (see http://consciousnessproject.org/).

"A cat's purr calibrates at 500. so does a dog's wagging tail. So these two domestic pets show an advanced evolution of the heart chakra without the mental body being involved, so they have a strangely evolved capacity for unconditional love. They look for, respond to and vibrate on the level of love - that's why we're crazy about our pets. They're unusual in the extreme."

...... From the Kindred Spirit web site.

Of Course They're Conscious
The self-delusional rationalists will refute all of David Hawkins findings, just as they refute those of Rupert Sheldrake and many other investigators of unexplained phenomena. They will deny that animals are in any way 'like us' in the way they think and feel. The atheistic majority within institutionalised science will also deny that, if it it defined as an increasing awareness of the divine, there is any such thing as consciousness. The animal slaughtering industries and their powerful lobbies will side with the naysayers. So will the vivisectionists of medical 'science', and the pharmaceutical and cosmetic researchers who conduct cruel experiments on thousands upon thousands of animals, deny that animals are conscious.

However, Hawkins, Sheldrake and their like are also scientifically trained and their experimental data meet the criteria for scientific experimentation. Kinesiological responses are now well documented and reliable in clinical use. In applying this testing mechanism to probe the collective database of knowledge Dr Hawkins sought and obtained scientifically valid results. In the following excerpt from Power Versus Force he makes this point very strongly.

"The test space for the determination of the data is the totality of the human experience throughout all time.

Mentally, test subjects ranged from what the world calls normal to severely ill psychiatric patients. Subjects were tested in Canada, the United States, Mexico and throughout South America and Northern Europe. They were of all nationalities, ethnic backgrounds, and religions, ranging in age from children to elders in their nineties, and covered a wide spectrum of physical and emotional health. Subjects were tested individually and in groups by many different testers and groups of testers. But in all cases, without exception, the results were identical and entirely reproducible, fulfilling the fundamental requirement of the scientific method: perfect experimental replicability."

Although Dr Hawkins might not perfectly understand what he is dealing with and, consequently, his explanations of the "database of consciousness" might not be entirely correct (although we can't tell that at this point), there can be no doubt at all that kinesiological responses to statements posed through the many human subjects in Hawkins' experiments were always consistent and capable of reproduction with other subjects and testers, at other places, and at other times. Something is clearly going on ! Dr Hawkins findings cannot be dismissed as either unscientific or unverifiable.

Nor is there any doubt that the responses to many statements about animals place those creatures squarely in the same collective consciousness that contains all human experiences, thoughts and feelings. Such a result will not surprise any of the people who work with animals, tend to their veterinary needs, or simply share their homes and their lives with them. Such people already know that animals are conscious in the same way that we are. The following story of 'The Diva' makes it patently clear how those who work around horses understand their subtle communications.

Bred in England and passed in at the yearling sales there, for lack of interest, this mare subsequently went to an owner in Western Australia, in the fishing town of Port Lincon. Starting and succeeding in local races the mare worked her way into the big-time of Australian horse racing, and to the most prestigious race of them all - the Melbourne Cup. Because they saw her as 'their' horse the populace of Port Lincon backed her in every race she ever ran. The mare Makybe Diva repaid her backers at the track and she eventually returned over $17 million to her owners in prize money. She was a champion, but until 2005 nobody knew just how great, and how very rare she really was.

The Melbourne Cup is the top race in the Australian calendar. But it's more than that. The Cup has been run each year since 1861, and the whole of Australia stops for it. People gather in pubs to watch it, workplaces stop for it, traffic pulls to the side of the road to listen to it, almost everybody has a bet on it, even if only in the office sweep.

When he visited Melbourne in 1895 Mark Twain said this of the Cup.

"Nowhere in the world have I encountered a festival of people that has such a magnificent appeal to the whole nation. The Cup astonishes me."

The Melbourne Cup is a handicap race run over 3,200 metres. Because a win or place results in horses having to carry additional weight the next year, few have ever won the Cup twice. Until 2005 no horse had ever won three times, and such a feat was considered impossible - as it just about is.

Yes, Makybe Diva won three Melbourne Cups in a row. During those races she beat top international stayers from Asia, the Arab States, and Europe. In 2004 she had beaten the great Irish stayer Vinnie Roe and he returned in 2005 for another attempt to crack the will of the flying mare from Port Lincon. Here are some excerpts from the ABC Sport website about Vinnie Roe's eighth placing in the 2005 Melbourne Cup.

"Dermot Weld's Irish champion Vinnie Roe, who humped the same 58kg top weight as Makybe Diva, finished eighth, some four lengths adrift.

It was also his last race.

The effort took so much from the four-time Irish St Leger winner that his jockey Pat Smullen dismounted and led him back to the dismounting yard.

"He gave everything". Smullen said.

"He ran till his heart almost burst".

Vinnie Roe will now return to Ireland to begin a stud career."

You had to look back in the records a long way to find a horse that had won the Cup carrying 58kg. Think Big did it 30 years earlier, and Makybe Diva did it in 2005, to take her third successive victory in the greatest handicap race in Australian, and one of world standing.

 The eerie thing was how easy the champion mare made it look, although the reality was quite different. Her jockey related how relaxed she was before the race, while he was tense and wondering if she could do it with such a weight. Only 1000 metres into the race, while well back in the field, Glen Boss said that he "sensed" that Makybe Diva could not be beaten that day. He took no credit for her great win, saying that he just sat on her back and enjoyed the ride from there.

Here is an ABC Sport account of how Makybe Diva won that November day.

"The race was a near formality.

Boss steered Makybe Diva to the fence with seven horses [of a field of 24] behind her. She settled and we waited.

The jockey started navigating at the thousand. He found clear running. The mare accelerated.

She has moved from the back third to three lengths off the wilting leaders on the corner [into the straight for the last time].

Then came the decisive moment when the pair surged away from the traffic. Victory was assured at the 400-metre pole. She was in front at the 300.

"A nation roars for a hero", the caller Greg Miles uttered. In his heart he thought "God Bless her", and settled in to enjoy and annunciate history."

After the race her trainer Lee Freedman said to the media pack.

"Go and find the smallest child on this course and there will be the only example of a person who will live long enough to see that again. We'll never live to see it again."

Glen Boss, her jockey, told them.

"I was giggling at the mile, I thought 'this is over', there was speed on, there were horses I thought were a chance who were trapped wide and she was crusing, off the bridle.

And when I split them through the middle, I got there way too soon, but I had such an easy run throughout the race, I was just on my bike.

I said 'they're not going to catch me now', she's such a gutsy, determined mare, she's given me so many thrills in my life."

That's the background to the story of Makybe Diva's 'talk' to the assembled, and throughly spellbound, racegoers that day. The following excerpts from the Sunday Telegraph of 6 November, tell what happened on Cup Day.

There was an instant Richard Freedman says, when Diva told the world she knew what she'd done. You just had to listen.

She knows. She understands that she's special. Not all great horses are like her. Some live in a world of blissful ignorance, oblivious to their talent, but not this mare.

She's the Queen, she knows it, and if you knew how to listen, she told you.

Makybe Diva has a way of communicating to both humans and other horses.

Sometimes it's the way she holds her head, or the subject of her fixed gaze, the twitch of an ear, or the flick of her tail.

If this sounds like romantic drivel to you, I can't blame you. The art of training horses of any kind is to understand them.

Some people are gifted; they're born with the innate ability to speak that language. Others devote their time to learning it, and eventually they'll be fluent too. This language is more telepathy than vocal.

There was a moment, just a breath, while she held centre stage. Millions saw it, but only horsemen understood it.

"Did you see it?" Among the huddled congregation of horsemen in the mounting yard and the stripping stalls at Flemington, it was all the talk.

They saw it and it was awesome. She understood and she told everyone. If you've read this far, by now you're throughly frustrated. "For God sake just tell me what it was".

That's music to any horseman who has spent hard years with low pay just learning the language.

After Glen Boss had eased the mare down along the back straight, she stopped and stood still. Exhausted horses are rarely motionless, they fidget in restless pain, but she was telling Glen that she was beyond that.

She had nothing left, no fuel, not even fumes, a living void.

Glen read the signs. He never asked her to canter back to her adoring fans as the others did; he let her walk quietly.

When she reached the gate to the mounting yard where the other horses gathered impatiently waiting to return to their strappers, she never broke stride. she ambled past them, making them wait at the gate until she was ready.

She had something to say, and they must wait until she'd said it.

When she stopped, she was in the middle of the racetrack in front of the grandstand, with the dewy eyes of millions fixed upon her. This was THE moment when every horseman knew that SHE knew. Glen Boss dropped the reins, handing total control and a world stage over to her.

She raised her head, twitched her ears and gazed at the maddening throng, first one way and then the other.

Boss played interpreter as best he could. He pointed with fingers on both hands at her head. She was telling us that she had done something that she was very proud of, and she wanted us all to know.

The joyous stable staff at Markdel where she lives and trains have been talking about it ever since.

"Did you see her? Wow, she really told them." It's a common line from these dedicated horse lovers. Lee Freedman saw it too. It was the moment he knew that no more could be asked of her.

He'd posed the impossible and, without question, she had delivered it. It was her final bow, her way of saying, "look at me. look at what I've done."

It was then that Freedman knew he must make one of the most momentous decisions of his training career and suggest her retirement to her owner Tony Santic.

To his great credit, Tony Santic, a man who is still learning the language of horses, accepted that his wonderful mare had done enough. He conferred with his wife, Chris, and they gave the nod.

Makybe Diva's racing days were over. There will be those who will question the wisdom of this decision, and those who will never understand why. But to horsemen, reflecting on that moment when she spoke to us, there will be no second thoughts. She made the decision. And it was a blessing someone was listening.

As Makybe Diva had entered the mounting yard that day, and prior to the announcement of her retirement by Tony Santic, all the trainers who had runners in the Cup that day lined the fence and clapped and cheered her. They knew what she had done, and they had heard her too.

An Awareness of the Divine
Nobody who comprehends true stories like The Diva's Triumph can doubt that animals are as conscious as most of us. Rupert Sheldrake would say that case studies like the Diva's, in sufficient numbers and within statistical norms, constitute proof of animal consciousness. The naysayers of institutionalised science, however, will want more than that. They will want measurable, quantifiable results and ironclad theoretical explanations that support the premise of animal consciousness - even though such explanations and measures don't yet exist for the premise of human consciousness.

Until animal consciousness is proven to the satisfaction of the naysayers in the science establishment and the shareholders of the various animal exploitation industries, their ruthless slaughter and use in cruel experimentation and twisted forms of entertainment will continue.

But there is hope for the animals. It does not come from winning a debate with the naysayers and proving the case for animal consciousness in materialist, reductionist terms. Rather, hope comes from the opportunity to raise our own human consciousness to higher levels.

According to Dr David Hawkins' kinesiological testing the overall level of human consciousness stood at 190 for hundreds of years. Then, in the mid-1980s it suddenly rose to 204. Given that most individuals only increase their consciousness level by five points in a lifetime, a 14 point average gain in twenty years is significant progress.

While it is not clear what was responsible for this sudden shift in the average level of human consciousness, my guess is that the Internet played a key role. Hawkins has discovered that it is possible for people to increase their consciousness level by hundreds of points in a single lifetime, but few accomplish this sort of advancement. The WWW has not yet reached most of humanity. But where it has been widely adopted it has served to change the context and meaning of human perceptions. Mass publication of books and other material during the Renaissance in Europe did much the same thing. People changed their world view and consciousness would have risen as a result of new perceptions and awareness of the human condition.

Here is what David Hawkins writes about the issues of raising consciousness, in Power Versus Force.

... The energy field which is calibrated for an individual at birth only increases, on the average, by about five points. That an individual's level of consciousness is already in effect at birth is a sobering idea with profound implications. Consciousness itself, in its expression as human civilization, evolves slowly indeed, through innumerable generations.

The majority of people utilise their life experiences to elaborate and express the variations of their native energy field; it is the rare individual who manages to move beyond it, although many may make considerable improvement. The reason for this is more easily understandable when we see that what defines one's level is motivation. Motivation proceeds from meaning, and meaning, in turn, is an expression of context. Thus, achievement is bounded by context, which when correspondingly aligned with motivation determines the individual's relative power.

The average advance of a mere five points in a lifetime is, of course, a statistical figure, produced by, among other things, the unfortunate fact that people's cumulative life choices not uncommonly result in a net lowering of their level of consciousness. ..."

The enormously important aspect of the human race achieving an average consciousness level above 200 is that everything above that level is positive. As David Hawkins says:

"The etheric realm begins at 200, as does kundalini energy. People below 200 don't have an etheric body."

... from the (http://consciousnessproject.org) website.

"... in general, any government official who falls below 200 will not solve problems but create them."

... from Power Versus Force.

Let me try to put these two statements, one that is quite mystical and the other which is more matter of fact, into an easily understood model. I'll use an analogy in which the etheric body is like a life jacket that attaches to and supports the physical body. Individuals who don't have a life jacket to support them will be at risk in the turbulent torrent of their life journey. They will spend a lot of time on the bottom of the rapids, being ground into the gravel and rocks before bobbing to the surface, gasping a quick breath of air and then being sucked under again. Not only is it hard to rise above the torrent without a life jacket, it's hard to see anything but the froth and bubble in front of one's face.

It's not the fault of a public official without a life jacket that they are unable to solve problems, or that they inevitably create new ones. they are doing the best they can in the circumstances. While they are fighting to break free of the currents of life that are threatening to batter them to a pulp or drown them, it is impossible to see what is beyond the immediate turmoil. Where's the bank of the rapids? What's around the next bend? Why's the water gone cloudy? They have no idea.

Individuals with a life jacket, on the other hand, have some prospect of seeing the bank and swimming towards it. Their context and motivation can be different and more positive than those unfortunates who are being assaulted by the torrent and are unable to stay on the surface. If an individual with a life jacket is able to promote that aid into a large life raft - equivalent to higher consciousness - their scope for success is even greater. Indeed, once they are secure themselves they will feel motivated to assist those who lack life jackets. They can and do exert power for the good of others.

On the Map of Consciousness devised from the research of Dr Hawkins, 200 is the point at which you get a life jacket. Below that it's a struggle to save yourself, let alone help others.

Look back to the diagram of Vogt and Sultan's levels. Not surprisingly, since they reflect awareness of and access to the information that makes up a solar system, there is an equivalence with the Map of Consciousness.

The Vogt and Sultan 4th level covers the awareness that living things can have as a result of using up to five senses. Primitive organisms might only have three senses, while higher animals including humans employ all five. This level of consciousness is sufficient for survival, most of the time. But it is insufficient for knowing more and having better access to the information databank that Vogt and Sultan term the diehold. For that one needs 5th level powers - extra senses as Sheldrake would put it.

As noted above, at the 5th level in Vogt and Sultan's model, there is so much potential that an intelligent being is able to perceive more information of its surroundings in the diehold than is possible by using the lower senses of sight, smell, touch, and so on. Some psychic abilities can be explained by this level of the model.

Telepathy fits squarely into the 5th level. And, as we have seen this power plays a major part in the bond between skilled horsemen and the animals they work with. The important aspect of such power is that it derives from the positive range above the 200 mark of the Map of Consciousness scale.

The 6th level of the Vogt and Sultan scale is the realm of miracle healing, walking on water, multiplying loaves and fishes, etc. It would correspond to levels above 700 on the Map of Consciousness. Intelligent beings at this 6th level of Vogt and Sultan's model have direct information about what makes up everything around them. Consciousness has gone beyond awareness of the surroundings due to the use of five senses, to awareness of the divine, and the power to change objects in time and space.

Ultimately consciousness is awareness of the divine and access to the power that this entails. Here, power will always defeat force - good will vanquish evil.

How does anyone know this? It's simply a function of consciousness. Albert Einstein (who calibrates at 499) was emphatic about the source of his genius. He said, unequivocally. "I never discovered anything with my conscious mind." By his 'conscious mind' Einstein meant the awareness that comes from the use of his five senses and the thoughts and ideas associated with such data. He tapped into the subconscious mind, and through it, to the greater database of consciousness; where he found the inspiration and insights he needed.

Once an individual achieves a sufficient level of consciousness they are aware of the divine to the extent that truth is lovingly revealed to them. Instead of a life jacket they have a balloon in which they can float above the world and the engulfing torrent of life experiences, look down and know things as they really are.

Going For Consciousness In The 21st Century
The Internet, and the 2nd Renaissance of which it is an element, is transforming the context of our lives and with it their meaning. Now is the best time in over five hundred years to go for a major lift in consciousness that will not only save the animals from humanity but also save humanity from itself.

The principles to use to find ways of transforming human values and building a Level 4 Civilization have already been set out in the 2nd Renaissance freesite. To recap, the key points are:

• Talk to each other: Us-2-Us.

• Act like the ants.

• Use the Internet / Freenet and PPDs to communicate.

• Focus on what we can control, not on changing what governments and corporations control.

• Remain non-violent.

• Apply reverse surveillance - if we can't hide they can't hide.

• Think as sovereign individuals, not some state's subservient citizens.

• Highlight the failures of the outgoing civilization, including the rule of law.

• Don't ever give up, don't ever compromise. The power to change things right now exists right now.

Some of these points will require further detail in order to be fully understood. You are encouraged to refer to the 2nd Renaissance freesite for this information, which is too extensive to include here.

When it comes to the matters of raising the level of human consciousness and saving the animals, some of these points are more significant than others. The following section elaborates some of the key points above and adds a few that are specific to consciousness.

Many reform movements make the mistake of trying to change the attitudes and behaviours of governments, corporations, the justice system, and the like. They waste considerable effort and resources on changing what they don't control now and never will control. A far better approach is to focus on changing things that they or their supporters are already in control of.

Organisations such a PETA use both strategies. They highlight inhumane practices in animal slaughter houses and they also promote vegetarian diets through their GoVeg website. In the former case they hope to put pressure on animal exploitation industries to change their policies and practices - which is a tough ask because the industries control what they do in their own areas. However, in promoting vegetarian lifestyles to consumers of meat products PETA is on firmer ground - the people who currently eat meat have control over whether they buy and consume it. If they can be persuaded not to eat meat they can make the switch of vegetables, etc. The policies and practices of governments and the animal exploitation industries are then irrelevant. Consumers control their own diets and they can change them at will.

The difficulties in converting consumers to vegetarian lifestyles lie in convincing them that:

1. Eating meat is bad for their conscience - which might not previously have concerned them.

2. Eating meat is bad for their health - which will concern many of them.

3. Eating meat is bad for their souls - which few will understand at first.

Following the major cataclysm twelve thousand years ago humans ate each other in order to survive. After many centuries great teachers and Wise Ones emerged and persuaded the survivors to give up cannibalism, grow grains, and begin to build a civilization. These Wise Ones, who had names such as Quetzalcoatl, Kukulcan, Toth, and Osiris, did not end the slaughter of animals at that time. So soon after the Flood, it was probably too great a leap from cannibalism straight to vegetarianism. But that is no longer the case and the time is right to give up killing and eating animals, because it is just another form of cannibalism. We ourselves are animals,and to eat other animals be they pigs, cattle, lambs, or poultry, is to be a cannibal.

A moral argument of this sort is lost on people who calibrate at 200 or less on the Map of Consciousness. But now that the average for all of humankind has reached 207 (it was 204 when Hawkins published Power Versus Force) the immorality of eating meat will start to be widely recognised. The opportunity we have now - to use a moral argument to which most people will be receptive - has not existed since the Flood 

Dr Hawkins' research shows that at the time of the Buddha the consciousness of mankind was 90. At the time of Christ is was 100. Only two decades ago it was 200. Currently it is 207. Not only are we on the path to a revival of the Golden Age that existed pre-flood, we have crossed the crucial 200 balance point, beyond which the attractors of the energy fields that make up spiritual consciousness will always draw us upwards to the light, rather than back into the darkness below 200.

Convincing people that eating meat and poultry is bad for their health is a case of reason versus habit. It should not be too difficult when tackled together with arguments centred on conscience and consciousness. Habits are hard to shake off, but animal rights and welfare organisations are in a sound position to persuade consumers to go vegetarian on health grounds. When animals are slaughtered they suffer stress and trauma that floods their bodies with hormones and other substances that are simply not good to eat. The cooked flesh might taste alright but it is not healthy to eat even small quantities of it.

Of course, the animal exploitation industries will be quick to present 'scientific' studies (that they've funded) to prove that their products don't present any risk to consumer's health, either in the short or long term. Unfortunately for them kinesiological testing is almost sure to disprove these assertions. Although it is relatively new to Western science the response of indicator muscles to good and bad stimuli and substances has been known to Eastern cultures for a long time. Here's an excerpt from the website of Mark Winter that makes this point quite clearly.

"In Korea, people regularly use muscle tests to help choose the freshest produce. A woman might hold an orange in her left hand and extend her right arm while her husband presses down on her right wrist. If she can resist they'll buy the orange, but if her arm goes weak, they won't."

While people might initially doubt the evidence from kinesiological testing, there will be plenty of scientific studies that can be done to show the presence of harmful substances in meat, poultry, and other animal flesh. We simply aren't designed to eat meat. Our teeth and digestive systems are built for grinding and breaking down grains and other vegetable materials. We aren't supposed to kill and eat each other, and we aren't supposed to kill and eat other animals.

This message can be sold directly to consumers and, since it is they who have the ultimate control over what they eat, many animals can be spared by a major swing to vegetarianism during the next five years or so.

The effort needs to be world wide though, because the animal exploitation industries will otherwise export their products to parts of the world that will still consume them. As the Internet spreads and consciousness continues to rise, this potential for the animal killers to switch markets will diminish.

I have little doubt that, due to their education and established ways of thinking, many people will baulk at the evidence of kinesiological testing. The Map of Consciousness scale has a very metaphysical and mystical image; at least at first encounter. Just as apekind in the movie Planet of the Apes had learned not to venture into the 'forbidden zone', citizens of our own (now obsolescent) civilization have learnt to view ideas such as the existence of a 'database of consciousness' as being in the same category as the reading of tea leaves.

During my working life I have often needed to introduce change and new ideas and I have learned the wisdom of gentle exposure. One should never try to convince people against their better judgement, but simply create the conditions in which they have the information and can 'open to it' in their own time.

This principle is very relevant to the idea that eating meat is bad for your soul. Due to the 'Planet of the Apes' culture that has grown over many areas of 'modern' education and science; many people are not even sure if they have souls, let alone whether animals have them. Presenting David Hawkins research findings and conclusions is fine if the target audience already accepts spiritual and metaphysical concepts and phenomena, but other groups will often need preliminary ideas and 'stepping stones' to prepare their thinking about topics that they have always seen as beyond normal everyday reason.

Fortuitously, the hidden powers of animals can offer very useful stepping stones to an acceptance that there is more to existence than we can see and measure in the physical bodies of humans and animals alike. Many households keep animal companions, and large numbers of humans are therefore aware that their cats and dogs dream, just like they do.

There is no need to convince people who live with companion animals of this fact - cats and dogs dream. So, we are immediately on the threshold of the extrasensory realm, because dreams are either about thoughts and experiences that are in our brains or they are about thoughts and experiences that are in 'something' that is 'somewhere else'.

Although nobody yet knows what dreams really are or what they draw on, the theories devised by institutional science generally assume that dreaming is a brain function operating on information or experiences stored within the cranium. An opposing school of thought holds that dreaming is a mind function that operates with information and experiences stored beyond the physical body.

Throughout recorded history, proponents of this 'external field' model have also argued that the information database for dreams spans all the lives that a soul has ever lived. Dreams are thought to bring past experiences and solutions to minds that are grappling with troubling or puzzling issues in the present.

Rather than start by informing animal lovers that the average cat calibrates at 245 on the Map of Consciousness scale, while the average dog is 250, it is better to introduce the concepts of external information fields through consideration of the dreams of their pets. For many people, though not for all, it will be too long a leap to go straight into Dr Hawkins research and its findings. A shorter, and easier, step is to link human dreaming and pet dreaming (most people are aware that their pets dream). This helps to establish that cats and dogs are as conscious as we are (most people who have pets already know this), and this leads people to wonder about their own dreams and those of their animal companions. Exploring the nature of dreams leads, in a short easy step, to the possibility of the mind being external to our bodies, and that the source of information for dreams is also 'somewhere else'.

I have described this route to the contemplation of external thought fields and non-physical data repositories because I have observed a surprising reaction when discussing animals with humans that love them. It is that while people often are uncertain about their own immortality, and whether they even have a soul or not, they will often support the premise that their pets have souls.

Think about it ! Amimals have an amazing potential as agents for rising consciousness and spirituality in the world.

Earlier, I related the story of Makybe Diva's triumph in winning a third straight Melbourne Cup. I can tell you quite reliably that the horsemen and women who make up the racing industry, the trainers, the strappers, the jockeys, etc, are not particularly religious or spiritual. There are, no doubt, a few exceptions, but most of these people are caught up in the activity and struggle that is characteristic of the sub-200 range of consciousness. Racing is a tough game. There are no dreamy-eyed mystics in it, they wouldn't survive. Yet I strongly suspect that if it had been possible to take aside each of the trainers who lined the fence of the mounting yard that day, when the Diva returned from her courageous run, and ask them whether she had a soul, their answer would have been an unequivocal YES. It would have been the same story in the stalls and in the jockey's room, everywhere on the Flemington course that there were horsepeople.

Moreover, everyone of those questioned would have understood precisely what was meant by the term soul and what it implied in a horse or a human. How could that happen? Besides having, at the moment she stood before her fans for the last time, strong energy fields for courage and pride, Makybe Diva also had powerful field energies for willingness and love. On the Map of Consciousness scale the power of Willingness is 310 and that of Love 500. These fields are highly positive and would more than cancel out Pride, which is negative, and Courage, which is at the 200 crossover point between negative and positive power.

At the time when Makybe Diva 'talked' to the grandstand crowd at Flemington she projected a highly positive field, and this temporarily raised the level of consciousness of all living things in her vicinity. Since this form of consciousness involves an awareness of the divine horse people who only attended church for weddings and funerals, and who did not usually think about things spiritual, could comprehend that the horse before then was filled with a bright soul. They knew it and felt it touch them. Even those who were not horse people were affected, but they might not have linked their feelings to Makybe Diva. Perhaps they thought it was the champagne, or something else. Whatever they thought, they were uplifted by the field of positive consciousness around them.

While being at Flemington that day to see and hear the Diva was good for the souls of the racegoers, the reverse effect would apply if they then went out on the town that evening and ate the flesh of slaughtered animals. Exposure to the negative energy fields that are associated with all facets of the traumatising, killing and eating of animals withers the soul and can predispose people to illness and depression.

This is the basis of the third point above, concerning the conversion of consumers to vegetarian lifestyles. Eating meat is, literally, bad for one's wellbeing. The negative energy surrounding the practice acts to destroy consciousness and shrivel the soul.

The same principle applies to wearing animal fur, attending 'attractions' that harm animals, hunting animals for sport, using cosmetic products based on animal testing, etc. Fortunately, in all such areas change can occur without any need to lobby governments, science institutions, or corporations. People involved in practices that harm or exploit animals, either as participants or consumers, can change their own minds, change their behaviours, and shun the negative energy fields that surround those evils.

The way to get people to do that is to help them to raise their consciousness levels to the point where they are open to spirituality and the divine. As many animal welfare organisations have already realised, it is also necessary to help people who depend on animal exploitation industries for their incomes to switch to other forms of employment or enterprise. It would be wrong, and counterproductive, to leave large numbers of people impoverished as a result of the cessation of animal exploitation.

Now that the overall correlation of humankind is above 200 on the Map of Consciousness scale there is a great opportunity to move it upward. The target level for the end of this decade should be 310, which Dr Hawkins terms Willingness. This level of 310 is a long way above 207 on the logarithmic scale Hawkins uses, but once human consciousness breaks through the 200 level the natural attraction is upwards.

Note that a consciousness level of 310 does not imply that every aspect, thought, feeling and action of an individual who calibrates there is one of willingness. A range of energy fields will be experienced, from Shame (20), through Guilt (30), Fear (100), Anger (150), all the way to Love (500) and Joy (540). An overall calibration of 310 simply indicates that this is the 'centre of gravity' of the consciousness of a particular individual at a given point in their lives. Yes, it is quite possible for one's consciousness level to decline throughout life, which is a situation to be strenuously avoided. Presently, the average infant comes into this world with a consciousness level of 207. The task is to help them to raise this initial level of consciousness very appreciably. The same objective applies to adults as well.

We can raise our consciousness by increasing our experience of positive energies and minimising negative energy stimuli in our life and the lives of others. We can help others to raise their consciousness by the same approach.

The early sections of this freesite contain descriptions and images that are associated with negative fields that will always act to lessen the overall consciousness of a reader. To balance the undertow created by the examples of cruelty and mistreatment of animals I have included several very positive stories and images of animals. These act like an antidote to the horror segments of this freesite.

I'll give you just one last example of cruelty and balance it with a very positive story. Even though the horror example will be very damaging to your present consciousness the wonderful story of Dr Dog will balance it out in spades. So the overall effect should be a positive shift in your consciousness.

Here goes, but be warned, the 'dark' description that follows is truly vile.

A Story With A Negative Impact on Consciousness (-)
The following excerpt from a February 2005 report by PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals) gives an illustration of the depth of senseless human cruelty involved.

"When undercover investigators made their way onto Chinese fur farms recently, they found many animals are still alive and struggling desperately when workers flip them onto their backs or hang them up by their legs or tails to skin them. When workers on these farms begin to cut the skin and fur from an animal's leg, the free limbs kick and writhe. Workers stomp on the necks and heads of animals who struggle too hard to allow a clean cut. When the fur is finally peeled off over the animal's heads, their naked bodies are thrown onto a pile of those who have gone before them. Some are still alive, breathing in ragged gasps and blinking slowly. Some of the animal's hearts are still beating five to ten minutes after they are skinned. One investigator recorded a skinned racoon dog on the heap of carcasses who had enough strength to lift his bloodied head and stare into the camera.

Before they are skinned alive, animals are pulled from their cages and thrown to the ground; workers bludgeon them with metal rods or slam them on hard surfaces, causing broken bones and convulsions but not always immediate death. Animals watch helplessly as workers make their way down the row."

Dr Dog - A Story With A Positive Impact on Consciousness (+)
This story is taken directly from Jill Robinson's Animals Asia website (www.animalsasia.org). The story is in her own words.

"In 1991, during an influx of pedigree 'designer dogs' entering Hong Kong (who were then thrown out into the streets when people became tired with their new "toys") and tortured by images of yet another dog dying by deliberate hanging in South Korea, or a cat being bludgeoned in China, I began reading about something described as "animal therapy" in hospitals in the UK. As I sat in the office absorbed by the power of this unique concept, Max, my beloved Golden Retriever was in his usual place by my chair. The message from his trusting brown eyes as he looked up at me couldn't have been more compelling and the seed for "Dr Dog" was planted.

The next few weeks of trying to get the programme of the ground were the most testing of all. Time and time again my calls were rejected by people who couldn't believe i was seriously suggesting bringing a 'dirty, smelly, unhygienic mutt' into a sterile hospital environment. Things looked up when the Staff Nurse of the Duchess of Kent Children's Hospital agreed to allow "one dog, for one hour, in the garden" and a few days later, whilst doctors, nursing staff and the media looked on, Max sat patiently in the grounds as disabled children were brought out to see him.

One paraplegic teenager lying flat in his bed was wheeled to the front and, as Max rose up on his hind legs and gently placed his massive golden paws onto the side of the bed, the boy's face lit up with a radiant smile...and Dr Dog was born."

Animals have a great untapped capacity to help raise human consciousness. This capacity exists not only in the widespread opportunities to publish positive stories about animals, but also in opportunities for human-animal contacts in institutions and many other places, including almost every home.

The news of the world is deliberately pitched at the level of Fear, which is 100 on the Map of Consciousness scale developed by David Hawkins. The news of the world, whether it is in print, on the radio, or on TV is a thoroughly brutalising force because its predominant content is negative, sub-200 material. As Dr Hawkins writes in Power Versus Force:

"From the viewpoint of this level, the world looks hazardous, full of traps and threats. Fear is the favoured official tool for control by oppressive totalitarian agencies, and insecurity is the stock-in-trade of major manipulators of the marketplace. The media and advertising play to Fear to increase market share."

"Fear limits growth of the personality and leads to inhibition. Because it takes energy to rise above Fear, the oppressed are unable to reach a higher level unaided. Thus, the fearful seek strong leaders who appear to have conquered their fear to lead them out of slavery."

Animals have the power to love unconditionally. Here are a few of the explanations that Dr Hawkins gives for the 500 level of the Consciousness scale:

"Love as depicted in the mass media is not what this level is about. What the world generally refers to as love is an intense emotionality, combining physical attraction, possessiveness, control, addiction, eroticism and novelty. ...

The 500 level is characterised by the development of a love which is unconditional, unchanging and permanent. It does not fluctuate because its source within the person who loves is not dependent on external factors. Loving is a state of being. ...

Love is not intellectual and does not proceed from the mind; love emanates from the heart. It has the capacity to lift others and accomplish great feats because of its purity of motive.

... Reason deals only with particulars, whereas love deals with wholes. This ability, often ascribed to intuition, is the capacity for instantaneous understanding without resort to sequential symbol processing. This apparently abstract phenomenon is, in fact, quite concrete; it is accompanied by a measurable release of endorphins in the brain."

In the United States alone, 17 million unwanted cats and dogs in animal shelters are "put down" each year. It is a similar story throughout the 'developed' world. Instead of desexing all the animals they are able to place in new homes and killing the ones they can't, animal shelters should be running programs to take these unwanted animals into schools, offices, libraries, factories (where it's safe to do so), sidewalk cafes, and as many other places where people gather as possible. There should be sufficient breeding of animals to enable their young to become a natural part of life in such places. Animal rights and welfare organisations should be encouraging people to keep more animals in their homes. They should be running health insurance funds for animals so that carers can get their pets full veterinary services when they need them.

What about health insurance for humans as a result of all the 'unhygienic' animals you ask. Well,if you go to any Indian city you will find animals everywhere in the streets, particularly the sacred cattle but also other animals such as pigs. There are no dire public health problems as a result of these practices, and Indian children grow up with stronger immune systems and disease resistance because of them. For the effective protection of public health, natural immunisation early in life beats artificial immunisation in adulthood, every time. We are meant to coexist with animals, including birds, who carry the 'terrible' flu we are being led to fear by governments. A lifetime spent among animals is the most natural and best insurance against plagues hosted by non-human species.

In brief, we should be raising the profile of animals in the community and reaping the benefits of their companionship and their positive influence on our consciousness and wellbeing.

We should, however, not seek to involve governments in this process of integrating animals into our daily lives. Governments are irrelevant to our success and wellbeing in the 21st Century. Because governments rely on raising the levels of fear in the populations they 'serve' their overall impact on our consciousness is negative. And, thanks to new technology, we can now do very well without them.

Refer to the 2nd Renaissance for more information on the need to secede from federations and practical considerations in establishing free cities and regions, and a Level 4 Civilization.

Animals will have a prominent and valuable role in the new social order based on abundance rather than scarcity.

Here, the word spirituality is used in its true metaphysical sense, rather than in a religious context. All religions are founded on a spiritual base, but religion is not spirituality. You can be spiritual, and highly conscious, without necessarily following any particular religious rituals.

I am not in any way downplaying the importance of religion and religious teachings. If you read David Hawkins research results you will find that every mainstream religion he tested correlates at a high level on the Map of Consciousness. There can be no doubt that being religious is a good and positive thing. Nor is there any doubt that religions can play a significant role in raising human consciousness in the 21st century. The doubt arises in respect of the present lack of stature, and therefore of following, of mainstream religions in the world.

It is not just the young who are now disinclined to satisfy their need for meaning and purpose in mainstream religions, particularly Western religions. Anyone who witnessed the many wars of the 20th century knows that not only were major wars fought between members of the same or essentially similar religions, but truly horrific wars were also sanctioned by the clergy and other religious leaderships of the times. As well as having reason to doubt the power and commitment to peace of their clergy when faced with the naked force and totalitarianism of secular states and federations, people raised in the 20th century were also conditioned to believe that chance and happenstance are responsible for the material world and all observed phenomena within it. An atheistic scientific establishment and state education systems, that eschewed any subject matter about the divine or paranormal, were responsible for this undermining of religion and spirituality.

Given the recent difficulties of present-day religions I consider that core spirituality (which is also a part of religion but not religion per se) will prove to be a better vehicle for raising human consciousness during the remainder of this decade. There is also the issue of the inclusion of the animals to consider. Although mainstream religions have mostly stopped the practice of animal sacrifices, they remain entirely focused on human beings and their salvation. On the other hand, core spirituality readily includes all living things, both plant and animal, and is thus a better medium for raising human consciousness through greater interaction with animals.

What sort of initiatives and processes can be used to this end? There are too many to fully list here, but a few examples will help to illustrate the possibilities.

• Support Metaphysical and Paranormal Research
  Animal rights and welfare organisations, and all their followers, should seek to generate funding for experiments into animal consciousness and related fields. Rupert Sheldrake has already designed experiments that cater for the wide involvement of ordinary people in projects of this type.

• Be Involved In Applying Kinesiological Testing
  While Dr Hawkins encountered considerable scepticism about tapping into a 'database of consciousness' that holds all the answers about past and present events, he found that participation in group sessions usually dispelled such reservations. When you keep getting the same response to a statement (strong or weak, true or false) no matter which subjects or testers are used or what their personal knowledge levels of opinions might be, it makes you think. Widespread thinking about consciousness and the place of animals in the divine order of things is what we need.

  For example, we know from Hawkins' research that the average dog or cat correlates significantly higher on the consciousness scale than the CEOs of Fortune 500 companies. This makes us think. Does it mean that the CEOs are inherently 'bad' people and dogs and cats are better? No, but it might mean that the activity of running a for-profit corporation based on the principles of economic scarcity invokes a negative filed of consciousness; just as working in a slaughterhouse, or being a hangman would.

  That's interesting, can we use testing to refine that picture a bit more? ... We can, and attitudes will change as a consequence of such testing.

  Of course, you have to believe that the responses are really coming from the collective consciousness of some sort of primary information field like the diehold of Vogt and Sultan. But if not, where are the 'answers' coming from?

  Perhaps we can test for that answer? ...

• Help To Widen The Case For Animal Consciousness
  Hanging you hat on a single set of research data or a single theory is not as universally convincing as a range of research and reasonably related theories can be.

  There is a lot of complementary research and theoretical development going on. It just needs to be tied into a coherent body of knowledge about animal consciousness that is published by animal rights and welfare organisations, and possibly by an Animal Consciousness Movement or umbrella body - the ACM.
  The ACM would work to join all the dots from disparate research and present the case for animal consciousness strongly, coherently, and independently of funding from governments or the animal exploitation industries.

  Here, I will just mention one complementary line of investigation, and leave the ACM to put the rest together in due course.

  Beings Of LIGHT

  The example concerns the writing of the anthropologist, Jeremy Narby, and deals with the prospect of a field of consciousness that is powered by light (photons) emitted by all DNA. It thus involves every living thing on this planet. Not just humans but everything, from roses to thinoceroses. It seems likely that they might all be conscious, and capable of communicating with one another at a cellular level.

  Details of Narby's book The Cosmic Serpent - DNA And The Origins of Knowledge can be found in the Sources page for the 2nd Renaissance freesite.

  Jeremy Narby became interested in DNA after he realised that the Peruvian Indians he lived with in the upper Amazonian jungles were seeing, and subsequently drawing and painting, DNA and other molecular structures while under the influence of the potion they call yage. The active ingredient in yage is the DMT (N,N-dimethyltryptamine) alkaloid, a potent natural hallucinogen. Yage is not a recreational drug for the Peruvian Indians, it is used only by Shamans, and then only for the purposes of healing the sick of contacting the spirits. The Shamans maintain that they learned all their knowledge of natural medicines while under the spell of yage and that this information comes directly from the spirit world.

  Jeremy Narby set out to determine whether the known emissions from DNA could be the basis of the transmission system between the Shamans and a source of collective knowledge. The following excerpts from his book give a brief indication of what he discovered.

  • On the paintings of Pabalo Amaringo a retired exponent of yaga use, who has a photographic memory. ...

    "Several weeks later, I showed these paintings to a friend with a good understanding of molecular biology. He reacted in the same way as the vegetalistas to whom Luna had shown them: "Look there's collagen. ... And there, the axon's embryonic network with its neurites. ... Those are triple helixes. ... And that's DNA from afar, looking like a telephone cord. ... This looks like chromosomes at a specific phase. ... There's the spread-out form of DNA, and right next to it are DNA spools in their nucleosome structure."

    Even without these explanations, I was in shock. ...Was it possible that no one had noticed the molecular aspect of the images? ..."

  • On DNA. ...

    "If one stretches out the DNA contained in the nucleus of a human cell, one obtains a two-yard-long thread that is only ten atoms wide. This thread is a billion times longer than its own width. Relatively speaking, it is a if your little finger stretched from Paris to Los Angles.

    A thread of DNA is much smaller than the visible light humans perceive. Even the most powerful optical microscopes cannot reveal it, because DNA is approximately 120 times narrower than the smallest wavelength of visible light.

    The nucleus of a cell is equivalent in volume to 2-millionths of a pinhead. The two-yard thread of DNA packs into this minute volume by coiling up endlessly on itself, ...

    The average human being is made up of 100 thousand billion cells, according to some estimates. This means that there are approximately 125 billion miles of DNA in a human body, ... Your personal DNA is long enough to wrap around the earth 5 million times.

    All the cells in the world contain DNA - be they animal, vegetable, or bacterial - and they are filled with salt water, in which the concentration of salt is similar to the worldwide ocean."

  • DNA has not changed in all of its time on our planet.

    "DNA and its duplication mechanisms are the same for all living creatures. The only thing that changes from one species to another is the order of the letters. This constancy goes back to the very origins of life on earth."

    Biologist Robert Pollack observes that:

    "The planet's surface has changed many times over, but DNA and the cellular machinery of its replication have remained constant. Schrödinger's 'aperiodic crystal' understated DNA's stability: no stone, no mountain, no ocean, not even the sky above us, have been stable and constant for this long; nothing inanimate, no matter how complicated, has survived unchanged for a fraction of the time that DNA and its machinery of replication have coexisted."

    And from Jeremy Narby: ...

    "The cell-based life DNA informs made the air we breathe, the landscape we see, and the mind-boggling diversity of living beings of which we are a part. In 4 billion years, it has multiplied itself into an incalculable number of species, while remaining exactly the same."

  • On seeing the visions:

    "During my first ayahuasca experience I saw a pair of enormous and terrifying snakes. They conveyed an idea that bowled me over and later encouraged me to reconsider my self-image. They taught me that I was just a human being. To others, this may not seem like a great revelation; but at the time, it was exactly what the young anthropologist I was needed to learn. Above all, it was a thought that I could not have had by myself, precisely because of my anthropocentric presuppositions.

    I also felt very clearly that the speed and the coherence of certain sequences of images could not have come from the chaotic storage room of my memory. For example, I saw in a dizzying visual parade the superimposing of the veins of a human hand on those of a green leaf. the message was crystal clear. We are made of the same fabric as the vegetal world. I had never really thought of this so concretely. The day after the ayahuasca session, I felt like a new being, united with nature, proud to be human and to belong to the grandiose web of life surrounding the planet. Once again, this was a totally new and constructive perspective for the materialist humanist that I was.

    This experience troubled me deeply. If I was not the source of these highly coherent and educational images, where did they come from? And who were those snakes who seemed to know me better than myself?"

  • Seeking the source of yaga [ayahuasca] visions:

    "My own experience with ayahuasca -induced hallucinations was limited, but sufficient to suggest a trail. Ayahuasquero Ruperto Gomez, who initiated me, had called the hallucinogenic brew "the television of the forest", and i had indeed seen sequences of hallucinatory images flashing by at blinding speed as if they were truly transmitted from outside my body but picked up inside my head.

    I knew of no neurological mechanism on which to base this working hypothesis, but I did know that DNA was an aperiodic crystal that traps and transports electrons with efficiency and that it emits photons (in other words, electromagnetic waves) at ultra-weak levels currently at the limits of measurement - and all this more than any other living matter. This led me to a potential candidate for the transmissions: the global network of DNA-based life."

  • The science of DNA transmitted photons:

    "In the early 1980s, thanks to the development of a sophisticated measurement device, a team of scientists demonstrated that the cells of all living beings emit photons at a rate of up to approximately 100 units per second and per square centimetre of surface area. They also showed that DNA was the source of this photon emission.

    ... I learned with astonishment that the wavelength at which DNA emits these photons corresponds exactly to the narrow band of visible light. ... This was a serious trail, but I did not know how to follow it. There was no proof that the light emitted by DNA was what shamans saw in their visions. Furthermore, there was a fundamental aspect of this photon emission that I could not grasp. According to the researchers who measured it, its weakness is such that it corresponds "to the intensity of a candle at a distance of about 100 kilometres," but it has "a surprisingly high degree of coherence, as compared to that of technical fields (laser)." How could a distant candle be compared to a laser?

    "After thinking about it at length, I came to understand that the coherence of biophotons depended not so much on the intensity of their output as on its regularity. In a coherent source of light, the quantity of photons emitted may vary, but the emission intervals remain constant.

    DNA emits photons with such regularity that researchers compare the phenomenon to an "ultra-weak laser". I could understand that much, but still could not see what it implied for my investigation. I turned to my scientific journalist friend, who explained it immediately: "A coherent source of light, like a laser, gives the sensation of bright colours, a luminescence, and an impression of holographic depth."

    My friend's explanation provided me with an essential element. The detailed descriptions of ayahuasca-based hallucinatory experiences invariably mention bright colour, and, according to the authors of the dimethyltryptamine study: "Subjects described the colours as brighter, more intense, and deeply saturated than those seen in normal awareness or dreams: "It was like the blue of a desert sky, but on another planet. The colours were 10 to 100 times more saturated".

    It was almost too good to be true. DNA's highly coherent photon transmission accounted for the luminescence of hallucinatory images, as well as their three-dimensional, or holographic, aspect. ...

    There I thought, is the source of knowledge: DNA, living in water and emitting photons, like an aquatic dragon spitting fire."

  • Developing a theory of consciousness in nature.

    "If my hypothesis is correct, and if ayahuasqueros perceive DNA-emitted photons in their visions, it ought to be possible to find a link between these photons and consciousness. I started looking for it in the biophoton literature.

    Researchers working in this new field mainly consider biophoton emission as "cellular language" of a form of "nonsubstantial biocommunication between cells and organisms." Over the last fifteen years, they have conducted enough reproducible experiments to believe that cells use these waves to direct their own internal reactions as well as to communicate among themselves, and even between organisms. For instance, photon emission provides a communication mechanism that could explain how billions of individual plankton organisms cooperate in swarms, behaving like "super-organisms".

    Biophoton emission may fill certain gaps in the theories of orthodox biology, which centre exclusively on molecules. Yet researchers in this new field of inquiry will have to work hard to convince the majority of their colleagues. As Mae-Wan Ho and Fritz-Albert Popp point out, many biologists find the idea that the cell is a solid-state system difficult to imagine. ... But this did not help my search for a connection between DNA emitted photons and consciousness. I did not find a publication dealing with this connection or, for that matter, with the subject of the influence of nicotine or dimethyltrypitamine on biophoton emission.

    So I decided to call Fritz-Albert Popp in his university laboratory in Germany. He was kind enough to spare his time to an unknown anthropologist conducting an obscure investigation. During the conversation he confirmed a good number of my impressions. I ended up asking him whether he had considered the possibility of a connection between DNA's photon emission and consciousness. He replied: "Yes, consciousness could be the electromagnetic field constituted by the sum of these emissions. But, as you know, our understanding of the neurological basis of consciousness is still very limited."

    One thing had struck me as I went over the biophoton literature. Almost all of the experiments conducted to measure biophotons involved the use of quartz. As early as 1923, Alexander Gurvich noticed that cells separated by a quartz screen mutually influenced each other's multiplication processes, which was not the case with a metal screen. He deduced that cells emit electromagnetic waves with which to communicate. It took more than half a century to develop a "photomultiplier" capable of measuring this ultra-weak radiation; the container of this device is also made of quartz.

    Quartz is a crystal, which means it has an extremely regular arrangement of atoms that vibrate at a very stable frequency. These characteristics make it an excellent receptor and emitter of electromagnetic waves, which is why quartz is abundantly used in radios, watches, and most electronic technologies.

    Quartz crystals are also used in shamanism around the world. ...

    Amazonian shamans, in particular, consider that spirits can materialize and become visible in quartz crystals. Some sheripiari even feed tobacco juice to their stones daily.

    What if these spirits were none other than the biophotons emitted by all the cells of the world and were picked up, amplified, and transmitted by shaman's quartz crystals, Gurvich's quartz screens, and the quartz containers of biophoton researchers? This would mean that spirits are beings of pure light - as has always been claimed."

  • DNA as a transmitter-receiver:

    "DNA is also a crystal, as molecular biologist Maxim Frank-Kamenetski explains: "The base pairs in it are arranged as in a crystal. This is, however, a linear, one-dimensional crystal, with each base pair flanked by two neighbours. The DNA crystal is aperiodic, since the sequence of base pairs is irregular as the sequence of letters in a coherent printed text. ... Thus it came as no surprise that the one-dimensional DNA crystal, a crystal of an entirely new type, had very much intrigued physicists."

    The four DNA bases are hexagonal (like quartz crystals), but they each have a slightly different shape. As they stack up on top of each other, forming the rings of the twisted ladder, they line up in the order dictated by the genetic text. Therefore, the DNA double helix has a slightly irregular, or aperiodic structure. However, this is not the case for the repeat sequences that make up a full third of the genome, such as ACACACACACACAC. In these sequences, DNA becomes a regular arrangement of atoms, a periodic crystal - which could, by analogy with quartz, pick up as many photons as it emits. The variation in the length of the repeat sequences (some of which contain up to 300 bases) would help pick up different frequencies and could thereby constitute a possible new function for a part of 'junk' DNA.

    I suggest this because my hypothesis requires a receptor as much as an emitter. For the moment, the reception of biophotons has not been studied. ...

    Despite these uncertainties, I wish to develop my hypothesis further by proposing the following idea: What if DNA, stimulated by nicotine or dimethyltryptamine, activates not only its emission of photons (which inundate our consciousness in the form of hallucinations) but also its capacity to pick up the photons emitted by the global network of DNA-based life? This would mean that the biosphere itself, which can be considered "as a more of less fully interlinked unit", is the source of the images."

  It is interesting to note that the energy fields involved in kinesiological testing are also very faint but measurable. Here is what David Hawkins writes in Power Versus Force.

  "The energy of human thought, though minute, is nonetheless absolutely measurable. A thought which emanates from the 100 level of consciousness will typically measure between log 10^{-800 million} to 10^{-700 million}microwatts. On the other hand, a loving thought at the consciousness level of 500 measures approximately log 10^{-35 million}microwatts."

  Could shamanism and kinesiology be tapping the same database of consciousness, but via different pathways? Shamans use hallucinogenic substances to 'switch channels' in the mind (from normal to paranormal) to see visions and talk with spirit beings, while kinesiological testing relies on the responses of specific 'indicator muscles' to establish whether a thought or statement is true or false. In both cases organs or parts of the body are used to receive or transmit to a source of information and knowledge that is 'somewhere else', outside the physical self.

  There seems to be a good chance that the same electromagnetic fields are the transmission medium, that the periodic crystals of 'junk' DNA might be the receiver/transmitter mechanism, and that the source of information is the same - a single 'database of consciousness' or diehold.

  But, of course, nobody would ever dare to believe such things on The Planet of the Apes.

• Develop And Spread Easily Grasped Spiritual Models

  Rather than evangelically urge people to embrace spirituality anew, and think thoughts and take actions that can raise their consciousness, we should give them information and models that can help them to decide for themselves that this is what they must do. Many existing religious models are too stale to have any further impact. People have learnt them, tried them, and usually given up on them when their lives and the lives of those around then failed to improve. They have often prayed to God in the past and heard nothing from Him.

  However, we can devise models that provide the principles for living according to the scriptures and other religious teachings, without ever mentioning these traditional sources. I'm not suggesting that religious teachings should be swept under the carpet and never aired, they must continue to have their place and to play their role in shoring up human consciousness. I'm simply suggesting that if we wish to help people to see why and how they need to give up eating meat and using other products of the various animal exploitation industries, we must provide new models of conduct to help them do it.

  Let me illustrate by using a model of the life based on the familiar game of Snakes and Ladders.

  An Outline of the Game of Life
  Or Snakes & Ladders With Free Will

  Even young children understand the principles of the game of Snakes and Ladders. A player moves a counter over a board according to the throws of a dice, and the aim is to travel from the 'start', at the bottom of the playing area, to the 'finish' at the top. Throws of the dice which land a player's counter on the foot of a ladder advance it to the top; throws that land on the head of a snake send the counter back down to the end of the tail.

  The board-game of life can be likened to snakes and ladders, but with 'free will' operating each time the counter lands on the foot of a ladder or the head of a snake. In life we have the freedom to choose whether we will travel up a ladder or down a snake.

  Usually, deciding to climb a ladder has some 'cost' attached; we have to give up something in order to rise up the board by way of a ladder. Conversely, going down a snake can bring us some form of gain, we might choose to cheat someone, or we might even decide to kill them in order to gain an advantage or to keep a secret hidden from the world.

  Because we have the 'gift' of free will and are not constrained by fate in the same way that the player of a normal Snakes and Ladders game is, we can choose whether to give and do good - climb a ladder - or to take and do harm - slither down a snake.

  Thus, we can strive to reach the 'finish' or we can decide to ignore that goal (often because we have no faith that there actually is a 'finish' or reward for helping others at our own expense) and deliberately cause havoc for our personal gain or satisfaction. The people who travel down snakes of their own free will are not usually convinced that there is any divine 'score keeping' involved in the game of life. They reason that if they can escape detection or hire a skilled lawyer who is able to get them off any charges of wrongdoing they have somehow 'won'. Only those of us who recognise the existence of a divine design and plan behind the game of life are concerned to climb ladders and reach the top of the board of life.

  As we live our lives we constantly face choices that involve the welfare of animals and, because we have free will, we can decide to help them or not. When we get some extra money, perhaps a performance bonus or the proceeds of selling some property, we land at the foot of a ladder. If we choose to help the animals by making a donation to Animals Asia or another of the organisations that are working to save them, there is a cost to us but a benefit to the animals. Climbing the ladder usually has a personal cost of some sort, we have to give up something to get something else.

  When we have the choice of ordering a steak in a restaurant or having a vegetarian dish instead we are on the head of a snake. If we eat the beef we seem to 'get' something but we also lose something as well. Exerting our free will and slithering down a snake always has negative consequences, along with what we might see as advantages. If we like the taste of a T-bone steak it seems that our wishes are fulfilled when we eat it. But other consequences ensue as well.

  We've already noted three areas of negative consequences associated with eating animals:

  1. It amounts to much the same thing as cannibalism and should concern our conscience.

  2. It's bad for our health, the hormones from the stress of the slaughter of the animals we eat, together with the cholesterol that coats our arteries are likely to shorten our lifespan.

  3. Because killing and eating animals involves sub-200 levels of consciousness, every meal of this sort exerts a negative influence on our overall consciousness, and our closeness to the divine order of existence.

     
     As for climbing ladders to help the animals, this comes down to one of life's great secrets:
     

     The more you give the more you get.

     
     

     David Hawkins puts the same truth this way:
     "To become more conscious is the greatest gift anyone can give to the world; moreover, in a ripple effect, the gift comes back to its source."

     
     

In the field of animal rights and welfare the goal of the next five years must be to help to raise human consciousness to an overall level of 310 (from 207). Dr Hawkins, writing in Power Versus Force describes Willingness thus.

"At this level self-esteem is high and is reinforced by positive feedback from society in the forms of recognition, appreciation and reward. Willingness is sympathetic and responsive to the needs of others. Willing people are builders of and contributors to society. With their capacity to bounce back from adversity and learn from experience, they tend to become self-correcting. Having let go of Pride, they are willing to look at their defects and learn from others. At the level of Willingness, people become excellent students. They are easily trainable and represent a considerable source of power for society."

Moreover, when humanity reaches 310, and beyond, the animals begin to be safe from us. They can stop having as many regrets and begin to be grateful for the way we then respect and care for them.

The Civilizing Power of Paws
As the old world order decays a new civilization will soon rise from its ruins. There is no doubt that this transformation is already underway and that it will dwarf the social and political changes that accompanied the earlier Renaissance in Europe. We are destined to be the first of our kind to build and live in a Level 4 Civilization.

While there is no doubt that the impact of digital technologies and the growth of the internet are driving technological and scientific advancements that are bringing, for the first time, the capability to banish scarcity in our world, this will not be the BIG story of the new civilization. That story will be about the rise of a new spirituality and the restoration of the consciousness levels that the human species had reached during the Golden Age.

Then, we will once again live in loving oneness with the animals. And we will have fully regained the power of communication with them. Those will be times of great joy in which neither we nor the animals will have cause for regrets. In the interim, while the 2nd Renaissance is gathering force around us, we can begin to draw closer to the animals and to tap their capacities to show us what unconditional love is - for they are the absolute masters of this emotion.

It is not only unconscionable to stand by and let unwanted animals be 'put down' by so-called animal 'shelters', it is a great waste! All those cats, dogs, rabbits, and whatever else, are a source of power. When they are appropriately homed, included in community programs to bring greater contact with animals into people's lives, or simply taken to a real shelter where they are truly loved and cared for, the animals will repay our kindness many times over.

With animals, life's great secret rings with truth - the more love you give the more you get back. And love has the positive power to raise your consciousness, and the consciousness of your family, and of the many friends who will visit your home once there are loved animals there.

Cats and dogs, and other companion animals, are a civilizing power. By living with us in our homes they make us fully aware of their sentience. They teach us that they and all other creatures have souls and inalienable rights that are conferred on them by the Grand Designer who made them.

We must never forget this most valuable lesson, for it is a marker on our path back to the compassionate and spiritual heights we occupied before the Fall.

Lothar, November 2005.

If you feel you want to make donations to help the people who are helping the animals, please give generously.

There are many worthy causes and Animals Asia and PETA come to mind in this regard. Please, however, check before you give to animal shelters. Find out whether the particular centre has a policy of destroying unwanted animals. If they do, please find some other animal welfare related organisation to donate to.